After the preliminary interrogation, Chen Xing sorted through his notes and said to the "sixteen-year-old human girl and member of the Human Resistance Army Alliance, Jiang Xuannv" before him, "I don't know what's going on with you, but I need to tell you this: if you're deliberately pretending to be mentally ill because you're afraid of the consequences of breaking the law, then you're making a huge mistake!"
"Mentally ill patients with unstable conditions can't attend college. They'll be expelled or forced to take a leave of absence!!"
Chen Xing emphasized this, staring at her. Yet she remained unmoved, as calm as a child who had truly been raised by robots, with barely any emotional fluctuation.
After a long while.
"Fine."
Chen Xing rubbed his head and said to her, "Based on the current situation, you have severe schizophrenia and imagine yourself to be an underage girl."
"Jiang Xuannv" lowered her head and looked at her broad chest. Shaking her head, she said, "Are you sure this isn't a virtual network? In a Virtual World, people can change their forms easily."
Chen Xing shook his head and told her, "Your real name is Lu Xing. You're twenty years old, and you're a third-year student at Hai City University."
Seeing that Lu Xing still did not react, Chen Xing sighed. "You deliberately damaged someone else's property. Luckily, the amount involved wasn't high enough to open a case. And you're a student at Hai City University, a key university. It wasn't easy getting this far with your studies... Forget it. I'll contact your counselor and have him come over first."
With that, he left Lu Xing in the interrogation room and walked out with the written record.
He muttered under his breath, "What the hell is this... Could academic pressure have caused schizophrenia?"
That afternoon.
When Lu Xing opened his eyes again, he saw his counselor, Li Xiao, staring at him in stunned disbelief, as though he had just heard something unimaginable from Lu Xing.
"Director Li?"
Lu Xing tentatively asked. Director Li froze for a moment, then asked him as well, "Lu Xing, you... you're back?"
"...Yes!"
Lu Xing's expression was indescribable. He had just experienced the most unbelievable event of his twenty years of life. With a blink of his eyes, he had arrived in a city filled with futuristic technology, dreamlike and beautiful, where he saw countless things that had left him utterly shocked.
Then, with another blink, he was back in the modern world!
It felt like a dream, yet everything he had seen and heard in that dream had been unprecedentedly real!
"Let me confirm something first."
Li Xiao, the counselor who had been in charge of the computer science class since Lu Xing's freshman year, asked seriously, "You're currently Lu Xing, a twenty-year-old human male, not Jiang Xuannv, a sixteen-year-old member of the Human Resistance Army. Right?"
"Her name is Jiang Xuannv?"
Lu Xing finally understood. He probably had not been dreaming, nor had he traveled through time. Rather, he and that girl with slender limbs, short hair, and a tiny face had somehow crossed over into each other's bodies!
It was like the movie Your Name, which Lu Xing had happened to watch.
"Director Li!"
He took a deep breath and forced a smile at Director Li. "I'm Lu Xing now, a student at Hai City University. Just now... just pretend none of that happened!"
Li Xiao grew angry. "None of it happened? Then what the hell was wrong with you just now?"
"Uh!"
"And why did you smash someone else's phone?"
"What?"
Lu Xing looked utterly astonished. He wanted to defend himself, but he had no idea how to begin.
At that moment, Chen Xing walked in from outside. He spoke with Li Xiao for a while, then asked about Lu Xing's condition. Seeing that he had returned to normal, Chen Xing patted him on the shoulder and said meaningfully:
"Can you tell the difference between virtuality and reality now?"
"Virtual? So her side was a Virtual World?"
Lu Xing finally understood. No wonder that world had felt so strange to him.
The two men in the room exchanged a look. Great, this guy still wasn't better!
That night.
After borrowing two thousand yuan from his counselor to repay the person whose phone "he" had smashed, Lu Xing dragged his exhausted body back to the dormitory.
"Sixth Bro's back?"
Qi Wenyu, who was gaming in the dorm, casually called out and lowered the volume on his speakers.
"Yeah."
Lu Xing answered weakly. He tossed his things onto the desk, glanced at Qi Wenyu's impressive 15-2-8 record, and sighed. "If I'd known, I wouldn't have gone out during the National Day holiday. Today was seriously unlucky. I lost two thousand yuan!"
"What?"
Qi Wenyu shot him a quick glance before turning back to the screen. "What did you do today? Get caught going for a massage in the village?"
The village was Chengdong Village, not far from the west gate. It had over a hundred massage and foot bath parlors.
Lu Xing was from the south, and Lu sounded like six, which was how he got the nickname Sixth Bro. His parents had died early, and he did not have many relatives. He had relied on loans to attend college. Two thousand yuan was two months' worth of food expenses for him.
After chatting with him for a few moments, Lu Xing sat in his chair and thought about what had happened that day.
He was almost one hundred percent certain that he had not been dreaming, nor did he have schizophrenia. He had undergone a Soul Exchange with a girl from the Future World—someone named Jiang Xuannv.
He had crossed over and become Jiang Xuannv, while Jiang Xuannv had crossed over and become him. Their souls had switched bodies.
It was just that he did not know whether this exchange would happen once or multiple times, or whether there was any pattern to it.
Wait!
Lu Xing suddenly remembered something. He hurriedly took out his phone, opened WeChat, and pulled down the screen. Sure enough, he found a mini-program called Life Experience Game.
He tapped it open, and several words came into view:
Currently playing...
"!!"
Lu Xing's expression became spectacular. He had seen this mini-program as a splash-screen ad when opening some app. Shaking the phone would redirect him to the mini-program. It was annoyingly intrusive.
"I remember seeing several beautiful girls in that ad, of different races and with different charms. The art style was totally to the liking of us old anime nerds, and the slogan said something like 'thrilling and exciting' and 'dreamlike and beautiful.' So I casually tapped it a few times..."
Recalling what had happened that morning, Lu Xing tried tapping around inside the mini-program, only to find that nothing happened. After closing and reopening it, it was still stuck on "Currently playing..."
After hesitating for a long time, Lu Xing ultimately could not bring himself to delete the mini-program.
It was not because he wanted to become an underage girl. He was not that perverted.
Rather, after witnessing the Virtual World from who knew how many years into Earth's future, he had developed an immense curiosity.
What was a human world ruled by artificial intelligence like?
How far had future technology advanced?
How would resistance fighters like Jiang Xuannv fight against an artificial intelligence that had imprisoned all humanity within a Virtual World?
Besides, was it possible for him to bring something back from future technology? Something like a two-dimensional foil, sophons, a space elevator, a wormhole spaceship, or quantum teleportation?
Even if none of that worked, bringing back any one of controllable nuclear fusion technology, magnetic levitation, superconductors, or anything like that would be enough to send him straight to the peak of life!
As for artificial intelligence technology, forget it. Future humans had already screwed it up, and Lu Xing did not dare touch it. He had learned about that world from Director Li, but because Director Li was worried Lu Xing might have another schizophrenic episode, he had not told him much.
"What's Sixth Bro spacing out for? Still thinking about your two thousand yuan?"
After a match ended, Qi Wenyu looked over and laughed.
"No. Oh, right. If I suddenly turn into someone else, remember to explain things to me."
"What?"
"...Forget it. Pretend I never said anything!"
Lu Xing shook his head again. He was torn between hope and anxiety. The Life Experience Game ad had been full of beautiful girls. Could it be that the next time they switched, he would become a girl again?
If there are men, don't play. If it's all women, don't leave.jpg
After thinking for a while, Lu Xing picked up a pen.
"My name is Lu Xing. If you see what's written on this paper, don't panic..."
On the paper, he wrote down his personal information, his school, his dormmates, his meal card, his mobile payment password, and more. His purpose was to tell whoever might cross over into his body again that this world was not controlled by artificial intelligence, and that the dormitory was safe.
—The reason he included his payment password was in case the other person wanted to buy something. Besides, there was not much money in his bank card anyway, not even as much as he had on his meal card.
After finishing, Lu Xing remembered a blonde foreign beauty from the ad and wrote another copy in English.
An hour later.
Filled with anticipation and unease, Lu Xing lay on his bed and slowly drifted off to sleep.