Chapter 89: You Resemble My Deceased Husband
Shoutout to nyanmaru for the commission!
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Beep—Beep—
Horns sounded in his ears, growing louder as they approached, until they were piercing:
Chu Feng opened his eyes and saw the roof of a Lamborghini.
The heavy rain continued, and the long line of traffic was still stagnant. His car was among them, squeezed in like a scale in a dragon’s body.
Clang.
The intelligent car system was still driving for him. Chu Feng quickly pulled off the “universal game headset” and tossed it aside.
Because of the prolonged lag, the mental connection was severed, forcing him back to reality.
After a moment’s pause, Chu Feng immediately clicked on the car system – started the backup “universal game headset” and reconnected to Dream City—
Beep beep!
【Welcome back to Dream City game…】
Then, a full-screen message popped up:
【This year marks the fifth anniversary of Dream City. Due to the large number of online players, a friendly reminder: please beware of hacker attacks, virus vulnerabilities, and information fraud… Do not trust anything that is not officially from Dream City…】
Chu Feng clicked through all of them, eyes shifting:
[Coordinates loading…]
[Player CF4088, your previous status has been automatically restored]
***
The sound of rain, the rushing sound of rain, came from the ears.
Then he smelled the damp, cold rain breath.
Not feeling the cold rain pouring on him, he was enveloped in another kind of warmth, and Chu Feng moved his nose, this feeling… was somewhat familiar.
Chu Feng opened his eyes and saw a gray windbreaker, the collar slightly damp. Looking up, he saw X’s face.
Some loose bandages fluttered in the wind, revealing an eye that looked like Xie Shiyu’s, staring at him.
Chu Feng looked away, immediately stood up from X’s arms, and moved to the side.
The shadow above his head moved with him. X held up the umbrella, and whenever Chu Feng moved, he followed suit, but he didn’t approach Chu Feng, so the area behind the umbrella immediately got wet from the rain.
“Thank you.” Chu Feng quickly stepped closer to X, “It’s okay, I have my own umbrella.”
“Hold it.” X stopped Chu Feng from reaching for the game backpack, “The umbrella has a regulator’s code, it’s safer.”
In the game, everything ultimately boils down to code. Objects with regulator codes are more stable and secure. When Chu Feng recovered from the lag, X received a message from Dream City headquarters:
@All regulators, the fifth anniversary conference is about to be held in China. There may be commercial hacker attacks recently. Please be careful and remember to protect the safety of the players!
X held a special black umbrella for regulators, sheltering Chu Feng under it.
The rain continued to fall, the raindrops reflecting their figures, like a pair of jadeite people.
Chu Feng and X shared an umbrella, with a group of Little Xies watching them nearby.
Under the umbrella, Chu Feng gradually recovered his senses, and the atmosphere… became somewhat subtle.
The expressions of the Little Xies around them were far from optimistic.
If they were just sharing an umbrella… Little Xies shouldn’t be so wary. Chu Feng asked with some suspicion:
“What did you just do?”
“I… didn’t do anything…” X said innocently, using the hand that had just embraced Chu Feng to hold the umbrella, and spoke with a hint of hesitation, as if self-reflecting, then innocently said:
“I don’t know why, but it seems like your husband isn’t very happy.”
Chu Feng: “…”
X: “He didn’t misunderstand us, did he?”
Chu Feng had nothing to say. Seeing Principal Xie’s face turning as dark as a burnt pot next to him, he immediately said:
“Let’s not mention that. The old teaching building is about to collapse due to the landslide. Do you have any rescue methods? There’s still a character trapped inside.”
X: “Time?”
The system spirit promptly reported: “There are 12 minutes and 53 seconds left until the landslide.”
X nodded, “Plenty of time.”
***
Drip, drip.
Inside the old teaching building, it was damp and leaky.
Chu Feng, X, and the system spirit entered from the window on the third floor.
The rain poured in through the windows, making the classroom look like a fish tank filled with water. The lights had long gone out, everything was dark, desks and chairs were drifting crookedly, textbooks and exam papers piled up in the drawers, like dead fish bellies floating on the black glass-like water.
Chu Feng asked, “Can we locate the character now?”
The system spirit fluttered its black wings, and the tuft of hair on its head stretched out like antenna, shaking its head regretfully:
“I can’t detect it. There was a weak signal outside just now, and then it disappeared.”
X: “It disappeared suddenly?”
System spirit: “Yes.”
Chu Feng turned to look at X, about to ask him if the sudden disappearance of the signal was a clue.
Suddenly, the words got stuck in his throat, and he didn’t say anything.
Chu Feng stared at X intently, watching as he… closed the umbrella.
He saw X’s slender index finger lift the folded umbrella canopy, unfolding it leaf by leaf, wrapping his hand with bandages, pinching the last leaf of the umbrella canopy, tying them up neatly, and putting them back into the game backpack.
The whole movement was quick and smooth, taking only three to five seconds, as skillful as Xie Shiyu.
Chu Feng’s heart couldn’t help but beat rapidly, like a drum.
X looked up at him:
“What’s wrong?”
The eye that resembled Xie Shiyu’s was looking at him, in the dim darkness, like ochre crystals.
“…Nothing.” Chu Feng said, “Nothing.”
—Both were over 1.9 meters tall, with similar eyes, both had incidents in the Pacific Ocean, and even their habit of closing umbrellas was exactly the same.
Chu Feng turned his head away, forcefully suppressing the questions he wanted to ask:
“It’s okay, let’s find someone first.”
—Suddenly saying to someone: you resemble my deceased husband, that’s too strange. Chu Feng couldn’t say it out loud. The most urgent thing was to find that lone 17-year-old Little Xie.
X nodded and put the umbrella into the regulator’s game backpack.
***
“Could he have gone into an area with poor signal?”
There were exactly 10 minutes left until the landslide. The system spirit looked around.
X frowned, and Chu Feng quickly realized that something was wrong:
“Why would he run away?”
The system spirit froze, “I… I… how would I know.”
Chu Feng didn’t speak. The system spirit’s suggestion made some sense, but it didn’t follow logical reasoning. Xie Shiyu wasn’t stupid, and all the Little Xies in the entire teaching building knew to run outside and cooperate with the rescue efforts. Why did only this 17-year-old Little Xie want to run inside?
“Is there a signal jammer in this building?” X asked the system.
The system spirit quickly pulled up the construction diagram of this old building and searched:
“No. This is an old-style teaching building, without any electronic devices.”
X: “Generally speaking, the system’s signal search range is 5km.”
Not to mention that the system spirit had lengthened its tuft of hair, greatly enhancing the search accuracy, and they were already inside this building, yet they still couldn’t find any signal related to Xie Shiyu. This was very abnormal.
Chu Feng quickly understood what X meant. In this situation, either the signal range suddenly exceeded, such as the character Little Xie being instantly transported more than 5km away, or…
X: “Is there any recent teleportation record?”
Chu Feng’s Dream City game restored reality, so the code also incorporated the basic laws of physics of the real world. To teleport instantly, one could only rely on teleportation gates/items, and once used, there would definitely be a record left in the system’s background.
“None!” The system spirit said, “The most recent teleportation record is… Regulator X arriving at your Dream City.”
Chu Feng: “Then why can’t we suddenly detect his signal?”
There was no signal jammer here, the lone Little Xie hadn’t been teleported away, and the system had just detected a weak signal from this character outside, but it suddenly disappeared.
Chu Feng suddenly realized something and quickly checked the “Little Xie Illustrated Handbook”, clicking on the unlit icon of Little Xie:
【Mood】: 75
【Status】: Calm
【Murder Rate】: 10%
Chu Feng breathed a sigh of relief. This Little Xie was still alive. If the character died, the signal would also be undetectable.
System spirit: “So… why can’t we detect his signal?”
“There’s another possibility.” X paused and said:
“His code has changed.”
Chu Feng: “What do you mean?”
X pulled up the message sent by Dream City headquarters to all regulators, and without avoiding Chu Feng, showed him directly:
“Recently, Dream City is going to hold its fifth anniversary conference, and there may be commercial hacker attacks resulting in character aberrations. The characters themselves won’t have any mutations, but once they come into contact with players, it will cause the player’s code to collapse.”
The system spirit shrank its wings in fear:
“Then the player will die…”
X remained silent. Everything in the game relied on code. Once the code collapsed, the player wouldn’t just die, they might be “torn apart by horses”:
After the code collapsed, there was a high probability of dislocation. The player’s hands, feet, head, abdomen, all could be separated. Because there was no biological death in the game, even if all parts of the body were separated, the player wouldn’t die, but they would continue to feel the pain of dying mentally.
It would continue until they experienced true brain death and were relieved. Or until the game company rewrote the code to fix the player and save them, but this unimaginable pain would cast a shadow over the player for the rest of their lives.
Chu Feng: “Are you saying that this character may have mutated? So…”
So this 17-year-old Little Xie deliberately stayed in the old teaching building, didn’t run out to cooperate with the rescue efforts like the other Little Xies, but curled up in a corner, waiting for the landslide, so he could die completely without harming Chu Feng.
X keenly found a new doubt from this sincere story:
“How did he know that he had mutated?”
System spirit: “Yeah, I check Dream City carefully every day and haven’t found any problems. If hacker attacks were so easily detected, they wouldn’t be called hackers. And characters are actually just pieces of code, they don’t have autonomous consciousness, how could they realize that their code has mutated?”
The system spirit felt that although its master knew rationally that these characters were just data, emotionally, sometimes he couldn’t help but mistake them for real people.
Characters wouldn’t do anything for players, the system spirit thought, and they certainly wouldn’t be aware of any mutation caused by hacker attacks. They wouldn’t choose self-sacrifice to avoid harming players either. They were just virtual characters stacked from data.
It wanted to tell Chu Feng these thoughts, but its human empathy module was beeping in its brain, reminding it that saying such things would hurt human fragile emotions. The system spirit chose to keep its mouth shut.
“One character can’t handle it,” Chu Feng said, “They need everyone’s cooperation.”
Today, Chu Feng had originally planned to arrive at the scene early, but he was delayed at the school gate for half a day and then went to collect his school uniform, which took a very long time.
And during this time, the reason why he followed these rules was because Principal Xie was commanding the on-site rescue operation. Principal Xie was also Xie Shiyu, whose abilities were commendable and gave him some peace of mind. Otherwise, if he were truly in a hurry, he could just break down the school gate to get in, without bothering to collect any school uniform.
Chu Feng began to feel that all of this was pre-arranged. After arriving at the scene, he saw many fire brigade Little Xies involved in the rescue.
But in fact, this team of Little Xies was not extinguishing fires or carrying out other high-difficulty rescue operations. They were simply grabbing the trapped student Little Xies from the windows and putting them on the ladder to come down.
—There was no need to mobilize the fire brigade Little Xies for this. With a ladder, the student Little Xies could come down by themselves.
In other words, the appearance of the fire brigade Xie Shiyu was to attract Chu Feng’s attention and enhance the credibility of the rescue efforts for him.
Finally, Principal Xie showed him the list of students, with everyone in each class highlighted, giving him a perfect final result, and then he wanted to take him away…
Chu Feng realized that if it weren’t for his intuition prompting him to check the “Little Xie Illustrated Handbook” in the end, he would have thought the rescue had been completed. Ten minutes later, the landslide would occur, and the isolated mutated Little Xie would die completely inside, without posing a threat to him.
At the same time, today he was wearing a sailor suit. After being taken away by Principal Xie, the fire brigade Little Xies involved in the rescue and the rescued Little Xies would definitely have a big meal together.
At that time, Xie Shiyu would have countless opportunities to get hold of his phone, perhaps tamper with his “Little Xie Illustrated Handbook”, delete the record of that 17-year-old Little Xie, or simply hide his phone.
In a few days, the record of the deceased Little Xie would automatically disappear.
After this Little Xie died, all the high school department Little Xies would be in the lit state, and Chu Feng would see all the high school column of his “Little Xie Illustrated Handbook” lit up, feeling both happy and very safe.
Chu Feng clenched his fists. This kind of thing… definitely wasn’t planned by 26-year-old Principal Xie alone. Such cruel decisions… he knew that there was a Little Xie in the entire city specifically responsible for covertly planning:
27-year-old Xie Shiyu
The real one, who bid farewell to him at the airport, the one who never appeared again.
The 27-year-old character Xie Shiyu never participated in any tree-planting activities, Chu Feng had never seen him, nor had he found his figure in any system’s monitoring. He didn’t know what code he used to conceal himself.
Xie Shiyu didn’t have a good major in college and couldn’t switch majors, so he took up computer science as a minor. After Dream City was completely restored, some Little Xies would also write code. Some of them were very hidden and would hide their whereabouts, not letting the system find them.
But these hidden Little Xies never avoided Chu Feng, only the 27-year-old one, whom Chu Feng had never seen. So much so that during the first generation of the city, he mistakenly thought that Dream City’s game system hadn’t imported 27-year-old Xie Shiyu.
—Until the end, 27-year-old Xie Shiyu appeared in front of him and said:
“Chu Feng, take care of yourself.”
Then, taking all the other Little Xies in the city, he boarded a train filled with bombs and exploded when it went far into the sky.
From that moment on, Chu Feng began to realize that although 27-year-old Xie Shiyu wasn’t truly by his side, he was always around him.
Xie Shiyu hid in the dark, coordinating the risks of the entire city. Once danger was discovered, he would eliminate it with minimal sacrifice.
All the Little Xies in the city would compete, mock, and be jealous of each other, but they would tacitly obey the commands of 27-year-old Xie Shiyu.
Once it was a decision made by 27-year-old Xie Shiyu, they would all follow it.
After the destruction of First City, Chu Feng pieced together Little Xie’s pattern of behavior from the remaining fragmentary information.
The 27-year-old character, Xie Shiyu, seemed to be more adept at identifying danger than other ordinary characters. Although, as a virtual data character, he couldn’t truly understand the nature of these dangers or the exact methods to neutralize them like the supervisor X could, he had a simple understanding: anything harmful to Chu Feng needed to be eliminated.
The simplest elimination method was to destroy the source of danger, which meant dealing with the Little Xie characters that carried the threat.
The method was brutal but effective, like a universal fixed program embedded in the code of all Little Xie characters. As long as a command came from the 27-year-old Xie Shiyu, other Little Xies would comply unconditionally, even those who were to be executed, without revealing anything to Chu Feng.
During the time of First City, the 27-year-old Xie had done many such things, preemptively dealing with several Little Xies without Chu Feng’s knowledge, ensuring the safety of the city with minimal sacrifice.
In the end, when it could no longer be maintained, the choice was between their deaths or Chu Feng’s. The 27-year-old Xie Shiyu made the most ruthless yet correct decision: he gathered the entire city and commanded mass suicide.
Chu Feng recalled the train explosion in First City and turned to the system:
“Help me check Principal Xie’s recent phone communication records.”
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