Unexpected Truth: Gas Station Decryption

He dragged the progress bar rapidly, and the footage he wanted to see soon appeared on the screen.

The store's surveillance camera captured the counter area. The clerk was huddled in the small back room when the entrance bell suddenly chimed, prompting him to push the door open and walk out.

At that moment, he was watching a video on his phone.

Then, a sinister figure wearing a hooded sweatshirt with both hands tucked into the pockets appeared out of thin air inside the store.

Before the chubby clerk could even register his confusion, the mysterious figure in the hoodie decisively pulled out a retractable knife and plunged it into the clerk's abdomen.

The movement was decisive and the placement precise; the chubby clerk didn't even have time to scream before he collapsed to the floor, failing to even close the door behind him.

The knife stuck in his stomach slid out as he fell, clattering against the floorboards and catching on a dangling wire, which it quickly severed, plunging the checkout counter into darkness.

The bloody scene assaulted Zhang Anzai's vision, but there was no time left for him to be afraid.

After stabbing the man, the mysterious figure in the hoodie stood still for a moment, then inexplicably vanished.

What followed was the process of Zhang Anzai pulling in to refuel and buy items.

This segment was particularly strange, as the mysterious figure in the hoodie seemed to blink into the back room in an instant, suddenly changing into a staff uniform before coming back out to lock the door and stand behind the counter.

Then, he truly appeared out of nowhere behind Zhang Anzai's car, only to suddenly reappear 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, having transformed into Chen Xing.

"This guy is definitely no pushover..." After confirming that the freak in his car could kill with such ease, a wave of lingering fear washed over Zhang Anzai, yet he remained seated before the monitor.

He dragged the progress bar to watch it repeatedly, then leaned back in his chair, lost in thought.

The complex information before him was simply too much, too far beyond reason, and too abstract. Yet, synthesizing all the clues, a bizarre idea began to sprout in his heart.

Zhang Anzai decisively switched his consciousness back to his main body and began searching for items in the administrator page.

"I remember there was something called..."

Zhang Anzai operated the mouse and clicked into the details page of an item: "[Image Restoration Water Mirror](Can restore damaged or blurry image records within a dungeon.)"

"Price: 30 Staff Points."

Zhang Anzai still had a full four hundred points, so he wasn't short on such a small amount. Moreover, he had a premonition that the restored footage would directly answer his doubts.

"Purchased [Image Restoration Water Mirror]."

The screen of the administrator interface suddenly blurred, and an incredibly clear image—one that was completely invisible from the player's perspective—began to play on the screen.

It was the segment where the clerk was stabbed to death.

Zhang Anzai examined it carefully from the administrator perspective, then zoomed in on a key detail.

The video the clerk was watching on his phone was a video about a robbery.

The mysterious figure in the hoodie, the clerk who later served Zhang Anzai, and the friend Chen Xing now sitting in the car.

This mysterious monster, in the hoodie image it first used when appearing in the store, was actually the robber from that very video.

"Damn it!" Zhang Anzai suddenly understood; he had figured out so many things.

"You really are a blank slate, learning from start to finish."

Zhang Anzai carefully combed through the details, clarifying the entire sequence of events.

[It] was a monster that initially had no image or will of its own, possessing a mimicry and learning ability that gradually evolved.

Thus, after Zhang Anzai drove onto this stretch of road, it appeared at that intersection according to the content of the radio story, using its still-clumsy mimicry to shape that blurry, impossible-to-discern image of burning paper on the street.

Then, after arriving here, the monster underwent its first essential metamorphosis.

It came into contact with the footage on the clerk's phone, and through the information conveyed by this clearer and more explicit medium, it began to grow rapidly, directly manifesting as the protagonist of the video: the robber.

It transformed from a phantom that couldn't even mimic shapes properly into a physical entity, killing the clerk according to the video's content.

However, after the clerk fell, the phone was likely broken.

The footage stopped, and its object of study shifted to something else: the surveillance footage that had been playing in the back room for a short while before the power cut out.

There were three clips in the surveillance: the clerk walking out of the back room and locking the door, going outside to refuel the car, and ringing up a customer at the counter.

Because they were all fragments, lacking continuity or cause and effect, the monster fused the images of the criminal and the clerk, learning the clerk's behavioral logic, but only partially.

That was why it would blink in and out of the store like the disjointed, parallel surveillance clips; the monster had never seen the intermediate steps of what the clerk was doing.

It was also because of this that it only mashed random numbers when ringing him up, and the total was wrong—it was just following the checkout footage from the monitor.

As for the final metamorphosis, Zhang Anzai also figured it out:

"Judging by this information, there are only two factors that cause this monster's learning to progress explosively.

One is that the information density of the object being studied suddenly evolves—for example, audio suddenly becoming video, or video becoming me.

The other factor is that the instruction from the object of study ends—for example, the footage disappears, or the broadcast concludes!"

Zhang Anzai remembered something: when he got out of the car, the radio program hadn't finished yet; it was still delivering its closing remarks.

So it was possible that before he finished shopping and got back in the car, the program ended, and the monster—just like it remotely received the surveillance content in the store—remotely absorbed the content of the broadcast, learning all the knowledge within that entire story.

Consequently, it changed from an incomplete existence—a glitchy clerk-monster hybrid—and altered reality, making Zhang Anzai his friend, while he himself became Chen Xing, the person sitting in the car, a fairly complete biological entity.

"So this is just a pure Mimic Monster that hasn't even evolved halfway, possessing only the instinct to learn and nothing else?"

Zhang Anzai had to accept the fact he had deduced; based on the current information, this was the most likely outcome.

In that case, Chen Xing himself was actually very safe. The reason the clerk had died was that Chen Xing had not fully evolved at the time, and he would mimic whatever he saw; as it turned out, the video he happened to be watching was of a robbery.

Normally, if he did not see or hear such harmful imagery or content, he should not act this way. Especially not now.

Because as he gradually matured, his state had been constantly becoming more stable.

At the very beginning, when burning paper outside the car, he was merely a phantom; by the time they reached the gas station, he had a physical form, but was only a thug stabbing the clerk.

Then, he transformed into a clerk whose physique closely resembled that thug, acting according to the footage recorded by the surveillance cameras.

His cognition and intelligence were constantly growing, evolving from a simple Mimic Monster into what he was now: a Disguised Freak that had blended all previous knowledge and possessed self-awareness.

Although still abnormal, he already possessed some ability to think.

The best proof of this was that just now, after listening to a new story inside the car, he did not change his identity again; he merely learned the knowledge within it.