Qi Yang leaned against the door in a daze for a moment. He had watched with his own eyes as Chu Huaize walked into the opposite apartment, and it suddenly hit him that he had only found out today who lived right across from him.
Recovering his wits, Qi Yang prepared to do something. He wasn’t planning on having lunch just yet because he wasn’t hungry.
Qi Yang decided to change out of his school uniform first and put on casual loungewear.
He went back to his room and put on a shirt covered in little teddy bears. Qi Yang loved this shirt because it felt soft to the touch and had a great texture.
He simply prepared the things he would need to take to school tomorrow. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t started organizing, but once he began, there was no end to it.
Only today did he realize he had so many workbooks to bring. If he brought one for each subject, he would finish them in about a month; once finished, he’d have to buy the next set. Buying them day in and day out, Qi Yang already had a corner piled high with test papers.
He pulled out a few test sheets that looked alright, planning to use them to pass the time.
He rummaged through the storage room and dug out a brand-new suitcase. Back in the day, Qi Yang had fantasized about using it when going on trips with his parents, but the opportunity never arose, so it just sat at home collecting dust. Today, it was finally going to find its use.
He found some changes of clothes and daily necessities. The house had brand-new supplies; the items in the storage room could practically rival a department store—almost everything you could think of was there.
By the time he finished tidying up completely, an hour had already passed.
Then he completely ran out of ideas on what to do next. On the first day of school, he had no urge to grind himself to death trying to outwork everyone. As a smart person, he needed to learn how to relax appropriately.
He opened the door to the room right next to his bedroom—a north-to-south transparent room that Qi Yang used as a gaming room.
This game room was very simple: a custom-made gaming chair designed so the user wouldn’t feel tired after sitting for long periods, a pair of VR glasses placed on the desk, alongside a desktop computer and some essential gaming equipment.
He turned on the computer. While waiting, he looked back on everything that happened today and felt it was all quite sci-fi. An A-grade differentiated alpha was not far away from him, and even those much further away suffered serious effects, yet he was completely fine. It was strange—truly strange.
The computer was now turned on. Qi Yang logged into his gaming account and connected it to the VR glasses. Once the connection was successful, he put on the glasses, preparing to enter the virtual world.
Portable Live-Action VR Glasses: Connect to the computer to link to this series of games. The scenes inside the glasses are live-action and touchable, equivalent to entering a dream world. Wearing the glasses to enter the game puts the human body into a sleep-like mode, while consciousness enters the game mode. Taking off the glasses means exiting the game mode.
Qi Yang’s game avatar had a head of white hair and fair skin, but his pupils were a normal brown; otherwise, Qi Yang would have genuinely mistaken himself for creating an albinism patient. He chose a slightly shorter height for his avatar, around 175 centimeters or so, to make hiding easier.
The face was detailed, but didn’t look much like him. Qi Yang usually looked cute, but inside the game, the outer corners of his eyes were elongated, turning his peach blossom eyes into upward-slanting eyes.
The clothes weren’t very complicated: a simple black top, and Qi Yang was even too lazy to pick a logo, just pure black. The pants were a pair of non-tight black trousers, but the shoes were quite flashy—the firearm logo on them was truly eye-catching, serving as a simple highlight for the overall outfit.
Except for the white hair.
In Qi Yang’s view, his avatar looked rather different from his real self—colder.
To sum it up in one word: Handsome.
The gameplay was very simple: a straightforward 4v4 gunfight game.
Whichever side reached 20 kills first won.
Players who were defeated would respawn at the resurrection point and could not be touched by opposing players for one minute, including but not limited to being attacked or touched.
Each team’s spawn locations were different, but the range wasn’t too far apart, and the size of the entire map wasn’t big either, making it convenient for players to finish the game quickly and reduce playtime.
Because the game development wasn’t fully perfected, playing for too long would stimulate the brain’s nerves, leading to symptoms like trance and discomfort, so game time needed to be controlled. Therefore, this game had a mode that forced players to go offline.
The game scenes were very random, but players could also choose from several scenes, roughly categorized into: school, hospital, laboratory, and war zone.
The reason this game was so popular was because of a very unique setting: it could bring the player’s pheromone abilities from the real world into the game. For example, if your pheromone was a floral pheromone, the system would create a special ability based on that pheromone for the player to use. If the pheromone was an animal pheromone mutation, the effect would be even better, though such people were extremely rare—they were uncommon mutated humans. This type of development was also adopted by the military to select high-end, elite talent.
An animal pheromone mutation meant possessing dual pheromone abilities, where the animal pheromone would evolve into a certain trait possessed by that animal. For example, if the animal pheromone was a cheetah, when this person used their pheromones, their overall speed would increase by 22%, while their inherent pheromone scent only served to emit an odor and provide an oppressive feeling.
When this skill first appeared, it was once severely criticized by Betas, who claimed it unbalanced the game environment and was extremely unfair to Beta players. Afterward, the official authorities made adjustments, allowing Betas to also randomly possess one ability upon game registration, which could not be adjusted later on. In the end, this placated the Beta players’ feelings.
Qi Yang figured that since today was the first day of school, he naturally had to experience the school map. Who knows, maybe some player would blow up the school—such scenes happened frequently.
Even though Qi Yang was a current student, actually seeing a school get blown up still felt quite shocking. After all, blowing up a school was the lifelong dream of countless students tormented by school.
Before the match started, Qi Yang prayed that he would spawn in some normal place, preferably an equipment room next to the playground or the back kitchen of the school cafeteria. He desperately hoped it wouldn’t be anything like an Omega dormitory; dormitories like that had heavy ghostly energy and were prone to spawning NPCs.
Speak of the devil. Qi Yang lay on the hard wooden bed frame, staring helplessly at the ceiling. He was on a bed in the Omega dormitory. Heavy, dragging footsteps echoed from the hallway, repeatedly appearing outside Qi Yang’s door, though she wouldn’t come in. It was clearly an NPC standing right outside the door. Qi Yang helplessly closed his eyes. Right now, he really wanted to slap his praying self; he would have been better off doing nothing at all.
Qi Yang opened his eyes. The room scene was still the dormitory, and only the game prompt next to him indicated that this was just a game.
He got up and looked around—it was pitch black. Through the glass on the dormitory door, he saw lights flickering in the hallway, blinking on and off. A red figure was floating past, occasionally glancing inside the dormitory. It could simply be understood as the dorm auntie.
Except this dorm auntie had no expression, and her entire face was sewn together with thread. The threads at her forehead were somewhat frayed, revealing twisted eyes squeezed together. Because the eyes were bunched up, they couldn’t move and could only look in one direction, giving her an extremely small field of vision.
Her mouth was also sewn shut with fine thread. As if to prevent the stitches from coming loose like the eyes, she used three different methods to sew it up, with the ends of the thread trailing from her ears into a dead knot. Perhaps to make her look a bit prettier, the modeler had tied a bright Barbie-pink bow onto her wildly floating hair.
She looked both creepy and comical.
She also made noises from time to time, as if she were saying something, but with her mouth sewn shut, it was completely unintelligible. Let’s just assume she was calling souls.
Qi Yang followed her position from the bed, catching her profile through the glass, and his heart tightened involuntarily. No matter how many times he saw it, he found it disgusting.
“This modeler has really had enough. How can someone so ugly have the nerve to put it out for people to see?”
As someone who was somewhat socially anxious, Qi Yang really didn’t want to deal with this dorm auntie. After all, he was also a seasoned aesthetics-lover. Figuring that there was currently no possibility of the dorm auntie breaking through the door, he decided to look for the starting weapon in his spawn point first.
He got off the bed and looked around to see if there was any place where a box had been placed. The dormitory light wasn’t on, making it a bit dark, and the dorm auntie was patrolling outside the door. Qi Yang decided it was best not to look for the light switch. He crouched down to look under the bed; there seemed to be a box there. He reached out to grab it and touched a handle, allowing him to pull the box out, but the box was very heavy, and Qi Yang pulled with all his might.
Qi Yang couldn’t help but marvel at how well the game was made. Just as he was about to pull it out, a knuckle kept poking him. Qi Yang used his other hand to scratch the itch, thinking he was hallucinating and actually feeling itchy.
He let go of the box handle and grabbed something with his other hand, but he didn’t realize what that thing was.
Just as he was wondering if this would turn out like before—a basically useless salted-fish weapon prompt—he pulled it out and tried hard to discern in the dark what it was that fit snugly into his hand. Then, he moved closer to the hallway and used the light from the hallway to see that it was a hand.
The hand had no arm, and it was still somewhat warm, as if it had just been detached from an arm. The upper part of the hand was still dripping blood, and a few words were carved onto it: Deserve to die a horrible death.
Qi Yang got a fright and quickly threw it aside. The start was not going well; he hadn’t found a weapon, but he had found a hand instead.
Qi Yang had no intention of using it as anything; it was completely a useless object. Qi Yang thought to himself: what if he popped out another hand? That would be terrible. He didn’t have the habit of collecting hands. Was he supposed to piece together a pair and stick them onto the dorm auntie outside to turn her into a four-handed freak?
Forget it. He didn’t have that kind of morbid humor.
Qi Yang wiped his hand on his clothes. There was a reason for his black clothes: the first time he played, he wore light-colored clothes, but as a result, when he defeated an opponent, he was splattered with blood all over, which only turned color when the game ended.
It had grossed Qi Yang out for a long time, and his initial slight germophobia had been worn down to almost nothing by this game.
Qi Yang stood up and scanned his surroundings to see if there was any other place where he could find a weapon. If he didn’t have a weapon to deal with that dorm auntie, he would hand over first blood right at the start—and get taken out by an NPC at that. Would Qi Yang’s pride survive?
Still under that familiar bed, it emitted a faint green glow, and the weapon prompt was still there.
Suppressing his nausea, Qi Yang crouched down again to reach for it, and finally dragged it out.
It was a wooden box. Because it had touched that hand earlier, it was covered all over with bloody marks. The fortunate thing was that he could open it directly, unlike previous weapon boxes that required solving a puzzle. However, Qi Yang skipped the puzzle-solving phase entirely; he exploited a bug and forcefully dismantled the box. The game didn’t restrict the way boxes were opened—as long as it opened, it counted.
Thus, starting with Qi Yang, a strange trend swept through the game: no one solved the puzzles seriously anymore, choosing instead to forcefully dismantle them along with Qi Yang. Because of this, the officials specifically modified this bug.
To thank Qi Yang for this epic feat, the game officials sent him to unexpected places at the start of every match:
On the cliff edge of a laboratory floating ten thousand feet in the high altitude, where he was just one step away from falling off at the start.
At the school bonfire party, right where the bonfire burned the fiercest, with his spawn point positioned one second away from burning Qi Yang’s shoes.
Inside a hospital morgue, in sub-zero temperatures, where he had to strip clothes off several corpses to keep himself warm.
On a desolate island, where venomous snakes eyeing him hungrily and toxic bugs waiting for an opportunity all treated Qi Yang as their prey.
Basically, after the bug was patched, he never spawned in a normal spawn point again.
Because of this, Qi Yang honed the skill of precise escape from being captured (the turtle-in-a-shell mode), absolutely never respawning at the default spawn point.
Today was somewhat unexpected; at least the dorm auntie was outside the door, and he didn’t spawn directly in the hallway.
Wondering if the game developers had grown soft-hearted and let him play normally.
He opened the wooden box. The limbs inside were strewn haphazardly in all directions. The corpses were neatly severed, with every knife stroke showing remarkable skill, and the blood was about to overflow the edges of the box, with fresh red blood continuously flowing from the limbs.
The other hand belonging to the one Qi Yang had thrown away was gripping a small pair of scissors. Blood saturated the entire box, leaking out from the cracks in the seams.
That face had also been scratched by several marks from the scissors held in the hand due to violent shaking.
Qi Yang carefully took out these scissors, which were smaller than a hand, measuring roughly 8 centimeters or so.
“I knew this inhuman game would never give me anything good.” “Even when giving props, it doesn’t forget to disgust me.” “I’m seriously going to pounce. Giving me a broken pair of scissors—am I supposed to go trim that auntie’s threads with them?”
System Prompt: Congratulations to the player for finding a hidden quest. Please complete the quest as soon as possible and reunite with your teammates.
Qi Yang gave a start. What kind of shadow of willows and bright flowers of another village plot twist was this?
Weapon Prompt: Scissors Damage Level: 70% Weapon Usage: Same as daily scissors, can also be used as a close-combat weapon. Attack Value: 20 damage per hit
Qi Yang pushed the box of limbs back under the bed, not wanting to look at it anymore.
Qi Yang lay back down on the bed frame, recalling every bit of his gaming experience and denouncing the game’s unfairness toward him.
“Who on earth did I offend?” “Even the quests aren’t normal. Official devs, come over here and look—how many times have you given me a normal quest?”
System Prompt: Please complete the quest as soon as possible.
“Grass (merely a type of plant).”
Holding these scissors with 70-percent damage, Qi Yang observed the facial stitches of the dorm auntie through the dormitory window.
“Which modeler designed this? Come out so we can exchange blows.”
System Prompt: Stop grumbling. Please complete the quest as soon as possible.
“You expect me to use a broken pair of scissors to cut her face and then stab her to death?” “Me engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the dorm auntie—am I crazy, or are you crazy?”
System Prompt: Game design is reasonable. Please complete the quest as soon as possible.
Qi Yang was truly speechless, but he still wanted to complete this quest. After all, the points rewarded for completing hidden quests were genuinely generous.
“Cut it is, then. Who’s afraid of who?”
Qi Yang observed the dorm auntie’s patrol route. She walked back and forth along this floor, but never looked back. Even when there was a loud noise, she still walked strictly in one direction and never looked back, only turning around when she reached the very end of the corridor.
She had already reached one end of the hallway and was preparing to turn around and walk back toward Qi Yang’s direction.
Taking advantage of the fact that the dorm auntie was still walking and hadn’t reached him yet, he took a look at his teammates’ locations.
His teammates’ locations appeared in dot-form at the top of Qi Yang’s vision.
“Am I harboring a grudge against this game?” “I didn’t do anything wrong, why does it target me every single time?”
The teammates’ positions were clear and distinct, making him feel even more strongly that this system wasn’t anything good.