He dragged the progress bar forward, and the scene he wanted to see soon appeared on the screen.
The store's security camera showed the counter. The clerk was huddled in this little room when the welcome bell suddenly rang. He pushed open the door and stepped outside.
At that moment, he was watching some video on his phone.
Then, a sinister figure in a hooded sweatshirt, hands in his pockets, appeared out of thin air inside the store.
For some reason, the fat clerk looked startled. Then he saw the mysterious figure in the hoodie decisively pull out a switchblade and plunge it into his abdomen.
The movement was swift and precise. The fat clerk didn't even cry out. He simply fell to the floor, without having time to close the door.
As he fell, the knife stuck in his stomach slipped free. It struck the floor, and its blade landed on a dangling wire, quickly cutting through it. The register went dark.
The bloody scene struck Zhang Anzai hard, but there was no time for him to be afraid.
After stabbing the man, the mysterious figure in the hoodie stood motionless for a moment, then vanished for no apparent reason.
After that came Zhang Anzai's arrival, when he filled up and bought some things.
This part was particularly strange. The mysterious figure in the hoodie seemed to flash into the back room in an instant, suddenly change into a set of employee clothes, then come out, lock the door, and take his place behind the counter.
Then, he suddenly appeared behind Zhang Anzai's car, and a moment later showed up inside the store to ring him up.
Finally, just as Zhang Anzai was about to leave, the mysterious figure vanished from the store and appeared inside his car, transformed into Chen Xing.
"This guy really isn't harmless..." Now that he'd confirmed the strange thing in his car could kill with ease, Zhang Anzai sat in front of the security footage, still shaken by the close call.
He dragged the progress bar back and watched it over and over, then leaned against the back of his chair and fell into thought.
There was simply too much complicated information in front of him. It was beyond reason and far too abstract. Yet as he pieced together the clues, a strange idea began to take shape.
Zhang Anzai decisively shifted his awareness back to his real body, then searched through the items on the administrator page.
"I remember there was something called..."
Zhang Anzai used the mouse to open an item's details page: "[Image Restoration Water Mirror] (Can restore damaged or blurry image records in an instance.)"
"Price: 30 Employee Points."
Zhang Anzai still had a full four hundred points, so thirty was nothing. Besides, he had a feeling the restored footage would answer his questions outright.
"Purchased [Image Restoration Water Mirror]."
The administrator interface blurred for a moment. On the screen, footage that had been far too unclear to see from Zhang Anzai's player perspective began to play in astonishing clarity.
It was the scene where the clerk had been stabbed to death.
Zhang Anzai examined it carefully from the administrator's perspective, then zoomed in on something important.
The video the clerk was watching on his phone showed a robbery.
The mysterious figure in the hoodie, the clerk who later served Zhang Anzai, and his friend Chen Xing, now sitting in the car...
The monster had first appeared in the store wearing the exact same hoodie as the robber in that video.
"Fuck!" Zhang Anzai suddenly understood. So many things clicked into place.
"You really were a blank slate, learning everything from scratch."
Zhang Anzai carefully pieced together the clues and worked out what had happened.
He was a monster with no appearance or will of his own at first, but with an ability to imitate and learn that gradually evolved.
So after Zhang Anzai drove onto this stretch of road, it had followed the story on the radio and appeared at the intersection. Its imitation was still clumsy, and it had created a blurry scene of someone burning paper offerings by the roadside—so unclear that it was impossible to make out.
Then, once it reached the gas station, the monster underwent its first fundamental transformation.
It encountered the footage on the clerk's phone. The information came through a much clearer and more direct medium, and it began to grow rapidly, transforming straight into the main character of the video: the robber.
It went from an apparition that couldn't even copy someone's appearance properly to a physical being, then killed the clerk just as the video showed.
But after the clerk fell, his phone had probably broken.
The footage stopped, and the monster turned to something else to learn from: the security camera inside the store, which had continued recording for a little while before the power went out.
The footage showed three things: the clerk coming out of the back room and locking the door, going outside to fill up a car, and ringing up a customer at the counter.
Since these were isolated clips with no continuity, context, or cause and effect, the monster blended the robber's and clerk's appearances and learned the clerk's behavior, but imperfectly.
That was why it flashed between the inside and outside of the store like the disconnected security footage. It had never seen the steps the clerk took in between.
That was also why it only pressed random numbers at the register and charged the wrong amount. It was copying what it saw in the footage.
Zhang Anzai also figured out the monster's final transformation.
"Judging from all this, only two things can make this monster's learning advance explosively.
"One is when the information in what it's learning from suddenly increases—for example, when audio turns into video, or when the video turns into me.
"The other is when it finishes learning from something, like when the footage ends or the broadcast is over!"
Zhang Anzai remembered something: when he got out of the car, the radio program hadn't finished. It was still delivering its closing remarks.
So it was possible that, before he finished shopping and got back in the car, the program had ended. Just as it had remotely absorbed the security footage inside the store, the monster had remotely absorbed the broadcast and learned everything in the story.
That was how it had gone from an incomplete existence that blended the robber with a flickering monster-clerk to one that could change reality, make Zhang Anzai its friend, and become Chen Xing sitting in the car—a nearly complete living being.
"So this is just a Mimic Monster that's only halfway through evolving, with no instincts besides learning?"
Zhang Anzai had no choice but to accept this conclusion. Based on what he knew, it was the most likely explanation.
That meant Chen Xing himself was actually quite safe. The clerk had died because Chen Xing hadn't finished evolving yet. Back then, he learned whatever he saw, and as luck would have it, the video he watched happened to show a robbery.
Under normal circumstances, unless he saw or heard something about violence, he shouldn't do anything like that. Especially not now.
As he grew, his state had steadily become more stable.
At first, the figure burning paper offerings outside the car had been no more than an apparition. At the gas station, he'd gained a physical form, but acted only like the robber who stabbed the clerk.
After that, he took on a shape closer to the robber's and behaved like the clerk in the security footage.
His understanding and intelligence had continued to grow. He had evolved from a simple Mimic Monster into this Disguised Freak, combining everything he had learned and gaining a sense of self.
He was still abnormal, but he could at least think.
The best proof was that after hearing a new story in the car just now, he hadn't changed identities again. He had only learned what was in it.
Before you continue