He Didn't Want to Kill Anyone

[The disasters brought by the endless siege drove people to band together for survival, but they also tore apart many small groups. Lonely survivors who happened to encounter one another often ignored their differences and chose to weather the war together.

Man had once been a frontline soldier, but after witnessing a mass execution, he deserted. Emilia was a lawyer. Before the war began, she had lived in a luxurious villa with her father and younger sister.

She was the only survivor of her family.

At least for now, they were fairly satisfied with their companions and decided to take shelter in a house that was not too badly damaged.]

Silver looked at the scene and was hit with a brutal shock right from the start.

The top-left corner of the game screen displayed the time, temperature, and day count.

This house was not too badly damaged?

There were only two people in the building: a frontline soldier named Man and a lawyer named Emilia.

A massive hole spanning two entire floors gaped in the building. The house could not even block the wind, and holes of all sizes were scattered everywhere inside.

There was not a single valuable piece of furniture in the rooms. Even the chairs had merely been cobbled together from wooden planks.

This counted as not too badly damaged?

He had never imagined a game could begin this way.

After going through the initial tutorial, he realized that this time, they were no longer playing heroes who wielded weapons and descended like divine justice to save everyone from misery.

Here, they were ordinary people, unarmed and without even any food.

And this game had only one goal.

Survive.

Survive until the war ended!

"A survival game? I've played way too many wilderness survival games. This is nothing." Silver did not think much of it.

It was not as if he had never played this type of game before. He just had not expected Black Star to make a game like this.

As the person in charge of the Yogame platform, Teng Feng was extremely concerned about the release of these two games.

He already knew his own game inside out. The only game he could not make sense of was the one produced by Sprout Studio.

Apparently, it was a war-themed game, and it had happened to clash with the game they had prepared.

What a coincidence. He had only deliberately collided with their release date; he had absolutely not intended to collide with their genre.

The moment the game released, he bought This War of Mine.

Anyone entering the game would be surprised, and Teng Feng was no exception.

When he saw the characters searching the ruins of a dilapidated building for food, he felt a little lost.

This... seemed like a genre clash...

And yet... it did not seem like one...

Who had said this was an FPS game? You called this an FPS?

Unlike the previous two games that required active control, this game was extremely simple to operate. It only required a few basic keys and did not even demand particularly fast reflexes.

Silver remembered reading a line in a book before.

"I once asked a military chaplain whether killing people in war was acceptable. The chaplain said that as long as you did not enjoy killing, it was."

He had only ever seen war in books and on television.

Later, he had played some war games too, but the protagonists in those games were soldiers carrying guns, warriors who broke through enemy encirclements.

He had never—been a civilian.

During the first few days of the game, he went out every night to gather food, scavenging through abandoned, dilapidated buildings.

By then, his shelter had grown from two people to three.

He had taken in another survivor from outside.

On the fifth night, Yinzi went out as usual to look for food and other tools. The grin had long vanished from his face, and the atmosphere in the livestream had grown quiet.

In the livestream with a hundred thousand viewers, only a few scattered comments remained.

On the fifth night, Silver chose to go to a supermarket.

Places like supermarkets generally still had some leftover food. Just a few cans or other supplies would be a huge help to him.

The moment he entered, he heard people talking behind a wall.

Silver hunched over and crept closer. A man in military uniform was speaking. He stood by the entrance with his back to Silver, while a young girl crouched before him, searching the rubble for useful supplies.

"That's a nice name. It suits such a pretty face," the soldier said teasingly.

"Thank you." The girl continued searching through the supplies, though she seemed at a loss.

"Looking for something?"

"I just want some food."

"Food? Poor girl, I can spare you some food." After saying that, the soldier puffed out his chest and swaggered toward the girl.

Watching through the crack in the door, Silver could not stand it any longer. He had never expected that he would come to a supermarket to scavenge and end up seeing a girl being molested.

He watched as the soldier stepped forward and kicked the girl to the ground.

Without any hesitation, he entered the room, switched weapons, rushed forward, and backstabbed him!

The girl fled in terror. Silver did not chase after her. Silently, he searched the soldier's body and found twenty AK rounds and a bottle of alcohol.

Clutching the supplies in his hands, he said nothing.

From the start of the game until now, he had never killed anyone. Yet someone had attacked the dilapidated house where he took shelter while he was out scavenging at night, taking more than half of their belongings and injuring the people left behind.

He had never seen such a realistic war game.

Soldiers bore the responsibility of killing enemies in war. The fighting between soldiers on opposing sides was not a simple matter of good and evil, but belonged to the moral gray area of modern ethics, where there might not even be a distinction between right and wrong.

Would someone feel guilty for crimes committed in a dream after waking up? Would they develop a sense of guilt?

Those two questions also applied to what players did in the game world, only more sharply.

Because players were conscious, capable of rational thought, fully in control of their actions, and no one forced or pressured them—it meant these were choices made voluntarily while fully awake.

Yet when he saw the girl about to be molested, he still could not hold himself back.

The game's environment was simply too realistic—so realistic that the characters' moods could be affected.

And he himself was affected as well.

At first, he did not want to kill anyone.

He had honestly scavenged for supplies. When someone pointed a gun at him and shouted, he immediately ran home. Whenever he nervously stole something, the people in the shelter would start feeling depressed and become overwhelmed with sorrow.

They starved, fell ill, complained constantly, cried, caused scenes, and ran away from home. Their lives were poor, miserable, noisy, and chaotic.

Until today, when he made a move. After killing someone, it was as if he had broken a taboo.

He picked up an axe and began chopping people down, and life suddenly seemed to go more smoothly.

But Yinzi felt—utterly suffocated.

Many readers probably got to know the two of us a long time ago. Thank you, big brother. Please check out both books, everyone.