Chapter 22: The Conspiracy Begins to Emerge (Part 2)

"Is it him?"

Sun Cheng's smile faltered, and his gaze flickered accordingly.

He recognized the owner of the voice, and was in fact very familiar with him; it was one of his roommates from his years in university, named Liu Kun.

If this had been a few days ago, and Liu Kun had come to the dormitory to see him, he surely would have been uncontrollably happy.

But now?

He pulled a flash drive from his pocket, toyed with it gently in his hand for a moment, and only then stood up and walked toward the door. "Coming..."

After calling out, Sun Cheng rubbed his stiff facial muscles, and after brewing for a moment to fill his face with a smile again, he finally opened the dormitory door.

The next moment, a young man wearing a casual long-sleeved shirt with a side-parted hairstyle appeared before Sun Cheng; it was indeed his former roommate, Liu Kun.

"A-Cheng, what's going on? I've been calling your phone and there's been no response. Did your phone get cut off for non-payment?"

Liu Kun walked in carrying a bag of fruit, skillfully placed the items on an empty computer desk next to Sun Cheng, and only then looked at him and asked with concern.

"Don't mention it. I was in a bad mood last night, drank a bit of alcohol, and accidentally dropped my phone!" Casually fabricating an excuse, Sun Cheng put on an annoyed expression.

His Apple 5 was currently still in the other world, so he had no fear of being exposed.

The dormitory was permeated with the lingering smell of alcohol. Liu Kun followed the scent, and sure enough, after seeing several cheap Su liquor bottles sitting in a trash can nearby, he didn't seem to be suspicious; instead, he gently advised him, "You, don't drink alone when you're in a bad mood. If you just made a call, could the boss, the fourth, and I not come out to keep you company?"

This familiar, warm conversation caused a wave of guilt to suddenly surge in Sun Cheng's heart.

"I must be overthinking it," he consoled himself, yet he dared not look at the good friend he had known for years with that scrutinizing gaze again; even when his eyes inadvertently met his, it gave him the urge to turn his head and look away.

Taking the opportunity to invite him in to sit, Sun Cheng also began to doubt whether his behavior of questioning a good friend just because of a Trojan horse was a bit too petty.

Carrying a bit of guilt, Sun Cheng busied himself back and forth, pouring him water and moving a stool for him. His enthusiasm made even Liu Kun feel uncomfortable. After sitting down, he said, unable to take it anymore, "You guy, why are you being so polite with me? This is your dorm; isn't it my dorm too?"

"Didn't you all move out? Coming back now, you're naturally half a guest!"

"It's not like we didn't ask you to move out and live with us. The boss and the fourth didn't hold a grudge against you because of the money-borrowing incident; it's just you who always feels bad about it!" Liu Kun said, "How about it? Move over and live with us. After all, we're graduating in two or three months; it's more convenient to live outside."

After finishing his sentence, he glanced at Sun Cheng's computer screen as if inadvertently, and his expression changed slightly. "You changed your system?"

Sun Cheng nodded. Still feeling guilty, once he saw the change on Liu Kun's face, his doubts rose again. "It's just a system change; why is his reaction so big? Could it really be as I guessed, that the Trojan horse came from his hand?"

He then calmly probed, "My computer was crashing frequently before, and I couldn't get it fixed even after taking it to a shop; reinstalling the system didn't work either. A couple of days ago, I found a tech expert in the department and asked him to help me look at it. He said the computer had a Trojan horse and helped me reinstall the system, and it finally got better!"

When mentioning words like "reinstalling the system" and "Trojan horse," Sun Cheng, who was already paying special attention to the changes in his facial expression, sensitively captured a trace of unnaturalness. His heart sank, and he suddenly realized that his previous guess might not be a delusion—this roommate of his had serious issues.

Perhaps because he had a guilty conscience, Liu Kun didn't stay long after sitting down before making an excuse that he had things to do later and left.

Once he left, Sun Cheng, with even deeper clouds of doubt in his heart, could no longer sit still. He was now impatient to know the truth.

After considering for a good while, Sun Cheng finally thought of where to start to continue his investigation.

Unfortunately, he hadn't been able to bring his phone back from the other world, which made him feel very uncomfortable, as he had grown accustomed to the convenience of a phone.

Fortunately, after thinking for a while, Sun Cheng soon remembered that someone he needed to contact liked to play games.

He sat back down in front of the computer, spent some time finding a game voice software he had used when playing games with the other party, and downloaded and installed it on the computer.

Then he entered his account, logged in, and searched for a while. Only after finding the other party's account in his friend list did he breathe a slight sigh of relief.

Seeing that the other party was actually online, Sun Cheng hurriedly clicked on the chat box and contacted him via text: "Fourth, reply as soon as you see this. I have something to ask you!"

After clicking confirm to send the message, he waited four or five minutes without receiving a reply, and he immediately understood that the other party might still be in a game.

He had no choice but to minimize it to the bottom right corner of the computer and wait for the other party to notice it.

Because he didn't know how long he would have to wait, Sun Cheng soon moved his gaze away from the bottom right corner of the screen and clicked on the browser again.

For Sun Cheng, investigating the Trojan horse that had inexplicably appeared on his computer was merely to resolve some confusion in his heart.

The most urgent matter for him currently was actually to raise money as quickly as possible to resolve the pile of debt problems created by his previous entrepreneurial venture.

For Sun Cheng, although this was very troublesome, it was not entirely impossible.

In fact, an attempt in the afternoon had confirmed that his current computer skills were very high, and Sun Cheng had actually already found a solution.

Quickly searching for an iOS system exchange community, Sun Cheng searched carefully for a while and finally found the latest version of the iOS system installation package in a post, which he chose to download.

One of the methods he thought of to quickly earn 100,000 yuan was to find bugs in Apple's iOS system to receive rewards.

In September 2015, the vulnerability acquisition platform Zerodium issued a bounty for iOS 9 system bugs, investing 3 million dollars to reward anyone who could develop a perfect browser-based jailbreak for the iOS 9 system.

This bounty, which had been the talk of the town last year, had actually already ended at the end of October last year. On November 3rd, Zerodium announced that one hacker team had successfully created a browser-based jailbreak for the iOS 9.1-9.2 system, thereby winning the 1 million dollar reward.

However, although that bounty from last year had ended, this did not mean that Sun Cheng couldn't make money from it.

Because it was very clear that the jailbreak system obtained by the Zerodium bounty would obviously never be sold to Apple again.

As the world's most popular mobile phone brand, there were plenty of people willing to pay large sums of money to obtain more system bugs regarding Apple phones.

As it happened, Sun Cheng actually knew quite a few.

The iOS system was not perfect; this was a realization he had long had after using Apple phones for several years.

However, what truly made him feel that the myth had shattered was when he was in the other world a few days ago, dropped off at a scrapyard on the outskirts of Washington by Barricade, who was returning to see Starscream. When he used the Enhancement function of 'Frenzy' to enhance his Apple 5, Sun Cheng had also taken the opportunity to use the powerful intrusion capabilities of the 【Spy Template】 to completely crack every line of code in the iOS system, from which he had discovered at least hundreds of various vulnerabilities.

Fortunately, when returning to reality from the other world, although Sun Cheng lost the powerful intrusion capabilities of 'Frenzy', all his memories regarding those vulnerabilities remained, and even under some influence of 'Frenzy', his computer skills had experienced a leap in growth.

Therefore, what he needed to do now was to download the latest version of the iOS system from the internet, verify one by one whether the vulnerabilities he had discovered had been fixed, and then consider whether to sell them to Zerodium or directly to Apple.

The internet speed in the dormitory was not fast; the 1.4G installation package had been downloading for a full twenty minutes and the progress bar hadn't even reached halfway, which left Sun Cheng quite helpless.

Just as he was bored, suddenly his computer emitted a "beep" notification sound. Sun Cheng subconsciously looked at the bottom right corner and sure enough, saw the voice chat software blinking.

He hurriedly clicked it open and saw a reply appear: "No response when I called you, why is your phone turned off? What do you need me for?"

"Come to Wang Shifu Xiaochao, we'll talk when you get there. Don't tell the boss and the second, just come alone!"

The chat software was silent for a long while before replying: "I got it, I'll be there in half an hour!"