【"What is going on...?!"】
The hairs rose on the back of Ji Zhao's neck. He backed up two steps and caught hold of a passing nurse. "Excuse me, sorry to bother you — is some senior official here on an inspection today? Why are the staff at all these windows smiling like that?"
The young nurse calmly shook his hand off. "Sir, please do not disturb me while I am working."
Ji Zhao stepped forward and took hold of the nurse. "Wait..."
"Sir, please do not disturb me while I am working."
"...?!"
"Sir, please do not disturb me while I am working."
Three replies — the volume, the intonation, the tone, every one of them exactly identical, without a breath, a pause, or a waver anywhere in between. Not even the most professional voice actor could manage it to that degree. Ji Zhao could swear on his standing as a master of the martial arts that no human being was capable of controlling their own body that precisely.
In that instant, Ji Zhao felt a cold draft spread up from his tailbone and shoot straight to the crown of his skull.
Tap.
Just then, a hand came to rest on Ji Zhao's shoulder... Ji Zhao's body jerked. He struck out on reflex as he turned, catching the arm backhanded and about to put force into the grip and lock the man down — but in the instant he saw who it was, every urge to attack drained away without a trace, leaving nothing behind but an enormous, indescribable panic.
Standing before Ji Zhao was a black-and-white pixel figure.
Not someone in some strange cosplay outfit — genuine, honest-to-goodness pixels, thousands upon thousands of blurry little squares fitted together into a man in ancient dress who seemed to have a head of long white hair... and those thousands upon thousands of little squares went on jittering along with the man's every movement.
Ji Zhao felt as though he had dropped into a pit of ice, but that body of his, tempered by ten thousand battles, moved of its own accord. Obeying pure instinct, it sprang backward and opened up the distance.
People came and went throughout the hospital, yet every one of them went about their business as though they could not see this utterly uncanny pixel figure at all.
Once he had put a little distance between them, Ji Zhao neither fled nor attacked, but stared at the pixel figure. At some point a bubble had appeared beside it, floating quietly in midair like a line of dialogue in a comic.
【"Ji Zhao, all I can do at present is repeat this one fixed line. Trust me — push the game forward, and I will be able to tell you more. If you do nothing, the world will be swallowed by the 'Mirror' without a sound... Push the game forward. It does not matter what the ending is, good or bad; that story is not yours yet. But you must push the game forward! Otherwise your own story will never get the chance to begin!"】
"...?" Ji Zhao was so terrified he could barely hold himself together. He clenched his teeth hard and just managed to keep his composure. "What... are you?"
The pixel figure turned its head toward Ji Zhao, and a bubble rose above it again — the same line as before.
Ji Zhao tried exchanging a few words with the pixelated black-and-white figure, but exactly as the bubble above its head had said, that one line was all he had.
【"..."】
Ji Zhao had, after all, weathered his share of storms. Once the initial panic passed he quickly forced himself calm, turned on his heel without hesitation, left the hospital, and drove to the police station. The black-and-white pixel figure did not follow... And, as expected, it was useless. The police had turned into parroting machines cycling between "Would you like to file a report?" and "I don't understand what you're saying."
After that Ji Zhao went to one place after another and came away with nothing from any of them. Everyone was the same. They looked no different from real people, only slightly blurrier, but in truth every one of them had been reduced to a program running a fixed routine.
Knowing full well that there was probably no one left who could help him, he drove home — yet he did not go straight upstairs to continue that inexplicable game. Instead he sat in the car and put his thoughts in order.
Ji Zhao's head was full of questions... far too many of them. Things had been wrong from the moment that strange bird cry made his hand jerk. The game itself had been all right; take it for a half-finished product and there was nothing about it he could not get past. But after he stepped out of the room... no, from that dizzy spell onward, perhaps everything had already been different.
Ji Zhao knew perfectly well that no amount of thinking here, no amount of ordering his thoughts, would help matters in the slightest. Even so, he wanted to wait a while... As for what he was waiting for, he could not quite say.
Perhaps another pixel figure would suddenly leap out with a bubble over its head reading "That man is lying to you." Or perhaps some dashing blonde foreign bombshell in a skintight bodysuit would drop out of the sky, blow away a mysterious agent with a backhanded shot, and shout at him, "Hey, Zhao Ji, follow me." Failing that, there ought at least to be a sudden wave of dizziness and a blackout, after which he would wake in some room full of gleaming technology, where a mysterious slab of a man in a black trench coat would tell him: welcome to the such-and-such Alliance, the year is such-and-such, this many years have passed since the era you knew, and our enemy is artificial intelligence... something along those lines.
But nothing came.
Ji Zhao did not hesitate for long. Years of professional competition had built a decisive streak into his character, and even faced with something on this scale — something that all but demolished his entire view of the world — he accepted reality swiftly and without flinching.
Ji Zhao got out of the car and walked into the house, and as he came up to the computer the massive dizziness struck again, a good deal stronger this time. He could not keep his feet at all; his head swam and he collapsed to the floor. When he opened his eyes again, the whole world had plainly taken on "game graphics." The fidelity was on par with the finest AAA PC titles of ten years ago, and yet anyone could tell at a single glance that this was a game and not reality.
But Ji Zhao was seeing all of it in reality.
"...Heh." Faced with this uncanny situation, Ji Zhao sneered coldly for reasons he could not name. "It seems I really have no choice at all...?!"
After that sneer, Ji Zhao realized something was wrong. The angle he had fallen at in front of the computer had been a bad one — he had knocked the tower over, and knocked the power plug out along with it.
【"This is bad. That game..."】
He scrambled to his feet and reached for the plug, only to stop halfway through the motion... The computer screen was still flickering with its faint glow, even though it was a desktop with no backup power supply and its plug pulled out of the wall.
In games with modern settings, computers turn up now and then, and the player can shoot at them. But even when the tower is destroyed, the monitor is unaffected, because they are nothing more than textures with no connection between them.
Exactly like now: the tower had been unplugged, and yet the screen was unaffected... And to take it one step further.
At this moment, no one could interrupt this game.