The three of us fell silent for a moment.
A shadow fell over my heart.
Not being so determined to escape with all three of them, and causing one of them to die, were two entirely different things.
In a situation like this, I couldn't just stand by and do nothing.
Xu Jiu quickly pulled himself together. "That's not necessarily true. It's only a guess for now. Maybe he just went on to the next level? Right! The messages! Let's see if we've received any!"
At Xu Jiu's words, he hurried to the computer room first.
Qin Shu and I followed at a more leisurely pace.
After Xu Jiu woke the computer from standby, he glanced at the screen and let out a surprised "Huh," then turned around and called to us.
When we went over, we immediately understood what had puzzled him.
Only a few minutes had passed on the computer since we last checked. The date was still the day we'd gone missing; the night wasn't even over yet.
"That was all fake, right?" Xu Jiu said at once, letting out a huge sigh of relief.
Qin Shu motioned for Xu Jiu to move aside, then checked the date and time online. The computer's system date and time might have been altered, but the numbers he found online couldn't have been changed by anyone.
The results were exactly the same.
Even on social media, the attention drawn by the posts Huanguang and Xu Jiu had made was growing at a normal rate. The post, its comments and reposts, and the people who had published them were all detailed. If someone had simulated all of that with their ability, it would have been terrifying.
But looking at it from another angle, if the scenes and people we'd seen earlier