Chapter 182 Native World

This is a real galaxy that is moving slowly!

Shu Fu didn't know why she suddenly came up with such a judgment, but when she stared at the icon, this understanding automatically emerged in her mind.

She stretched out her finger and tapped it lightly. In an instant, everything in front of her eyes began to distort and jump, like a TV screen with problems. She once again felt a weird and unreal feeling.

She remembered clearly that the last time she had this feeling was when she was sitting on the evacuation ship and planning to leave Suicheng with the main force. Later, the ship successfully left the waters of Suicheng, but she was like being sifted out of the ship by an invisible big net and left in the cold and dark water.

And now, she had the same feeling as last time.

After being distracted, she looked around again and found that she was no longer in her Drifting Island house.

This was at the seaside. She was standing on a beach. On the distant horizon, the setting sun was slowly sinking below the waterline. The surroundings were very noisy, with the unique hustle and bustle of the city.

Nearby, the tide rose and fell, and the surging waves hit the beach, bringing something to her feet.

She looked down and found that she was not wearing the clothes she had just worn in the house on the drifting island, but a pair of very short hot pants and a pair of beautiful sandals on her feet. At the same time, she also saw clearly the thing that was brought to her feet by the tide.

It was a drifting bottle, with a transparent bottle filled with azure liquid and a sailboat ornament floating inside.

She remembered that this was where it all started. That evening, the animation company had received investment, and her script outline was finally approved, so the company brought everyone to a dinner at a restaurant by the sea.

She found this drifting bottle while walking on the beach, and took it home because she thought it was beautiful. She put it aside while eating, and then seemed to forget about it. When she thought about it and looked at it again, the drifting bottle was gone. She didn't care, anyway, she had picked it up.

The restaurant where they had dinner was located in a remote place, and the dinner lasted until very late that night, so the company booked rooms in a B&B next to the restaurant, and everyone stayed there that day.

The morning when she awakened her memories of her native world in Suicheng, her last memory of her native world was at this point in time. She always thought that she traveled directly to this world after falling asleep that night.

It was not until later, when Lu Zheng and Chen Fa woke up one by one, that she discovered that she had lost a piece of her memory.

So is she now standing in her past memories, or are the lost memories returning to her mind?

Everything around her felt very real to her. Shu Fu bent down and reached out to the bottle at her feet. When her fingertips touched the bottle, everything in her sight began to twist again. In an instant, a large number of images rushed towards her, enveloping her in an instant like a tide.

…

This is indeed the beginning of everything, but this is not the beginning of her journey through time.

Not only did she lose her memory, she lost three whole years of her memory.

Something did happen that night, but she did not travel through time that night. When those things happened, no one would have thought that they would lead to such serious consequences.

After that, she successfully completed the animation script for the first season of "Aqua Planet". The team then started working, and it took more than a year from promotion to launch.

This past year has been the most tiring and busiest year, but fortunately, hard work pays off. After "Aquatic Planet" was launched, it became very popular because of the ups and downs of the characters and the endless disasters in the plot. In addition, the production team was very reliable, and the visual effects were extremely realistic, which made it a phenomenal cartoon that became a hit on the Internet that year.

Even people who have never watched cartoons before will click in because they like disaster films or are attracted by the behind-the-scenes footage of disasters during promotions.

There were other companies that wanted to work with them, mainly for the special effects scenes, and wanted to work with the animation production team, but many matters in the later stages were completed by the company's boss Chen Fang, who found another team, and people in the company didn't know much about it.

Despite the endless glory, no one in the company paid much attention to some details. The company made huge profits, and she also won the Best Screenwriter Award, becoming a first-line screenwriter.

The following year was her most successful year. She collaborated with two film production teams and completed two live-action films.

Not long after the film with a short production cycle was released, it caught up with the film festival. She won the Best Screenplay Award again. She was the talk of the town for a while. She knew all the big names in the circle. The artists were also kind to her and would politely call her Teacher Shu every time they met her.

In the third year, she set a new plan for herself and planned to go back to produce the second season of "Water Planet".

When she wrote the script for "Aquatic Planet", she left an open ending. This is a common practice. Disaster films or science fiction films like this usually leave a suspense at the end. If the film is popular when it is broadcast in the future, there will naturally be new investors willing to invest large sums of money to continue filming the second part.

For her, this time she will have more say in the collaboration, and things like anyone being able to interfere and make decisions when writing the outline of the first season's script will never happen again.

Drastic changes also occurred in this year. At first, there were frequent natural disasters, typhoons and rainstorms. The heavy rains caused large-scale mudslides and floods, and thunderstorms and hail. The severity of the disasters broke the disaster records of previous years time and time again.

However, at this stage, the public has not yet noticed anything unusual. They just think that the planetary environment is not as good as before and that there are more disasters.

But soon, the severity of disasters in various places increased significantly, and many cities that had rarely experienced disasters in the past also experienced natural disasters that broke historical records.

Then, disorderly disasters began to occur.

The so-called disorderly disaster refers to a disaster that is completely inconsistent with the planet's climate and ecological logic. For example, a coastal city located on a wide continental shelf encountered a tsunami tens of meters high without warning; a country's desert suddenly snowed and the temperature plummeted by 30 degrees in one day; a dormant volcano on an island country that had not erupted for hundreds of years suddenly erupted, and the islanders were unprepared, and the erupting volcano destroyed several surrounding cities...

When people all over the world were in panic, someone came to Shu Fu.

She was stopped by the other party in the underground parking lot of the company. She was wearing a mask and a hat and suddenly rushed out. After the mask was pulled down, a haggard face was revealed. Probably due to lack of rest and sleep, the woman's mental state looked very bad.

She told Shu Fu that her relative had been missing for more than 30 days. A few days ago, she finally found him. She wanted him to come back, but she couldn't save him. But she felt that Shu Fu could do what she couldn't do!

Shu Fu initially thought she had run into a lunatic. Perhaps the recent frequent and disorderly disasters had frightened her, or perhaps her family members had died in the recent disasters, and she had been so devastated that she had gone mad...

Shu Fu's first reaction was to call the police and let them handle the matter.

But the woman held her hand and told her that only she could solve this problem and only she could save her family because that’s where she found him - in the cartoon "Aquatic Planet", and she was the screenwriter of "Aquatic Planet", and the whole story was created by her, so she must have a way to save him!

The woman looked at her with red eyes, which were full of despair and pleading. She was clearly saying some incomprehensible crazy words, but the seriousness in her eyes made Shu Fu feel creepy.

Shu Fu struggled to break free from the other person, returned to the car and called the police, but when the police arrived, the woman had disappeared.

There was no dashcam installed in her car. Although there was a surveillance camera nearby, it only captured the woman's back due to the angle. In addition, she wore a mask before stopping the car and when leaving, so there was no way to investigate further.

The police asked her to be careful when going out, after all, the world is not peaceful now. Many cities are in turmoil due to frequent disorderly disasters.

After that, Shu Fu saw the woman twice more on the street corner outside the apartment complex. She seemed to be targeting her, but both times she didn't find a chance to stop her car.

Later on, she no longer cared about this woman because even she herself realized that something was wrong.

**

Those frequent disasters seem to be somewhat similar to the disasters that occurred in the early stage of "Water Planet". In fact, all disasters are similar, whether it is heavy rain and typhoons, hail and thunderstorms, floods and tsunamis... and all the chain disasters caused by these disasters.

If it weren't for the strange woman mentioning "Water Planet", she wouldn't have noticed it at first.

Because of the targeted attention, she soon discovered that someone had posted a similar post on the exclusive website of "Water Planet".

Today we live in a scientific and civilized society where atheism is flourishing. Many people want to attribute these similarities to coincidence, but some people have begun to compare the disasters in reality with those in "Water Planet" one by one, and have made a large number of comparison posts.

These posts sparked a certain amount of heated discussion, and people who have watched "Aquatic Planet" were discussing this strange coincidence. However, discussions were discussions, and most people, even the few people who made comparison posts, did not take it seriously.

These posts were blocked by the administrator not long after.

If she didn't have administrative privileges on the website and searched on purpose, she wouldn't even know these posts had appeared.

At the same time, another thing was slowly fermenting and spreading.

No one knows when it started, but the number of missing incidents and missing people is increasing in cities around the world. These disappearances, like disasters, must have been happening for some time, but they did not attract people's attention at first.

Even now, not many people pay attention to this matter.

The reason why she noticed it was because she checked with a purpose.

But looking at the world as a whole, there is too much missing persons information on the Internet and it is too messy. She searched for several days but couldn't find any useful information.

Finally, she went to the website of "Water Planet" and found some posts that had been blocked, just like before.

Someone posted that he saw an animated character in the cartoon "Aqua Planet" who looked similar to his missing family.

There are not many similar posts this time. Although "Aquatic Planet" became a hit, that was more than a year ago. As an animated disaster film, even if it becomes a hit online, it is impossible for it to attract attention for too long in this Internet age where there are new hot topics every day.

Someone in the family is missing, and the family members of the missing person happen to see "Aquatic Planet" afterwards, and at the same time notice a character in the cartoon, and have to confirm this fact and know how to post on the Internet. With these several factors combined, the percentage of discovering this situation is very low.

The person even posted screenshots of the animation and photos of his missing family.

The animation effects in "Aquatic Planet" are relatively realistic. They are not the kind of animations with exaggerated distorted proportions. The same goes for the characters. Even with the animation effects, people can tell their different appearances apart.

The comparison photos that person posted were indeed very similar. It was precisely because of the photos that this post sparked a certain amount of heated discussion before it was blocked.

Soon after, other people posted similar posts and comparison photos. There weren’t many of them, about five or six. I don’t know if they were trying to join in the fun or if the same thing really happened.

"Aquatic Planet" has a group of protagonists, both male and female, with complicated relationships. It strives to highlight the human nature in the big background based on a single disaster.

Moreover, the official script of "Aquatic Planet" is earlier than the outline timeline finalized by Shu Fu. The story begins in peacetime and will also focus on the early disasters. This is also to better introduce the original life and background of several protagonists so that the audience can be more involved.

Most of the posts that posted comparison photos focused on scenes from the pre-disaster period, and many of them only showed one shot, showing the person as one of a group of people.

However, after opening those comparison photos, there are similar ones, but also completely unrelated ones. Although everyone is discussing and participating enthusiastically, and terms such as doomsday and infinite flow appear in the replies, they are basically just there to join in the fun and joke, and no one takes what is said seriously.

Or maybe, there are people behind this who really believe this, like the woman who once stopped her car, but such individual voices are drowned out by all kinds of joke posts with well-reasoned science fiction wording and professional analysis, and appear very inconspicuous, and she has no way of telling the truth from the false.

However, many people became angry because of these posts, condemning the production company of "Aquatic Planet" for deliberately creating topics and discussion points, and questioning whether they would resort to any means and sensationalism to carry out pre-promotion in this way in order to produce the second season of "Aquatic Planet".

The people who posted these messages remembered similar disaster events that had sparked discussion on the site before, so they put the two together, which seemed to further prove that all of this was the work of the production company itself for the purpose of publicity.

For a time, the focus and criticism shifted to the production company, or even the production team within the company. Some people also mentioned the screenwriter Shu Fu.

Because these posts caused a certain amount of negative discussion and abuse, they were eventually blocked.

Shu Fu couldn't find any more information. The only thing that was certain was that the missing people that had appeared online recently did not have any relevant information captured by any surveillance cameras at the time of their disappearance. There were no unusual clues, and nothing seemed out of place.

**

Shu Fu didn't go out during that period. Because of these things, the script writing for the second season of "Water Planet" was almost completely stalled. Deep down, she didn't want to believe those posts on the website, but soon, missing people appeared among the people she knew.

The details are exactly the same as those mentioned in the previous post. The missing person disappeared when he was alone. There were no witnesses and no clues were captured by any cameras. The police, like before, could not find any useful clues.

Although the investigation yielded no results, this incident caused a big stir because the missing person was a new female director who had worked with her on a live-action film last year.

Although Shu Fu didn't want to believe it, she had to find out the truth. She locked herself in her house, took the director's photo, and started watching "Water Planet" again, comparing all the characters in it one by one.

This is a very time-consuming job. After the first day, she felt that this was not a good idea as it was a waste of time and comparing with the eyes was not accurate. So she found a friend and asked him to make a small software to extract the faces of all the characters that appeared in "Water Planet" and then let the computer compare them by itself.

This is actually not difficult, because in such cartoons, when setting up the characters, except for the protagonist, supporting roles, and passers-by who have roles to play, all other crowd images have a template. Just by slightly adjusting the hairstyle, clothes, and skin color on this template, the same face can be used as a crowd in another scene.

She waited anxiously for the result, and finally the software displayed "match failed", which meant that the missing female director she knew did not appear in the picture of "Water Planet".

But at this time, she did not relax. She was a person with a very meticulous mind. Once she began to doubt something, she would never end it easily.

If the missing person really entered the world of "Water Planet" as the woman said, he or she would not necessarily appear in the entire animation, because the camera only depicts a part of the scene, which is actually relatively narrow. Outside the camera, inside "Water Planet", there are other wider-angle worlds.

She needs more research.

So she used the software to compare all the photos of missing persons previously posted on the website.

Indeed, there are several missing persons whose images do not match the characters in the animations they posted, but there are also two who look almost exactly the same.

These two animated characters are both members of a group portrait. They only appear once from beginning to end, and the first one only appears for two or three seconds. There is too little comparison data to support the result.

Another animated character had continuous footage, which was a highlight of the disaster, lasting about 20 seconds. The result of this comparison was particularly obvious. This animated character and the missing person posted on the post had the same details as the clothes and hairstyle, facial features and body shape.

What made Shu Fu feel even more horrified was that she remembered this part of the plot very clearly, because she had discussed it during the original production, but now the route, expressions and movements of this group of characters when they were escaping had all changed!

In this plot where many animated characters are running for survival, this is a very inconspicuous change, but she remembered that in the online version of "Aquatic Planet", this person should have clearly looked at the huge waves of the tsunami drowning him after falling down.

But now he suddenly changed lanes, rushed onto a car on the side of the road, and climbed onto the roof of a nearby shop using the height of the car... However, the tsunami waves were too high, and he ultimately could not escape the attack of the waves...

The outcome of death has not changed, but the process has become different!

This process has never appeared in any version. The animation scenes of extras are very short, unlike the protagonist, who usually will not be changed once the decision is made.

She watched this scene over and over again, and that creepy feeling came back to her again.

It’s as if... this NPC whose fate was originally set suddenly had its own self, made different judgments in the disaster, and took a different course of action!

In other words, this NPC is like being replaced by a real human being in reality!

Could it be that those missing people really entered the world of "Water Planet"? And just as she judged, the reason why some missing people were not found in the animation was because they were somewhere else outside the camera, trapped in the depths of this world...

When she realized this, Shu Fu felt as if she had been hit hard on the back of her head with a hammer. She felt a buzzing in her ears and felt a huge sense of panic and dizziness.

How is this possible!?

Why did such an unscientific incident occur!

What happened to "Water Planet"?

What's the problem?

No! She forced herself to calm down in the confusion and panic.

This is not right!

Regardless of whether there are really missing people who have entered the "Water Planet" animation to replace a certain NPC, just the fact that the original plot trajectory has been changed is impossible for no one else to have noticed! At least those who posted the comparison pictures should have noticed it, but why no one mentioned it before?

She quickly went to the production company and found the people from the original team. She first showed them the task comparison chart, and then played this part of the plot.

Several colleagues gathered around at the same time. They didn’t understand why Shu Fu looked so bad. After seeing it, everyone thought it was a coincidence. After all, the animated character and the photo of the missing person did look very similar.

But no one mentioned the most crucial plot until she asked. However, the people from the production team looked at her in confusion and asked her why she asked that. Wasn't the plot of this short animation character like this?

Shu Fu looked at their puzzled and self-righteous expressions. A chill slowly spread from her back and penetrated into her brain bit by bit, making her hands and feet cold and her whole body frozen.

She finally understood why no one had mentioned this in the posts on the website before today.

Their memory of "Water Planet"...seems to be wrong.

**

Is it that there is something wrong with other people's memory of "Water Planet" or is there something wrong with her memory of "Water Planet"?

She did not have much time to think and react, as disasters around the world soon escalated again, and even the city where she lived began to be hit by heavy rain, thunderstorms and hail.

The disappearances continued to occur, and among the missing people, someone she knew appeared again.

She was an actress, whom she had met at a celebration party. She was introduced to her by the previously missing female director. They got along very well and had agreed to work together after she finished the second season of "Aquatic Planet".

But now, these two people have disappeared one after another.

This time it was even more strange, as she disappeared in the RV where she was resting.

Someone can prove that she never got out of the car after she got in. When the assistant realized something was wrong and went to look for her, he found that there was no one in the car.

In other words, she disappeared out of thin air.

Shu Fu couldn't sit and wait any longer, so this time, she went directly to the villa of Chen Fang, the owner of the production company.

Chen Fang's villa is also half an office location. When they were working together on the "Aquatic Planet" project, people from their team would often come to his house for meetings. She even knew the password to his house, but after the project was completed, the two sides had fewer opportunities to meet.

The last time they met was when both parties decided to develop the second season of "Aquatic Planet". She wanted to find him several times after that, but her assistant told her that he had gone to a sanatorium to recuperate due to health reasons and did not want to be disturbed for the time being.

This time she heard from the production company that Chen Fang seemed to be back, and considering the recent events, she decided to have a good talk with him.

However, when he arrived, Shu Fu found the villa in a mess, and she was packing her things in the mess, as if she was preparing to travel far away. When he saw her, he was obviously a little flustered, and when he knew that she came here for the matter of "Water Planet", his expression became even more strange and inexplicable.

The two looked at each other, and Shu Fu found that he looked haggard and thinner, with sunken cheeks, dark circles under his eyes, messy hair, and casual clothes. He didn't look like someone who had just returned from a sanatorium.

At first, Chen Fang just sent her away and continued to pack up, refusing to say anything until she opened her mouth and told him directly what she had discovered.

——The disaster in "Water Planet" appeared in reality, and the people in reality entered "Water Planet", replacing some of the originally set NPCs, and some even changed the original plot trajectory.

She had told the production team about this, but no one believed her. She had reached a dead end. If she continued, she would start to think she was crazy...

However, when she finished speaking, the busy man suddenly stopped. He slowly turned his head and looked at her in shock and strangeness: "You, you know? You also remember the original plot trajectory?"

Shu Fu felt her scalp tingling when she met that look, but she didn't hesitate and immediately got to the point: "You know that too? So, shouldn't I know that?"

Chen Fang refused to speak at first and then looked away.

No matter how she asked, he kept his mouth shut.

Later, he told her not to pursue the matter, because he didn't tell her because he wanted to save her! If she wanted to live, she should pack up her things and move to an inland highland city like him while there was still time, find a safe place to live, and store as much water as possible, maybe she could live longer...

But she had finally found someone who had discovered the same problem as her, so how could she give up so easily?

I don’t know if it was because he was annoyed by her questioning and that affected his decision to pack up and run away, or if it was because he had been hiding this matter for too long and had been panicking alone for too long, so he needed an outlet to talk, but she finally pried him open.

"Well, since you're not afraid of death, I'll tell you! That's not a cartoon anymore, not from the beginning! Why are those animation effects so realistic? How could a small company like ours have enough funds to make it?

Because it's all real! Water Planet - it's activated!"

As he spoke, Chen Fang's expression gradually became crazy, "That thing! Yes! The drifting bottle you picked up! It's not a drifting bottle at all!... The thing inside it is alive, it will talk to you in your mind! It said it is... System TK... It said it likes the setting of this disaster world very much, and can make it a real world - as long as I use the reality simulator, I can activate the "Water Planet" and make it a low-latitude world...

After the story is formed, the disaster scene of that world will be automatically generated... Everyone will be shocked by the realistic disaster special effects scene, my company will achieve unprecedented success, and "Water Planet" will go down in history... I really wanted to succeed at that time, I just tried... I didn't expect all this to actually happen..."

…

From Chen Fang's messy narration, Shu Fu gradually pieced together the whole story.

There is something called a system that allowed Chen Fang to use a reality simulator for "Water Planet", turning a completely virtual animated disaster film into a real low-latitude disaster world in another time and space.

And now, this low-dimensional disaster world and the real world they live in are dislocated and overlapped. The disaster in that world has affected reality, and the people in reality have entered the disaster world.

They did not enter accidentally, but were selected by the system, which made them taskers.

It is impossible for them to leave the disaster world - or the mission world - before completing the mission.

The two worlds are entangled with each other. Now is just the beginning, and the disaster will be even more serious in the future.

The other party didn't know what the final result would be. It was very likely to become a flood-affected apocalyptic world like "Water Planet", so he had to take advantage of the time and quickly run to a relatively safe plateau city to live...

When things started to get out of control, he thought about stopping them, but the situation of the others was the same as what Shu Fu had discovered here. They didn't remember the original plot trajectory of "Water Planet", and those few individual faces that looked similar couldn't prove anything.

He tried to tell someone else the whole story, and that person believed it. But the scary thing was that not long after he told the other person, the other person disappeared and became a member of the missing list...

He initially thought it was a coincidence and told another person, who then also disappeared.

He began to feel scared and called the police, but in the end, he was put in a mental hospital...

He was locked up in a mental hospital for a whole month. At first he insisted on his statement and resisted, but he was only tied up, drugged and put in solitary confinement. Staying in such a place made him feel that he would go crazy even if he was not sick, so he quickly learned his lesson, admitted that he was sick, cooperated with the treatment, and pretended to recover slowly.

Later, his assistant came to visit him, and he asked the other party to find a way to arrange for his discharge as soon as possible. After both parties cooperated, he finally escaped from the mental hospital a month later.

Shu Fu finally understood why he looked like this after a month of recuperation. It turned out that he didn't go to a sanatorium at all, but was locked up in a mental hospital.

According to Chen Fang, if the insider believed it, he would disappear; if he did not believe it, Chen Fang himself might be in big trouble.

So it doesn't make any sense to say or not say anything about this matter, because it can't change anything. He was trapped there for a month and now he doesn't want to care about anything and just wants to leave as soon as possible.

But at this time, how could Shu Fu let him leave like this?

Since this incident was caused by him, he must have a way to stop it.

She asked him about the whereabouts of the reality simulator, how exactly he was using it, and was there any way to stop using it and prevent all this?

However, the man who had been talking incessantly before suddenly became speechless after hearing this. He started to pack his things again, saying that he was late for the train, and then he said that he had a stomachache and wanted to go to the bathroom.

The more he did this, the more Shu Fu would not let him go.

The other party really had to catch a train, and she pestered him so much that he couldn't pack his things. In his anxiety, he finally said, "It's always been with you!"

"What?"

"It's been on that computer you've been using all along! The new computer I gave you after you started writing the script and your old computer broke down—that matte silver laptop!"