In the dead of night.
The boy walked beneath the moonlight, heading into the darkness.
A breeze stirred his slightly long hair.
He studied the scenery beside the road.
This was the wilderness. In the distance, the hazy silhouettes of a few trees looked faintly menacing.
He lowered his gaze to his feet. The soles of his canvas shoes made crisp sounds as they stepped on stones.
He could also hear sewage flowing through the channels beneath the ground.
The boy looked around.
See?
How real all of this is.
Ding.
His high-tech wristwatch received a message.
"Officer Wang: Yiguan, everyone's brain has a limit to what it can handle. Considering your current physical condition, the bureau probably won't hire you again. Don't worry..."
The boy frowned slightly.
This is my most important part-time job.
From now on...
My future is uncertain. I could be flat broke at any moment.
At that instant.
The boy's palm began to flicker, giving off a faint glow. Then its flesh tones faded, and the edges of his hand became blue lines, like guidelines in a sketch.
Then.
The quiet, moonlit countryside in his field of vision also began to flicker repeatedly.
The scenery blurred and stretched.
The world was like a monitor running low on power, liable to shut down at any moment.
Blue text began to appear in midair.
[Login time depleted.] [Please log out as soon as possible.]
The boy sighed softly.
Then he made the motion of taking off a helmet, though there was nothing there.
The cool moonlight remained unchanged.
Yet the boy's face and body shattered into blue code, scattering and vanishing like dandelion seeds in the wind!
This scene.
Was astonishingly similar to what had happened outside the concrete house earlier.
The boy's final words echoed through the air.
"Everything can be simulated. This world is no exception, of course."
At the same time.
Inside a somewhat dim apartment.
The boy set aside the neural helmet he had just removed.
He had "logged out" of that world.
Qin Yiguan rose from the couch, drew back the heavy black curtains, opened the window, and looked outside, quietly breathing in the fresh air.
Scattered blue lights shone throughout the city beneath the night sky.
His apartment was in an underdeveloped district.
Countless old metal buildings stood at varying heights, their paint peeling to expose rust. They loomed in one another's shadows, like a city at the end of the world.
A fully automated hover train, long overdue for repairs, streaked across the sky, passing the silver moon.
There was no one on the train, nor anyone on the streets.
Of course, a few caretaker robots might be moving about inside the train or along the distant streets.
Beside the road, a seemingly faulty virtual screen flickered in the gloom, its green date and time digits ticking over.
"Current time."
"August 4, 2122, 20:00:01."
The boy stared at the time, his thoughts seeming to travel a hundred years in an instant.
A hundred years ago.
A company with technology that defied all expectations had turned an imagined technology into reality.
That company was called Gemini.
It had started with VR headsets-virtual reality.
Then came AR headsets-augmented reality.
And now, noninvasive brain-computer interfaces-immersive reality.
Using these devices, people could send their consciousness into a virtual world.
It was called the Gemini Metaverse.
It was not a virtual online game.
It was a twin world, an entirely new way of life.
It also marked the dawn of a new technological era.
When metaverse technology appeared, it was like a spark that set the entire era ablaze. Every technological development could be simulated and tested within the metaverse, then brought into reality for practical use.
Within the metaverse, there were no constraints imposed by physics, space, temperature, chemical elements, or other such factors.
Perfect vacuums, faster-than-light speeds... these were no longer concepts humanity could only contemplate with a wistful sigh.
And so.
During that period, the progress bar of technology, which had always advanced at a steady pace throughout human history, suddenly shot forward.
Thus, fifty years after the metaverse appeared.
Humanity ushered in...
A technological leap.
A revolution in understanding.
The ascension of the world.
Now.
It was the 101st year since the metaverse's birth.
Ninety-seven percent of humanity had switched the world that served as the backdrop to their lives, lying down in nutrient pods and moving entirely into the metaverse.
History recorded it as the "Great Migration."
The boy murmured to himself, "This is a new age. The age of the metaverse, the age of virtual reality!"
The tragic murder of the girl he had just witnessed.
Had indeed happened, just two days earlier, and the crime scene was in the outskirts, only fifteen kilometers away.
It was one of the exceedingly rare offline murders of this era.
Times had changed.
The police no longer needed to mobilize in force, travel to the crime scene, surround it, and cordon everything off as they once had.
The entire investigation could be completed within the Gemini Metaverse.
What he had just seen was, in essence, the metaverse world plus a virtual crime scene plus a simulated murderer.
The world-the Gemini Metaverse, shared by all of humanity.
The crime scene-with the broader environment entirely virtual, the police could easily use their special privileges to simulate a small house and a lifelike girl in a white dress.
The murderer-recreated through Qin Yiguan's condition.
As for everyone involved in the case.
The two police officers and Qin Yiguan only needed to sit on their couches at home and put on their helmets, or simply remain in their nutrient pods, to begin working.
In the metaverse era, even this most basic measure of work efficiency had improved dozens, even hundreds of times over.
In less than twenty minutes, a bizarre murder case had been solved with ease.
The passerby was merely an ordinary resident who happened to be passing through.
Like the rest of humanity, he lived in this world while also looking up at it in awe.
Humanity's second world... created by a company from China.
This technology came with an insurmountable technological barrier. No one could create another like it.
Because of this, China had become the world's leading technological power.
At that moment.
Outside the boy's window lay the city of reality.
It was a forest of steel, a forest of technology, devoid of the warmth of everyday life, devoid of emotion, and even lacking some of its color.
All of this had begun in 2022, when people spent an average of 18.9 percent of their time immersed in their phone screens.
Qin Yiguan did not know whether he should agree with that statement: "The higher a civilization's technological level, the more virtual its world becomes."
But...
Even in such a technological age.
On this twin Earth, the divide between rich and poor, class oppression, overt and covert struggles, the pursuit of fame and fortune, and even ruthless, bloody cruelty remained just as they had always been.
Ever since intelligent humanity had emerged, tens of thousands of years of life and propagation had illustrated one truth.
Technological progress was inevitable.
But human nature.
Was the hardest thing in this world to change.
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