Weird APP
[Memo]
Character Profile:
Time ticked by, and Ying Yan still hadn’t typed the rest.
Outside, the endless stream of car lights flashed across her view, briefly illuminating a desert.
From a distance, orange-yellow lights flickered, casting a faint shadow on the windowsill.
Half an hour later, Ying Yan opened her phone and launched a drawing app to start the character illustration.
But when the screen lit up, the neatly arranged rectangular layout of her phone was disrupted by a rogue APP, spinning into a star vortex.
Being slightly obsessive, she immediately noticed the APP right in the center of her vision.
—It was probably downloaded automatically while browsing ads.
The stranger APP was aggressive, immediately grabbing the central position and pushing other apps to the corners.
Its blood-red background slowly flowed into bright green letters reading “Weird Question,” strikingly harsh on the eyes.
Perhaps the designer was inspired by the colorful poisonous snakes of the forest.
Ying Yan thought for a moment, silently warning herself to learn a lesson and avoid such jarring color schemes in the future.
She tapped on the APP, waiting, but the “Uninstall” option never appeared.
She had no choice but to check the app store, searching for it, but couldn’t find a corresponding app.
Could her phone have been infected with a virus from browsing?
Realizing the potential severity, Ying Yan immediately launched her antivirus app, selected the rogue APP, and activated a high-intensity cleaning mode.
This mode is thorough, capable of effectively eliminating computer viruses—but it takes time.
Watching the progress bar move, Ying Yan sent the app to the background and glanced at her phone—19:50.
She estimated roughly, sighed, and temporarily set aside the drawing to start her professor-assigned homework.
Ying Yan studied software engineering in college, and her professor assigned many technically challenging tasks.
By the time she finished, it was already 11:30 PM.
She massaged her sore shoulders and went to wash up.
After lying down in bed, under the light, she glanced at her phone one last time.
Progress bar: 40%.
By tomorrow, it should be done. Ying Yan persuaded her obsessive side, closed her eyes, and soon fell asleep.
The clock hands ran silently in circles.
The minute hand moved soundlessly, overlapping the hour hand, both pointing at “12.”
The ceiling light flickered once, then went out completely, plunging the room into darkness.
In the next instant, the phone by her bed suddenly blazed with light.
The antivirus worked diligently, yet the progress bar dropped to zero.
The light expanded, engulfing the entire bed.
Under the pale glow, only a messy pillow and thin blanket remained.
Ying Yan had a nightmare.
In it, she wore black-and-white pajamas with pandas chewing bamboo on the back, standing in an unfamiliar room, shocked and bewildered.
The room was a standard two-bedroom, one-living-room layout with a separate bathroom, toilet, and kitchen. Every door was unlocked, freely openable.
But the exit doors and ventilated windows had vanished.
Looking from the master bedroom inside, she saw: smelly socks draped over landscape paintings, crumpled blankets on the floor, textbooks piled messily on the bed, bookshelves filled with toys, pillows nested in flowerpots, roses blooming in a fish tank…
And on the bedside table, a half-dead alarm clock flipping its eyes—wait, it was a fish!
The scene was sheer, hellish chaos.
Since arriving in this world, Ying Yan often had fragmented dreams of past experiences: blood-stained notes, bizarre creatures…
Yes, “arriving in this world!” She wasn’t originally from here, but from a fantastical world.
There, starting from the 3034 Star-Moon Calendar, all written urban legends became reality.
People caught in these tales could only survive by following corrupted rules.
By chance, a year after the legends became real, newborns displayed innate special abilities, later called “Talents.”
To increase survival rates in these legends, exceptionally gifted children were selected and specially trained into the Vanguard Squad.
Vanguard Squad members entered the legends, verified rules, corrected them, and protected ordinary people, building the first line of defense against these tales with their flesh and blood.
Ying Yan’s Talent was “Flowlight,” allowing her to generate various weapons at a cost.
By her second year, she became the leader of the first Vanguard team and gained battle partners.
But as humans gradually reclaimed territory, the power of the legends intensified.
Corruption spread beyond rules, affecting objects, ordinary people, and even innate Talents…
In an accident, Ying Yan’s Talent was corrupted. The original cost of “happiness” twisted into “pain.”
She endured to the last moment, until her death transported her to this world—the 21st century—reborn as an abandoned infant in an orphanage.
Accepting her fate, Ying Yan adapted quickly, leaving the past behind, living as an ordinary person.
She sensed gaps in her memory but instinctively avoided recalling them, vowing never to awaken her corrupted Talent in this world.
For over a decade, life remained uneventful.
So, seeing this scene, Ying Yan’s first reaction was: she must be dreaming, an obsessive-friendly nightmare.
Closing her eyes, counting to three, she opened them: the room remained chaotic, everything in the wrong place.
Her body shivered; her ears seemed to hear her obsessive mind scream.
Dream or not, danger or not, this room had to be organized!
The thought struck abruptly. Ying Yan, in black-and-white fuzzy slippers, impatiently yanked the socks from the painting, tossing them into a basin in the shoe cabinet, and retrieved the hidden alarm clock, placing it on the bedside table.
The half-dead fish? For now, it stayed in the tank. If it died, it would be moved to the kitchen cutting board or the living room trash.
She removed the painting, catching a fragment that fell—slipped it into her pocket. She hung the painting at the center of the wall.
Her peripheral vision noticed the wall patterns were asymmetrical!
Jumping off the stool, she grabbed a fruit knife from the closet and trimmed the extra pattern.
Done, she froze, realizing one fact: her OCD was intensifying; she had to speed up.
Socks, painting, wall patterns fixed; she folded the blanket on the floor into a block, dusted the pillow, neat.
Sheets were fine; toys temporarily on the floor, textbooks into the bookshelf, dried roses into the flowerpot.
After finishing the master bedroom, she pulled fragments from her pocket—texture like newspaper, but few words.
To gather effective clues, she needed more fragments.
Taking a deep breath, she stepped into the living room, thinking about clues while her hands worked uncontrollably.
This uncontrolled OCD was previously impossible.
Her mind seemed split: one half calm and analytical, one half frantically anxious.
While she busied herself, the bathroom quietly changed.
The shower turned on automatically, filling the tub.
Blocked hairs floated, grew longer, winding over the showerhead, crawling up the ceiling, covering the patterned mirror.
One strand slid along the floor, trying to escape, only to be grabbed.
Hair: ?
It straightened, seeing a human in white pajamas.
One hand pinched it, the other wielded large scissors, eyes devoid of fear, radiating killing intent.
The hair tried to inspect further but suddenly felt pain, vision snapping back to the dark bathroom.
Minutes later, the door was kicked open.
The human entered, scissors in one hand, plastic bag in the other, slashing wildly.
Fallen hair was collected and stuffed into the bag.
In under half an hour, the bag held shredded hair, lifeless.
It felt something was wrong but couldn’t pinpoint what.
Meanwhile, Ying Yan had finished the master bedroom, living room, bathroom, collecting three fragments.
She combined them, slipping them into her pocket.
Due to frequent disturbances in the kitchen and toilet, she prioritized them, entering the kitchen first, arranging utensils and tableware at lightning speed.
While busy, a shoulder tapped her.
Irritated, she turned, “What? Didn’t you see I’m—”
She swallowed the word “busy.”
Behind her stood a massive stitched-together monster.
Bloodied pork, fresh cabbage, potatoes for eyes.
The one tapping her shoulder was a green onion stalk.
Normally, she would stay alert and calm.
But here, she thought: “I’m exhausted, the kitchen ingredients are disobedient, mixing at will—damn it!”
Grabbing the green onion, she swung a kitchen knife with the other hand.
The stalk was easily cut.
The monster panicked, waving the other stalk. The two potato eyes glared viciously.
Ying Yan remained calm.
She often cooked to save money; even hostile potatoes were still ingredients.
Knife swung—cabbage head chopped, potatoes rolled.
The stitched monster, blinded, weakened, soon dismantled, lying lifeless on the cutting board—empathetically echoing the previously mocked hair.
Are humans really this terrifying now?
Opening the fridge, she was surprised—it was full.
Gazing at the cutting board, a doubt arose. OCD-driven, she cleared a path: “This… doesn’t belong in the house?”
Unable to place it in the fridge, she sorted ingredients into a basin.
The small kitchen had plenty of hiding spots.
She moved the fridge slightly and found a fragment in a crevice.
The notoriously haunted bathroom was surprisingly tidy.
She checked the toilet, then the sink, finally finding a fragment in the tissue box.
The secondary bedroom was fairly orderly, except three boxes in the corner containing mixed glass beads of three types.
She muttered to herself, calming only after finishing.
Two boxes of beads were poured into the third, sorted carefully.
Under the third box, she found something unusual: a crystalline slime-like organism changing shapes every minute—cube, sphere, cylinder, flashing colors.
Her temporarily relaxed mind tensed, sliding into panic.
She took the slime to the kitchen cutting board, swung the knife down hard.
The slime, just waking from being hit by beads, saw the knife descending.
It imagined being chopped into pieces, utterly destroyed.
Frightened, it quickly opened its tester panel, pressing “End.”
The knife stopped a centimeter away; its glint disappeared.
Everything around twisted, shattered, and was swallowed by darkness.
Terrifying! How can a human kill a tester!
The crystalline tester thought.
At the same time, Ying Yan sat at a huge round table, pale, chills running through her.
Black hair framed her face, aura of unease, strangely aggressive despite her appearance.
—Nonconforming life forms must be eliminated.
A nearby black cylinder shrank, retreating into deeper darkness.
Ying Yan didn’t realize the fleeting thought had been read.
Half an hour later, she calmed her emotions, temporarily shutting down OCD.
Yet mental and physical fatigue lingered.
Rational and calm again, she noticed a notebook and black pen on the table.
She picked them up and wrote carefully:
[Please Follow These Rules]
At that moment, a mocking voice echoed clearly to everyone’s ears:
“Good evening, players! Congratulations on surviving the trial—you’re lucky to live and have the chance to attend this roundtable!”