After he taught Lynn the ways of the Dungeon Maker Console, he left her to her own devices to try some things out. She too appreciated being left alone so she could try things out without getting embarrassed for doing it wrongly. Meanwhile, he figured it was a decent time to look at the reactions of the Nian Raid Instance as well as the revamped Store Instance through the forums.
He read through the comments from users such as Tola, EuryEvans, Talzin, Dear_HeartMine, Suncust, crackedcacti, Yaximbahps and many others and they all shared a similar sentiment. (Editor's Note; Congrats to the named readers, you are now canon in the NODS novel. ^^ To any other long-time reader, apologies for not including you all, but the list might have grown too long otherwise. Feel free to become more active, so you can make the next cut 😉 )
Despite their initial praises, they pointed out that the dungeon raids were getting harder with each new one and that they took longer to complete. While they liked the story theme, quite a lot of them would prefer a return to shorter dungeons.
To Jin's surprise, the very first Goblin Dungeon Instance had lived through a renaissance of popularity. And when he checked the statistics as well as the population analysis, he learned that most of the repeat customers were salarymen (and women) who only had a limited amount of spare time during their lunch break and took a quick spin to the dungeon instance fight, seemingly preferring it over the monster arena battles.
It appeared to be somewhat of a 'catch a break and release the stress' dynamic for most of those salary workers. They needed just a quick workout before taking the busses Jin had employed to send them back to their respective districts. Incidentally, there were actually more demands for the buses in the nearby business districts as well as an unofficial petition from the Hua Wee Phone Company Campus.
And speaking of Hua Wee, the company had also been trying to contact Jin with regards to his phone app programming, questioning him if they could partner up so they could cooperate with his app specialists. Apparently, his Pandamonium Phone App had not gone unnoticed and as all attempts to reverse engineer it so far had failed. They had even tried to crack the app code but they found out that the Pandamonium Phone App had been using some sort of special app engine and source code that they could not figure out.
At first, they thought it was because of a strong encryption code which was why everything looked like gibberish when they tried to look at the workings of the app. This alone had been enough to attract the interest of various Hua Wee departments who specialised in engineering new cyber security methods. But as they tried to decode it, they found out that the encryption code got even harder to decrypt with each update.
Although they could isolate the phone and the Pandamonium app from updating itself and tried every method to decode every version of it, they were still nowhere near cracking the first release version of the Pandamonium App. But despite the setbacks, it prompted them to think out of the box and allowed them to think of ways to increase the encryption in their very own phones. And as time passed since the first Pandamonium App had appeared, it had prompted Hua Wee Staff to visit the shop to learn more about it.
While some of the shop options were mundane, there were quite a few quirky aspects that surprised them and enabled them to be interested in participating in the dungeons. Eventually, there was even a regular team that entered the shop for fun while others were there as part of a reconnaissance team to check out what new events and items were on. Because every time a new event or item was up, the Pandamonium App would have another feature that could potentially be on their list to crack.
It was to the point that Hua Wee management had decided to open a special Pandamonium Department just to study it, and that was regardless of whether Jin would join them or not. As for those staff who were in that app department, they treated the team of engineers who created the app as saints and the app itself as the holy grail.
Some of them were the brightest of minds in China, who had graduated with the highest of honours in various top universities. Nearly all of them had also gotten their post doctorate degrees in the shortest time possible. Yet, this particular Pandamonium App had left them speechless, clueless and befuddled.
There had also been employees from their Human Resources stalking, to see if they could identify the said-engineers or any details about them so they could poach these miracle workers into their midst. Unfortunately, they had little luck getting into contact with any of them, as if there were 'ghost' engineers working on the project, meaning that those engineers and cyber security specialists might not necessarily be stationed in the Tree Mall. So their only bet was getting the cooperation with Jin.
Yet for several times, the Dungeon Supplier had ignored them with good reason on his side. (He had to come up with some believable stories, since he could not tell them he was busy conqu- *ahem* SAVING other worlds, right?) Still, they did not yield, knowing that Jin might be hooked into the offer. From trying to lure him with money to now giving him the rights to charter a bus from the campus and to his Tree Mall. Since there had been no reply on his side, the employees of Hua Wee were trying their best to create the perfect bait for Jin to pick up.
Nevertheless, Jin was aware that the Pandamonium App was a delicious attraction to those big companies as the System has detected multiple intrusions to its application. Even though he was making waves in the Royal Zodiac scene, the spread of his infamous store had been propagated by the techies in Hua Wee Phone Company. Now even the major monopoly companies like Onepenny had tried getting their tech personnel to prod into the Pandamonium application.
With the word of an unbreakable encryption code in this modern age, it might certainly spur the brilliant minds to give it a try. Some even rumoured that the Pandamonium App could be a living AI entity that evolved with the number of common decryption methods failing to open it up and it lived to its Pandamonium name for bringing the tech society in China into disarray.
But they did not know there was a catch about all these decryption tries, which actually made Jin delighted that all these brute force methods were being revealed to the System so that the System could revise its code and update to prevent such decryption methods from ever working.
If anything, the trip to the Abyss Web had enabled the System to learn that it was important to be tech relevant in this particular age to stay above his competitors. (Although such advice was not translated well in Jin's current weaponry, he should be getting there soon.)
Not to mention, the Pandamonium App was part of the System and no matter how they isolated the app from updates, the System was able to change and update it on the fly with its own unique frequency of Wifi. Unless the phone would get shielded from all the radiating frequencies, they were fated to fail.
Of course, no one had ever considered going to such lengths. And even if someone did that, the System could update as long as there was another phone with the app within the vicinity of the isolated phone. It's like tracing and always searching for its fellow app users to learn more about the users.
It sounds invasive in nature and it truly is.
And knowing that there were people trying to pick the app apart, the System only placed the security patches in those 'isolated' apps and not changed the version number. (It irked the System to do that, but it was to fool the enemy.)
Nevertheless, the System believed that its encryption code could be broken if it was not careful in updating itself. The System determined that more information was better than none!
