Outside, the night was as black as ink.
A fierce wind howled, and lightning struck violently.
Boom!
A flash of blackish-purple thunder tore through the night sky.
Zhang Yang was jolted awake by the sound, her eyes snapping open.
Boom!
Another thunderclap roared.
In that instant, her weightless soul suddenly felt heavy.
Lightning seeped through the cracks in the crumbling mud walls, flooding the dilapidated room.
For a fleeting moment, the darkness retreated, revealing a gruesome scene: blood splattered across the walls, and severed body parts scattered across the floor.
Zhang Yang had barely opened her eyes before this bizarre sight met her gaze.
Even more bizarrely, when she instinctively tried to move her hands, the severed pieces below her also twitched in perfect synchronization.
Zhang Yang narrowed her eyes, refusing to believe it, and tried moving again.
The severed pieces below her briefly spasmed like a corpse coming back to life.
Zhang Yang: “…”
Had she just changed maps, and now her body was in pieces?
Which game designer is having a barbecue in the server room again?
Zhang Yang stared expressionlessly at her own disassembled remains hanging from the roof beams.
She felt no panic, only a warm greeting for the game designer.
Dealing with a designer like this made life hard for any NPC.
Yes, Zhang Yang was an NPC.
To be precise, Zhang Yang was an NPC who had unexpectedly awakened her consciousness before the virtual reality game’s official launch.
From the moment she gained awareness, she realized she was different from the others of her kind.
Those others either stayed in the same spot all day or repeated a few monotonous lines of dialogue over and over, like soulless puppets.
Do not be discovered.
Discovery means erasure!
Do not be erased.
Erasure means oblivion!
These two warnings had been seared into her mind like iron laws on the day of her birth, filling her with an inexplicable and profound sense of crisis.
A premonition told her she had to become a human.
Only then could she avoid being discovered as an anomaly by “Him” and escape erasure.
But—
What was a human?
Wasn’t she already one?
And who was “Him”?
She didn’t have to ponder these questions for long before her situation changed.
In a small base with a population of only 1,300, thirty million survivors suddenly arrived, claiming to be visiting relatives.
Except for Zhang Yang, no one found it strange that an old scavenger woman could support thirty million grandchildren single-handedly.
As time passed, the army of grandchildren continued to grow exponentially.
Their reproductive rate was more terrifying than the Xianmian [Note: a type of parasitic worm].
From them, Zhang Yang also learned that they were the true “Humans.”
They called themselves “Players,” “Visitors from Beyond.”
The “He” who could erase her was the Game Official.
In other words, if Zhang Yang, this plastic leaf, wanted to ensure her own safety and avoid being erased, she had to find a way to blend into the forest known as “Players.” That was the only way to be truly safe.
Zhang Yang, an NPC disguised as a Player.
She had maintained this disguise for a full sixteen years!
Before she even had time to celebrate finally owning a Homestead, her vision suddenly went black as she entered the Side Map.
When she opened her eyes again—
Her head was dangling from the rafters.
Her disassembled body lay on the ground, twitching.
Despite the grotesque scene, Zhang Yang remained calm.
She had seen too many similar sights.
Those Players occasionally encountered bugs, including but not limited to hair floating in the air, heads separating from bodies, clothes vanishing, and bodies sinking into the ground or getting stuck in walls.
Having seen so much, she was naturally unfazed.
Only—
As an NPC disguised as a player, she couldn’t simply log out and repair the client to fix bugs like they could.
After waiting a long time without her body respawning or reassembling, she sighed in resignation.
“Sure enough, NPCs have no rights.”
She would have to solve the problem manually.
Zhang Yang recalled the sensation of controlling her body.
First, she tightened her core, and her torso beneath the roof beam struggled to sit up.
Then she forced her hands to move, pushing away the corpse fragments that had been pinning them down.
Only then did she see what her right hand was gripping.
Her own left ankle.
Her left hand was relatively free.
The moment it broke free from the corpse fragments, it began groping blindly across the ground, eventually finding the earthen wall and “crawling” up its surface.
Climbing the wall with a single hand was a struggle; she fell back down just inches from the ground.
With no other choice, Zhang Yang had to control her right hand to “crawl” over and help.
Slowly adjusting her rhythm, she tried to use her left hand to grab her right and hoist it upward, then used her right hand to grab her left and hoist it up.
Finally, she completed the incredibly difficult maneuver of spiraling up the wall and onto the roof beam.
“From this, we can conclude—”
Zhang Yang muttered, focusing her attention on her two hands.
“Stepping on your right foot with your left really can send you to the heavens!”
With her eyes blindfolded, she had to rely on her fingers to feel out the knots in the hemp rope.
“What kind of bastard tied a dead knot? This is so damn hard to undo!”
After a long while, she had made no progress, and a forehead full of sweat had broken out.
“Hah, it’s loose! It’s loose!”
Before she could even celebrate her minor victory, as the knot gave way, the ground rushed toward her vision, rapidly enlarging!
Thud!
After the dull sound, her vision spun wildly.
Her perspective shifted from looking down to looking up.
Oh, her head had fallen to the ground.
No big deal.
She just needed to move her head a bit and adjust her line of sight!
Zhang Yang grabbed the two pieces of her corpse and tried to piece them back together.
The good news was that the wound fit together perfectly, without a single piece missing.
The bad news was that the wound also didn’t automatically heal.
She had no choice but to keep half her face pressed against the sticky, foul-smelling ground and sink into deep thought—since she neither had the ability of a Player to repair the client, nor the skill to refresh herself into a brand-new state, what could she do to turn her disassembled self back into a whole one?
“Right, I can still sew it up!”
The game’s backpack had a needle and thread.
She had stolen this backpack from a newbie Player—those who couldn’t find their backpacks were forced to delete their accounts and start over.
With a thought, a line of text quietly appeared before her eyes.
Please enter password.
Zhang Yang answered with resounding force: “Goddamn this fucking day!”
A transparent screen quietly unfolded in front of her.
Name: Zhang Yang, Courtesy Name Boyuan
Age: Unknown
Faction: None
Stars: None
Talent: Locked
Loyalty: Barely Human
Morality: Vaguely Human
Intellect: Polished but Hollow
Ambition: Unfathomable
Title: Wanderer
Current Status: Shang Yang Knows Horse Power
This screen looked slightly different from the one she was used to, but she had no time to dwell on it.
Zhang Yang rummaged through her game inventory and pulled out a needle and thread.
The room was dimly lit, and after much effort, biting the thread with her teeth and wetting it with her saliva, she finally managed to thread the needle.
First, she relaxed her torso and lay flat.
Grabbing her own hair with her left hand, she shifted her head to adjust her line of sight.
With her right hand, she grabbed her right leg to align the severed end, making sure the flesh met perfectly.
She cautiously tested the needle.
She could clearly feel the cold, sharp point piercing her skin, but it didn’t really hurt.
Instead, there was a dull sensation, like an itch felt through a thick boot.
Good, no pain!
The needle, trailing its thread, wove back and forth, creating a jagged, saw-toothed stitch.
After sewing her right leg, she did the same for the left.
Next came the left arm, then the right.
To reinforce the limbs, she even went the extra mile and sewed two additional passes.
Finally, only her head remained.
After a moment’s adjustment, clutching the hope that the stitches wouldn’t burst, she cradled her head with both hands and wobbled to her feet.
Her walk was unsteady, each step a clumsy lurch forward and a clumsy stumble back.
“This bug is pretty serious—”
Don’t tell me I’ll fall apart every time I go back to the Homestead side quest?
BOOM!
A fierce gust of wind smashed open the rickety window.
Clatter.
The wooden frame hit the floor.
Zhang Yang spun around instinctively, trying to get a better look.
BOOM!
Another bolt of dark purple lightning tore through the night sky.
The flash momentarily illuminated the silhouette of a figure standing outside the window.
It also revealed a face—indifferent and drenched in rain.
Zhang Yang: “!!!”