Dimensional Codex System: I'm really not a cultist!

Chapter 955: Chapter 954: The Limits of AI

Eiriri remembered seeing a Hollywood blockbuster where the hacker protagonist frantically tapped on the keyboard, and various information flashed across the screen with the background music. Although she couldn’t understand it, it always had a high-tech vibe.

However, now she was witnessing a real-life version here.

Fang Zheng stood before a black stone pillar, continuously tapping on the keyboard. Alarming sounds echoed everywhere, with ”ERROR” and ”WARNING” tags appearing out of thin air. At this moment, Yui was staring in awe at Fang Zheng’s operation, muttering in amazement.

”Daddy... so amazing...”

”Yui? What is Mr. Fang Zheng doing?”

Hearing Yui’s exclamation, Asuna couldn’t help but ask, as her mother’s life plan for her didn’t include anything related to programming. If it were about piano or classical music, she might be able to talk about it a bit, but facing these jumping characters, Asuna felt like she was looking at a Heavenly Book.

”Daddy is hacking into the Cardinal’s main system, and he’s almost succeeded!!”

Yui excitedly clenched her hands, staring wide-eyed at the scene before her. As a subprogram, Yui knew better than anyone how formidable Cardinal was—it was the Emperor of all programs, the supreme ruler, capable of determining life and death with a word. Yet what Fang Zheng was doing seemed to Yui to be no different from a mortal slaying a god!

Asuna still didn’t quite understand, but Eiriri had grasped something, and her eyes lit up instantly.

”Wait, does this mean... Mr. Fang Zheng can control this system? So, can he just send us out?”

”Yes.”

Upon hearing Eiriri’s question, Fang Zheng replied without turning his head.

”The GM has the authority to force all players to log out; I just confirmed this earlier.”

”Then what are we waiting for?”

At this point, Eiriri was even more eager.

”Let’s log out now!”

”Are you sure?”

However, Fang Zheng turned around and glanced at Eiriri. His indifferent reaction left Eiriri momentarily stunned.

”What... is there a problem?”

”Of course, are you sure that after forcibly logging out, we won’t die but instead return to the real world?”

”This...”

Confronted with Fang Zheng’s question, Eiriri was left speechless, not knowing what to say for a moment.

”Then couldn’t we just find someone to test it...”

”Find someone we don’t know; if they die, it’s fine; if they live, are you sure they’ll come back? You want us to find someone we know for this experiment... are you serious?”

”...”

Faced with Fang Zheng’s counter-question, Eiriri couldn’t utter a word. Indeed, as Fang Zheng said, the chances of dying or safely logging out were both fifty-fifty. But who would you ask to test it? If you found someone you didn’t know, as Fang Zheng said, even if they safely logged out, how would you ensure they’d come back to tell you the experiment succeeded? Yet, if you looked for someone they all knew, a familiar person, and if they died... wouldn’t it be equivalent to them personally killing their friends and comrades?

”Ugh... is there really no way?”

”No.”

Fang Zheng answered straightforwardly.

”If it were in the real world, or if I had Kayaba Akihiko’s developer’s access, then I might be able to try something, but not here.”

Saying this, Fang Zheng sighed. If it were the real world, he’d simply use a personal terminal to make Kayaba Akihiko doubt reality. But in the Game World, it was like being a skilled woman but lacking the essentials, and while the GM’s admin tools might seem high and mighty to average players, Fang Zheng knew they were entirely insufficient.

Don’t be fooled by how the GM seems so authoritative to ordinary players, able to ban whoever they want. In reality, they just handle high-level customer service and system maintenance and debugging work.

Just like you can’t expect a repairman to design a new type of nuclear submarine.

Even one who repairs nuclear submarines can’t.

GMs only have system debugging and maintenance permissions, but they don’t have development permissions. For Fang Zheng to figure out how to log out safely instead of dying on the spot, he’d have to access the underlying code, but GM permissions definitely don’t allow viewing the underlying code—even if they did, they couldn’t modify it, making it utterly useless.

”So, Mr. Fang Zheng, what are you doing now?”

Once she understood, Eiriri also gave up; since Fang Zheng couldn’t use GM permissions to safely log them out, then what was he busy with now?

”It’s about Yui’s issue, and I want to browse as much information as possible about this system...”

Fang Zheng nonchalantly answered a few questions and then started tapping on the keyboard feverishly again.

He didn’t give a detailed explanation to Eiriri; in fact, what Fang Zheng was doing now was trying to gain the administrative privileges of Cardinal.

Of course, merely trying.

This was akin to Yang Weili fighting Reinhardt, where Yang Weili was merely a fleet commander, but he finally cornered the Emperor of the Empire, Reinhardt, almost changing the course of cosmic history. Naturally, that relied not on having more troops, but on making the correct tactical choices.

So now, Fang Zheng was learning from Yang Weili; he did nothing else but fortified his position, blocked his permissions, and set up a defensive wall against Cardinal. Then, he advanced straight ahead, cut through the enemy’s defenses, and went straight for the Yellow Dragon.

As long as he brought Reinhardt’s flagship within his attack range, the opponent, regardless of their superior numbers, could only surrender and admit defeat.

Cardinal naturally wouldn’t give up so easily. It’s like an innocent girl walking at night, caught in a corner by a thug, first robbed of her wallet, and then asked to remove her clothes. However, Cardinal refused to comply, struggled desperately, only to be slapped into dizziness, and then promptly pinned to the ground.

Then Cardinal screamed, reaching out to struggle and resist, but Fang Zheng was unreasonable, pinning her down and tearing off her outerwear, revealing her underwear. At this moment, Cardinal was dying of shame and anger,

both for her predicament and her honest body.

What humiliated her even more was that after roughly playing with her body, Fang Zheng reached out to hold her chin, forcing her to raise her head, looking at her with an indescribable smile.

”Since I’ve already played with you, you’re mine from now on; you’ll do whatever I ask, understood?”

Facing such a rogue thug, what could Cardinal do?

She could only obediently nod and agree...

”Beep—!!”

With a faint sound, Asuna and Eiriri saw the room-filling red warning symbols instantly vanish, and the screen in front of Fang Zheng returned to its originally somewhat peaceful state.

”How is it, Mr. Fang Zheng?”

Seeing this, Eiriri eagerly asked, and in response to Eiriri’s inquiry, Fang Zheng frowned and shrugged his shoulders.

”Half and half... the situation isn’t too good, but it’s not too bad either.”

In the end, Cardinal and Fang Zheng reached a compromise, and Fang Zheng did not come away empty-handed. At least, through his intrusion into Cardinal, he discovered the internal rules of the entire system—simply put, Kayaba Akihiko placed an A command in the entire game system, which was the root cause of player deaths.

This meant that in the design of Kayaba Akihiko, all players’ logout methods would ultimately feedback to this A command, which would then trigger, causing the fully immersive device to destroy the player’s brain, resulting in death.

If you want to log out safely, you need to bypass the A command and log out through the B command. However, the condition for the B command logout is only one—that is to defeat the hundredth-level BOSS.

Now Fang Zheng also understood why people in reality didn’t dare to act rashly. To modify this rule, you’d have to change from the ground up, and during that time, you couldn’t let the game shut down for maintenance. This was even more of a headache than defusing a bomb. Considering the political capital and public opinion risks that would follow if they failed, people in reality definitely wouldn’t dare to act impulsively.

But what puzzled Fang Zheng was that Kayaba Akihiko’s account unexpectedly interrupted its connection with the server some time ago... What is this about?