Chapter 200: Disheartened
The next day.
As agreed, Qiao Susu came to the cafe to meet Ye Xi.
She arrived half an hour early, found the red velvet sofa, put a recorder in the tissue box, and then walked to the bookstore across the street to wait for the agreed time.
The clock points to two o'clock.
Qiao Suisui entered the cafe on time and saw someone already sitting on the red sofa.
She was a girl who looked to be in her early twenties, very thin, with short hair, pretty features, simple dress, and black-framed glasses.
She walked over and sat opposite.
When Ye Xi saw Qiao Susu, his eyes were filled with indescribable excitement.
"You're here. I thought you weren't coming."
Qiao Suisui asked as if to confirm, "Ye Xi?"
"It's me." Ye Xi pinched her fingers nervously, and it was obvious that she was not very good at dealing with people.
"How did you find me?" Qiao Susu asked straight to the point.
Ye Xi didn't expect her to be so direct. She adjusted her glasses with her hand and said, "This is not difficult for me." Then she explained a long list of operating procedures mixed with professional terms. Qiao Susu didn't quite understand and asked some questions. The two chatted for a while, and Qiao Susu learned some information.
Ye Xi is a hacker who usually stays at home and enjoys the anime world. The most exercise she gets in a day is going downstairs to take out the trash. She has been self-taught since middle school, and because of her extraordinary talent in computer science, she has now been hired as an exception by a foreign gaming company.
"What do you mean when you say you are player number 1?" asked Qiao Susu.
Ye Xi pondered for a while before saying, "I wrote this game."
She held the coffee cup in both hands, lowered her head, and unconsciously exerted a little pressure on her fingers. "I just feel so lonely. I want someone to love me." Her voice was soft. She looked up at Qiao Suisui, as if to confirm whether she was laughing at her.
".Initially, INF Company approached me and asked me to be the main creator of the game and to integrate their company's high-tech technology to allow players to experience an immersive experience.
I think this is a great idea. Initially, I just treated the world I created as a game. I wanted someone to listen to me and play with me. But as I spent more and more time in that world, I found myself starting to lose the distinction between reality and the game. I even wanted that world to be reality.
So I've been constantly refining every plant and tree in the game, achieving unparalleled realism, maximizing the degree of freedom, and imbuing each character with the most authentic life. They aren't just cold, cold keywords; I've coded each character's backstory. Each one has a complete trajectory, and their personalities and thoughts have completely transcended my preconceptions; they've truly experienced, lived, and felt.
Gradually, I found that they were giving birth to themselves.”
Qiao Susu felt that all this was a bit ridiculous, but as one of the players, she knew clearly that Ye Xi did not lie to her.
"So you ended the game and logged me out?"
"No." Ye Xi shook his head, looking at her seriously, and said, "The original setting of the game is that the player and the protagonist Anubis are bound together in life and death. If Anubis dies, the game will determine that the player has failed and will automatically log out."
Qiao Susu's fingertips trembled, and she listened to her own panicked heartbeat.
"You mean Anubis is dead?"
Even though she knew it was a game and even though she had returned to the real world, she still felt heartbroken.
The suffocating feeling of being submerged in water swept over Qiao Susu. She looked at Ye Xi with red eyes.
"So I can never go back into the game?"
Ye Xi empathized with her sadness, and now a look of guilt crossed his face. "My original intention in making this game was not to make you sad. I just wanted everyone to experience the feeling of being loved. At that time, the internal beta test invitations were randomly sent to thousands of people, and you were the first to enter the game."
She hung her head in frustration and muttered, "I had a falling out with INF Corporation. They took away my privileges. I tried everything, but I couldn't get back into the game."
"Why?"
"Because." Ye Xi took a sip of coffee and felt that the bitterness in her mouth was not as bitter as the bitterness in her heart. She took out her mobile phone from her bag, pressed a button, and the screen lit up.
Qiao Suisui stared at her screensaver in shock and blurted out, "Anubis?"
After saying that, she felt that the person on the screensaver was not quite like Anubis. The boy might look similar to Anubis, but his expression, smile, and facial features were all different from Anubis.
Ye Xi said, "This was my first love, or more accurately, my secret crush. Anubis was created based on him, and he's also my favorite character. When I first designed the storyline, I had no idea I would develop such strong feelings for a character. I couldn't tell if it was empathy or something else, but I knew I wanted to be with him forever, even if it was in the game world, even if I lived in a fantasy world forever."
Qiao Susu was in mixed emotions and listened to her quietly.
"But I don't know why Anubis ended up dead. I clearly gave him the best arrangement, but no matter how I adjusted the game difficulty, rewrote that section of the code, or restarted the game more than ten times, I couldn't change his ending. Anubis always died in various ways I couldn't imagine. So I planned to overturn the entire game and rewrite it, but INF disagreed. They thought it was already a mature enough game and no one could guarantee that it would be surpassed, so we fell out."
"Wait, you said you reopened it more than ten times?" Qiao Susu quickly grasped the key point.
"Yeah, I logged out after Anubis died the first time, saved the game, and then re-entered the game. I have over ten save files on my account."
"So when you re-enter the game, do they still remember you?"
Ye Xi shook his head. "I don't remember. For the characters in the game, each save file is an independent world. And for the player, even though you've already played the story once, everything starts over. No matter your progress and points in the previous world, re-entering the game is equivalent to entering a new world. The worlds are not connected to each other."
Qiao Suisui continued: "So every player has his own world."
"That's right."
"So the plot is the same? They'll fall in love with every player too?"
Ye Xi shrugged. "That's how it's supposed to be, but INF has recently received a lot of complaints from players saying the characters aren't engaging enough. Especially with the character of Munekata, players generally complain that he'd lose focus when they were talking to him. Some players even complained about him being so gentle one moment and then being strangled to death the next. In short, the experience was terrible."
It was difficult for Qiao Susu to describe her mood at the moment. She just felt like she had drunk a glass of vinegar with soy sauce, mustard, lemon and toothpaste added, with a mixture of various feelings.
In that world, the love she received was so real, so real that she didn't want to return to reality at all. And if all this was set, then what was her feeling for them?
(End of this chapter)
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