The moment the lights came on, Bo Yi noticed something was wrong.
In that instant, the carousel seemed to have become a completely separate little world-at least, when Bo Yi looked outside, he could no longer see any of the players who had gathered around to wait and see how things turned out for them.
He withdrew his gaze from the suddenly deserted streets of the "amusement park" outside and listened absentmindedly as the mechanical female voice finished explaining the riding instructions. Just as he felt the carousel beneath him slowly start moving, he suddenly heard a player nearby cry out with a string of curses.
"Holy shit!"
"When did these things show up!?"
Bo Yi looked up at the sound.
Whoa.
He raised his eyebrows slightly.
This really was... "lively"!
The carousel, which had originally held only a scattering of players, was now completely filled with "people." Their genders, ages, clothes... were all different. There were adorable children of seven or eight wearing pretty dresses, young couples in their twenties, middle-aged people in their thirties or forties who had brought their children along, and Bo Yi even spotted an elderly woman with graying hair.
-No wonder the ticket scanner had said "all seats are occupied." There really were "people" sitting in those empty seats...
These newly appeared "visitors" had materialized silently on the horses at some unknown point, sitting perfectly upright and staring straight ahead. Their skin was uniformly a stiff, ashen blue-gray. Bo Yi even suspected that the reason their poses were so uniform and precise was that their limbs had already stiffened, leaving them fixed in that position.
Throughout all the players' shouting, not a single one of these "visitors" turned their head. They remained utterly "unruffled," making the players seem rather prone to overreacting.
But... Bo