For an entire incense stick of time, Lin Tao remained motionless in the ditch, his star-white-gold metal pen capturing the incoming signal packets streaming from the three giant beast towers.
His test overlay piled up hundreds of signal traces, decomposing the necromantic protocol into a clean stone-built schema.
The system was staggering in its stone-built fault.
In any robust, mission-critical distributed public works, endpoint management needed mutual authentication. If a central node wished to issue execution commands to remote hardware, it had to exchange coded tokens, verify sender identity, and validate that incoming order packets had not been tampered with in transit.
The Ashen Bone Ghost Sect had implemented none of these safeguards.
Because the necromancers viewed their corpses as mindless living clay and assumed that no mortal fighter without Ghost Sect lineage could see or manipulate rotting flux, their control system operated on pure, blind trust. The star-iron pins embedded in the corpses’ necks were fully open receivers. They listened continuously on the fourteen point eight kilohertz band, accepting any properly modulated pulse that matched their internal address register without asking for a password, a lineage seal, or a pass-key!
A wide-open memory bus, Lin Tao analyzed, a cold, hungry gleam appearing in his test eye. The corpse receivers don’t know who is speaking. They only know the hum and the address. If I transmit on this hum with enough signal wave height, every receiver on the network will accept my command packets as gospel.
