"Comrade Guo Xiaoyun! If you don't come clean right now, I'll report to your family that you skipped class and went joyriding with some wild man!!" Several roommates surrounded her during the meal, grinning wickedly.
The girl being teased was none other than the top player who had consistently crushed the Liver Emperor in points: Yu Nv Wu Gua.
At that moment, she was being besieged by her unscrupulous roommates and looked utterly flustered.
"You... What nonsense are you talking about..." Guo Xiaoyun blushed and explained, "I really was playing a game. Maybe... maybe the backup battery had enough power. After all, I bought it from South Lake."
"Just keep making things up..." Her roommates rolled their eyes and thought to themselves, Do you really think one can beat six?
Besides, they had already looked inside the Game Pod earlier. There had been no one in it at all!
One of the girls, whose hair was dyed burgundy, grinned mischievously. "Stop forcing her, girls. It's her first time going out joyriding in her three years of university, so of course the little girl is shy. Unlike you old hands, who can casually discuss men's sensitive parts afterward."
"Men's sensitive parts?" Xiao Yun froze, then instinctively asked the drivers around her for advice. "What are those?"
The single men around them in the cafeteria pricked up their ears as well, eager to hear the expert opinions of these female drivers!
"Of course it's the minion waves. What else could it be?" Wen Shanshan curled her lip.
"And the plating..." another girl beside her chimed in.
"What the heck!" The assorted losers nodded repeatedly. As expected of these experienced senior students—they understood them so thoroughly!
Seeing that the topic had finally shifted away from her, Xiao Yun quietly breathed a sigh of relief. Then she looked at the food in her bowl, but had no appetite at all.
What was going on? She had been lying in the Game Pod for nearly three days without even a drop of water. Why didn't she feel hungry at all?
"Hey, have you heard? A monkey escaped from Dream Island yesterday. The whole city is hunting for it now." Wen Shanshan suddenly started a new topic.
"A monkey escaped?" The people around them immediately paled.
A new virus had recently broken out in the Federation's South Africa Region. Using monkeys as its vector, it had rapidly infected large swaths of South Africa. It spread extremely quickly and had an almost one-hundred-percent fatality rate!
It had already caused immense panic. The Federation's Eastern and Western Alliances had separately sealed off all routes there and begun comprehensive inspections of monkeys imported locally from South Africa.
This large-scale inspection had drawn protests from many zoos, which claimed it was creating panic for no reason and seriously affecting the profits of large animal ecological parks.
Since the interests of major capitalists were involved, the inspection work was obstructed in all sorts of ways in many places. Yet in the Central China Region, the inspections proceeded exceptionally smoothly!
The reason was simple. From ancient times to the present, the land of Central China had never had large-scale capital capable of challenging the government. Even after the Federation was founded, the government here remained just as forceful.
After inspections were announced, eighty percent of the zoos obediently cooperated. As for those that resisted, such as the owner of Dream Island, word had it that he had been summoned for a "cup of tea" yesterday after protesting—and had yet to return.
The zoo was sealed off directly the next day. A project worth hundreds of billions was shut down by the administrative district without so much as a blink, instantly making the remaining zoo owners in the Central China Region behave themselves.
Although this approach was somewhat overbearing, the results were obvious. In the two hundred years since the Federation was founded, South Africa had suffered thirteen major epidemics. The most serious one had nearly swept across most of Planet D. Yet the Central Asia Region, home to the largest population, had never been affected.
The Federation's people living in Central Asia had always felt that those global plagues were far away from them. Even so, when they heard that a monkey had escaped, every one of them still paled. After all, tens of thousands of people had reportedly died outside, and they couldn't help feeling uneasy.
"Where do you think that monkey will run?" the red-haired senior student asked curiously.
"It should be somewhere in our University Town..." Guo Xiaoyun suddenly said, despite having no appetite.
"Huh?" The people around them froze. Several girls were so startled that the meat on their chopsticks fell back onto their plates. They glared at her reproachfully. "You little brat, have you learned to scare people now?"
"I'm not trying to scare you..." Xiao Yun casually toyed with the grains of rice. "The South African monkeys imported by Dream Island are Koala Monkey and Golden Bear Monkey. They're both kept in Zone B14 of the zoo. That area is surrounded by water on three sides, so the only way out is through B16 Boa Constrictor Zone. From South Mountain, they'd have to flee northeast. Aside from Panlong Zone, the route would lead to our University Town Zone. Panlong Zone is the lighting district, and the entire route from South Mountain is a highway. If it had gone that way, traffic cameras would have spotted it and it would already have been caught. Besides, monkeys are arboreal animals. Going toward our University Town is the natural choice."
Everyone fell silent.
She... actually sounded like she made a lot of sense.
"Xiao Yun..." her roommates said blankly, "where did you learn all that?"
Guo Xiaoyun herself was stunned. Then she rubbed her chin and said, "I visited the place once when it opened two years ago."
"Oh, come on..." Her roommates rolled their eyes furiously. "You only went there once, and you know it that well? You even know which animals are in which zones? And that was two years ago! Do you think you're some child prodigy with perfect recall?"
Xiao Yun fell silent at their rebuttal. She also felt that what she had said was rather unbelievable. Her memory wasn't bad, but it was nowhere near photographic. Besides, even if she knew how the animals were divided between zones, had she really memorized the terrain well enough to analyze the monkey's route so clearly?
She had noticed that ever since she started playing that game and became a developer, things like this kept happening. Certain insignificant memories from the past would suddenly surface whenever she needed them. It felt as if her brain had become a highly efficient intelligent computer.
Had she become obsessed with the game?
Just then, a burst of commotion came from outside the cafeteria. A moment later, their bald vice-headmaster walked in with a group of people in military uniforms.
Everyone was startled by the sight. Xiao Yun narrowed her eyes slightly and thought to herself, It couldn't really be that accurate, could it?
According to her calculations, the monkey's route to University Town ran from south to north. Her school was located right beneath South Mountain, so the monkey might very well be hiding on campus!
"Students, please don't panic..." The vice-headmaster tried his best to smile reassuringly, but his smile looked worse than crying and only made everyone more nervous.
"You've probably seen the news about the monkey escaping from Dream Island yesterday. The troops tracked down the monkey and have successfully captured it. The crisis has been resolved. However, since the monkey appeared at our school, and we discovered that someone had fed it two hours ago, that person may have come into direct contact with the monkey. Therefore, we ask everyone to cooperate with the officers and help us identify that person."
Guo Xiaoyun's face twitched when she heard this. Images flashed rapidly through her mind, and suddenly, a moment she had barely noticed surfaced in her memory, making her expression darken.
Just now, when Wen Shanshan had brought up the monkey, the burgundy-haired senior student beside her had very clearly stiffened for a moment. A trace of unnaturalness had also flashed across her face.
Guo Xiaoyun hadn't paid attention to that scene when it happened. Her mind had been full of thoughts about the Game Pod, so she had subconsciously skipped over the senior student's unnatural expression. Normally, the brain would instinctively forget such an insignificant scene.
But now, after hearing the bald headmaster's words, her brain instantly retrieved that fleeting image and connected it to the situation before her!
Although she was somewhat surprised by her own ability, Guo Xiaoyun was more concerned about the information conveyed by that scene.
Could it be...
No way...
At the thought of that possibility, Guo Xiaoyun's heart seemed to plunge straight into an ice cellar.