Shen Ning thought of the look Fu Songcheng had given her when he learned the truth—anger, unwillingness, resentment. She thought, better not drain the pond to catch all the fish.
Shen Ning took a deep breath. “Once the system updates, fix this bug. Don’t make the data public.”
The subordinates exchanged glances and nodded one after another, counting themselves as having survived the punishment for this mistake.
…
Inside the game.
Evening, the rest area’s training room.
Fu Songcheng had just finished a high-intensity combat training session with Yu Huaiting.
Sweat slid down the sharply defined lines of his muscles, dripping onto the gray training mat.
Yu Huaiting sat on the equipment beside him as if nothing had happened, idly tossing Fu Songcheng’s dagger in his hand, his gaze hooked and stuck dead on Fu Songcheng’s waist and abdomen.
Beep—
The terminal set aside lit up.
Fu Songcheng took a towel and wiped his hands, then opened the message.
[Chen Muhuai: Engineer Fu, I’ve gotten in touch with a few old colleagues from the company who are still alive. We’re all in the rest area now, thinking of getting together and meeting up. At the D-zone tea bar. Coming?]
Looking at this message, Fu Songcheng’s taut nerves relaxed a little.
He was just about to reply “Sure, be right there” when Yu Huaiting, who’d leaned in at some point, rested his chin on Fu Songcheng’s shoulder and stared at the name on the screen.
“I’m coming too.”
“Fine, fine, fine. Come along, bring you with me.”
Fu Songcheng shook his head helplessly and picked up the jacket beside him to put on.
Only then did Yu Huaiting’s expression improve. He kept grumbling relentlessly: “I want to hold an umbrella outside waiting for you, and then suddenly it starts pouring rain, and I just watch you coldly, and then I tell you—you step one inch past the wall, I move the wall one inch; you step one foot past, I move the wall one zhang.”
Fu Songcheng was walking down the corridor when he heard this line and couldn’t help laughing out loud. “Where in the rest area would it rain?”
Where in the game’s rest area would it rain?
Here there was no cycling of seasons, no wind or frost or rain or snow.
Here the sky was forever azure blue, switching to a starry sky at night.
Here there was only sunny, cloudy, day, night.
No changeable climate of the real world, no earthy dampness, no cool breeze after rain.
They were like insects kept in a giant glass tank, every move on display for others.
Yu Huaiting suddenly strode forward and blocked Fu Songcheng’s path. He cupped Fu Songcheng’s face with both hands, pulling his gaze back to himself, and complained with exaggerated tone: “Hey! Is the point whether it rains?! Why didn’t you retort just now that you’d never step past the wall?! Are you already scheming in your heart to go see Chen Muhuai?!”
Fu Songcheng looked at Yu Huaiting’s face, so close at hand, deliberately putting on a show of being frantic with anger—he knew Yu Huaiting was diverting his attention.
The puppy was clever. He knew how to make his master angry, and how to make his master happy.
He took a deep breath and followed Yu Huaiting’s thread: “You never gave me the chance to step past the wall anyway.”
Yu Huaiting gave a satisfied humph.
After a quick wash, the two appeared punctually at the D-zone tea room.
The place was decorated somewhat like a real-world café.
At the booth in the corner, Chen Muhuai was already sitting, along with several familiar faces.
Seeing Fu Songcheng approach, the group stood up one after another to greet him.
“Engineer Fu, over here!”
Chen Muhuai waved, and when he saw Yu Huaiting behind Fu Songcheng—eyes like a starving wolf guarding its food—he smiled knowingly.
Seeing the two of them all lovey-dovey, the others didn’t react much.
Morality, ethics, worldly approval and disapproval—before life and death, none of it was worth mentioning. Today you could still sit together drinking tea; tomorrow you might be a pile of rotting flesh.
So, regarding the relationship between these two men, everyone quickly accepted the arrangement, and a few colleagues even teased them with a couple of congratulatory remarks.
“Finding a boyfriend in this hellhole, Engineer Fu—you’re the envy of everyone.”
An old colleague named Wang Lan said with a bitter smile.
Fu Songcheng gave a faint smile and pulled the snickering Yu Huaiting down to sit. “How’s everyone been lately?”
The group sat around together and ordered a few cups of tea, as natural as when they used to sneak a break in the company tea room between afternoon work.
Only the topic had shifted from the trivialities of work to their instance experiences.
“Last instance, I really almost died in there. There was a robot chasing me with a blade…”
One colleague described it with lingering fear.
“Who hasn’t? And now the system’s even announcing the death count—watching that number drop, I feel my heartbeat stopping along with it.”
As they chatted, the atmosphere gradually warmed, though it was mixed with hard-to-hide panic.
At this point, a colleague named Si Yi sitting next to Chen Muhuai, seemingly caught up in the conversation.
He’d been a technical backbone at the company—quick-witted, but sometimes with no filter on his mouth.
He lowered his voice and leaned forward mysteriously, his gaze sweeping over the group. “Hey, let me tell you something—I found a system loophole.”
Fu Songcheng’s fingers holding the teacup jolted to a stop. Yu Huaiting too instantly narrowed his eyes, every muscle in his body reflexively tensing.
Everything Fu Songcheng and Yu Huaiting did in public areas was constantly exposed to Source Star viewers’ eyes. For Si Yi to say this in front of them was no different from a self-detonating truck.
Si Yi didn’t notice the subtle shift in atmosphere. “You all know the system requires us to forcibly enter an instance once a week, but I…”
Fu Songcheng suddenly laughed, his voice loud, his eyes fixed straight on Si Yi. “Si Yi, are you drinking tea or liquor? You haven’t even had a drink—how are you already drunk?”
Si Yi was taken aback by this sudden reprimand and was just about to retort “I’m not drunk, what I said is true.”
But when he looked up and met Fu Songcheng’s eyes, he forcibly swallowed his words.
Fu Songcheng’s gaze was extremely frightening.
On the surface he was smiling, but beneath was a cold warning and pressure—the terrifying aura of someone long in power at a life-and-death moment.
Si Yi had, after all, struggled in the workplace and had once worked with Fu Songcheng at the company; he knew this supervisor’s character well.
Fu Songcheng never made pointless jokes like this. For him to suddenly flare up like this, there must be an extremely serious reason.
Though Si Yi didn’t know about the cameras, his instincts sensed danger.
He reacted extremely fast, immediately putting on an awkward, exaggerated drunken act, going along with it and rubbing his temples, deliberately slurring his tongue: “Aiyo, President Fu, look at this brain of mine, really… lately the instances have scared me into hallucinations. I’m not drunk! I can still drink! Come on, tea instead of liquor, cheers!”
As he spoke, he raised his teacup, his hand trembling slightly as he clinked Chen Muhuai’s cup.
Though the other colleagues were somewhat baffled, seeing Fu Songcheng’s expression, they all wisely didn’t press further on the so-called “bug,” and chimed in with laughs, raising their cups.
“You’re just too stressed, dreaming nonsense. How could the system have such an easy bug.”
A fatal crisis was temporarily covered up amid a few seemingly casual laughs and chats.
The bug Si Yi mentioned—if it was real—would be of great value to Dawn, even to humanity.
But he couldn’t ask himself, nor could he let Yu Huaiting ask.
A bug is a bug because it hasn’t been discovered yet.
Fu Songcheng could only go through Chen Ke—using his encrypted communication skill—to bypass those Source Star people’s surveillance and find out the truth.
But Chen Ke was still in an instance.
Leave a Reply