Observer

"These newcomers had fairly solid nerves. Thrown into such an unfamiliar environment, they could still maintain a relative degree of rationality."

Someone commented lightly, as if evaluating a bottle of chilled soda.

In the dim light, gray mist seemed to permeate every corner. Drifting dust spun in the air, as though trapped within a lonely labyrinthine city.

"Yes. People always reveal the differences in their nature and understanding during a crisis. Courage or cowardice, reason or madness—those are all understandable reactions. But whether they can effectively control their actions while under the influence of their emotions is often the key to survival."

An invisible voice answered him.

Even though the air had not stirred in the slightest.

That distinctly cold, entirely new inorganic voice carried an absolute indifference, like something looking down from on high.

Beneath the swirling mist, this exceptionally illusory figure appeared alone atop a steep slanted roof. His lowered gaze passed directly through the countless barriers of the walls, calmly observing everything currently happening inside the detached villa—

The five "survivors" who had awakened from unconsciousness were now dividing up the work, doing their utmost to endure the indoor environment, a scene that harshly tested them both physically and mentally, while trying to quickly uncover whatever supplies might still be usable.

But clearly, not many useful items remained on this floor, where some tragedy resembling a slaughterhouse massacre might once have taken place.

Most notably, there was the immediate problem of food.

It was not as though they had found nothing at all, but aside from several baguettes as hard as stone, barely recovered from a drawer in a living room cabinet, these newly awakened people—who had not yet grown excessively hungry—had found nothing more.

This was undoubtedly a terrifying fact.

One of the male searchers kept trying to call out on the phone in his hand while rummaging through the house. Yet with each successive failure, his expression became increasingly ugly despite his efforts to suppress it.

Noticing his actions and seemingly realizing something, the phantom on the roof suddenly asked the air a seemingly random question.

"What are these newcomers' main quests?"

"The current scenario is a newcomer trial world in the biochemical apocalypse category. A total of twenty-six newcomers have been randomly placed within it. Their main quests are respectively [Survive for Twelve Hours] and [Reach an Exploration Score of Five]. Completing either one will count as completion of the main quest, allowing them to activate a Main God identification number and choose to directly leave this trial world."

"Survival... Given the state of this 'spawn point,' if they don't choose to explore on their own or do anything suicidal, simply hiding for half a day shouldn't be too difficult."

Adjusting the glasses on his nose, the phantom, whose appearance could not be clearly seen, could not help shaking his head.

"...But without a clear goal, judging by the way they look, they might start fighting amongst themselves for survival before half a day even passes."

He had clearly seen something.

"After all, the survival instinct of humans naturally carries an unavoidable selfishness."

"Newcomers with weak initiative certainly have the flaws of weak initiative, but those with too much initiative can easily create problems caused by excessive initiative as well."

After offering a few faint remarks, the figure merely raised his head and quietly gazed at the gray, dark sky in the distance.

Mist of unknown origin had long since blanketed every corner of the city. Shadowy human figures occasionally revealed themselves within it. Only on the upper floors of relatively tall buildings was the fog somewhat thinner.

Yet whenever the people on the ground occasionally looked up and noticed the dark clouds above, which seemed identical to the mist in appearance, rolling and stretching with the wind without ever dispersing, they would always feel a profound sense of unease.

Only a faint gleam flowed through those bluish eyes, cold and without trace.

An indescribable "gaze" continued rising and leaping. In a daze, it looked down upon the mortal world from above, allowing every person and thing to gradually become "slower" within its sight, bit by bit, until they seemed almost still...

Everything was taken in at a glance.

The placid "line of sight" passed unhindered through the fog among the skyscrapers, sweeping over the "newcomers" scattered like specks of starlight throughout this dust-covered city, each having only recently awakened and reacted differently. It observed the blocked streets, silent houses, parking lots with their entrances cut off, hospitals that had already become places of death, bloodstained campuses, half-charred abandoned warehouses...

Life and death, love and hatred, hope and demise, kindness and cruelty...

In this large, typical Western-style city, death and gray had become its dominant colors. Countless walking corpses wandered through the mist, while the few surviving "natives," amid the mercilessly crushed foundations of society and survival, and even beneath certain ruined wreckages, were acting out tragic scenes of the apocalypse in real time...

Without lingering.

The probing "gaze," like a bird lightly skimming through the void, extended all the way to the city's outskirts. At the end of roads broad enough to be called the city's arteries, there was nothing within the increasingly dense, almost impenetrable mist. Only surging gray covered everything.

This was its "edge."

At least, for now.

Only he could see clearly that within the murky darkness perpetually shrouding the boundary, countless tiny motes of light condensed from nothingness. Like a vast school of fish bursting from the depths of the sea, they endlessly meshed and churned, eventually becoming wisps of hazy, drifting light and shadow. At the border where gray mist met the city, they gradually seeped in, assimilated, solidified, and moved from illusion toward reality...

The city's once-blurry boundary and broken concrete ground then began pushing outward and spreading, nearly from nothing, inch by inch, slowly growing from the gray-white void.

Highways, roadside vegetation, corpses with smashed skulls, escapees carrying shotguns, wrecked cars still belching thick black smoke... Every emerging detail fit perfectly into this just-right puzzle, extending in an orderly, cyclical manner toward an even more distant horizon.

—This city was gradually "growing," like a living thing that breathed!

It was undoubtedly a shocking and novel sight.

With a hint of rising curiosity, someone watched the process with great interest for a long time.

"What is this?"

Within the endlessly slowed "time," only another voice, seemingly unaffected as well, caught up with him.

"Simply put, [Model] itself does not currently possess a complete relevant database. Therefore, it has separated related operational threads and continuously collected cognitive information, primitive fantasy projections, individual consciousness fragments, and other materials related to several key elements such as 'apocalypse,' 'biochemical,' 'zombies,' and 'evolution' from the ocean of collective biological subconsciousness. It then gradually sorted through and constructed this biochemical-apocalypse-type 'newcomer trial' instance. Of course, most dream worlds of other types are created according to the same principle as well, merely differing somewhat in their general details..."

The virtual consciousness born from [Model], now renamed the "Main God" after being given armor to suit the occasion, provided a brief explanation—

"And what you can now see, after using Mirror to enhance the essence of your own consciousness, is a relatively 'intuitive' process of a dream world coming into existence, with its formation speed slowed down."

"I roughly understand."

The azure within his eyes brightened once more.

With deeper observation, the phantom named Li Yun vaguely noticed a difference—the almost imperceptible motes of light in the darkness did indeed carry a trace of a quality similar to certain familiar black "seawater." Compared to that, however, they had clearly been diluted by an unknown number of times.

After undergoing the Main God's large-scale "disinfection and recycling" process, their utterly chaotic essence had evidently been greatly diminished, even acquiring a faint feeling of "order" instead.

"The layers of souls and information... really make truth and falsehood difficult to distinguish."

He reached out and gathered a wisp of gray mist from the air. This clearly formless, intangible existence was now obediently gathered between his fingers.

He sensed it carefully.

It was like a paint palette knocked onto the ground. Within the "paint" flowing and mixing together, there were countless different colors, yet they could no longer be distinguished from one another.

But deeper within, he could vaguely perceive that chaotic "rhythm." Information flowed endlessly, gathering and changing without cease. It appeared utterly chaotic, yet it also revealed a perfectly interlocking sense of "coordination."

"Very good, Main God. You have indeed done well."

"Administrator, this is not entirely 'my' achievement. You should understand that even if these elements were merely placed into the 'dream' within the Mirror, they would naturally form a dream world on their own. Main God merely guided them as much as possible to operate and take shape according to the general blueprint calculated in advance. I have only done a tiny amount of work."

Though it was praise from its "leader," this virtual intelligent consciousness gave no face at all and took the initiative to refute him.

Of course, someone did not care about such things.

"...No need to be modest. That is already very impressive."

Even someone as indifferent by nature as Li Yun did not begrudge it a sincere compliment at this moment.

Such processing might still be unable to extract the spiritual energy within the "seawater" from the ocean of collective subconsciousness as the most directly usable resource, but merely being able to reduce its "density," and even make relatively efficient use of the fragmented information it contained, was already enormous progress in itself.

After all, that bottomless, boundless ocean was essentially formed from vast quantities of imagery, emotions, and the traces of thoughts left behind in every moment lived by countless lives. For any individual possessing the concept of "complete sapience," it was undoubtedly a self-eroding "poison."

There were priorities in learning the Way, and every profession had its specialty.

Compared to a carbon-based lifeform like him, whose thought threads were simple to the point of being negligible, only a virtual consciousness like the Main God—innately born from the remains of the Cosmic Model, spontaneously formed from equally unimaginable computational power, and constantly undergoing dynamic iterative change—could calmly endure the assault of that vast amount of garbage information, even filtering out immense quantities of reusable "material" from it...

Even the illusory world of this "newcomer trial" beneath his feet had clearly benefited from the help obtained through it.

However, when he recalled the moment his gaze had swept across the city not long ago, he had briefly noticed a handful of peculiar individuals among the zombie hordes. Compared to the other ordinary living corpses, they were clearly more "unconventional" in both appearance and behavior.

This included a few zombies that had already developed obvious appearances and abilities different from their normal kind, with entirely different styles; a very small number of mutant individuals, covered in blood, hunting humans and zombies alike while continuously devouring and evolving; and even certain special types temporarily sealed within unusual underground structures by "coincidence," which had yet to fully gain the ability to move...

A hidden setting?

As though he had thought of something amusing, someone gave a slightly speechless laugh and raised another concern.

"But I think your difficulty setting is a little unreasonable, isn't it?"

"Main God, don't forget that this is only a newcomer trial. It is meant for preliminary testing and selection... You're trying to kill them."

After all, who knew how many settings, creations, and associations humanity had produced relating to the concept of "zombies" since that concept had gradually come into being...

Likewise, considering this, could the illusory world now taking shape from the gathering of information from those complex sources possibly be anything "tame"?

He did not think so.

When Li Yun had initially designed this newcomer trial, he had never intended to set the difficulty so excessively high from the very beginning.

After all, an excessively high threshold often meant an unacceptably low success rate. For some matters and plans that were still not entirely clear at present, that might not be a good thing.

He was not Miyazaki Hidetaka, and he did not have the little "hobby" of placing three dogs at certain doorways and waiting for kind passersby to feed them...

However, the Main God, which now controlled the relevant details during the actual construction, clearly did not entirely agree with his view.

"Appropriate risk stimulation is beneficial to activating the manifest spiritual characteristics of biological individuals and increasing the collection speed of the relatively dissipated spiritual energy during this process."

"Furthermore, in order to regulate screening difficulty, in accordance with your original opinion, the initial conditions of the newcomer trial have already reduced some risk factors. The newcomers are 'randomly' placed in relatively safe starting locations, ensuring a certain safe period for adaptation and preventing immediate death upon arrival."

"Under such conditions, newcomers who still have a chance of encountering special viral infected entities, exploration indicators, and other factors are theoretically those who choose to actively leave their original locations and explore."

"Since they have chosen to venture out, then according to normal human social values, obtaining possible benefits while bearing the corresponding risks is only natural."

That cold, inorganic voice also explained one of the principles behind its decision.

"Moreover, during the initial design and construction of this story world, its setting itself has already restricted the introduction of relatively 'out-of-bounds' elements, preventing unaudited, excessively high-level, or information-breaching elements from entering prematurely. Those removed include the Blacklight Virus, Necromorphs, the G-Virus Prototype, Nurgle Plague Zombies, Biohazard Ghosts, Zombie Fungus, the Jenova Virus, the Zombie Universe..."