Chapter 438 - The News Conference Begins (1/2)

March 4th, Friday…

Pei Qian arrived at the office early. He accessed the platform to take a look. Not a single person had bought Be Quiet yet! Obviously, gamers could not achieve any breakthroughs in a single day.

Of course, that was what Boss Pei had planned!

The series of codes had been hidden in The Lonely Desert Road, and one would be able to find it after driving for just three hours. What’s more, only one person had to find the code before the others would be able to work on it.

If trying to repel gamers had been his only goal, Pei Qian could have requested all gamers to finish all eight hours—or even sixteen hours-of The Lonely Desert Road. That would have been effective, but the system would not have allowed it.

Thus, Pei Qian had to keep an eye on the difficulty while setting the riddle.

It would not be reasonable to make the riddle too difficult. That was because gamers would not be able to buy the game, and the System would prohibit it.

Yet, making the riddle too easy to solve would result in a lack of a barrier. Gamers would be able to purchase the game very quickly, and Pei Qian would have worked in vain.

Pei Qian’s main goal for setting up the filter was to minimize the number of gamers who would be qualified to buy the game during this cycle, which had less than a month left. He had to reduce the game’s sales volume as much as possible.

As for what he would do during the next cycle, he would think about it when the time came.

The ideal situation for Pei Qian would be for the riddle to take a month for gamers to solve. That way, he would not make any sales during this month.

Moreover, the game had already been released. Gamers were only unable to buy it because they could not solve the riddle and not because Boss Pei had not completed the game. Thus, the System would not take it as an unfinished project, and settlement would not be delayed.

Even if Pei Qian failed to hold them back by a month, buying two or three weeks would still be better than allowing everyone to purchase the game as soon as it was released.

Many gamers had thought of various ways to crack the code. From among them, a bunch of experts emerged.

The entire process was dazzling and included splitting, converting the English alphabets to numbers, converting the numbers to letters on keypads, reversing them, alternating them, forming a sequence, applying the American Standard Code for Information Interchange and the hexadecimal, and the like.

In actual fact, Pei Qian was only an average man. He had not learned about all the complex ways of creating a code. Thus, the riddle was a simple one, which one could use everyday observations to crack.

It was just that there were many steps.

Some gamers had been on the right track. However, the final step was less well-known and more amazing. Thus, once gamers arrived at this step, they mistook it as a dead-end and gave up digging any deeper.

Thus, nobody paid much attention to this accurate way of cracking the code.

GAICCCCCCACBIADBHCEA.

After some observation, one would be able to tell that ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’ appear the most times in the code. ‘l’ was the last alphabet of the alphabetical sequence that appeared. If ‘A’ was 1 and ‘B’ was 2, then ‘I’ would be 9. That meant this string of alphabets was meant to be converted to numbers.

71933333313291428351.

If one observed this string of numbers, they would realize that there was an order to every alternate number.

71/93/33/33/31/32/91/42/83/51.

None of the latter numbers surpassed four. This was a very common way of arranging alphabets on a cell phone keypad.

’71’ symbolized the first letter on the number ‘7’ of the cell phone’s keypad— ‘P’. By the same logic, every pair of numbers corresponded to a letter on the cell phone’s keypad.

PYFFDEWHVJ.

However, what came after this would not look so logical. Thus, gamers who followed the same thought process often failed to get any further. As more gamers observed one another’s progress on forums and discussions, they would form the impression that this was not the right way.

In fact, there was nothing complicated about the next step. Its general category was very common in the real world, but this particular branch was very rare. That meant very few people would understand it.

Pei Qian had only learned more about it out of interest. Therefore, when he felt like creating the code, it turned out more effective than he had expected.

Furthermore, even if one managed to get past this step, he would only be one-third done with the entire process.

“Keep working hard, everyone! If you can’t solve it, I will incur losses during this cycle!” Pei Qian could not help but feel arrogant.

Otto Technologies would be holding a news conference for the new cell phone this weekend. Pei Qian had to take a look to ensure that everything went perfectly.

However, before that, Pei Qian sent a message to the programmer who had been put in charge of the riddle. “They have found the clue in The Lonely Desert Road. You can reduce the time needed for the clues to appear from three hours to fifteen minutes.”

…

March 6th, a Sunday…

At Oasis Four Seasons Hotel, the biggest five-star hotel in Jingzhou City…

Tengda had collaborated with this hotel to host many of its events, including high-end business meetings, employees’ recruitment examinations, annual meetings, and the like.

The news conference was also being held in the ballroom in this hotel. Tengda had already invited many members of the media in advance, prepared rooms for them, and paid for their food, accommodations, and transport expenses.

The rest of the seats had been given to customers of Fish-Catching Internet Cafe, Upwind Logistics, and other businesses for free.

In any case, Pei Qian had experienced no problems in filling the entire event venue up.

The news conference was supposed to begin at 3 PM. At 2 PM, Pei Qian sneaked into the event venue and then found a seat in the corner.

He could have sat in the first row if he had wanted to, but there were cameras set up to live-stream the entire news conference. Pei Qian would definitely appear on camera if he sat in front. Then, his identity would be exposed.