Wang Tianyi's work log.
July 6, 1973. Weather: According to what I heard from others, it should be sunny.
I can't stay in this place any longer! I really have to find a way out. If I don't get out soon, I'm afraid I'll go crazy.
I checked my attributes, and my Sanity Value had already fallen to 70. As a dead person, I shouldn't have been able to feel too many negative emotions, such as irritability. But once the Sanity Value began dropping, the restlessness, fear, and anger I had thought were long behind me started surging up in waves.
The Sanity Value was the same as the sanity stat. Before it reached zero, a person's mind would be considered normal. However, a large drop in SAN over a short period could cause bouts of madness and phobias at irregular intervals. When the Sanity Value fell to zero, it meant that person had descended into permanent insanity.
Of course, those explanations applied only to the living.
Human emotions and mental states were, when you got right down to it, all controlled by the brain—the living brain. The Prosthetic Body of a dead person could simulate part of a living brain's functions, such as thinking and analysis, along with other useful functions for carrying out missions. But its other "useless" functions would be weakened.
A living person's body was like a top-of-the-line computer, with a powerful CPU and enormous memory. It could play games, write documents, and send emails. A dead person's Prosthetic Body didn't have as much memory, and its CPU wasn't as good, so it retained only functions like writing documents and sending emails. As for playing games, it could barely run them, but they would lag.
Dead people weren't normally sensitive to emotions or sensory input, except when it came to certain stimuli. Those stimuli might pose a threat to the dead, so the Sanity Value could be understood as the dead person's Lu Master, checking whether they were overheating. When the Sanity Value began falling, the Prosthetic Body would restore part of its "useless" functions to warn the dead that something was wrong and that the situation was extremely dangerous.
This caused the dead to experience emotional fluctuations far stronger than usual, usually negative emotions.
However, when the Sanity Value reached zero, the dead didn't go permanently insane. Instead, they became trapped in endless negative emotions, leaving them unable to spare more "memory" for analysis and thought. Put simply, their system had crashed. Even restarting it wouldn't be enough—they had to return to the City of the Departed and have their system reinstalled.
For the dead, "reinstalling the system" was equivalent to erasing memories. The more memories were erased, the more lost they became regarding their own identity. In the end, they might even become vengeful ghosts who remembered only their obsession from life.
The day I became a player, a kind player had warned me to pay attention to changes in my Sanity Value. Qi Zhi once said she had seen players whose memories had been erased again and again. Eventually, they existed only through their obsessions, mechanically completing missions in a daze, to the point that they didn't even know they were suffering.
In the end, these players would lose all reason. As long as they could complete missions, they would do anything—even things explicitly forbidden within the City of the Departed. In the end, without exception, such people were dealt with by agents sent by the system.
Just like an antivirus guard clearing out bugs.
I was getting off track.
Let me talk about what happened from last night until today.
The Glass Jar and I continued asking each other questions. I told it about various things in human society, while it occasionally offered its own opinions and shared some profound knowledge I didn't quite understand.
Sigh, when had I ever done anything like this? Forget discussing academic topics—even if you made me sit in a classroom for one minute and listen to a teacher lecture, I couldn't sit still.
But I discovered that it seemed intensely interested in relationships between humans.
"I've read many books and found that a great number of them describe the feelings between people—how people love, suspect, hate, and pity one another... In my view, these things are useless. They can neither solve problems nor provide knowledge."
"Uh..." I was rendered speechless.
"Do you agree with me? Are these emotions superfluous things?"
"Not really. It's precisely because I love my family that I have the motivation to face each new day and work hard." I didn't know how to argue with it, so I could only state what I thought.
"But if you discarded all distracting thoughts, couldn't you concentrate more fully on your work? Besides, what I've seen most often is suspicion and hatred between people. If they diverted that energy into work, wouldn't their efficiency become higher?"
"Furthermore, these emotions make people consume themselves from within. For a race, shouldn't everyone develop together and explore more knowledge together? If one person fell in love with or hated another, would that help them gain more knowledge?"
"..." I missed Tang Yuan terribly. If he were here, he would probably know what to say.
"Besides, the same person can produce completely opposite emotions of love and hatred. That's also worth studying. You're human too—do you have anyone you love or anyone you hate?"
"The person I've loved most in my life is my daughter. Unfortunately, she's already gone. So no matter what happens, I'll follow her last wish and strive to survive."
"The person I've hated most in my life is myself."
"Impossible to understand. I can't understand what could have given rise to such tremendous energy in you." The subject was soon dropped.
Later on, the man who had first brought me here submitted the report.
He opened it and skimmed through it, then gave a faint smile. "Well done. You obtained extremely valuable information for us, and you did it in the shortest possible time. You passed the test. You're now officially one of us. Congratulations."
As a reward, I was allowed to leave this laboratory and move freely through other areas.
Only after I was free to move around did I discover that this place was actually an underground facility.
There were many laboratories here, seemingly researching different subjects.
Most of the subjects were creatures I had never seen before: monsters that liked eating corpses, humanoid monsters that looked like merfolk... Besides those, I also saw some strange machines. It was impossible to tell what they were for just by looking at them, but the researchers would find some "volunteers" from who-knew-where to use them.
After the machines were activated, nothing happened. Then those "volunteers" would be taken away again.
The reason "volunteers" was in quotation marks was that nearly all of these people were bound when they came in, and they wore suspicious matching uniforms that looked much like hospital gowns. Some of them resisted violently, but they would quickly be injected with something and fall into a deep sleep.
Once the machines finished running, these people would awaken. They no longer resisted and even became extremely affectionate toward the researchers.
Aside from monsters and inscrutable human experiments, strange totems were painted all over the research institute. They looked very much like the magic array beneath the Glass Jar.
Then I tried to find an exit, but failed.
This place was very much like the research institution or organization from some occult horror film. Perhaps it really was one.
And they were conducting illegal human experiments.
After hearing about the Great Race Is from the Glass Jar, my suspicions grew deeper and deeper.
So I asked the Glass Jar.
"Do you know what the humans who come here are used for? Why do they stop resisting after the experiments? Does it have something to do with the Is Race?"
"Oh, you don't know? They're all vessels helping members of my race come to this era. These people came willingly to help us. In exchange, we also teach them some knowledge."
"You're human too?"
"No, no. I didn't choose a human body. To obtain more information, I chose a different body."
Those people hadn't come willingly at all. The people at the research institute had used illegal means to force innocent people to participate in these things.
"But that doesn't make sense. From the sound of it, your status should be higher than that of the humans at the research institute. Why would they lock you up?" I was confused. If these humans worshiped the Is Race, why would they imprison the Glass Jar, a member of the Is Race?
"Because our relationship is inherently equal. We locked her up to observe the data and test whether this body was truly suitable for us." A deep male voice came from behind me.
I turned around. It was the man who had first brought me here. He stood there expressionlessly, looking nothing like a living person.
Wait... you people?
As I looked at the man, I suddenly realized something terrifying.
"Well, since you've passed too, prepare to make the exchange."
There wasn't a single human here besides me.
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