"Damn it, main tank, fall back! Get back! Hurry! Number Two, get in there! Switch to Number Two and keep pulling aggro! Priest, give—"
Hunched over with his back bent, Zhang Pengfei was comfortably curled up on a cracked leather sofa, barking instructions at his teammates through his headset, occasionally throwing in a few "friendly exchanges."
Trading insults was part of online gaming. You had to savor it.
On the screen before him, guided by the mouse's smooth movements, a Tauren warrior with massive horns was laboriously swinging a huge axe. Following commands from the keyboard, he let out battle cries and hacked furiously at the swarming mobs in the dungeon.
The computer screen's glow reflected off his face, flickering between light and dark along with the dramatic shifts of his character's colorful skill effects. Even with the internet café's air conditioning blowing, this old World of Warcraft Classic player already had a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead, glistening brightly.
People immersed in games often found it hard to notice such minor details.
A cheap dark headset was clamped tightly over the middle-aged man's head. The edges of its thick earcups had vaguely yellowed in a suspicious way, but its wearer seemed completely unaware. He simply hammered urgently at the keyboard while roaring into the microphone, nearly spraying spittle everywhere!
"Damn it! Left side! The left entrance spawned more! Mage! Where's the Frost Nova? Freeze them! Ah, fuck..."
His voice traveled through the headset cable, hoarse and anxious.
By now, even the gaps in the keyboard were packed with cigarette ash. The plastic ashtray beside him held more than a dozen cigarette butts piled into a small mountain, and no one had come to clean it up. The cleaner at the internet café's front desk seemed not to have noticed this seat tucked away in the corner, nor this loudmouthed player.
Only Zhang Pengfei was flinging the mouse around wildly with one hand, making its worn, whitened cable slap and rustle. He did not care in the slightest.
"Hurry, hurry! Heals! Give me a heal! I can't hold on!"
Having just absorbed a round of the dungeon boss's brutal attacks, he turned and saw the Doomguard trapped at the center, swinging its blades as sickly green Infernals rained down from the sky like meteors. The Tauren was stunned after failing to reposition in time, and his health bar began plummeting off a cliff!
The situation became urgent. The middle-aged player, immersed in the game, suddenly raised his voice again, looking as though he was about to press himself 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 somewhat shrill female voice immediately came through the headset, mixed with a faint crackle of static. "Coming, coming! I gave you Lay on Hands! Hold on, Old Bull!"
But then a young man's frantic voice cut in, firing off words like a machine gun. "Priest, dispel first! Dispel! The one beside him still has a curse! Dispel it! It's about to blow—"
The frantically clattering keyboard abruptly stopped. The screen flashed violently, and then the LCD monitor reflected a face that had nearly frozen stiff, along with a screen that had almost turned into a single solid color.
"Fuck! What's going on? Admin! Why did it freeze—"
Less than two or three seconds of silence passed. When the noise in his headset also suddenly fell silent, confusion had already crept onto his face. Then, finally realizing what had happened, the middle-aged man could no longer hold back and put on the agonized expression of a defeated dog.
Yet the earth-shaking sound trapped in his throat—less a shout than a wail—died before it could fully emerge.
"...What is this?"
This middle-aged man, already in his forties, had argued with his wife and angrily "run away from home" like a child. He had spent most of the day at an internet café playing games to relax. Now that his anger was gradually fading, he had been secretly considering such life-or-death questions as, If I go back tonight, will I have to kneel on a washboard? Would asking my son to plead for me help? Or should I just make do and spend the night at the internet café? Yet now, he merely slowly widened his eyes and opened his mouth, staring at the pale screen before him—perhaps frozen by accident, perhaps turned white by some electronic virus—
A silver halo swept across it, like molten metal naturally melting and dripping under extreme heat, rolling, changing, and solidifying as one seamless whole...
...Latin, Slavic letters, Arabic, Sanskrit, seal script...
As countless characters and symbols flickered past at a speed too fast for the naked eye to distinguish, several lines of perfectly sized dark text quietly emerged from that small silver vortex. Unconcealed and impossible to ignore, they occupied the very center of the screen.
[Zhoutian Fuli, Infinite Worlds. Login access is now available.] [Current user may choose to log in—Yes/No]
At the same time, a mechanical voice without the slightest fluctuation came through the headset, repeating the words on the screen—
"...Log in?"
With a violent shudder, bewilderment and confusion mixed with surprise rapidly climbing into his eyes, finally turning into an unusually drawn-out syllable from Zhang Pengfei.
"—Huh?"
It took him several stunned seconds to recover from his vacant state. He rubbed his eyes, which had already begun to sting, in disbelief.
"No, have computer viruses evolved this much now? There's even GG hijacking? Is this how they do it? How much would that cost in GG fees?"
This middle-aged man, whose understanding of electronic viruses was more or less still stuck in the era of the incense-burning panda from ten or twenty years ago, finally roughly "guessed" what was going on.
He could not help smacking his lips, shaking his head with both irritation and amusement. After casually glancing over the words on the screen a few times, he stopped paying attention to them.
After all, getting a computer virus while using an internet café computer was hardly unusual.
Who knew what all the customers before you had done on this machine, or what strange websites they had visited...
Zhang Pengfei, who had been a regular at internet cafés in his youth, naturally understood this. What truly annoyed him was that he had finally assembled a party for a dungeon run and the fight was reaching its most intense moment when an electronic virus suddenly "pulled the plug" on him. No! Who the hell could take that?!
His blood pressure was rising! It was practically through the roof!
"These damn GG-makers are way too vicious..."
After being hit with this out of nowhere, there was nothing he could do. Even if he reconnected to the game, the party would definitely already have wiped, and his teammates would probably curse him out for it. After all, he had plainly screwed them over.
He felt rather listless.
His mood for gaming was gone. Pulling off his headset, Zhang Pengfei grumbled as he bent down and held the power button on the computer tower, intending to force it off before going to the front desk for a refund. Maybe he would buy a cup of instant noodles and a sausage while he was at it, then make do by sleeping on this internet café's sofa for the night.
That was what he thought, but when this unlucky man with a home he could not return to sat back up, the words within the silver vortex on the still-lit LCD screen remained perfectly still in their original place.
It did not turn off? Had he not held the power button long enough?
Confused, Zhang Pengfei instinctively reached for the button with the power symbol on the computer tower again. But when he turned to look, the darkened power button clearly reminded him—the computer was already shut down.
But that was not right! Why was the monitor still on? Was the machine broken?
After patting the computer case and examining it carefully for a few moments, Zhang Pengfei simply bent down and unplugged the power cord beneath the desk.
...Then, when he sat back up, cold sweat visibly began to emerge.
One glance told him that the completely dark mouse, scroll-wheel keyboard, and old computer tower all clearly proved that the computer had objectively lost power.
Only the screen before him, where the silver vortex continued to flow without pause, still displayed those unaffected words, as though coldly mocking a spectator who had thought things too simple.
[...Current user may choose to log in—Yes/No]
Something was wrong.
Carefully lowering his head to inspect it, he confirmed that his memory had been correct. The monitor in front of him was indeed connected to the power supply line beneath the computer desk.
But that changed nothing.
Rather, after confirming the facts again and again, a hidden chill finally shot up from his spine, like an icy centipede slowly crawling over every inch of the man's skin and bones.
The air conditioner in the ceiling duct still hummed as it blew, but the air in the internet café—which had clearly remained at a comfortable temperature above twenty degrees—seemed to have quietly turned far too cold.
Goosebumps even rose across Zhang Pengfei's skin.
But at that moment, as a former internet café regular and a "sharp-eyed expert" who had once taken second place in a local area network StarCraft tournament, Zhang Pengfei—whose eyesight was still barely decent—suddenly noticed a detail—
Beneath the line reading [Yes/No], an odd new label had appeared at some point, followed by a constantly decreasing Arabic numeral.
[Option closing countdown—141 seconds (failure to choose will be treated as abandonment)] [Option closing countdown—140 seconds (failure to choose will be treated as abandonment)] [Option closing countdown—139 seconds (failure to choose will be treated as abandonment)]
His entire body stiffened, and the middle-aged man's face even twitched faintly.
Reason clearly told him that he might have encountered serious trouble. The best solution right now was undoubtedly to stand up, get away from this suddenly bizarre computer, and ignore this obviously suspicious GG option completely!
Like facing a suspicious package, a normal person's best course of action was not to investigate it like some brainless character in a horror movie, but to tactically retreat at once and run for it!
But for some reason, as he watched the countdown tick toward zero, a growing sense of panic, accompanied by an extremely faint and inexplicable feeling of strange familiarity, quietly reminded him as well—
...If he truly missed this bizarre "page" today, it might become a mistake he would regret for the rest of his life.
No, no, I must be out of my mind. What could there possibly be to regret about something that obviously has problems? Maybe it's some scam link from Myanmar?
Zhang Pengfei sharply smacked his head, cutting off his ridiculous thoughts. Honestly, he only felt that after being online for several consecutive hours, his brain was getting a little muddled.
After all, at his age, no matter how unwilling he was to admit he was getting old, he could not compare to his twenties.
Yet for some reason, that indescribable stirring in his heart remained faintly present, 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, it had nothing to do with him, right? Maybe he was just scaring himself? It was not as if Sadako would crawl out of the screen the second he pressed an option and say, "Hello, handsome! Want to be friends?"
As chaotic thoughts raced through his mind, he hesitated for several seconds. Then, as if possessed, Zhang Pengfei's hand slowly reached toward the mouse, still warm to the touch, while his gaze remained fixed on the utterly ordinary [Yes/No].
Lost in thought, he did not even notice one thing—the mouse had already been disconnected from power not long ago.
Yet on that almost entirely silver screen, a white cursor suddenly appeared. Completely unaffected, it moved along with the mouse that should no longer have done anything, heading toward the option—
When the countdown suffix was about to reach single digits, the left mouse button was quietly pressed, selecting [Yes].
As the cursor landed on the choice, the dark text instantly began to dim. Then, unexpectedly yet not unexpectedly, nothing happened.
What was I even expecting?
He smiled with a hint of self-mockery, yet could not stop himself from letting out a long sigh of relief. Zhang Pengfei watched as the selection ended and the silver vortex before him quietly began to fade from the screen as well...
...Until the next second, when a deep, irresistible drowsiness surged over him.
It was as if some invisible influence had silently taken control of every movement of his body in an instant. The person seated before the computer merely tilted his head, naturally collapsed back against the sofa, and fell into a deep sleep.
What the sleeping man did not know was that what had just happened in this tiny internet café was merely an insignificant reflection of the tip of an iceberg.
At the same time, in places ordinary people could not notice, similar events were unfolding one after another throughout many corners of the land—
A worker standing on scaffolding, extending an arm to adjust a machine's angle, covered from head to toe in dust as he inspected the installation of glass curtain walls floor by floor along a building's exterior, seemed to suddenly try to rub his eyes unconsciously. But after raising his hand, he instinctively stopped himself...
In a museum, a blue-eyed, brown-haired foreign tourist marveled at a green-patinated bronze Mirror from centuries ago inside a display case, switching between different lighting angles to photograph it...
A young student with light still in his eyes sat in a classroom. He briefly raised his head to rest his neck, gazing blankly through the window at the traffic in the distant street, when he suddenly saw a heavy silver sheen in the pale glass...
On the clearly layered ridges of southern terraced fields, an old man carrying a long hoe and wearing a tattered raincoat splattered with mud carefully examined the water flow after the rain, casually shaking several field leeches from beside his feet...
In that brief span of time, hundreds and thousands of quietly appearing silver halos flashed obscurely through different people's eyes.
The myriad lives of the world displayed every possible state.
Faced with this sudden and even somewhat terrifying strange choice, some were indifferent and dismissed it at a glance, never noticing anything unusual about it at all;
Some looked unfocused, yet quickly noticed that the pattern reflected in the glass was strange;
Some screamed loudly in public, violently shaking off the arm of the man beside them. Suspecting they were hallucinating, they questioned others about whether they had seen the same thing;
Some silently considered the strange interface displayed on their phones, repeatedly turning them off and on, trying to find the key...
In the end, some chose [Yes], while some chose [No]...
Others, perhaps out of caution, perhaps out of fear, perhaps simply because they did not want anything to do with something that obviously looked wrong, never made a choice between the two from beginning to end.
Thus, after 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 abandoned, or what it meant.
Nothing happened to those who chose to give up. Slightly distracted, they continued their former lives, and everything that had just occurred seemed like an illusion.
Only those who chose to accept fell unconscious. Their bodies seemed to instinctively suspend all unnecessary actions, choosing nearby, relatively safe places to enter a dormant state...
Different choices now led toward different possibilities.
This was merely a trial, but clearly, such an unreasonable "change" would surely trigger far-reaching consequences whose full scope no one could possibly estimate...
Every trace was taken in by an illusory "gaze" from an unknown source.
It remained silent.
It had cast down the beginning.
It was waiting for a result.