Who Was Pulling Strings Behind the Scenes? (Part 2)

In the blink of an eye, everyone had left, leaving Sun Cheng alone in the spacious office.

Feeling downcast, he stood there alone for quite a while before sighing, closing the office door, and walking toward the desk at the very back.

This not-so-large office had been provided by the school as a temporary workspace after they received the university's startup support.

Though the office contained only a few desks and five mediocre desktop computers lent to them by the school, it was simple yet warm. Sun Cheng and the others had created far too many wonderful memories here.

Unfortunately, all of it was gone.

Lonely, he walked over to the desk he usually used. The high-end laptop his roommate often brought was no longer there, and even the few scattered documents were coated in a gauzy layer of dust.

Apparently, no one had used it for quite some time.

His finger lightly traced a line across the desktop. Feeling the coarse dust against his fingertips, Sun Cheng remained silent for a while before taking a USB drive from his pocket, his eyes flickering.

"Please... don't let it be what I think it is!"

He murmured the words under his breath, more as self-comfort than anything else.

Sun Cheng quickly composed himself. He walked to a nearby desk without sitting down and switched on the computer.

If he remembered correctly, the computers supplied by the school had come with a Linux system localized to guard against Microsoft Windows XP. Later, some team members had found it inconvenient, so several machines had apparently been changed to Windows 7. But none of that affected what he needed to do.

He first entered Safe Mode. Using the computer abilities that had suddenly appeared—abilities he himself still did not understand—Sun Cheng carefully examined the computer in the office.

"Nothing? Was it really just my imagination?"

Still filled with doubts, he turned on the other computers one by one. After checking them all and finding none of the Trojan files he had discovered on his own laptop, Sun Cheng returned to stand before the first computer he had turned on.

After hesitating for a moment, unable to shake his doubts, he took out the USB drive again and inserted it into the computer. He prepared to install the system on the drive onto this machine to verify his suspicions.

More than forty minutes was quite a long wait.

Perhaps because he had been staring at the computer screen for so long, Sun Cheng distinctly felt a little dizzy.

He rubbed his foggy forehead, but his hands did not stop moving. Once the system installation was complete, he quickly granted himself the highest permissions and entered the C drive. In barely a dozen seconds, he found that inconspicuous Trojan folder amid the numerous system files.

Sun Cheng's expression instantly darkened. Forgotten fragments of memory surged continuously into his mind.

"Cheng, I really support your desire to make something of yourself. You know my family's circumstances. I can't help you much financially, but if you don't mind, I can lend you a hand!"

"...Don't think it's too little, Cheng. I swallowed my pride and begged everywhere to get these seven thousand yuan. It should be enough for a while... Don't refuse it... Hey, you're just too stubborn... Fine, let's say I'm lending it to you, okay..."

"Speaking of borrowing money, a classmate mentioned a campus loan platform a few days ago. It seems to offer preferential loans for college students starting businesses, though I don't know whether it's true!"

"Huh? Even the repair shop couldn't find the problem? Why don't you just reinstall the system? Here, I happen to have an installation package for the classic version of Windows XP..."

The more he recalled, the more he felt that those words that had once moved him so deeply were filled with suspicious points. It felt as if a huge stone had been pressed onto Sun Cheng's chest, and the dizziness lingering in his head grew stronger as well.

"My head hurts so much. Is this a lingering effect from getting drunk last night?"

In only a short while, even his vision seemed to start swaying. No matter how muddled Sun Cheng was, he realized that something was wrong with his body. He could only pull over a stool from beside him and drop heavily onto it, intending to lie down for a while and see whether he could recover.

But just as he shut down the computer, moved the keyboard aside, and forced himself to lie on the desk, the dizziness immediately closed in on him step by step, while his eyelids grew heavy as well.

In the end, before he had even lain there for a few minutes, darkness fell over his eyes, and he completely passed out.

"What's going on?"

The moment he opened his eyes, Sun Cheng discovered that he was no longer in the office located in the school's old campus. Instead, he was in a strange yet familiar spherical space filled with watery blue light. He could not help shouting out in alarm.

Unfortunately, although he made the motion of shouting, he heard no sound. Coupled with that empty sensation of having lost his body, he finally realized what had happened to him.

"A spherical space glowing blue, unable to feel my body... Could everything that happened last night have been real?"

A flash of insight struck his mind, and Sun Cheng's expression changed slightly.

To verify his guess, he hurriedly looked up in his ghostlike state toward the very center of the spherical space. Sure enough, he clearly saw two light screens of identical size standing side by side in the center of the mysterious space.

He hurriedly drifted toward one of the light screens. The instant he drew close, an image appeared on the previously dim screen: a young man bent over a desk.

"The office... that's me!"

Suppressing the excitement and unease in his heart, Sun Cheng roughly realized, after experiencing this once before, that some kind of change had happened to him. He simply could not yet determine whether those changes were good or bad.

Last night, he had been too anxious to carefully examine the light screen.

Now that he had confirmed he could still leave this place, he no longer felt last night's urgency. With great interest, he carefully studied the light screen before him. Soon, he noticed something in one corner that he had overlooked last night.

There were two sets of numbers. They looked quite regular, each preceded by a differently colored star-shaped symbol—Blue Star: 65/1000, Red Star: 51847:56:12.

The first set of numbers was one thing, but Sun Cheng stared at it for a long while without figuring out what it meant.

The set of numbers behind the red star, however, continued to decrease with every breath he took, like a countdown.

After watching it carefully for a while, Sun Cheng vaguely gained some confidence. He silently calculated for a moment and arrived at an approximate figure. "Thirty-six days? Does that have some special significance?"

There was simply too little information available. No matter how hard he racked his brains, he could not guess what the two sets of numbers meant. He could only give up on further research and continue studying the light screen. Only after confirming that there was nothing else on it did he drift, somewhat disappointed, toward the other wall of light.

Whoosh!

As though it sensed his arrival, the other wall of light lit up the moment he approached. It projected an image Sun Cheng was quite familiar with.

"That's the office in the research center I hacked into last night? Why is it still showing this image? Could it be that nothing over there has changed since I suddenly passed out in that office last night?"

On the light screen was the very same scene Sun Cheng had seen the previous night: a three-heads-tall little mechanical figure falling onto a chair.

After examining it more closely, he soon found two sets of numbers in one corner of the wall of light.

One set matched the numbers on the other light wall beside it. A blue star was displayed before them as well, followed by 65/1000. The second set, however, differed from the previous wall. Behind the symbol of a white star was a completely new number: 1/1. Sun Cheng, who had been trying to make sense of it all, felt even more at a loss.

"Looks like I wasn't dreaming last night. But where exactly is this place? What happened to my body? Could these two walls of light really represent two worlds? What should I do? Should I test it?"

Though his subconscious kept warning him that everything he was experiencing was not merely astonishing, but even more terrifying, setting aside how unscientific it was for someone to travel freely between two worlds, the fact that Barricade had nearly crushed him to death in the other world last night proved that this strange encounter was not only dangerous—it could cost him his life!

His throat bobbed as he swallowed, his gaze fixed tightly on the light wall before him.

After all, he was young. Though he hesitated for a while, he ultimately could not suppress his longing for this miraculous opportunity that had fallen from the sky.

After casting a hesitant glance at the other light wall beside him, he gritted his teeth and, without looking back, charged into the light wall in front of him.