Four Split Personalities

The silhouette on the screen was dim and blurry, and one could only faintly discern that it was a somewhat delicate girl, her environment and appearance indistinguishable, impossible to glean any additional information from. Her voice, however, seemed unprocessed and was identical to that of Double Leaf from The Realm of Innocence.

Because the event happened so suddenly, Cui Xiaoyu and the others hadn’t even reacted yet after the new group member cheerfully greeted them...

More precisely, only two people had reacted.

Yi Dong had been just as stunned as everyone initially, but as he subconsciously reviewed the system alert again, he froze because the name ’Double Leaf’ was far too familiar to him these days!

In fact, even aside from recently, the person had often appeared in Yi Dong’s daily life, primarily through various major online incidents and narratives by Mo Tan. Back then she was not ’she’, she might have been ’he’ or ’it’, and her name was not ’Double Leaf’ but ’Black Sun’. To be exact, she was fifty percent of Black Sun, basically a despicable person who somehow got mixed up with Mo Tan.

An utterly despicable person with extremely superior hacking skills.

Since Yi Dong had secretly helped to ’monitor’ her before Mo Tan arrived in Sālāmù’ēn, and also because Double Leaf frequently visited the Mage Guild not exactly keeping a low profile, young Yi promptly recognized her.

That lazy voice tinged with a bit of teasing and youth was highly recognizable.

[Mo Tan you @#￥%&! What the hell are you up to!]

Yi Dong cursed silently in his mind, then, pretending to continue to be dazed, he quickly switched pages, cleared his chat history with Mo Tan on this app as fast as possible, and did not hesitate to block the other two accounts of hers.

As a friend, Yi Dong could vaguely deduce something from Mo Tan’s unchanged expression, like the fact that the latter truly had no idea about Double Leaf suddenly joining them, which meant that she must have mixed in through some special means...

Even though theoretically Double Leaf did not know the relationship between Mo Tan, Hei Fan, and BLACK, Yi Dong, being the only one privy to this fact, was still alarmed into a cold sweat. He then immediately tried to destroy as many of their message histories as possible, though such an act was more about self-comfort, but it was better than doing nothing.

[This woman must be targeting ’Hei Fan’...]

[She might have been lurking here even before this group chat started...]

[Mo Tan hasn’t noticed, which proves he probably hasn’t done anything as BLACK before, otherwise he wouldn’t be unguarded...]

[This might just be purely accidental...]

[I don’t look particularly like my in-game character right now, so even if she saw me at the Mage Guild, she probably wouldn’t remember me well...]

[Calm down, the situation isn’t as bad as I imagined. Let’s keep quiet and do what needs to be done and observe!]

Yi Dong, who had limited knowledge of hacking, quickly sorted out the situation after a series of thoughts. Obviously, their friend A was not just a simple fool; he was meticulous enough, alert enough, clever enough. Perhaps his screen time wasn’t much, and these traits weren’t obvious under Mo Tan’s concealment, but in a crucial moment, this man named Yi Dong could be relied on more than anyone else could.

He adjusted his expression like a precise machine, making himself look as dumbstruck as everyone else, and at the same time, he silently moved his mouse, noiselessly carrying out a series of clean-up operations, meticulously and efficiently deleting all ’incongruent’ parts of his recent chat records with Mo Tan’s current account.

Total time taken: fifty-three seconds.

Yi Dong knew that if Double Leaf was not suspicious, his actions were completely superfluous, and if Double Leaf was suspicious, these measures would hardly be effective. If Mo Tan could dig up two and a half years of his deleted manga records, then Double Leaf, who could hold her own against him, could probably do the same.

But he still meticulously completed the full set of ’cover-up work’.

No explanation needed.

And NAVI had completely executed ’basic monitoring’ within one minute and eight seconds...

...

As for the other one who reacted... or perhaps never got confused at all, it was Mo Tan himself. Maybe a few minutes earlier, he might have panicked a bit, but having just involuntarily switched to a ’Chaotic Neutral’ personality, there was no sign of panic at all as he quickly deduced a series of results based on the current outcomes...

[I must be out of my mind~]

Mo Tan thought contentedly, because this really wasn’t anything complicated. From the moment Double Leaf appeared to the conclusion he reached, it took him less than two seconds.

There was no conspiracy, nor was it deliberate, Double Leaf’s intrusion from the start to the end was a complete accident, an incredibly annoying accident.

Simply put, it was because he had previously lowered his computer’s security level to video call Yu Chen, leaving his usually at least minimally protected laptop completely defenseless. Further, due to the ’inspection’ incident, he had disconnected the internet cable provided by the Rais brothers, and switched to using an old network card initially purchased for decoration, thus making his network environment also defenseless.