On a pirated website, Chen Changsheng opened the science-fiction section. It was filled with foreign movies. After browsing for a while, he opened the Marvel section and clicked on Spider-Man, the Tobey Maguire version.
After the movie started playing, Chen Changsheng switched screens and opened the game Prototype, a major title he had played during his childhood.
He had already played it several times, so Chen Changsheng quickly got the hang of it. Before long, his movements were exceptionally smooth.
In the game, Chen Changsheng glided from a high-rise toward the next mission marker, but when he passed over a certain mission point, he suddenly stopped.
This mission marker was different from the icons of the other side missions. Its cursor flickered with black-and-red light, displaying something unusual.
Chen Changsheng could no longer remember whether he had encountered such a mission when he played the game before. But even if he had never seen it, he still wanted to click in and try it. Maybe it was some sort of easter egg.
He clicked the mouse, and a standard game dialog box appeared. It contained only one question: Start Prototype from Hope Town? Yes/No
Without thinking, he tapped the keyboard and pressed Enter. In the next instant, Chen Changsheng felt a flash of white light from the screen, and then he lost consciousness.
When Chen Changsheng awoke, he found himself sitting in a hospital somewhere. He had just received some kind of vaccine and was being monitored in an isolation ward.
Outside the isolation ward, townspeople kept entering the hospital to get vaccinated before coming in for observation.
Chen Changsheng shook his head and rubbed his aching forehead. What had he been doing just now?
He had left home to get vaccinated. Afterward, while waiting in the isolation room, he had suddenly felt sleepy and taken a short nap... But why did his head hurt so much?
Just as Chen Changsheng was recalling what had happened, an alarm rang.
Following the sound, Chen Changsheng looked over and saw the green light of the isolation room come on. His isolation period had ended.
The other residents in the room rose one after another and walked outside. Chen Changsheng had no choice but to set his thoughts aside for the moment and follow the crowd out.
After leaving, Chen Changsheng suddenly felt a sense of familiarity. After determining his direction, he walked toward his home.
Chen Changsheng was an orphan—or more precisely, his father had died serving his country, leaving him an orphan.
Fortunately, his father seemed to have rendered great service, so the military adopted him and placed him in this small town.
In an ordinary small town, an orphan like Chen Changsheng would inevitably be bullied.
But that would not happen here. The town's four or five hundred residents were all family members of fallen soldiers.
Aside from some orphans like Chen Changsheng and elderly people left without support after their children died, the rest of the town consisted of disabled soldiers and their families.
After Chen Changsheng's father died, he left behind a large pension. As his guardian, the military deposited the interest into his account every month for his daily expenses, while the principal would be transferred to Chen Changsheng's account in a lump sum when he came of age.
It seemed he would become an adult next month. He would soon have a considerable amount of cash. Once he received the money, he could buy a car and leave the town to see the outside world.
As he walked along the narrow roads of the town, Chen Changsheng's thoughts ran wild. Before long, he arrived home.
Because there was a military base nearby, the town also served partly as a supply transfer station.
And because the town was the closest one to the military base, soldiers always came here to spend their money on rest days. The soldiers brought the town an economy—and noise.
But for some reason, not a single soldier came to spend money today. Without the commotion of drunken soldiers, Chen Changsheng found the town unusually quiet.
After returning home, Chen Changsheng felt that the furnishings were familiar and should have turned on the television to relax.
Yet at that moment, he stood quietly gazing out the window. He felt something inexplicable—a sense of unfamiliarity.
After standing there silently for a while, Chen Changsheng's stomach began to rumble. He was hungry.
He opened the well-stocked refrigerator, put the prepared food inside into the oven, and carried some things that could be eaten directly to the table. Then Chen Changsheng eagerly began wolfing them down.
Perhaps he was simply too tired today, but Chen Changsheng felt exceptionally hungry. The hunger was so intense that it seemed capable of making him lose his reason.
Chen Changsheng quickly finished the food on the table, yet the hunger did not diminish in the slightest.
He then took the food out of the oven and began devouring it. Whether it was cooked or not no longer mattered to him, because after eating the first batch, he had somehow become even hungrier.
Only after eating everything in the entire refrigerator did Chen Changsheng finally feel somewhat full, easing the unbearable hunger from before.
But even that feeling of fullness was gradually fading. Chen Changsheng could sense that it would not be long before he felt hungry again.
At that point, Chen Changsheng also noticed that something was wrong. The refrigerator was small, but it had contained several days' worth of food. He had now eaten it all in a single meal.
Before he could think deeply about it, his stomach began to rumble again, and Chen Changsheng stopped thinking about it.
He put on some clothes, climbed into an old pickup truck that was nearly ready for the scrapyard, and drove toward the supply station.
The pickup had been discarded by the military and salvaged by Chen Changsheng. The town was tiny and had no traffic police or anything of the sort, so half-grown children like Chen Changsheng drove their family cars around every day.
As long as they stayed in town, no one cared about underage driving—not even the military. They could do whatever they wanted, provided they did not leave the town.
The supply station was beside the town supermarket. The necessities of life for the townspeople were generally distributed directly by the army, but anything beyond the allotted supplies had to be bought at the supermarket.
This month's supplies had not arrived yet, so Chen Changsheng could only buy some food at the supermarket first. Fortunately, the supply station was not far from town, and Chen Changsheng arrived soon.
Chen Changsheng rarely spent the money the military gave him. He was still underage, and everything he needed was provided by the military.
His daily life was simple, so he had saved quite a bit of money by now. He could be considered fairly well-off.
At the supermarket, Chen Changsheng went straight to the food section and bought a large amount of meat, chocolate, candy, and similar items. He then asked a supermarket employee to help carry them to the truck.
Chen Changsheng drove straight home. He did not immediately start eating there—not because he was not hungry.
Although Chen Changsheng was hungry, he still retained his reason. If he wolfed down food in front of everyone, the news would spread throughout the town at once and cause unnecessary trouble.
On the drive home, Chen Changsheng finally could not hold back. The enormous rumbling in his stomach continued without pause, as if he would starve to death the very next moment.
He suddenly cranked the steering wheel and drove into the forest beside the road. After traveling farther into a secluded area, Chen Changsheng felt so dizzy from hunger that his vision blurred. He urgently stopped the truck and ran toward the food in the cargo bed.
But perhaps the hunger had become too severe. Chen Changsheng only managed to reach the cargo bed before collapsing onto the truckload of food and losing consciousness.
After Chen Changsheng fainted, strips of flesh pierced through his clothes and pounced onto the truckload of food. Ignoring the packaging, they burrowed straight inside and began digesting it.
Chen Changsheng's body also gradually melted like an ice block, eventually becoming a pool of liquid that mixed together with the food.
Within the sludge-like liquid, numerous tentacles wriggled back and forth. The sight was incredibly bizarre, and carried a horrifying, nauseating quality...
The next day, Chen Changsheng awoke amid a violent headache. In the truck bed, he rubbed his head and gritted his teeth.
Looking at the unfamiliar surroundings, Chen Changsheng was bewildered. Wasn't he just playing a game?
Another wave of pain struck his head, and a memory entered his mind. But why did the style of this memory look so much like the memory nodes from Prototype...?
After the intense pain subsided, Chen Changsheng understood his situation. It seemed that he had just been assimilated by the Original Virus, the predecessor of the Blacklight Virus. After receiving the vaccine yesterday, he had been infected by the Original Virus.
Unlike the other infected people in the town, Chen Changsheng had become that one-in-ten-thousand chosen one—a person upon whom the virus's collective will had descended.
The virus had only just awakened and was still very weak. For a time, it had been unable to digest its host. But the previous night, Chen Changsheng had suddenly absorbed a massive amount of energy, giving the virus the opportunity to completely absorb the original Chen Changsheng.
In theory, the original Chen Changsheng's consciousness should also have been absorbed by the virus, leaving only an empty shell awaiting control by the viral will. But by coincidence, Chen Changsheng had transmigrated into the game. After the virus absorbed the original consciousness, it failed to notice the newly arrived consciousness.
Perhaps because Chen Changsheng came from reality, when the Original Virus discovered that the body still contained a powerful consciousness, it had no way to do anything to Chen Changsheng's consciousness or memories.
The newly awakened virus clearly did not possess much intelligence. It tried attacking several times, but when it saw that nothing worked, it changed tactics and directly fused with Chen Changsheng's transmigrated will... becoming part of Chen Changsheng's will.
What a simple-minded virus. If it can't win, it just joins? In any case, Chen Changsheng's will and the viral will had now fused.
After the fusion, Chen Changsheng could observe the Web of Conspiracy as if he were playing a game, while the viral will could not influence him and could only passively obey his commands.
As a result, Chen Changsheng became the dominant will of the virus and could issue commands to control the Original Virus aggregate.
Chen Changsheng mourned his original self for two seconds, while also feeling deeply worried about his future.
Although transmigrating was somewhat unsettling, Chen Changsheng had read so many novels and played so many games that accepting it was not particularly difficult. The problem was that he knew exactly what would happen to this town next.
According to the backstory posted online, it would not be long before the Original Virus erupted throughout Hope Town. Everyone in the town would become a zombie, and the military would be powerless to control the situation.
In the end, the military would deliver justice from the sky, nuking Hope Town into oblivion.
Fortunately, there was still time. The viral outbreak seemed to be some distance away. During that time, he had to find a way to leave.
But according to his original memories, Chen Changsheng discovered that there was seemingly no way out of the town. The only road was tightly controlled by the military, and the only vehicles coming and going each day were military transport trucks.
The transport trucks were also subjected to strict screening. As for the soldiers who usually came to town, they had probably already been abandoned. When Chen Changsheng had played the game, those Marine Corps soldiers had been like leeks—cut down in one batch and replaced by another, nothing more than cannon fodder.
The only ones worth paying attention to were the Black Watch soldiers. However, Chen Changsheng had never seen any Black Watch soldiers in the town in his memories. Those people were the true elites, the backbone of the fight against the Blacklight Virus.
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