Shen Yi rolled over into his arms, her voice mumbled as she hugged him, "Stop checking if I'm breathing, Second Brother."
"Good night."
Perhaps because of her trip through another space and time, she was exceptionally tired right now, her eyes so heavy she could barely keep them open.
She slept straight through to noon.
Shen Ruxu had watched over her all night, entirely sleepless.
When she woke up, the young man was leaning against the edge of the bed, idly playing with his phone. Seeing her groggily sit up, he said, "You must be hungry, right? I made some food. Mom wants the two of us to go home."
Shen Ruxu felt that a domestic failure like himself really shouldn't be haphazardly taking care of a kid.
"You'll easily get sick following me around."
Getting sick was terrifying. The moment Shen Yi had fainted dead away in his arms, Shen Ruxu had nearly been scared to death.
He hadn't dared to sleep all night. Looking listless now, he heavily emphasized, "You really—scared me to death yesterday."
Shen Yi: "I'm sorry, but I'm completely fine now."
The good child of the family had made a kill for the first time in her life, making Wen Ya exceptionally worried. The very next day, she called to urge Shen Ruxu to quickly bring Shen Yi back home.
In the past, whenever Wen Ya asked him to come home, Shen Ruxu would mostly play deaf and dumb.
Not this time. He had to return his sister.
Shen Ruxu looked at her as if she were a porcelain doll, terrified she would shatter if he looked away for even a second. Even while eating, he kept staring intently at her.
But she was obviously super brave!
"I'll take you back." Shen Ruxu clasped his hands together and rested his chin on them. He bit his lip, quickly released it, and said somewhat neurotically, "Don't run around anymore, and don't follow anyone else. Just stay right by Mom's side."
"This world is very dangerous."
"There are a lot of bad people."
Shen Yi: "..."
"Like you?"
He actually admitted it. "Yes, there are a lot of people like me."
"Like who?"
"Like your gaming friends. I looked into them yesterday." Mentioning this, Shen Ruxu perked up a bit. His amber eyes lowered as he fell into a brief recollection.
Last night, with nothing else to do, he had pulled up a packet analysis tool and captured the login data of the gaming friend Shen Yi had been in long-term contact with.
As soon as the other party's IP address range came out, he noticed something was wrong.
It wasn't standard home broadband, but a constantly jumping proxy chain.
He tried scanning with a default port scanner, but the services the other party had open were pitifully few, leaving almost no trace.
Normally, Shen Ruxu wouldn't be so paranoid. It wasn't like he was the emperor.
But right now, he was overly anxious and sensitive, wishing he could suspect every single person out there.
Shen Yi was too young; he had to eliminate all potential dangers around her.
So Shen Ruxu changed his approach. Disguising it as a normal game data packet, he sent a tiny probe to the other party's IP to check the return packet's time difference.
The result was an extremely short return delay.
It didn't seem like a civilian network; it was more like a dedicated line.
Why would an ordinary person set up a dedicated line?
There was no way that was normal.
Shen Ruxu opened his penetration framework, hooked up an anonymous jump node, and starting from a relay server in Northern Europe, slowly felt his way into the other party's system.
First, he bypassed the outer firewall, discovering that the other party's port filtering rules were written impeccably clean, leaving virtually no entry point.
Not giving up, he tried stuffing a bit of his own payload into the ICMP traffic of the other party's gateway.
The person on the other end reacted extremely fast.
Almost the instant he stuffed it in, the other party's gateway dropped the anomalous packet and changed the keys for all sessions.
"Your internet friends have really fast reaction speeds," Shen Ruxu lowered his head, his delicate face devoid of any expression. "I was hoping to see who exactly they are."
"Are you a pervert, Second Brother?" Shen Yi, with food still stuffed in her mouth, was shocked. "You didn't even spare my gaming friends and hacked their system? If they find out, how are we ever going to happily play games together again?"
He was never like this before.
He never used to micromanage her.
"Do you really like playing games that much? You can play with me." Shen Ruxu didn't love playing games, but he was a tech geek after all, so games posed no difficulty to him whatsoever. "Anyone approaching you has an ulterior motive, Little Yi. You could easily die."
"..."
Shen Yi felt that whether her gaming friends had ulterior motives or not was beside the point.
Everyone just chatted online and complained about their daily lives.
They were merely friends separated by the internet.
Yet Shen Ruxu had followed the network cables and almost doxxed them completely.
Where on earth did this restless overprotectiveness of his come from?
"We're just internet friends. I won't meet them, at least not before I grow up." Shen Yi promised him earnestly. After eating her fill, she climbed down from the stool and took his hand. "Let's go home quickly, Brother. It's almost the New Year, let's not run around anymore."
Home was still the safest place!!
The outside world was just too dangerous.
Shen Ruxu bent down to pick her up and rubbed against her vigorously, like a cat furiously sniffing catnip. "You've grown taller."
Shen Yi felt a bit ticklish from his hair rubbing against her and dodged a couple of times. The thought of growing taller made her happy: "Of course I'll grow taller. My dream is to reach one point eight meters."
Shen Ruxu chuckled softly: "Wow, that's a truly noble ideal. I support you."
"...Thanks!" Shen Yi beamed with joy. "I'll work hard at eating, too."
If nothing else, her second brother was never a buzzkill.
If it were her third or fourth brother, one would just mockingly laugh at her, while the other would use data to tell her exactly how low the probability of that happening was.
"No, but why would she suddenly try to trace the network cables all the way to us out of nowhere?"
The boy leaned over his computer desk, unable to stop himself from wiping away a cold sweat.
It was too terrifying.
The girl was extremely puzzled. Sitting up straight, she asked seriously, "Did you find out clearly? This kid with the screen name Sugar-Coated Bullet, what exactly does her family do?"
"I don't know, I couldn't find out. That person's reaction was quite fast too." The boy's smile vanished as he muttered to himself, "Damn, I didn't expect the internet to be full of hidden dragons and crouching tigers like this. Could it be that someone in her family is a professional hacker?"
"It's possible. We've known her for a long time too. That brother of hers is really good at games, but the two of them are definitely genuine kids."
"I'm guessing the one who made the move must be a family member or friend around her." The girl narrowed her eyes and grumbled, "We're all just friends separated by the internet, isn't it better to keep some distance? To actually try and dox us, that's too much! Hmph!"
"Alright, maybe her family thought we had bad intentions and just wanted to probe our backgrounds?"
The boy leaned back lazily. "Let's just be more careful next time. I finally know why she's so mature for her age; turns out she's not an ordinary person either."
"In future chats, we can casually try to feel out what her family does."
The girl curled her lip. She felt they wouldn't be able to ask anything out of her; that kid was very sharp, and her lips were sealed tight.
