True: Consumed by Desire

Lin Feng sized up the girl who had greeted him.

She wore a white gauze dress embroidered with gold and silver threads in auspicious cloud patterns, reflecting flecks of rosy light beneath the sun. The breeze gently lifted her waist-length hair.

Her hair bore no excessive ornaments, only a white jade hairpin simply gathering the strands beside her ears, while the rest cascaded naturally down her back.

Her lively, spirited eyes seemed to shimmer with vibrant light. Her unadorned face carried a cheerful, charming smile that left a deep impression on anyone seeing her for the first time.

Lin Feng identified the dynasty of her hanfu as the Tang Dynasty.

"Hehehe, have you been captivated by this young lady's charm already?"

"No, I was thinking about something. I just entered this game, and there's a lot of information to take in. There are people from the Tang Dynasty, the Han Dynasty, and even the Middle Ages..."

Lin Feng shook his head. Being captivated was impossible. It was not as if he had never seen beautiful women before. Before becoming a Wallfacer, he had not merely looked at quite a few of them—he had pushed over quite a few as well.

Besides, this was a game world. Character appearances and genders meant nothing in reality, since they could all be adjusted. For all he knew, there might be a fat, greasy old man on the other side of the internet connection.

"I'm feeling pretty lost right now. This game doesn't even have a beginner tutorial."

Lin Feng explained his situation to the girl. Normally, when players entered a game, there would be something like a beginner tutorial to tell them how to operate it and what the main quest was.

But the Three-Body Game did the exact opposite.

Ultimately, it was because the original purpose of its design differed. Ordinary games focused on profit, so they needed beginner tutorials to help players quickly immerse themselves. The Three-Body Game, however, existed to screen out anti-human elements within human society for use in aiding Trisolaris's invasion.

"A newcomer? Then come with me."

The girl tapped her chin thoughtfully for a moment, then waved at Lin Feng, signaling for him to follow.

As they walked and chatted, Lin Feng learned the girl's name. She was Liang Gong, one of the Three-Body Game's administrators.

Yeah, definitely an ETO member.

They discussed the game's main quest. Lin Feng said he had only come to play a game and hoped Liang Gong, as an administrator, could explain the main storyline.

"There used to be one. Now there isn't."

"No main quest? I remember something about predicting the sun's trajectory, and creating something like a Human Computer."

Lin Feng deliberately brought these things up. He wanted to see the Human Computer from the original novel, Mozi's Armillary Sphere, the array-like ranks of giant pendulums, and so on.

"Someone already completed that, so naturally it disappeared." Liang Gong spread her hands.

"The laws governing the sun's movement have already been analyzed. The Three Suns constantly move in the sky with no pattern whatsoever."

"The three-body problem. I know it. I heard that problem has no solution," Lin Feng said.

Liang Gong shook her head and waved the half-eaten candied hawthorn skewer in her hand.

"Saying it has no solution isn't accurate. A more accurate statement is that there is no stable general-form solution. The three-body problem has no regular answer and cannot be expressed using an analytical formula. You can only calculate numerical solutions, and there's no way to obtain an exact value."

"Here, don't you want a taste?"

As she spoke, Liang Gong held the candied hawthorn skewer, with two fruits remaining, out before Lin Feng.

"No, no. I appreciate the thought. You should keep it for yourself."

Lin Feng repeatedly waved his hands in refusal. It was not that he feared being taken advantage of or felt embarrassed. He simply thought of the possibility that there was a greasy middle-aged man on the other end of the internet connection, and physically could not adapt to the idea.

Especially since the girl had offered him her candied hawthorn skewer, it made him feel even more certain that she was actually a man. After all, most women would not offer food they had already eaten to a man they had just met, would they?

The girl regretfully ate one candied hawthorn fruit and spoke as she chewed.

"Ahh... if you don't hurry up... and enjoy this peaceful time now... you won't get the chance later..."

"You make it sound like the world is about to end in the next second."

"It is the end of the world."

Liang Gong said it as though it were only natural. As if to validate her words, unrest began to spread.

The sun overhead, originally normal in size, began to expand for some unknown reason. Before long, its volume had doubled.

But that was not the end. The sun's expansion showed no sign of slowing. Like a beast devouring all things, it was consuming the sky.

The strange sight left Lin Feng staring blankly. No matter how wealthy he was, he had never seen anything like this.

The air trembled. Within half an hour, the ambient temperature rose to three times its original level. Even the high-temperature environment of an iron-smelting furnace on Earth could not compare to such heat.

Strands of black smoke rose from the horizon, especially conspicuous beneath the bright sky.

"Run! Fire! Fire!"

The temperature had reached the ignition point. Even without direct flames, combustible materials exposed to the air began to burn.

The clothes of countless people caught fire. Tang Dynasty silk might have been light and durable, but it was not fire-resistant. These flame demons descending from the sky were devouring human lives.

"Dehydration! Dehydration!"

"Quick, get into the shade! Don't let the sun shine directly on you!"

People screamed in panic and fled toward the shelters prepared long ago.

"It's burning! It's burning! My clothes are on fire!" Lin Feng cried out in pain.

Lin Feng and the others were running too. While fleeing from the sun's rays, the clothes on his left arm caught fire.

"Hold on a little longer! There's a cave over here where we can hide from the sunlight!" Liang Gong, whose body was also on fire, shouted back at Lin Feng.

The pain of severe burns made running incredibly difficult for Lin Feng. What surprised him was Liang Gong ahead of him. Her back had already been scorched and even her hair was burning, yet she could still run so swiftly without the slightest panic.

The cave was right before them. Just as Lin Feng stumbled and was about to fall, Liang Gong caught him.

Already transformed into a human torch, she used the momentum to shove Lin Feng into the cave's shadow.

"Get inside!"

"You...!"

The Hanfu Girl no longer had time to enter the cave. The blazing flames covering her body burned her into a human torch. The beautiful girl from moments ago was now utterly unrecognizable.

Lin Feng struggled to get up and pull Liang Gong into the cave's shadow, but the girl stopped him.

Her vocal cords had already burned away. She opened and closed her mouth soundlessly, and the Three-Body Game system automatically converted her words into a line of small text—Don't worry, Passerby A. Death and doomsday are normal in this game. You'll get used to them.

The girl was soon burned into a charred corpse. Even inside the cave, he could still smell the scorched stench saturating the air.

Lin Feng struggled to his feet against the cave wall. The cave was situated high up, allowing him to see the city below.

Flames devoured everything. Whether dehydrated or not, people were reduced to ashes. It was an ocean of fire; all prosperity vanished in an instant, as though it had merely been Heaven's joke.

No, Heaven was not that cruel...

The sun above continued expanding. Lin Feng could even clearly see details on its surface. The ocean of flames was filled with surging waves and whirlpools, sunspots moved without pattern, and the corona lazily unfurled like the long sleeves of a dancer.

The sun expanded even further, covering most of the sky. As Lin Feng looked up, a strange sensation welled up within him: the sun above did not seem to be above him at all, but below.

He was not looking upward. He was hanging upside down in the sky, looking down at the blazing earth!

The enormous sun sank westward, yielding the sky it had occupied as it dropped beneath the distant horizon.

It set quickly. The dazzling evening glow vanished in an instant, and night descended upon this world ravaged by flames and already riddled with devastation.

The flames that had yet to fade, along with molten lava, cast a dark red glow across the entire land beneath the pitch-black night sky.

Darkness gradually swallowed Lin Feng's vision, and a line of crimson words appeared before his eyes.

Civilization No. 839 was destroyed in flames. This civilization had evolved to the level of the early Tang Dynasty.

The seed of civilization remained. She would restart and once again begin her unpredictable evolution of fate within the Trisolaran World. Welcome to log in again.