Chapter 189
Beiqiao came as he pleased and left as he pleased. He didn't make any travel plans in advance, nor did he visit any popular attractions. He just strolled around the streets that were directly accessible by bus.
On the way, Bei Qiao met several anchors who were broadcasting live. She took a look at the mobile phone screens in their hands. The automatic coding system of the live broadcast room quickly gave her a purple frog head as she passed by. So, the audience in the live broadcast room saw a purple frog carrying a white cat on its back calmly passing by the anchors they were following, and glanced back at them before leaving.
After lunch, Bei Qiao went for a stroll in the local large supermarket, and finally got on the return train empty-handed. He returned home before Qiao Lin got off work and started cooking.
Tangyuan had a lot of fun today and was still very excited after returning home. He kept hanging on Beiqiao's shoulders and refused to come down. Even though the sound of cooking made him angry, he refused to leave.
Today, Bei Qiao was wearing a sweatshirt with a belly pocket. Tang Yuan crawled on her for a while, then finally went straight into the pocket, curled up into a ball, and leaned comfortably against Bei Qiao's belly, closing his eyes and snoring.
Bei Qiao prepared a simple dinner: one plate of boiled sweet potatoes and three plates of stir-fried vegetables. Qiao Lin, returning from work, took some food and oil from the delivery locker and brought it home. He was delighted to see the steaming dinner on the table when he opened the door. He immediately changed his clothes, took a photo of the table, and posted it to the "Loving Family" group and a message on his Moments.
Bei Gu, who returned home a little later, came home with a bag of bulk discounted blind box mooncakes. He said that a colleague's relative asked his colleague to help sell them in the company. Everyone saw them every day, and everyone else paid for them. It would be a bit unreasonable for him not to buy one.
"Blind Box of Mooncakes" Bei Qiao took out a mooncake from his pocket: "The Mid-Autumn Festival seems to have passed a month ago, and most of the mooncakes in the supermarket have been taken away." The packaging bags of this blind box of mooncakes are exactly the same. There is no text on it to indicate the flavor, and the brand does not look familiar. It is suspected to be produced by a small workshop.
"The shelf life is long anyway, you can try it. If you don't like it, just eat it slowly. It won't go bad until next year anyway." Bei Gu also took a mooncake, opened the package and took a bite: "Hmm... what does this taste like?"
Qiao Lin took the remaining mooncake from him, broke off a piece and put it in his mouth: "Eat first, you guys...what does this smell like?"
Aren't mooncakes just a few flavors? What's with that expression? Bei Qiao ripped open the mooncake wrapper and took a bite. His expression froze. "Uh, I think I tasted celery, Mom. What flavor is that?" He was quite picky about flavors. He felt a blackout as soon as he took a bite. Judging by his parents' expressions, the mooncake they got didn't seem very good either.
"I don't know, it smells like rotten fish, cough cough, ugh." Qiao Lin chewed a few bites reluctantly and found that he really couldn't get used to it. He pulled a piece of tissue paper from the table, spit out the mooncake filling that he couldn't swallow, and turned around to throw it into the kitchen trash can: "It's really disgusting." Was this a deliberately unpalatable filling, or was the mooncake left for too long and expired?
"The bag doesn't even say what flavor it is." Bei Gu swallowed the mooncake with difficulty, ripped open the mooncake bag in his hand, and looked over it again and again, leaving no corner untouched, but still couldn't find a single word. "This is a prank, no wonder it's on sale." Even Bei Gu, who was never picky about food, found this mooncake particularly hard to swallow: Is this another way of getting back at society? It's outrageous that I have to pay for something this bad!
"Maybe it's positioned as a prank?" In the past, there were games that were very difficult to operate and very psychologically challenging. Most people bought the games but didn't play them. They just watched the streamers play. The streamers on the screen got so angry that they threw their keyboards and banged their heads against the wall. The audience held up their phones, drank tea, laughed, and gave likes and little hearts while watching.
"Okay, let's eat first. Put the remaining mooncakes on the table and open them tomorrow. Eat less at night." Qiao Lin put the other unopened mooncakes on the table: "These things have no nutrition. If they really don't taste good, throw them to the feeding point to feed the small animals. Don't waste them." In order to prevent stray animals from overrunning residential areas, the city has specially planned feeding places for residents and set up sweeping robots to watch over them.
"Okay, let's eat." Bei Gu grabbed the boiled water on the table and rinsed his mouth.
After dinner, Bei Qiao returned to his room and logged in, opening his eyes in the basement of the official Chamber of Commerce. There were still many players around, many of whom, like Bei Qiao, had logged off while sleeping against the wall.
In the basement, besides players sitting on stools and the floor, you can occasionally see players lying on the floor. These people didn't intentionally log off in this position, but the position they took before logging off was not stable enough, and after a long period of waiting, they couldn't hold it up and fell over.
Bei Qiao didn't find anyone familiar in the basement, so she opened the forum to see if there were any recent tasks worth doing. She opened the Chamber of Commerce task list, but before she could even look at the other task titles, she was caught by a task that had suddenly appeared at the top.
System: Release wild system arrest auxiliary tasks, provide route planning throughout the process, system task rewards are to be determined, and foreign aid rewards are to be determined.
Bei Qiao: Oh, something interesting has happened again.
Players all understand what a wild system is. It's safe to say that among the billions of people worldwide, there are at least a thousand who have encountered one. The system behind "Another World" provides a certain level of protection for players, so those taken by the wild system are mostly minors who are unable to register for "Another World." Some of the more immature children initially even think being taken away is a good thing, as it allows them to skip school. However, after being severely beaten by society and reality in other time and space, they will cry and clamor to go home, preferring school to never coming here again.
The wild system the system was preparing to arrest was bound to a minor, once a classic middle school girl. After being bound by the system, she was forced to serve as cannon fodder and stepping stone for several people. After completing her mission and returning home, she was kidnapped again. The reason was that the person she had previously saved had turned evil, and the wild system required the host to provide after-sales service and save her again.
The girl, who had finally returned to school and had given up on her second year of junior high school and was in the final stage of her senior year, was furious. However, she was lucky. When she was going crazy, she met the sister next door who was making money in "Another World Martial Arts" and sent a distress signal in time.
It wasn't until then that the girl realized the spacetime this wild system had taken her to was the very same space where "Another World Martial Arts" existed. If it weren't for the fact that the quest she'd taken previously had no players to encounter, she might have been discovered and rescued by the system much earlier.
After receiving a request for help from the little girl next door, the player quickly found a deserted corner and submitted a request to the system, hoping to bring the girl back. However, the girl was brought here in her entire body, not through a spiritual journey. To bring her back, they first had to suppress the wild system and gain access to the transmigration channel it controlled. Therefore, the system issued an arrest mission, seeking the player's help. As for the reward for external assistance, it was a thank-you gift from the girl's parents in the future.
Players have no way of apprehending wild systems; their role in the mission is simply bait. To prevent the wild system from escaping, players must, when the system is about to strike, hang around the girl with a plausible excuse, tricking the wild system into thinking they are a backup host and a safe haven. The moment the wild system binds to the player, that's when the system strikes.
Players of "Otherworldly Martial Arts" are unlikely to be taken away by wild systems, as registering for the game is also a form of binding. With the system pulling them along, other wild systems can't steal them away. The principle is similar to anti-lost bracelets. However, if faced with a more powerful entity, the system may lose. The power strength varies from world to world, so if a higher-dimensional world snatches a player, it will be very difficult for the system to rescue them.
Players who want to get to the bottom of things: Why would people from higher-dimensional worlds come here to snatch our people?
System: It's not necessarily a picture. There are idiots in higher-dimensional worlds too. Sometimes it's simply a work error, like mistakenly pulling a lower-dimensional counterpart over. Some people are left there, reduced to a vegetative state, while others have their memories wiped and thrown back to their original world, occasionally recalling fragmented memories in dreams, only to forget them completely upon waking.
The reward for this mission is unknown, but many players have accepted the mission. Bei Qiao had just accepted the mission and before he had time to look at the specific content in detail, the number of participants reached the upper limit.
To prevent the girl from getting into danger, the players who received the quest immediately left the basement after reviewing the quest details, including Bei Qiao. The rain had stopped outside, but the ground was damp. Bei Qiao slung his umbrella over his shoulder, booked a room at the official inn, and stowed his rain gear away. Then, feeling relaxed, he headed towards the quest location.
The arrest quest took place at the Chuzhou City night market. By the time Bei Qiao arrived, the other players who had already arrived had already blended in seamlessly with the locals. The maximum number of players allowed for the quest was 749, of which over 30 had already dispersed to various stalls. The remaining dozen or so players, some using their familiarity to find their way to the locals' stalls, while others had simply rented a stall for the night.
Because the quest was so urgent, the player didn't have time to stock up on goods, so he bought some items from a nearby stall and piled them on his own, resting his chin on his hand as he watched the quest objective. When others asked him how much his stall sold, he wasn't in the mood to answer. He only responded to one question out of three, ultimately driving them away.
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