Observer

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

Someone commented blandly, as though evaluating a bottle of chilled soda.

In the gloomy light, gray mist seemed to permeate every corner. Drifting dust spun in the air, like a lonely maze lost to silence.

"Yes. People always reveal differences in their true nature and perception during a crisis—courage or cowardice, rationality or madness. Those are all understandable reactions. But whether they can effectively control their behavior under the influence of emotion is often the key to survival."

An invisible voice answered him.

Even though there had not been the slightest unusual vibration in the air.

That distinctly indifferent, entirely new inorganic voice carried an absolute lack of concern, like someone looking down from on high.

Beneath the swirling fog, the unusually illusory figure appeared alone atop a steep roof. His lowered gaze passed directly through layer upon layer of walls, calmly observing everything currently taking place inside this Throne, the detached villa—

Five "survivors" who had awakened from unconsciousness were now dividing up the work. They endured the environment inside, one that harshly tested them both physically and mentally, and tried to uncover whatever supplies might still be useful.

But clearly, not much usable remained on this floor, which may once have witnessed a massacre-like tragedy.

Most immediately, there was the issue of food.

It was not as though they had found absolutely nothing, but apart from several baguettes as hard as stone, barely discovered in a drawer of the living room cabinet, the awakened people—who were not yet terribly hungry—had indeed found nothing else.

This was undoubtedly a terrifying reality.

While one of the male searchers rummaged through the house, he kept trying to make calls on the phone in his hand. With each failure, his expression grew increasingly grim.

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

"What are these newcomers' main missions?"

"The current scenario is a Biohazard Apocalypse-type Newcomer Trial world. A total of twenty-six newcomers have been deployed at random. Their main missions are [Survive for Twelve Hours] and [Reach an Exploration Score of Five]. Completing either one will count as completing the main mission, activating their Main God ID and allowing them to choose to leave this trial world directly."

"Survival... judging from the state of this 'spawn point,' as long as they do not choose to explore proactively or do anything suicidal, simply hiding for half a day would not be too difficult."

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

"...But without a clear goal, judging by their condition, they might start fighting among themselves for survival before half a day even passes."

He had clearly noticed something.

Human survival instincts naturally carried an unavoidable selfishness.

Newcomers with weak initiative certainly had the flaws of weak initiative, but excessive initiative could also create problems caused by excessive initiative.

After offering a few quiet observations, the figure merely raised his head and gazed silently toward the gray, dark sky in the distance.

The fog of unknown origin had long blanketed every corner of the city. Shadowy human figures occasionally emerged from within it. Only atop relatively tall buildings was the mist somewhat thinner.

Yet whenever people on the ground occasionally looked up and noticed the gray cloud cover high above—seemingly identical to the fog, rolling and stretching with the wind but never dispersing—they would inevitably feel a deep unease.

Only a faint glow flowed through those pale blue eyes, leaving them cold and unmarked.

An indescribable "gaze" continued to rise and leap. In a daze, it looked down upon the mortal world from above, while every person and thing gradually slowed, inch by inch, within its sight until they seemed almost motionless...

Everything entered its view.

The placid "line of sight" passed unhindered through the fog between skyscrapers, sweeping over the "newcomers" who had only recently awakened and reacted in different ways, scattered like specks of starlight throughout the dust-covered Throne. It observed clogged streets, silent houses, parking lots with their entrances blocked off, hospitals that had become lands of death, bloodstained campuses, half-charred abandoned warehouses...

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

In this typical large Western-style city, death and gray had become its dominant colors. Countless zombies wandered through the mist. The few surviving "natives," the mercilessly crushed workings and foundations of society, and even certain ruined wreckages all played out tragic scenes of the apocalypse in real time...

It did not stop.

The probing "gaze," like a bird lightly passing through nothingness, extended all the way to the city's edge. At the end of a broad road that could be called the city's main artery, there was nothing within the increasingly dense, nearly impenetrable fog. Only rolling gray obscured everything.

This was its "edge."

At least for now.

Only he could see clearly that within the murky Chaos perpetually shrouding the boundary, countless tiny points of light condensed from nothing. Like a vast school of fish surging up from the deep sea, they endlessly interlocked and churned, eventually transforming into wisps of hazy, floating light and shadow. Along the line where gray fog met the city, they gradually seeped in, assimilated, solidified, and turned illusion into reality...

The city's once-blurred boundary and broken concrete ground then began moving outward, inch by inch, almost appearing from nothing. They spread and grew slowly within the gray-white void.

Highways, roadside vegetation, corpses with shattered heads, fugitives carrying shotguns, car wrecks still spewing thick black smoke... Every emerging detail blended perfectly into this just-right puzzle, repeating in orderly cycles as it extended toward ever more distant horizons.

—This Throne was gradually "growing," like a living thing breathing!

It was undoubtedly a shocking and novel sight.

With a measure of rising curiosity, someone watched the process intently for quite some time.

"What is happening here?"

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

"Jane put it simply, AC currently lacks a complete relevant database. It therefore split off operational threads and continuously collected and processed vast quantities of cognitive information, primitive fantasy projections, individual consciousness fragments, and other material related to keywords such as 'apocalypse,' 'biohazard,' 'zombie,' and 'evolution' from the Cluster Subconscious Sea. It gradually sorted and constructed this Biohazard Apocalypse-type 'Newcomer Trial' instance. Of course, most dream worlds of other types were also shaped according to the same principle, with only broad details differing..."

The virtual consciousness born from AC, now appropriately clad in armor and renamed the "Main God," gave a brief Jane explanation—

"What you can now see, through Mirror's enhancement of your consciousness's essence, is a relatively 'intuitive' process of a dream world being born, with its formation speed slowed."

"I roughly understand."

The sky-blue color in his eyes brightened once more.

With deeper observation, the phantom named Li Yun vaguely noticed the difference—the nearly imperceptible points of light in the darkness did indeed possess a trace of a quality similar to certain familiar black "seawater." Yet compared to that, 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 sensation of "order."

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

He extended a hand and gathered a wisp of gray mist from the air. Though it was clearly formless and intangible, it obediently collected between his fingers.

He sensed it carefully.

It was, as Jane would put it, simply an overturned palette, where paints of every color flowed together and mixed, no longer distinguishable from one another.

Yet beneath the surface, he could faintly perceive a disordered "rhythm": information flowing, endlessly forming, gathering, and changing. It appeared utterly chaotic, but also revealed a seamless sense of "coordination."

"Very good, Main God. You truly did well."

"Administrator, this was not entirely 'my' achievement. You should understand that even if those elements were simply introduced, they would naturally form dreams within the 'dream' inside Mirror. The Main God merely guided them to operate and take shape according to a broadly calculated blueprint. I only did a small amount of work."

Although it was being praised by its "superior," this virtual intelligent consciousness rather unapologetically refuted him.

Of course, someone did not care about that.

"...No need to be modest. That was already remarkable."

Even someone as indifferent by nature as Li Yun did not hesitate to offer sincere praise at this moment.

Even if this method could not yet extract the spiritual energy within the "seawater" from the Cluster Subconscious Sea as the most directly usable resource, merely reducing its "density" and efficiently utilizing the fragmented information within was already a tremendous advance.

After all, that bottomless, immeasurable sea was essentially formed from countless images, emotions, and traces of thoughts left behind in every moment lived by innumerable lives. To any individual possessing the concept of "complete intelligence," it could undoubtedly be called a self-eroding "poison."

There were those who came before in learning, and every profession had its specialists.

Compared to carbon-based organisms like himself, whose thought processes were, in Jane's terms, simple beyond mention, only a virtual consciousness like the Main God—innately born from the wreckage of the Cosmic Model, spontaneously formed from equally unimaginable computing power, and constantly undergoing dynamic iterative change—could calmly withstand the assault of vast quantities of junk information and even filter out large amounts of reusable "material" from it...

Even the illusory world of the Newcomer Trial beneath his feet had clearly benefited from the assistance obtained this way.

However, when he recalled sweeping his gaze across the city not long ago, he had briefly noticed a handful of strange individuals among the zombie hordes. Compared with ordinary zombies, they were clearly more "distinctive" in both appearance and behavior.

There were a few zombies that had already developed obvious appearances and abilities unlike those of normal members of their kind, each with a wildly different style. There were also a very small number of mutated individuals, covered in blood and constantly devouring and evolving, hunting humans and zombies alike without discrimination. There were even certain special types that had been temporarily sealed within special underground structures by "coincidence," not yet fully capable of movement...

A hidden setting, perhaps?

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

"But I think your difficulty settings are a little unreasonable."

"Main God, don't forget, this is only a Newcomer Trial. It is meant for preliminary testing and selection... Are you trying to get them killed?"

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

Likewise, considering that, could this fledgling illusory world—gathered and formed from information drawn from such complex sources—really be something "harmless"?

He did not think so.

When Li Yun had initially designed the Newcomer Trial, he had never intended to set its difficulty so excessively high from the outset.

After all, an overly high threshold often meant an unacceptably low success rate. For certain matters and plans that were not yet fully clear, that might not be a good thing.

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

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

"Appropriate risk stimulation benefits the activation of explicit spiritual traits in biological individuals and increases the rate at which dispersed spiritual energy is collected during the process."

"Furthermore, to regulate the selection difficulty, in accordance with your original instructions, the initial conditions of the Newcomer Trial have already reduced some risk factors. Newcomers are 'randomly' deployed into relatively safe starting locations, ensuring a certain safe period for adaptation and preventing immediate death upon arrival."

"Under such premises, newcomers who still have a chance of encountering special virus-infected entities and exploration-related factors are theoretically mainly those who did not remain where they were and instead chose to venture out and explore."

"Since they chose to take the risk of going outside, then according to normal human social values, obtaining potential benefits while bearing corresponding risks is only natural."

That cold, inorganic voice likewise explained part of its decision-making principles.

"Moreover, during the initial design and construction of this scenario world, its setting has already restricted the introduction of relatively 'overpowered' elements, preventing unaudited, excessively high-level, or boundary-crossing information from being incorporated prematurely. These excluded elements include [Blacklight Virus], [Necromorph], [G-Virus Prototype], [Nurgle Plague Zombie], [Biohazard Ghost], [Zombie Fungus], [Jenova Virus], [Zombie Universe]..."