"If our memories of yesterday aren't wrong, Honghuai City looked perfectly normal yesterday." Zhuang Anping thought for a moment, then added, "Not just normal. Looking back, apart from some buildings being different from what I remembered, yesterday's Honghuai City was no different from the Real World. At least when I walked down the street, I could feel that everyone was alive. They had their own emotions and their own lives."
"But now, how are these people on the street any different from walking corpses?" Zhuang Anping looked around.
At first glance, they seemed to be in the middle of a city's busy morning rush, but there was no light in any pedestrian's eyes. Everyone looked as though their soul had been sucked out. Though their steps were hurried, their gazes were vacant, as if invisible strings were pulling them forward. An eerie silence hung in the air, as though the city had lost its soul and only an empty shell remained in motion.
"Could we be overthinking this? You office workers are forced to get up early every day, and you're always short on sleep. Maybe this is just what you look like every morning after dragging yourselves out of bed?" When Chen Xi's tongue turned sharp, her words were both unpleasant and hard to refute.
"Heh." Zhuang Anping gave a few dry chuckles. "Put that way, you do have a point. My coworkers and I often say that our job is just everyone sitting in separate cubicles, working like mechanical walking corpses from clock-in to clock-out. But the people acting strangely on this street aren't just wage slaves forced into it by life." Zhuang Anping looked around. "Everyone here is strange. Those classmates are walking to school together, right next to each other, but they don't even make eye