[Mercer: Don't worry, it's probably not a highly contagious, highly lethal virus. Otherwise, everyone would have been dead a long time ago. I guess it might be a chronic virus that only gets transmitted through close contact.
Unless there's direct, large-scale contact, there shouldn't be any danger. That woman didn't even wear protective gear, so it should be fine.
They might be researching a special medicine.
As for Red Ochre's side... we need to investigate further, but it sounds like they're poisoning the water supply for Red Ochre's people.]
[Pan'an: Damn, is this Red Hand crazy? Poisoning his own people? Mercer, I need to tell Red Ochre's people!]
[Mercer: Of course you should, but you need to calm down first and not let them ruin our plans. Who knows if there are other spies in the biotechnology sector.
But don't worry, I've already got the information on that woman.
Emilia Morton is currently the regional project manager of the technical department at the biotechnology company.
Looks like this job has plenty of secrets to dig up. Normally, a manager wouldn't personally get involved.
I found out that she only has two regional deputy directors and one regional director above her, so her rank isn't low.
Let's move on to the next step. Once we hijack the drug samples and catch this woman, we can pass the information to Red Ochre's people to do them a favor and let them clean up their own mess.]
[Qiwei: You plan on capturing her too?]
[Mercer: Of course, I want to get more intel from her and then consider hacking into the biotechnology servers later.
If she turns out to be useless, we can just get rid of her after we're done.]
[Qiwei: Got it, we'll do some disinfection and also clean the car before heading back.]
[Mercer: Relax, if it really were a highly infectious virus, their own people would be scared to death. But, safety first.]
[Qiwei: Understood.]
Pan'an restarted the car and headed back, looking somewhat uncomfortable: "We drank beer there... we're not that unlucky, right?"
"It should be okay, look at that owner, they've been fine for so long. What's there to be afraid of?" V forced calmness into his voice.
The three of them wandered around Old Wei's place, got checked, and confirmed they weren't infected with any virus. Only then did they breathe a sigh of relief and returned to Adcardo.
...
Mercer borrowed a large tent from the camp that they use for meetings as a temporary base, so everyone wouldn't have to squeeze into his little tent.
When V brought Qiwei and Pan'an to find Mercer, they saw Lucy and others who had gone out in the morning to research the market, giving a report to Mercer in the big tent.
"I went to look at the Sorcery Puppet Virus Program Chips on the market, and the ones sold in the Kabuki District were of the highest quality.
The programming level is about that of an average advanced hacker. Not bad, but not particularly great either.
Next are the goods sold by the Voodoo Gang in Taiping Prefecture. They aren't very friendly to outsiders, their prices are on the high side, and the chip quality is slightly worse than those in the Kabuki District. It seems like they didn't put much effort into them, and you can only see the programs after purchasing them.
I bought one and tested it on my computer; it's full of back doors. It's unclear if they're selling quick crack chips, or back doors and hidden viruses.
In terms of overall pricing, low-end market chips are generally around 3,000 Euros, mostly simple programs like for cyberware overload and quick invasions.
Mid to high-end crack chips are sold as plugin items, which can be directly inserted into a Network Access Vault for execution. Seems like if we want to enter the program market, we need to get a batch of advanced program chips.
The audience buying these chips generally aren't doing it to research them, they're for plug-and-play use. The users aren't particularly skilled and rely on the program chips and the computing power of the Network Access Vault to run programs.
Unlike you, who likes to put everything into the Access Vault and use brainpower to process data, Mercer, I found that most of those 'script kiddie hackers' still rely on external hardware to hack.
This means we might also have an opportunity by working on hardware to develop advanced program chips and increase the price.
The only products that can be considered as high-end are those sold by Voodoo Gang and in the Kabuki District. The program chips they include ensure the program runs automatically and don't require hackers to provide much computing power most of the time, and the programs are fairly refined.
The price for these chips starts at around 10,000 Euros, and depending on the hardware and program content, the highest can be sold for up to 30,000 to 50,000 Euros, but nothing more expensive than that."
After Lucy finished speaking, Rebecca casually added: "The low-end market is basically composed of chips written by hackers themselves, then handed over to stores there to sell.
These stores don't have any special influences. They just pay protection fees to the local powers wherever they set up shop, nothing more than a simple relationship.
So anyone wanting to sell to them can, and they usually just sell them along with other goods.
The stores that specialize in selling program chips are usually directly controlled by local gang powers, like the chip stores over in the Kabuki District, which are watched over by the Tiger Claw Gang.
As for the suppliers... I did some probing, and the mid to high-end chip market is basically monopolized by the Voodoo Gang. However, I heard that the stuff in the Kabuki District comes from Dog Town.
The batch from Dog Town doesn't seem to be from the same group as the Voodoo Gang in Taiping Prefecture."