Chapter 49: Indifference Brings Strength

Returning to his computer, Du Long turned on the monitor, compressed the three videos, encrypted them, and then uploaded them to his cloud storage. He thoroughly deleted the local files using a file shredder.

After destroying the local evidence, Du Long breathed a sigh of relief. He casually browsed through Shen Yujie's other files and found many things that interested him.

These files were not videos or photos but summaries and reflections on Shen Yujie's work, as well as internal documents and materials from the Public Security Bureau. These were all useful to Du Long, so he unhesitatingly copied these files and moved them to his own folder.

There wasn't much else that caught Du Long's eye. The most important things were family photos and such. Du Long quickly switched to Shen Bingqing's folder, which contained a simple compressed file. Du Long double-clicked to open it and found that the compressed file was encrypted. He tried a few common, simple passwords, but Shen Bingqing was clearly not that naive, so all of Du Long's attempts failed.

Encrypting a file for no reason must mean something was wrong. Du Long copied the compressed file to another location and then went online to search for password-cracking software. Although he found many options, very few were actually usable, and most were infected with viruses. The antivirus software kept sounding alarms as soon as the files were decompressed, and even deleted the files he had downloaded with great effort.

Du Long struggled with this until his mother called him for lunch. After eating, he continued his work. The impulse to uncover secrets made him recklessly turn off the antivirus software and open a cracking software that claimed to be absolutely clean... The software indeed worked, starting to crack the password of the compressed file. The progress bar moved as slowly as a turtle, and Du Long knew that cracking the password would take a long time, especially if the encryption algorithm was complex and the password was long and complicated. So he turned off the monitor and went to bed.

Du Long usually took a nap when he wasn't working, but today he couldn't fall asleep, his mind constantly filled with the image of a beautiful, captivating woman. Even thinking about the pictures in the "yellow book" didn't help him calm down; it only made things worse.

Du Long jumped up and ran to the bathroom for a cold shower. When he returned, he noticed that the hard drive light on his computer was constantly on and making a clicking sound, which was very unusual. Du Long quickly turned on the monitor and saw that the progress bar of the cracking software hadn't moved much, but the mouse had lost its response.

Du Long knew something was wrong. He hurriedly turned off the power. When he restarted the computer a few seconds later, he couldn't even enter the system, not even in safe mode.

Du Long knew he had been hit. The problem must have come from the cracking software he had downloaded, which had promised to be absolutely virus-free. Du Long smiled bitterly: "Indifference brings strength, but I'm getting punished even before I do anything bad..."

At this point, regret was useless. Du Long wasn't completely at a loss. He found an old USB drive he hadn't used in years, used the WinPE on the USB drive to boot the system, set up the network, and upgraded the green antivirus software on the USB drive. Then he started scanning the hard drive for viruses.

The antivirus software kept sounding alarms, and Du Long's eyebrows kept twitching. Damn viruses, damn cracking software, how many of my precious files will be destroyed... A large number of trojans and viruses were detected, and many files were infected. Many of them could not be recovered and had to be deleted directly. Seeing the list of deleted files, Du Long's heart ached.

"It's all that sissy's fault. If he hadn't mentioned the hard drive, if he hadn't encrypted that damn compressed file, how could my computer have been infected!" Du Long naturally blamed everything on Shen Bingqing.

After the virus scan, Du Long checked the list of deleted or quarantined files. Fortunately, the damaged files were not very important. His cherished early AVs by Saki and Kaori were still intact, and the pictures and novels were not the main targets of the virus. The computer suffered minimal damage, thanks to Du Long not falling asleep. If the virus had continued to wreak havoc for the entire afternoon, who knows what would have happened.

What made Du Long even more frustrated was that the files on Shen Yujie's hard drive were completely unharmed, and the copied files were also intact. Could it be that there really are gods watching over us?

Du Long scoffed at this fleeting thought. He cloned the system back, and the computer returned to normal. The afternoon passed in this way.

Du Long checked the time and saw it was getting late. He said goodbye to his mother and took a bus to the Sichuan restaurant where he had eaten before.

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