Countdown: Humanity's struggle to survive against yesterday

Awareness Day, January 14th.

At Taiqing Mountain, the five members of the Huitian Group reunited.

After a brief exchange of pleasantries, everyone immediately got to work.

The Dream Seeking Project was proposed by Zhou Yunci, and everyone thought the name sounded nice, so they have continued to use it ever since.

This plan mainly consists of five steps:

The first step is to try it out. It is planned to take five days to use the power of the Luoshu (洛书) to instantly take over all smart devices in the country and first collect statistics on the status of all people in the country.

This status only counts who is awake and who is sleeping.

At this point, Jiang Ning will enter the mysterious space after obtaining the statistical data to compare the two and see if they are the same.

If they are the same, we will try to proceed to the second step.

The second step is expected to take ten days, mainly to continue analyzing people's sleep and wakefulness states after the world has regressed, when time has progressed to 24 hours.

Similarly, the test was first conducted on humans in certain parts of the country. Jiang Ning was primarily observing the changes in the cloud map within the mysterious space, examining the differences between the two.

Especially after the final 15 seconds of the countdown, the experiment aims to obtain preliminary data comparing the changes in the cloud map with human sleep patterns.

That is, the changes in gray dots and off-white dots.

Jiang Ning persisted with this experiment because, through his observations over several months, he discovered that the gray and grayish-white spots were constantly changing.

Especially after each rollback, 24 hours later, the gray-white dots representing wakefulness will suddenly decrease, while the gray dots representing sleep will increase significantly.

For this reason, Jiang Ning speculated that if all of humanity fell asleep, the world would regress.

However, Jiang Ning had also observed this in the mysterious space, and even if the world experienced a major regression, the gray-white dots would not all disappear.

On the contrary, these two colors are constantly changing.

Faced with this situation, the five members of the Resurrection Group made a judgment: they believed this was normal, because it was impossible for all of humanity to sleep at the same time, nor was it possible for them to wake up at the same time.

It's normal for people to be sleeping and for others to be awake.

Therefore, this second step mainly explores this change.

If a discovery is made, the third step will be taken, which is the same as the first step. At this point, the testing will be conducted on all of humanity.

At this point, the Luoshu (Lo Shu) would be needed to invade the entire world.

Initially, Academician Zhao of Taiqingshan lacked confidence in this challenge, but after more than a month of dedicated development, utilizing Jiangning's positioning capabilities, Luoshu has quietly evolved into a monster.

That might not be a vivid description.

According to Academician Zhao, this is called a dimensional reduction attack.

What does that mean?

For example, the super AI Apple in South America normally iterates itself every three months, but now it has been regressing for 66 days. During these 66 days, not only has it failed to iterate, but its original accumulated data has also been decreasing.

In contrast, Luo Shu has been absorbing data for over a month. Furthermore, there are historical network vulnerabilities that other countries are aware of but lack the time and resources to fix.

This would allow Luo Shu to be like a wolf among sheep; once released, it could destroy and forcefully take over all the world's networks with overwhelming force.

Of course, this will inevitably leave obvious traces.

Other countries aren't sitting idly by either; they're bound to discover this.

This step is very risky; it's like showing your fangs to the whole world in the online world.

Initially, the organization disagreed, believing the timing was not right.

But Jiang Ning persisted.

The organization studied his proposed plan and found that by the time the third step was completed, it would be just after New Year's Day. At that time, the world might be in chaos, and it would be feasible to take advantage of the situation.

So it was approved.

Step four is similar to step two.

Similarly, by randomly selecting some samples and having Jiang Ning compare them with the mysterious spatial cloud map, they could deduce the patterns of whether humans in the world sleep or not.

The fifth step is to identify the sample and then do everything possible to find its meaning.

If it is found and it is truly confirmed that the Great Regression of the world is related to sleep, then the entire scientific community will devote all its efforts to exploring this line of inquiry.

If the problem cannot be found, Jiang Ning promised to disband the Huitian Group and do everything in his power to help other scientists.

……

Taiqing Mountain, basement level, northeast corner.

Jiang Ning stood at his workstation, looking at his teammates who were either sitting or standing: "That's roughly the overall plan. Also, Taiqing Mountain will only give us two hours a day to fully utilize the Luoshu computing power, so we must make the most of those two hours."

"Su Mian, once the plan begins, I want you to directly and violently hack into all electronic devices across the country, including cameras, mobile phones, and computers. Don't feel pressured; I will take full responsibility for the consequences. Just follow the pre-set program."

Upon hearing this, Su Mian calmly exchanged a glance with Jiang Ning, but said nothing.

"Lu Xue, like Su Mian, after he finishes cracking the code, I need you to use another facial scanning program to count these people. At the same time, we also need to compare them with the National Security household registration database to ensure the accuracy of the sample, so that we can know later which areas are not covered by Skynet."

"Understood, Team Leader Jiang!"

Lu Xue, carrying a dog cage, nodded vigorously. After speaking, she quickly sat down at her workstation, first placing the dog cage beside her feet, and then intently looking at the computer screen.

The professional staff at Taiqing Mountain have already installed all the necessary software on the computer. All you need to do is open it and follow the instructions – it's a foolproof process.

In fact, Academician Zhao once suggested to Jiang Ning that their staff at Taiqingshan Mountain could help with these tasks.

But Jiang Ning refused.

It's not that Jiang Ning is being sentimental; it's just that he believes sometimes the sense of participation is more important than the result.

These people are willing to believe him and follow his "fooling around," so they should at least feel a sense of participation.

Furthermore, the staff at Taiqing Mountain are not idle either. Everyone has endless things to do. Apart from necessary scientific research, most of them have to devote themselves to daily stability maintenance work.

For example, whether the Ouroboros Project can be implemented step by step also requires technical support from the staff of Taiqingshan.

Of course, senior network engineers from various internet companies are also busy. If it were just Taiqingshan and his people, they wouldn't be able to maintain stability in the country's transportation, power, and network systems.

Fortunately, these people had lived and worked here for a long time before the major setback, which allowed them to concentrate their efforts on their work.

Therefore, in the process of verifying his conjecture, Jiang Ning tried his best not to cause trouble for these people.

Even if you fail, you'll feel better in the end.

"Zhang Jimin, I need you to start compiling and statistically analyzing this data in half an hour and give me a sample that you consider reliable."

Zhang Jimin nodded emphatically, his face full of excitement.

He had never fought such a costly battle since becoming a sleep research expert.

A reliable sample usually refers to a real and valid sample when conducting sleep research surveys.

In the past, in order to get a sample, one would often have to say all sorts of nice things and give gifts in order to get someone to cooperate.

Now, they've resorted to brute force, using the Luoshu (洛书) to monitor everyone, with countless samples.

He enjoyed himself immensely, but Zhang Jimin was also well aware that such methods were immoral. Despite his excitement, he also had mixed feelings.

He looked up at Jiang Ning, only to see that Jiang Ning was expressionless with firm eyes.

"If this gets exposed, Ningzi, can you really handle it?" Zhang Jimin thought to himself.