“Ladies and gentlemen, this is ABC morning news. Today is another day approaching Christmas and yet today has become our darkest day…
“None of us expected a new type of creeper virus would appear out of nowhere and invade our network, crippling our communications. The entire continent was plunged into a medieval era devoid of modern communication for twenty-four hours.
“According to investigations by various countries, this was certainly an act of terrorism. The total economic damage it caused totals up to 300 billion U.S. dollars, which makes it the largest scale and most costly damage inflicted by a computer virus. So far, not a person or organization has claimed responsibility for this event…”
The day after the dust had settled, all television networks and online media were reporting on the events which happened in North America. Many people speculated that this was the work of a hacker or a hacker organization.
The fact that the virus was remotely controlled and that North America was the only continent affected further solidified the theory.
Furthermore, the virus only existed for twenty-four hours. After the twenty-four hours duration, the virus had disappeared from all of the computers in North America. This bizarre event that felt more like a fever dream bewildered all programmers.
This event also turned out to incite fear across the other continents, extending to the entire Earth Federation.
After all, if the virus could invade the North American network and cripple an entire state, the other continents could very well be at the mercy of the creator of the virus as well.
Nobody would choose to be put in such a position with a sword of Damocles hanging overhead.
Therefore, the entire Earth Federation set forth on a mission this very day, expending every resource available to them to find the organization responsible for crippling an entire state.
Unfortunately, the mysterious organization responsible for invading the North American communications network went into hiding again after that day…
On the other side of things, more bad news emerged from North America. The violence department of the Earth Federation – the Los Angeles branch of the FBI was purged by an underground organization.
All 153 members of the department were assassinated. There was not a single survivor. The victims included four high-ranking FBI officers…
To prevent a mass panic event, the Federation had tucked the information under covers.
Based on context, many people began speculating that there was a great deal of connection between the virus invasion incident and the FBI incident both occurring in the North American Continent.
For the mysterious organization to silence so many mouths, there was a chance they were trying to hide some secret.
Over the next few months following the incident, the entire North American Continent was driven into a state of panic and chaos. Underneath all the chaos, countless investigators were silently dispatched to find relevant information they could regarding these events.
Sadly, all their hard work would bear no fruits.
A week later.
Chen Chen had boarded an international flight and arrived in a small town named San Diego in the region of Los Angeles.
In the end, he did not issue the order to have the three statues delivered back to Namibia because something else suddenly occurred to him.
If the Earth Federation had previously set the three statues in the large province of North America, would they catch wind of the information should Chen Chen have the statues delivered back to Africa?
If that were to happen, he would be losing more than he bargained.
When the Earth Federation found out that Chen Chen was the hacker behind the attack on the North American communication network, no number of excuses would spare him. It would all come down to a devastating crash-and-burn.
It would not make a difference even if Chen Chen was doing this for the sake of mankind.
Therefore, this showed that Chen Chen still did not have enough in his arsenal to make Earth Federation tread carefully around him as he could not call the shots just yet.
Chen Chen did not dare to risk having the Earth Federation find out about the statues so he did not have them sent back to Africa.
Still, the statues would have to be dealt with eventually, otherwise, humanity would end up just like they did in Elysium.
For the moment, Chen Chen would not even dare to study the statues. Previously, X-112 had said that humans with their current technological advancement could barely scrape the core principles of the statues, no less utilize them on a higher level.
With the escort of the Black Knights, Chen Chen arrived at a manor and proceeded into the underground section.
Although it was a rented manor, it was decorated quite extravagantly as it also came with a spacious basement. There was a desk in the basement with a laptop set on top of it.
Positioned beside the desk were the three oddly-shaped statues that seemed to originate from the world of Elysium.
This was the first time Chen Chen saw the statues in person.
So far, he had always been analyzing these statues by remotely controlling the X-122 artificial intelligence in Elysium. One thing that was clear was instead of Chen Chen’s suspicions diminishing, they only continued to fester and grow.
Looking at the three statues, an absurd idea occurred to Chen Chen for the very first time. So far, he had determined that these three statues did not have the ability of thought, movement, attacking, and such. If not for everything he had observed in the world of Elysium, he would never have imagined that these three statues would be the agents of destruction of a civilization.
As for the motivation behind Chen Chen’s sudden boldness, it was because he was already familiar with how the statues killed people, which was with what appeared to be an electromagnetic wave propagating at the speed of light. Therefore, it would make a minimal difference even if Chen Chen were to hide on a separate corner of the Earth. In that case, he might as well confront it directly.
Besides, it seemed like a certain condition had to be met to activate the world-ending destructive capabilities of these three statues. Without meeting these conditions, they were just three ordinary mounds of rocks.
Chen Chen believed that the trigger condition was the three brains.
Previously in the world of Elysium, X-112 discovered a human brain in each of the three statues while studying them. The owner of the brains had long been deceased several centuries ago.
However, despite being the first person in the universe of Elysium who had his brain extracted by the statue, the Grosses in reality was still alive. This meant that there was a good chance that all three statues were hollow inside and were not a potential extinction threat at the moment.
Still, these were mere speculations. Though Chen Chen had a certain degree of confidence, he would not say it was a hundred-percent guarantee.
Therefore, to eliminate this looming threat, Chen Chen only had one option – to open a passage to another dimension where he could dispose of the statues.
All of this brought him to the current basement.
“Since the apocalypse statues were first discovered in the universe of Elysium, you shall return to your sender!”
Chen Chen snorted coldly and plugged the USB drive into the laptop. He opened the passage to the world of Elysium again.
After that, three Black Knights hugged a statue each and tossed them into the world of Elysium on the other end of the passage.
This was probably the most standard green waste disposal method in the world…