Qi Si opened his eyes, only to belatedly realize that, just as he’d expected, he had forgotten to ask about the bracelet again.
The principle behind how the bracelet could be brought into the game was likely far more complex and important than the Identity Card System itself.
A slow yawn escaped him, and suddenly, a question surfaced in his mind.
If a being on Qi’s level could influence his perception, couldn’t it also erase his hostility?
Was his current wariness and suspicion toward Qi just another carefully orchestrated manipulation?
It was a rabbit hole of second-guessing, impossible to unravel. No matter which way he looked at it, he could find a way to justify his fears.
The only thing Qi Si could be certain of was that his persecution complex was getting worse—terminally so, the kind there was no curing.
Well, no matter. He already had a whole collection of mental illnesses; one more wouldn't make a difference.
Qi Si shook his head and floated up from the bed. He looked down to see himself clad in a red suit, while his body, dressed in white pajamas, lay on the bed with its eyes closed.
It was happening again.
Qi Si was unfazed by the familiar sight. Considering he had nothing pressing to do, he wasn't in a hurry to return to his body. Instead, he simply drifted near the ceiling, idly observing his bedroom from above.
The tidy room was free of clutter. A small, exquisite statue in a red wedding dress lay quietly by the pillow. It was, of course, the Joy God Statue that Xu Yao had become, which he had managed to bring out of the game.
From Qi Si's perspective, he could see faint wisps of black smoke coiling around the statue's surface. Its smiling crimson lips looked as if they were about to drip blood, giving it a sinister and eerie aura.
As his gaze lingered on the statue for a few moments, a stream of non-verbal information flowed into his mind. He now understood that he could trigger its effect with a mere thought.
This meant he could mail the statue anywhere he pleased and remotely control it to transform an entire area into a ghost domain. It was simple, convenient, and difficult to trace.
"It looks quite intimidating, but I wonder how powerful it really is. What is it capable of?" Qi Si stroked his chin, sinking into thought.
From the instance’s ending cinematic, he knew that Double Happiness Town, as a "B-rank anomaly," had encompassed an entire town, unconditionally devouring any living being that passed through. Even the official organization known as the Weird Investigation Bureau had been helpless against it.
So, how much damage could the Joy God Statue inflict upon the real world?
He didn’t expect it to match the full scale of Double Happiness Town, but it couldn't be too far off, could it?
At the very least, it should be able to trap all the people in a village within a specific area, preventing even a single fly from escaping, right?
As Qi Si envisioned the tragedy of people after the anomaly descended, he drifted a full circle around the room, eager to share his joyful mood, but was disappointed to find not a single ghost in sight.
Disheartened, he floated back to the bedroom and lay down flat, aligning his soul with his corpse-like body to facilitate his return.
The fusion of spirit and flesh left him dizzy and disoriented, unable to do much else. Qi Si rolled over, pulled out his phone, and opened the game forums.
He started by searching the name "Xiao Fengchao" and found a heap of results.
#Is the great Xiao Fengchao a comedian? Every time I watch his streams, the game doesn't seem so scary anymore.#
#Calling him out: Xiao Fengchao from the Listening Wind Guild blackmailed our members and extorted items from them when they were in trouble. Shameless!#
#Does anyone know what happened to Xiao Fengchao? Haven't heard from him in a while.#
...
Hundreds of posts pieced together the image of a player named "Xiao Fengchao."
—He appeared out of nowhere, an idiot who loved to live-stream, seemingly with a flair for the dramatic, and was excessively talkative.
—His reputation was polarized. He would save people on a whim but had also engaged in blackmail, extortion, and looting bodies. He frequently posted on the forums under his real name and would argue with people for hundreds of replies.
—He was once a high-ranking member of the Listening Wind Guild but was only active in that capacity for a short time before disappearing, becoming a figure who lived on only in the conversations of other players.
Qi Si noted that his last appearance on the forum was on July 11, 2025. He hadn't said anything of substance, only mentioning that he was about to enter an instance.
It was safe to assume that this character, who had once stirred up trouble in the Weird Game, had likely died in that instance.
The only strange thing was that he live-streamed every time he entered an instance. Why did he skip the very last one, leaving behind no footage to reveal his fate? It was as if... he had anticipated that something would go wrong.
Qi Si clicked on his profile.
At the top was a strategy guide with over ten thousand replies. Amidst a sea of "RIPs" were scattered musings from other players, expressing their confusion about the future and their fear of death.
Leaving the instance required accumulating ten million points, an astronomical figure that was unattainable for most. They were forced into a seven-day cycle of life-and-death crises, frantically running from one perilous instance to the next.
Some had grown numb, giving up on the future and spending all their points to enter safer instances, just trying to survive one day at a time. Others had collapsed in despair, losing their will to live, only wishing for a quick death to find release.
Most of the comments in the thread were negative, but there were also people who went through and encouraged the original posters, telling them to grit their teeth and persevere.
The last reply was dated March 27, 2028—almost seven years ago.
Qi Si scrolled through a few replies with interest, then clicked on the profiles of the people who had posted them.
The most recent activity from any of them was three years ago. They, too, were most likely dead.
"Coaxing others to climb toward an unreachable peak, only to perish on the way himself?" Qi Si tutted softly and shook his head.
After admiring the digital tombstones in the memorial thread for a while longer, he backed out and searched for "Double Happiness Town."
The post with the most traffic was a plea for help from twenty-seven years ago. The original poster had anxiously written:
[My girlfriend went missing near Double Happiness Town in Peng City, and I'm sure it's related to the Weird Game! But she's not a player, so I can't contact her! I called the police, but they don't believe me and said I'm spreading rumors. But I've learned that a lot of other people have gone missing there too, it has to be related to the anomaly! You all know the game exists, please, can anyone nearby help me vouch for it? At least to get them to believe me and search the area...]
Below, other players raised doubts:
[2nd Floor: Is this the new story people are making up to lure others into meeting them in real life? (sweating emoji)]
[3rd Floor: There are tons of haunted places in the world. How is the OP so sure this is related to the Weird Game?]
[4th Floor: I believe the OP; his words don't seem fake. But testifying for you is useless. People who haven't been chosen by the game can't know it exists. They won't believe it even if we tell them.]
The original poster replied after a dozen more comments:
[I'm not lying! If you're worried, you don't have to come! But can you please help spread the word? If more and more people know about this, they'll have to take it seriously!]
[The reason I'm sure my girlfriend's disappearance is related to the Weird Game is because it's too much of a coincidence. Yesterday my countdown ended, and I was about to select an instance when I noticed a new one in the pool called "Double Happiness Town." Based on the time it appeared, it opened on the same day my girlfriend went missing. I don't know what the connection is, but how can something be so coincidental?]
[I feel like the police department must know something, especially with so many people missing. Even if they don't, someone has to. The Weird Game isn't small anymore. I refuse to believe there isn't an official organization managing it by now!]
His words seemed genuine, and the voices of doubt began to dwindle. Although some still scoffed, most people expressed sympathy and concern after doing their own research. [41st Floor: OP, don't scare yourself just yet. Get your friends and family to help you search for the next few days. Maybe your girlfriend wasn't involved in an anomaly; it could just be a coincidence.]
[78th Floor: I looked it up online, and it seems like there really have been disappearances in the Double Happiness Town area, but the local police's official account has issued a statement debunking it. Looks like they don't plan to investigate further.]
[219th Floor: I'm a civil servant. I used my connections to ask around. This matter is very complicated. The Federation doesn't plan to intervene. Everyone should be cautious.]
In that era, players' understanding of the Weird Game was extremely limited. They were still in the early stages of exploration, unfamiliar with many situations.
Double Happiness Town was the first anomaly to appear in both the game and reality simultaneously, which was enough to pique the curiosity and desire for investigation of most players. More and more people flooded the thread to join the discussion, offering their opinions and quickly pushing the reply count into the thousands.
But from beginning to end, no one explicitly offered to help.
Two days later, the original poster left a final message:
[I'm going to choose to enter the "Double Happiness Town" instance to see what's going on. I promised my girlfriend I would always be with her. But I still want to ask everyone, please keep an eye out for any news. Maybe she wasn't caught up in an anomaly, maybe she just doesn't want to talk to me right now... By the way, her name is Xu Wen.]
The moment Qi Si saw the name "Xu Wen," a knot formed in his stomach.
He exited the thread and browsed other records related to Double Happiness Town.
Unlike the hushed secrecy surrounding Su Clan Village, perhaps because it had appeared earlier or involved more people, there was a wealth of information on the forums about the real-world Double Happiness Town, including a fair number of comments that undermined the Federation's credibility.
Qi Si noticed that on April 27, 2017, the Double Happiness Town anomaly was finally dealt with by an unknown force. And the date Xiao Fengchao achieved a True End in the "Double Happiness Town" instance was April 21, 2017.
"It seems the game's influence on reality is deeper than I thought. Not only can it deploy anomalies into the real world or create instances based on real-world events, but it can also guide the direction of those events on some level. Reality and the game complement and interact with each other. A single event can generate multiple times the evil. How economically efficient."
Qi Si remarked with admiration as the "rules, gods, and world" trinity theory that Qi had told him about resurfaced in his mind.
Unlike those theory-crafting players who had an immense interest in studying the fundamental nature of the world, he didn't so much want to know the answers as he enjoyed the process of exploration.
And now, he knew a piece of the truth, but in doing so, he saw even more of the unknown.
The purpose of the Weird Game was to harvest the "evil" scattered throughout the world to feed back into the rules. The most efficient way to generate "evil" was undoubtedly to link reality and instances, getting multiple uses out of a single event.
But in fact, only a minority of instances, like "Flesh Eating" and "Double Happiness Town," were directly connected to reality.
Instances like "Rose Manor" and "Dialectical Game" had completely fictional settings, plucking players from their world and dropping them into a scenario.
As for "Hopeless Sea," although it involved elements like the Bermuda Triangle and the slave trade, making it seem closely related to reality, Qi Si was certain that no major news had broken about that region of the real world after he cleared the instance.
Qi Si refused to believe that the Weird Game would design something that didn't align with maximum economic efficiency. Were those absurd, reality-defying instances really just created out of boredom?
"If instances were only generated from real-world anomalies, it would be impossible to form such a massive and inscrutable instance pool. Fictional instances have certain benefits, like introducing new anomalies into reality that people would likely have no experience dealing with... but the efficiency still seems low."
Qi Si silently made his calculations, and suddenly, a thought occurred to him.
Qi never seemed to have specified exactly how many planes of existence the rules and gods controlled...
"Time does not exist," but under the order of the rules, there must be a central axis that marks the relationship between events.
The Weird Game doesn't consume real-world time, yet a counter-intuitive mechanism like live-streaming exists. This contradiction between relative and absolute time was proof enough that neither the "Weird Game" nor "Reality" was that central axis.
Within this system, other planes of existence must exist...
"That makes sense. The rules control countless worlds with different settings. Instances and players come from different worlds, intermingling and contaminating each other in a combinatorial fashion... The immense chaos would indeed produce more evil."
"But why haven't I met any players from other worlds yet? Everyone has two eyes and a nose, and communication isn't an issue. If we weren't from the same world, it's impossible that I wouldn't have noticed something."
As his thoughts drifted aimlessly, a single phrase suddenly popped into his mind—
"Pilot program."
Just as he was now plotting to introduce anomalies into reality on a large scale, his actual plan was to pick one lucky village as a test site.
The Weird Game was likely the same. It was preparing for a massive harvest of evil and had chosen one lucky world as its pilot program.
This also explained why the game's mechanics exhibited a degree of chaos, with details that were constantly changing and subjectively idealistic.
Because it was all just a test.
Qi Si suddenly felt an urge to laugh. If Qi hadn't deliberately misled or deceived him, and his judgment was correct, then for thirty-six years, four million people had struggled between life and death, like ants caught in a death spiral, repeating the cycle endlessly.
Across infinite dimensions of time and space, in the eyes of a god, humans were nothing more than specks, finite and insignificant...
But so what?
The greater the disparity, the more dramatic things become, don't they?
Qi Si returned to the forum's homepage.
There, new posts refreshed tirelessly, creating an almost pathologically lively atmosphere.
#LFR, any cute guys out there? I don't wanna die a virgin.#
#Teaching you how to game the live-streaming system for profit. I've been using this trick to save up points and haven't had to enter a new instance in a year.#
#Finally got into the Listening Wind Guild and even got picked for an exchange with Kyushu. Documenting my journey, let's see if I can meet God Fu.#
...
Under the immense pressure of death, fear was useless.
The human species had always been adept at adapting to its environment. They looked upon a world of despair with optimism.
Deconstruct, entertain, and then revel...
Thank you to Xue Fengfeng for the 100-point reward!