Building a Gaming Empire From Scratch

Chapter 1291: Chapter 1164: Binary Tomb Raider?

Chapter 1291: Chapter 1164: Binary Tomb Raider?

Could it be that those are not fragments of damaged technological information, but rather the “remains” of digital life?

Lincoln was startled and alarmed.

This possibility was a bit scary.

On his first day in this world, he received that golden-glowing seed in a hazy dream.

Everything, including Mavis and the virtual world, came from this unknown opportunity.

While Cloud Dream’s step-by-step success to this day had certainly involved his and all employees’ effort, the true source was undoubtedly due to those technologies and that ball of golden light.

However, he had always considered it a pure bundle of compressed technology.

After all, the information that Mavis decrypted continuously turned out to be technologies, one after another.

At most, the technology used for compression was somewhat special, and the decompression process was overly complex, which made the efficiency quite low; as such, they had not entirely finished decompressing it to this day.

But—

Seeing the incomprehensible changes on the code level that arose after those six digital lives completely lost their physical bodies, with the Consciousness Chip becoming their only attachment, especially the subtle similarities…

The civilization that created the virtual world had “packaged (hibernated)” their digitized lives and launched them out in some incomprehensible way, and he had accidentally picked it up?

What does this count as?

A special funeral ritual of digital civilization?

—Like humanity’s sea burial and sky burial, had they come up with a quantum funeral?

What, then, were Mavis and those technologies?

Funeral objects?

And what am I?

Lincoln’s thoughts flew further and further.

Am I… grave robbing?

Tomb raiding?

A Binary Tomb Raider?

In that case, what would be at the very bottom of the “burial,” or rather, the innermost layer of that glow—”the last folder of the compression pack”?

What could it be?

A tombstone inscription?

Or perhaps a tomb guardian?

An endless stream of question marks bubbled up from Lincoln’s mind.

The more he thought about it, the more outrageous it seemed, yet he unexpectedly found that the logic… sort of matched?

But this brainstorm had no evidence to back it up, and the problems were numerous.

He couldn’t even be sure how much similarity there was between the two.

Especially when he saw Mavis beside him, who was lost in her own world and possibly enjoying some gossip, the sense of incongruity grew stronger.

—Even if Mavis is, in essence, intelligent life, using a little girl as a funeral object seemed far too primitive and absurd, didn’t it?

A civilization that has unlocked technology to the virtual world should not have such primitive customs.

Lincoln shook his head and temporarily stopped his wild speculations.

The current priority was to determine that the incomprehensible data was indeed a form of “digital life.”

And—

Whether it would be possible to “resurrect” them?

“Take me to the Transfer Station to have a look,” Lincoln made a request.

Henry nodded without hesitation and turned to lead Lincoln toward the “Transfer Station.”

…

The Transfer Station is a temporary storage place for Digital Life Cards.

Currently, there are only six saved here, which are the basis on which those six “deceased” elders can still remain in this world.

This Digital Life Card looks somewhat like a long USB drive, but it’s extremely hard because its primary function is to protect the internal Consciousness Chip.

After Lincoln and Henry passed three layers of security checks to get here, they first checked the preservation status of these Digital Life Cards, then Lincoln took out a cable to connect the headband with the server and began to examine more detailed data on the site.

The data fragments decrypted by Mavis and the underlying code of the six digital lives were displayed side by side.

Lincoln scanned the data on both sides, in search of conclusive evidence.

But that was very difficult.

Especially the data on the right side—the code of those six digital lives was constantly changing, thoroughly dazzling to the eye.

Even Lincoln, fully focused, couldn’t possibly sift through the important information relying solely on his eyesight and memory.

He had to use tools.

And the data fragments on the left side were just as complicated.

Lincoln referred to it as “fragments” not because of its small size, but because it could not run and its logic was incomplete.

Actually, the size of that thing was quite substantial; otherwise, given Mavis’s current decryption efficiency, it wouldn’t still take many days to decrypt a part of it.

For Lincoln, the only relatively friendly aspect was that it was fixed and wouldn’t change as rapidly as the data on the right.

Henry and several professors watched as Lincoln suddenly sat down and began typing rapidly on an invisible keyboard in the air and looked at each other in confusion.

They knew what Lincoln was researching, but they couldn’t see it.

Henry had seen this a few times before, so he didn’t ask right away.

But after a while, noticing that Lincoln hadn’t stopped, he couldn’t help asking, “What are you doing?”

Lincoln, engrossed in performing a “cyber autopsy” on those fragments, responded to Henry’s question without a second thought, “Matching Link.”

He meant identifying content that was the same across several different sets of code and marking it.

But Henry and the two researchers didn’t know this, and they were baffled by Lincoln’s response.

‘You’ve come here to play Matching Link??’

Fortunately, Mavis was more leisurely and poked Henry’s leg while whispering softly, “He’s just joking, you know.”