Part 3
Lu Xunye waved his arms at Shen Yunqian, who was returning from the corner, and broke into a smile. Ignoring his pounding heart, he shouted to the other:
“I’m here! Shen Yunqian, I like you! Not ‘Lu Xunye’! It’s me! I like you!”
[Host mental body damage value: 8. Initiating protective measures. Current mission progress: 99.5%. Target emotional threshold reached. Fifth preliminary judgment failed. Host consciousness will be extracted in one minute, and this quest memory will be erased.]
[Countdown: 59]
He didn’t see the light screen glowing with a faint red light that suddenly appeared above his head.
After shouting those words, he felt an inexplicable sense of relief, like a soul trapped in a magical tool finally being released. His mind and body had never felt so light.
He was sure Shen Yunqian could hear him, but Shen Yunqian just looked in his direction, his footing seemingly unstable. He stumbled and leaned against the wall beside him.
Lu Xunye instinctively reached out in concern, only to realize he couldn’t move a single step. He was frozen in place like a wooden puppet.
Suddenly, the sound of a ticking stopwatch began… faster and faster. The wind grew quiet, and the surroundings turned silent.
Except for… the figure of Shen Yunqian running toward him.
Until—Bang!
[Countdown: 12. Congratulations, Host, mission successful.]
The gunshot roared. Lu Xunye snapped out of a dull pain in his back and turned his head to see Si Jinyan in the dark passage, pointing a gun at him.
His hands gripped the clothes of the person on top of him, feeling warm breath against his ear.
The pounding of his heart hit his eardrums repeatedly. Lu Xunye slowly lost the strength to grip. The world seemed to grow quieter.
“This time… I saved you…” Shen Yunqian’s cold fingertips traced Lu Xunye’s face to behind his ear. “Remember me…”
The weight pressed down. Lu Xunye’s mind went blank. His eyes widened in horror as he murmured, “Shen Yunqian.”
VIP Ward
The youth adjusting the equipment only turned his head slightly when he heard the door open. Seeing the figure, he continued organizing his things.
“It’s been a week since he was transferred from the holographic pod to a regular ward. It shouldn’t be like this. Why hasn’t he woken up yet?”
Gu Qingyi retracted his gaze from the pale, sleeping face of the youth on the bed. He familiarly leaned on the youth standing by the monitor and shook him. “Old Ji, say something?”
The youth glanced at him, shrugged off his hand, and moved away. “Get away.”
“Are you still holding a grudge because I used your name? Are you really that petty? I just used it on a whim; how was I to know the R&D department would adopt it? Besides, I didn’t give you some melodramatic role. That’s all on R&D.”
Gu Qingyi scurried over to stand before the youth with a serious expression.
“Once the clinical trials pass, this will be a major breakthrough in combining holographic pods and medicine. The probability of people with brain injuries waking from a coma will greatly increase. What a huge honor it is to have your name remembered for this.”
The chance of an external stimulus waking a person in a vegetative state was one in ten thousand. These patients were divided into two types: conscious and unconscious. The cause was usually physical brain damage or a defense mechanism.
Patients with no perception of the outside world couldn’t receive external stimuli. In plain terms, this technology created a dream for the patient. It worked directly from the inside, making them forget themselves and become a blank slate, then slowly rebuilding their self.
By generating huge emotional, mental, and cognitive fluctuations, the brain would be stimulated to achieve the goal of awakening.
The success rate was high, but so were the risks. The technology wasn’t perfect; it couldn’t fully derive a mental world equal to reality.
Machines weren’t as precise as the human brain. Even a programmed script was rigid and singular. For someone with a brain injury, staying in such an environment for a long time might result in them being assimilated by the script.
The initial world would only run according to the code, rigid and singular.
But to wake the patient, the mental world needed to be flexible and adaptable to handle any “off-script” behavior and adjust to changes in the world. To prevent the patient from noticing anything unusual, it had to rely on a human’s mental will.
But you couldn’t expect a person in a vegetative state to have strong mental power, could you? Otherwise, they wouldn’t be in a vegetative state.
Therefore, Ji Huixu had no intention of buying into his grand promises.
“…Alright.” He lowered his head in defeat. “I just thought your name sounded so nice. Ji Huixu… forgive me~”
His final move: “You know that the direction of the world framework is just a few simple settings. The major nodes don’t change, but the specific details are influenced by the user’s subconscious.”
Gu Qingyi pointed to the person on the bed. “I just borrowed your name. Besides, there are so many people with the same name in the world. It’s just his subconscious that used your face. Why don’t you scold him?”
Ji Huixu let out an angry laugh. “You think that’s why I’m angry?”
Gu Qingyi was puzzled. “What else?”
“Auntie Jiang was called a medical genius when she was young. She dabbled in this project years ago but gave it up. Although I don’t know why you restarted this project…” Ji Huixu’s face darkened. “But this technology currently has no clinical data for reference. The internal tests were fine because those people were normal and conscious.”
“But what about him? What if he never wakes up…? In short, you’re taking too much of a risk.”
“But there was no other way.” Gu Qingyi sounded a bit aggrieved. “Two months ago, he went mountain climbing out of spite, fell off a cliff, and hit his head on a rock. He barely survived. The doctors said he wouldn’t wake up. Normal medical methods couldn’t save him.”
“Luckily, the experimental team’s technology has improved a lot compared to three years ago. We were just one step away. I was confident. Besides, it wasn’t just me, there was also… forget it. Anyway, the result couldn’t have been worse.”
“Don’t give me that. If Siheng wakes up and finds out you used him as a lab rat for clinical trials, how do you plan to explain it to him?”
“Tsk, that is a bit tricky.” Gu Qingyi reconsidered. “But I did help him quite a bit… that should balance it out?”
“You mean the ‘help’ where you made him pursue an NPC and gave him electric shocks if he failed?”
“Who said that was an NPC?” Gu Qingyi crossed his arms and stared at the unconscious person on the bed, a mischievous smile curling his lips. “That is… the creditor.”
“Gu Qingyi.” Ji Huixu asked him seriously, “What exactly are you hiding from me?”
“That is… a secret of heaven.”
“Si Jinyan!”
Bang! Gu Jiang lunged at Si Jinyan, knocking away the gun the other had snatched from his hand. But he was ultimately a step too late.
Blood flowed steadily from the wound on his wrist where it had been cut during the struggle.
His head was ringing uncontrollably. Seeing the scene in the distance, his eyes instantly turned bloodshot.
His limbs felt weak as Si Jinyan grabbed him by the collar and slammed him against the wall, followed by an unexpected punch to the face.
“Why the f*ck are you stopping me?! Do you know that if I’d been just two seconds faster, I could have killed that man first! Shen Yunji!”
Si Jinyan was drenched in a cold sweat of lingering fear, trying his best to stop his hands from shaking.
The thought of killing Lu Xunye had once controlled and occupied his body. A voice kept telling him that all the abnormal and uncontrollable things in his life were because of Lu Xunye. As long as he killed him, everything could return to normal.
He had left in a daze and seen Shen Yunji running. Without knowing how, he’d ended up fighting him, snatching the gun, and aiming it at Lu Xunye.
Only when Shen Yunji called his name did he snap out of it. But at that moment, he saw a man in another corner wearing a black baseball cap and a mask, holding a gun.
A second before he pulled the trigger, he had changed direction and hit that man.
But he hadn’t expected that man also wanted to kill Lu Xunye. He certainly hadn’t expected Shen Yunji to take a bullet for Lu Xunye. And now, he was despicably venting his emotions on Shen Yunji.
He clutched the black recording pen in his palm, looking at Shen Yunji’s hollow, soul-like expression.
Yet Si Jinyan felt no joy in his successful revenge. “The people I hate are all dead… Shen Yunji, I want you to live.”
The last thing Si Jinyan heard was: [Ding! Underlying code error. NPC has broken free from data control.]
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