Unknown "Invitation"

"Damn it, main tank, fall back! Get back, now! Number Two, get in there! Switch to Number Two and keep the aggro! Priest, give—"

Hunched over with his back arched, Zhang Pengfei curled comfortably into a sofa with cracked leather upholstery. In a rough voice, he communicated with his teammates through his headset, occasionally throwing in a few "friendly exchanges."

Trading insults was part of online gaming. You couldn't go without sampling it.

On the screen before him, guided by the smooth movements of his mouse, a Tauren warrior with enormous horns swung a massive axe with grunts. Following commands from the keyboard, it let out battle cries and fiercely hacked at the swarming mobs in the dungeon.

The computer screen's glow reflected off his face, flickering brighter and dimmer with the colorful effects of his character's skills. Even with the internet café's air conditioning blowing, this veteran World of Warcraft Classic player already had a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead, glistening with oil.

People immersed in games often found it difficult to notice such minor details.

A cheap dark headset was clamped tightly over the middle-aged man's head. The thick edges of its earcups had faintly yellowed in a rather suspicious way, but its wearer seemed utterly unaware. He hammered the keyboard urgently while roaring into the microphone, practically spraying spittle everywhere!

"Damn it! Left side! The left entrance spawned more! Mage! Where's the Frost Nova? Freeze them! Oh, fuck—"

His voice traveled down the headset cable, hoarse and anxious.

By now, even the cracks of the keyboard were stuffed with cigarette ash. The plastic ashtray beside him held more than a dozen cigarette butts piled up like a little mountain. No one had come to clean it up. The internet café's front-desk cleaner seemed not to have noticed this seat tucked away in the corner, nor this loudmouthed player.

Only Zhang Pengfei flung his mouse around at high speed, making its cable, worn white at the base, rustle and scrape. He did not care in the slightest.

"Quick, quick! Heals! Heal me! I can't hold it!"

Having just absorbed a round of brutal damage from the dungeon boss, he turned to see the Doomguard at the center of the crowd swinging its blade. Sickly green Infernals rained down from the sky like meteors. The Tauren character was stunned after failing to reposition in time, and its health bar plummeted off a cliff!

The situation became urgent. The middle-aged player, immersed in the game, suddenly raised his voice again. He looked so frantic that he was practically about to press his whole body against the clearly overburdened monitor.

If the front line collapsed again and no one could hold aggro, this dungeon run would truly end in a wipe!

A slightly shrill female voice immediately came through the headset, with a faint crackle of static mixed in. "Coming, coming! I gave you Lay on Hands! Hold on, old bull!"

But right after that, a young man's voice cut in with frantic urgency, firing off words like a machine gun. "Priest, dispel first! Dispel! That one beside him still has a curse! Dispel it! It's about to explode—"

The frantically clattering keyboard abruptly stopped. The screen flashed violently, and then the LCD monitor reflected an almost frozen face and a screen that had nearly turned into a single solid color.

"Fuck! What happened? Admin! Why did it crash—"

Less than two or three seconds of silence passed before he realized that the clamor in his headset had also suddenly gone quiet. Confusion had already crept across his face, but now that he finally understood what had happened, the middle-aged man could no longer hold back. He put on the agonized expression of a defeated dog.

Yet the earth-shaking sound trapped in his throat—more a wail than a shout—fell silent before it could fully emerge.

"...What is this?"

This middle-aged man, already in his forties, had quarreled with his wife and angrily "run away from home" like a child. He had spent most of the day gaming at an internet café to relax. His anger had gradually faded, and he was subtly considering such life-or-death questions as, If I go home tonight, will I have no choice but to kneel on a washboard? Would asking my son to plead for me help? Or should I just make do and sleep at the internet café tonight? Yet now, he merely slowly widened his eyes and opened his mouth, staring helplessly at the pale screen before him, which might have crashed unexpectedly or perhaps caught some kind of electronic virus and turned white—

A streak of silver light swept across it, like molten metal naturally flowing down under high heat, rolling, shifting, and solidifying as one—

...Latin, Slavic script, Arabic, Sanskrit, seal script...

As countless written symbols flickered through it at a speed too fast for the naked eye to distinguish, several lines of perfectly sized dark text finally emerged quietly from that tiny silver vortex. They occupied the very center of the screen without concealment and without any possibility of being ignored.

[Zhoutian Fuli, Infinite Worlds, login access is now open.]

[Current user may choose to log in—Yes/No]

At the same time, a sudden mechanical voice with almost no fluctuation came through the headset, repeating the words on the screen—

"...Log in?"

With a jolt, the bewilderment on his face, mixed with the surprise rapidly climbing into his eyes, finally turned into an especially drawn-out syllable from Zhang Pengfei's mouth.

"—Huh?"

He stood there dumbly for several seconds before recovering from his vacant stupor and rubbing his eyes, which had already begun to sting with fatigue, in disbelief.

"No, have computer viruses evolved this much now? There's even GG hijacking? Is this how they do it? How much GG advertising money would this cost?"

This middle-aged man's understanding of electronic viruses largely remained stuck in the era twenty years ago, when they only started by making a panda burn incense. At last, he roughly "guessed" what was going on.

He could not help smacking his lips, shaking his head with both annoyance and amusement. He casually glanced at the text on the screen, then ignored it.

All he could say was that getting a computer virus while using an internet café computer was practically routine.

After all, no one could say what all sorts of customers before you had done on that machine, or what strange websites they had visited...

Zhang Pengfei, who had been a regular at internet cafés in his youth, naturally understood this well. What truly irritated him was that he had finally assembled a party for a dungeon run, and just when the fight was at its fiercest, an electronic virus suddenly "pulled the network cable" on him. No, seriously! Who could endure that?!

His blood pressure was rising! It was about to shoot through the roof!

"These bastard GG advertisers are way too vicious..."

There was nothing he could do after being hit with that out of nowhere. Even if he reconnected to the game, the party would definitely already have wiped. He would probably get cursed out by his teammates too, since he had obviously dragged them down.

His interest faded.

He no longer felt like playing. Taking off his headset, Zhang Pengfei grumbled as he leaned down and held the power button on the computer tower, preparing to force it off. Then he would go to the front desk for a refund, maybe buy a cup of instant noodles and a sausage while he was at it, and make do by sleeping on the sofa in this internet café tonight.

That was what he thought, but when this unfortunate fellow with a home he could not return to sat back up, the text within the silver vortex on the still-lit LCD screen remained motionless in exactly the same place.

It didn't shut off? Had he not held the power button long enough?

Somewhat confused, Zhang Pengfei instinctively wanted to press the power-marked button on the tower again. But when he turned to look, the darkened power button clearly reminded him—the computer was already shut down.

But that wasn't right! Why was the monitor still lit? Was the machine malfunctioning?

He patted the computer case, examined it carefully a few times, then simply bent down and pulled the power plug beneath the computer desk.

...And when he sat back up, cold sweat visibly began to form.

At a glance, the completely darkened mouse, scroll-wheel keyboard, and old-fashioned computer tower all clearly proved that the computer had objectively lost power.

Only the screen before him, where the silver vortex continued to flow, still displayed those unaffected lines of text, as though they were coldly mocking this viewer who had thought things far too simple.

[...Current user may choose to log in—Yes/No]

Something was not right.

He carefully lowered his head to check and confirmed that his memory was correct. The monitor before him was indeed connected to the power line beneath the computer desk.

But that did not change anything.

Rather, after confirming the truth again and again, a hidden chill finally shot up from his spine, like an icy centipede slowly crawling across every inch of the man's skin and bone.

The air-conditioning duct above still blew with a low hum, but the air in the internet café, which had clearly been maintained at a comfortable temperature above twenty degrees Celsius, seemed to have become excessively cold without him noticing.

Even Zhang Pengfei's skin was nearly covered in goosebumps.

But at that moment, as a former internet café regular in his youth and a "sharp-eyed master" who had once won second place in a local-area-network StarCraft tournament at an internet café, the man, whose eyesight was still barely decent, suddenly noticed a detail—

Below the line reading [Yes/No], a strange new label had appeared at some point, followed by a constantly changing Arabic numeral.

[Option closing countdown—141 seconds (failure to respond will be treated as abandonment)]

[Option closing countdown—140 seconds (failure to respond will be treated as abandonment)]

[Option closing countdown—139 seconds (failure to respond will be treated as abandonment)]

His entire body stiffened, and even the middle-aged man's face twitched faintly.

Reason clearly told him that he might have run into serious trouble. The best solution was undoubtedly to stand up immediately, get away from this computer that now seemed extraordinarily strange, and ignore that suspicious GG option entirely!

Just as when faced with a suspiciously packaged item, a normal person's best response was not to investigate it like some brainless character in a horror movie, but to execute a tactical retreat—turn around and run!

Yet for some reason, as he watched the countdown tick away second by second toward zero, a rising sense of panic, accompanied by a faint and inexplicable sense of strange familiarity, quietly reminded him as well—

...If he truly missed this bizarre "page" today, it might be a mistake he would regret for the rest of his life.

No, no, no. I must be losing my mind. What was there to regret about something that obviously had a problem? Maybe it was a scam link from Myanmar?

He sharply knocked himself on the head and forcibly interrupted his ridiculous thoughts. Honestly, he only felt that after being online for several consecutive hours, his brain was getting muddled.

After all, at his age, no matter how unwilling he was to admit it, he could not compare himself to when he was in his twenties.

Yet for some reason, that indescribable flutter deep in his heart remained faintly present and impossible to shake off.

...But then again, this was only an internet café computer. Even if clicking it gave the machine a virus that damaged its memory or stole information, what did that have to do with him? Maybe he was just scaring himself? It wasn't as if Sadako would crawl out of the screen the instant he selected an option and say, "Hello, handsome! Want to be friends?"

His thoughts a mess, he hesitated for several seconds. As if possessed, Zhang Pengfei's hand slowly reached toward the mouse, which still held some warmth, while his gaze remained fixed on the utterly ordinary [Yes/No].

Lost in his wild thoughts, he did not even notice one thing—the mouse had actually been unplugged by him a short while ago.

And the white arrow that suddenly appeared on the almost entirely silver screen was likewise completely unaffected. It moved with the mouse that should have had no function at all, heading toward the option—

When the countdown after the option was about to reach a single digit, the left mouse button was quietly pressed, selecting [Yes].

As the arrow made its selection, the dark text instantly began to fade. Then, unexpectedly yet not unexpectedly, nothing happened.

—No, what was I even expecting?

He smiled with a touch of self-mockery, yet could not help letting out a long breath. Zhang Pengfei watched as the silver vortex before him, now likewise beginning to quietly lose its form and fade from the screen with the end of his selection...

...Until the next second, when a deep, uncontrollable drowsiness washed over him.

It was as if some invisible force had quietly taken control of every movement of his body in an instant. The person sitting before the computer merely tilted his head, then naturally slumped back against the sofa and fell into a deep sleep.

What the sleeping man did not know was that the experience taking place in this small internet café was merely an insignificant reflection of the tip beneath the iceberg.

At the same time, in places ordinary people could not notice, similar events were unfolding one after another in many corners of this land—

A worker standing on scaffolding, his entire body covered in dust, stretched out an arm to adjust the angle of his equipment while inspecting the installation of glass curtain walls floor by floor along the outside of a building. He seemed to suddenly try to rub his eyes unconsciously, but as soon as he raised his hand, he instinctively stopped himself...

In a museum, a foreign tourist with blue eyes and brown hair marveled at a green-patinated bronze mirror from centuries ago inside a display case, switching between different lighting angles to photograph it...

In a classroom, a young student whose eyes still held light briefly raised his head to relax his neck, gazing blankly through the windowsill at the traffic on the distant street. Then, upon the pale glass, he suddenly saw a streak of heavy silver...

On the clearly layered ridges of southern terraced fields, an old man in a tattered raincoat spattered with mud carried a long hoe as he carefully observed the water flow after the rain, casually flicking several field leeches away from his feet...

In that brief span of time, hundreds and thousands of quietly appearing silver halos flickered obscurely through different people's eyes.

The countless people of the world displayed every manner of life.

Faced with this sudden and even somewhat terrifying strange choice, some were indifferent. They dismissed it at a glance and did not notice anything unusual at all;

Some stared vacantly, yet quickly noticed that the reflected pattern on the glass was strange;

Some screamed aloud in public, violently shook off the arm of the man beside them, suspected that they were hallucinating, and demanded to know whether anyone else had seen the same thing;

Some silently contemplated the strange interface displayed on their phones, repeatedly turning them on and off as they tried to find the key...

Until, in the end, some chose [Yes], while some chose [No]...

Others, perhaps out of caution, perhaps from fear, perhaps because they simply did not want anything to do with something so obviously suspicious, never made a choice between the two from beginning to end.

Thus, when the mere five-minute countdown ended, the silver light vanished without the slightest reluctance...

No one could be certain what it represented, nor could they necessarily fully understand what they had chosen, what they had given up, or what it all meant.

Nothing happened to those who chose to abandon it. A little absent-minded, they continued their former lives, and everything that had just happened seemed like an illusion.

Only those who chose to accept it fell unconscious, while their bodies, as though acting on instinct, temporarily ceased all unnecessary movement and chose nearby, relatively safe places to enter dormancy...

Different choices now led toward different possibilities.

This was only a trial, but it was obvious that such an unnatural "change" would inevitably create consequences whose full scope no one could estimate...

Every trace of it was taken in by an illusory "gaze" from an unknown source.

It remained silent.

It had cast down the beginning.

It was waiting for an outcome.