Xiao Xie is a very honest person.
He told Nan Zhou that he was actually a fictional character in the comic "Eternal Day".
Just two days ago, a console game called Gravity was officially released.
The author of "Eternal Day", Nan Zhou's real father, completed his debut novel "Eternal Day" in two years, and the genius horror cartoonist Yong Wu, who has occupied his place in the manga ever since, died of cancer twelve years ago. died.
Because of his withdrawn personality and indifferent relationship with relatives and friends, he entrusted the copyright of thirteen comics, including his debut novel "Eternal Day", to one of his most trusted editors.
The part of the property that belongs to him is divided, and this eccentric man has not announced the specific disposal method.
Therefore, "Eternal Day" was included in the adaptation echelon of "Gravity" as early as three years ago.
Now, Nan Zhou is already a character in a game copy.
Xiao Xie said that he had read "Eternal Day" before and liked it very much.
So, after the game cabin he just bought arrived, he was the first to choose to parachute into the copy of "Eternal Day" to see this young man who was unilaterally acquainted with him and separated by a dimension.
Nan Zhou just nodded to Xiao Xie's eloquent remarks.
He couldn't feel the cruelty and malice behind Xiao Xie's purpose of telling him the truth at all.
—Normal people are clearly told that no matter how hard they work, their fate is always in the hands of others, and when they will be under control for the endless years to come, their first reaction will often be collapse and madness.
But Nan Zhou didn't take it to heart.
Because he had already guessed it.
Nan Zhou sketched the shape of Ms. Apple Tree's lips on the paper, and marked her lips with fine lines to make them appear more colorful, and responded symbolically, "... um."
Noticing Nan Zhou's indifferent expression, Xiao Xie's eyes lit up with moving light: "Aren't you surprised?... How much did you guess?"
Nan Zhou glanced at Xiao Xie: "About what?"
If it's about his own identity, then this is something he's been thinking about since he was in elementary school.
At one point he thought he was a character in a book.
In the comics, it's almost the same as his speculation.
If it's about the game copy...
Nan Zhou's understanding of the concept of games is limited to a few game magazines in the bookstore that are still dated ten years ago.
In Nanzhou's cognition, a game is a story locked in a box.
Much like what he felt as a book.
It's just that he doesn't have the feeling of being a puppet pulled by silk threads for the time being, which means that the box is very open, and the control over him is not as strong as he imagined.
In the future, more new people will come in.
If someone can get in, he can get out.
So he didn't understand why Xiao Xie kept looking into his eyes.
It seemed that his indifferent emotions and reactions did not meet his psychological expectations.
Xiao Xie looked into his eyes intently: "Have you ever spoken to someone like me?"
Nan Zhou thought about it carefully.
He hadn't been able to speak to Lady Apple Tree.
So he shook his head.
Xiao Xie's shoulders slumped slightly, looking rather disappointed: "Why aren't you surprised?"
No madness, no breakdown, no pain.
boring.
Nan Zhou's surprises ran out as early as yesterday.
He was not used to expressing emotions with ups and downs, so he looked at Xiao Xie with confusion in his eyes.
He asked, "What do you want to ask?"
Xiao Xie's expression became better now: "I will be your friend from now on, okay?"
Nan Zhou: "Why?"
Xiao Xie: "… "
Xiao Xie: "...Aren't you alone?"
Nan Zhou put down his pen: "loneliness."
Nan Zhou: "But why should I be friends with you?"
What Nan Zhou asked was from the bottom of his heart.
But Xiao Xie seemed to be choked a lot.
In order to avoid humiliating himself, Xiao Xie took the initiative to change the topic: "Do you feel that your world is any different?"
Nan Zhou thought about it, but didn't feel that his days were any different from before.
The sun is still scorching hot.
The arrangement of buildings has also not changed.
The world is still that world.
The only difference is the addition of an apple tree.
Thinking of the apple tree, Nan Zhou's mood suddenly improved a lot.
If Xiao Xie's word of making friends is to plant apple trees for each other...
Then he hopes to find the lady of the apple tree and plant one for her.
It's just that Xiao Xie's question still caught his heart.
According to his accumulation, shouldn't ordinary games use data, algorithms and models to build another virtual parallel world with all the conditions as close as possible
Why did Lady Apple Tree and Xiao Xie come to him
This is a question worth thinking about.
But over the years, Nanzhou has not had the habit of sharing ideas with others.
For Xiao Xie, he also has no desire to share his thoughts.
He just intends to digest it by himself.
It has to be said that Nan Zhou's animal intuition is quite powerful.
He was on guard against Xiao Xie from the beginning.
He felt that there was something in his smile that he didn't like.
But no matter how careful he was, Nan Zhou could not escape the influence of the full moon night on Guangmei.
The tides ebb and flow periodically, culminating at the monthly full moon.
Xiao Xie came to the third day of the copy, which was the full moon.
Nanzhou's room, the watercolor window paintings of blue sky and white pigeons, and the wooden fences used in January have tried their best to keep out all the moonlight.
Even so, Nan Zhou was still soft on the bed, his whole body was sore, he was sweating madly, and his waist was so soft that he couldn't exert any strength.
Originally, when the moon was full, all the light charms in the town were too weak to get out of bed, and the threat was almost non-existent.
But Nan Zhou still remembered that there was a little Xie who lived next to him at home.
So he struggled to lock the door when he found that his physical strength began to lose violently before nightfall.
The clock on the wall slowly pointed to the 12 o'clock position.
The moonlight outside the window is getting brighter and more dazzling.
Nan Zhou uncomfortably grasped the hard bed board with one hand, and pinched his fingertips until he faintly lost blood.
At this moment, Xiao Xie's gentle voice suddenly sounded outside the door: "Nanzhou, are you there?"
Nan Zhou's mind moved.
From just now, he hadn't heard any approaching footsteps.
… Xiao Xie, it seems that he has been standing at the door for a long time.
Nan Zhou bit the horn and tried his best to swallow the weak gasp.
However, in a short while, the sound of the key getting into the keyhole and rustling came from his ear.
He had no idea how Xiao Xie got in.
When he heard the door being pushed open with a creak, Nan Zhou's throat tightened, and before he could think about it, he put his weak wrist under the pillow—
Before he could grab the handle of the hidden fruit knife, his wrist was easily caught by a hand.
Nan Zhou pursed his pale lips tightly, and was turned over by Xiao Xie and sat down, easily controlled on the bed.
Xiao Xie's hand covered his mouth, and his tail finger pressed down on his lips maliciously, like some kind of condescending teasing.
"It's so painful. So lonely, isn't it?"
Xiao Xie spoke to him in a whispering voice, but without much sympathy, he just enjoyed Nan Zhou's slightly out of control expression when he couldn't hold back his breath.
"If I were you, I would have wanted to die long ago."
Nan Zhou: "… "
ill.
You are not me.
When do I want to die.
Xiao Xie leaned down and said softly, "I'll help you free yourself."
The pressure suddenly left.
Before Nan Zhou could catch his breath, something cold and cold pressed against his waist.
A lethal electric current boiled the blood all over his body from his waist.
With the electric shock point as the center, a black hole-like substance was formed, causing all of Nanzhou's perception and consciousness to collapse inward.
Out of the corner of his eyes, for a while, there were scattered and colorful electric light trails.
In from his fingertips, out of his chest.
Brilliant, utterly dazzling.
All of a sudden, all the excitement was reduced to complete silence.
At the same moment when Nan Zhou's heartbeat stopped, there was still an afterimage of reality in his vision.
Xiao Xie's figure was blurred, like a screened TV, with snowflakes flashing.
Xiao Xie also looked a little surprised, looking at his palm.
But in the next second, he disappeared into Nan Zhou's room.
And a surge of oxygen rushed into Nanzhou's heart, as if someone was holding an electric shocker and rudely pressed his chest repeatedly.
—The feeling of being controlled by an irresistible force has returned.
- The result this time was a forced resurrection.
Nan Zhou suddenly sat up from the bed, causing a terrifying burst of heart palpitations and dizziness.
He lay down beside the bed, gasping for a long time, before re-adapting to the influx of oxygen and the constant pain in his body.
Next, Nan Zhou asked the school for three days off.
He went to the library, found some books related to the game, and reread them carefully.
He was in severe pain, and he was the only reader in the library. He simply abandoned the upright sitting posture of the past, lay down on the table like a cat, put the book under his head, curled up, and rested.
The author has never dabbled in the gaming field less.
Therefore, in the "Xinhua Bookstore" built by him, there are the most literature and art books.
About games, it's just a few outdated magazines and a brief history of game development.
Nan Zhou read through all the information he could collect, and as expected, he noticed something was wrong.
- In a normal game, the player should be the core role to be served.
The performance is that the boss in the dungeon, no matter how miserable he is killed by the player, will end the process when the player leaves.
State reset, nothing happened.
But what about yourself
In addition to being resurrected, his memory has not been cleared, and the wounds on his body are still painful to this day.
It's as if... the reset wasn't quite complete at all.
Nan Zhou didn't have time to think about why he was so different.
On the second day after he resumed classes, two more strange guests were welcomed into the town.
A man walked around the town with a cute little girl.
The two looked like they were on a tour.
When the little girl saw him, she stuffed him with a fruit candy.
If there wasn't that little loli who was about the same age as his student, Nan Zhou wouldn't let his guard down at all.
She reminded him of his sister after a long absence.
He even took the little girl to his sketching class.
Two days later, on the suddenly full moon night, when she was stabbed in the back with a knife by that little girl, Nan Zhou could clearly hear that "she" shook off the blood drop from the knife, grinning in a man's voice, Said to the partner next to him, "The time modifier is really easy to use. Got another achievement."
The man also smiled lightly: "The Raiders are right. He is so easy to deceive."
The two talked and disappeared quickly.
Just like the situation when Xiao Xie disappeared.
Exactly the same.
Nan Zhou fell to the ground, and after a long pause, he resisted the pain in his back and got up.
He put his hand in his sweater pocket.
There was an apple that had been crushed to one side.
It was originally intended for a little girl to eat.
… If not, then forget it.
Nan Zhou sat on the side of the road, wiped the apple with the front of his clothes, took a bite, and calmed down a bit.
He quietly thought about the "time thruster" in the mouth of the little girl, and the "universal key" that Xiao Xie used to open his door.
—He has another piece of information.
The players he encounters are very likely to have a large number of props and items with different functions.
He needs to think of something to deal with.
After that, more players came to Never Town one after another.
Some players just come here for a stroll, but some players clearly want to get close to Nanzhou.
Although Nan Zhou is lonely, he is not stupid.
He really wanted to ask, do you have anything else to do
Why play games
Why get obsessed with something that doesn't make much sense in reality even if you win
Why do you have to kill me in another world in order to achieve this goal
No one could answer these questions for him.
So he tried his best to show his fierce and indifferent side, trying to drive them out of Nevertown.
However, the night of the full moon was the curse that he could not escape after all.
The next full moon night will come as scheduled.
After finally escaping the four players' pursuit, Nan Zhou just wanted to take a breath, but fell into the hands of three players who he had never seen before and who had sneaked into the town at some point.
They used stun guns in the dark.
An assault weapon studded with barbs and electrodes, ejected by high-pressure nitrogen gas.
The power is very strong, it is said that it can be fatal at once, but it is not.
At this time, Nan Zhou had already dealt with the previous four players until dawn.
Nan Zhou was exhausted physically and mentally.
So they hit it right off the bat.
The moonlight on the horizon is gradually disappearing, and it has gradually dimmed.
The light that fell on Nan Zhou's body was very light and thin.
The familiar and severe pain caused Nan Zhou to fall to the ground again, drenched in cold sweat.
He did not continue to resist, but closed his eyes and pretended to be dead, ready to wait for an opportunity.
When the three found that he was not moving, they squatted not far from his "corpse", ready to receive rewards and accept teleportation.
"Why doesn't this boss have a health bar? It's so brittle, it's gone after a single shot?"
"Hey, it's really like the Raiders, as long as you click into the dungeon when you are stuck, you can kill it if you say it. It's just an ordinary person, it's really boring."
"Forget it. Forget it. It's good to get the achievement."
The tinnitus caused by the pain, coupled with the sharp roar of the blood rushing to the top of the head, interweaved into a harsh and messy symphony.
The conversation that entered his ears was mixed with the noise in his head, making Nan Zhou's heart beat faster than ever.
"Strategy".
"Boring".
"Achievement".
Is this their purpose
So, why must their goals be achieved
These unfamiliar and provocative words stimulated his nerves, causing anger to gradually erode Nan Zhou's mind.
He supported the ground with his arms, and after borrowing a little force, he tapped the ground with his toes and rushed forward.
There was a sudden gust of wind on the empty street.
The tall and strong man with his back to Nan Zhou turned his head to the side inadvertently, and out of the corner of his eye, he only had time to catch a cold figure that was approaching close behind him.
…and a cold hand resting on his throat.
Click.
…
Ding.
When Nan Zhou put the small spoon back on the plate, the slight collision between the plate and the wooden spoon woke him from his memory.
Nanji Xing finished eating the lychees, licked his little paws clean, and ran back, pouting his fleshy buttocks, and was about to dig into the sleeves of Nan Zhou's windbreaker.
The apple-faced girl walked over shyly and handed Nan Zhou an elaborate fruit plate.
She said gently: "Guest, for you. Thank you for helping my sister just now."
Nan Zhou looked to the side of the fruit plate.
There were a few cut-toothed apples with red to translucent skins.
The apple-faced girl said softly to herself: "The fruits are grown by themselves, and they are not worth anything. I just hope... I hope you can come often—"
Nan Zhou suddenly got up.
Familiar scent.
Familiar sheen.
Familiar... apples.
He thought for a while that he was still in the memory and did not leave.
He was sitting on the tree that belonged to him, picking apples, and swallowing the apples and sunlight into his own mouth little by little by the fine light sifted through the fruit branches.
Nan Zhou asked, "How did your apples come from?"
The apple-faced girl was taken aback by his actions and tone. Holding the apple, Nuonuo said, "How come... Everyone is the seed from Boss Zhong..."
Nan Zhou asked, "Where is Boss Zhong?"
Apple-faced girl: "Go south and walk along the path... There are signs on the side of the road, and the seed store is very eye-catching."
Nan Zhou grabbed the small tail of the South Pole Star, which was trying to climb towards the fruit bowl, and shoved it straight into his arms: "Thank you."
After all, he walked in a hurry and left the dessert shop.
It's like rushing to a late appointment.
Li Yinhang was puzzled for a while, and turned to look at Jiang Fang.
While Jiang Fang was stunned, he couldn't help pursing his lips and his eyes flashed slightly.
… Does he remember the apple tree thing
Jiang Fang had something on his mind and did not answer Li Yinhang, but just followed Nan Zhou away.
Li Yinhang hurriedly packed his things and planned to decorate them.
Before leaving, she did not forget to pat the shoulder of the apple-faced girl who didn't know if she had done something wrong, and said with relief:
"It's not your fault."
No one noticed that there were two men and one woman sitting two tables away from Nan Zhou's right side.
Seeing the three people and one mouse leave, the girl's back, which had been tense, finally relaxed.
She patted her chest and let out a small sigh of relief: "… wow. It scared me to death."
Only then did the man A who was with her dare to let go of his voice and asked her, "Are you sure you didn't admit your mistake?"
"I can't be sure."
The girl frowned: "That little thing, so small. We are not sitting very close, how can I recognize it."
Man B tried to comfort her: "You're wrong. Maybe it's a small pet. Wherever you go, there's a monster?"
"No… "
The girl's brows were tangled badly: "I have played "Gravity", and I have been farming on the 'Homeland Island' before. That little animal looks especially like a monster in the only pastoral dungeon in the 'Homeland Island'."
She gestured at the shape of the South Pole Star: "If there is a lightning-shaped mark near the fluff of its stomach, I can be sure!"
Man B still doubted her eyesight: "Even if it's a monster, it's just a little mouse..."
The girl glared at him fiercely.
"Little mouse?" she muttered, "That's a monster with a combat rating of A+ on the 'Homeland Island', with a near-S rank!"
Having said that, the girl doubted her eyesight again.
If the sugar glider was really the kind of monster she knew, how could it be walking with other players
How could it be raised like this...
a...
… little cutie
…
After using the World Channel to send a gathering signal to other teams, He Yinchuan temporarily closed the background page and said to Lu Bifang: "Little Lu, tell me about your findings. You said Jiang Fang, Mr. International Friends, was once the author of "Gravity" player?"
Lu Bifang nodded obediently: "Yes."
Unlike Lin Zhisong, Lu Bifang could not understand professional intelligence, so he focused most of his attention on the information about the missing persons.
Lu Bifang added: "To be precise, he is not an official player of this game."
"The price of the game "Gravity" is still very high, and when each machine is sold, the real ID of the buyer will be recorded."
"After the accident, the relevant departments investigated the situation of each comatose person."
"Only Lodoka... Mr. Jiang Fang, his game cabin was not registered with his own ID information."
Zhou Ao, who doesn't play games much, frowned: "What does this mean?"
Lu Bifang scratched his head.
"how to say… "
"Is he supposed to be a power trainer?"
The author has something to say: Brother Fang did not intentionally wear women's clothes
He's just forced into business qwq:,