At night, the edge of the city is brightly lit.

Amid the dazzling and prosperous neon colors, there is a strange building with no lights on. It is pitch black from the top floor to the bottom floor. It stands opposite the largest shopping mall in the city center without any light at all, like a huge monster that can absorb the surrounding light.

As you walk into the building step by step, you will find that this 36-story building overlooking the prosperous city is actually a semi-finished product that has not yet been completed.

There are steel bars sticking out from the cement walls, and the walls have not been sealed in most places. The edge of the room is directly exposed to the night sky, and the situation inside the room can be seen directly from the outside.

What’s strange is that for such an unfinished building, these rooms are not empty. With the dim and colorful lights, you can vaguely see the furnishings in the rooms in the night.

Some rooms were furnished with simple mattresses, sleeping bags and desks, with a hot water kettle and two or three rolls of toilet paper on the floor. It was obvious that someone lived there.

Other rooms have only an altar with a black-and-white photo on top of a stack of apples, an incense burner and an urn in a shrine.

There were still four incense sticks burning in the incense burner, indicating that someone had come to burn incense just now.

The incense was rising in a spiral. In the night, a phone rang in the last building of the rotten house. A man with a heavy bag of apples in his left hand and a bag of paper money in his right hand held the phone with his chin and shoulder and asked softly, "Hello? I just burned some for Miss Li. How about you guys?"

This is a clear and clean voice from a young male.

"The ones on the 17th floor have been burned." A female voice came from the phone, and it sounded young. "Then let's meet at Brother Wang's house on the 18th floor?"

After the man finished speaking, he raised his hand with difficulty to hang up the phone.

The female voice on the other end was silent for a while, then spoke in a low voice: "Yuan Guang, we haven't offered incense to the two players who died in the preseason this year."

The man paused as he was about to hang up the phone. The apple in his hand seemed too heavy, and it slowly dropped his hand. His shoulders slowly shrunk, and he lowered his head and let out a long breath: "...When we win the last game, we will all go and burn incense for them together."

The female voice hummed and hung up the phone.

18th floor, room 1803.

There is an altar in the house. On the altar is a black-and-white photo of a bearded middle-aged man laughing heartily. Next to it is his name - [Wang Shuqi, died at the age of 42].

The man holding the apples silently placed the apples one by one on the offering plate in front of the uncle, as if he had obsessive-compulsive disorder. He then took out four incense sticks, lit them up properly, bowed three times, then clasped his hands together, closed his eyes, and muttered to himself:

"Uncle Wang, we have reached the playoffs again this year. I hope that your spirit in heaven will protect everyone and keep them safe and alive."

"...last year...last year's competition..."

The man took a deep breath, his eyelids fluttered twice, and his eyes were a little wet: "Thank you for your hard work!"

After saying this, he stepped forward and solemnly inserted the incense into the stove.

A woman walked in from the side doorway.

The woman was wearing flat shoes, a T-shirt and jeans, with her hair tied up in a bun. She looked to be only 27 or 28 years old. She was young and beautiful, but she looked tired. She looked at the man's skillful incense burning, sighed with mixed feelings, and handed him a candle: "Yuan Guang, I bought some candles. Can you light a pair for Uncle Wang?"

"No more ordering." Yuan Guang shook his head and turned around in the darkness. The moonlight outside the house surged on his profile.

With single eyelids and thin lips, his facial features give him the air of a young talent. However, when you look at him as a whole, that impression of a young talent is instantly destroyed.

His hair, which had not been trimmed for a long time, was tied up clumsily, but it was tied crookedly, leaning on his right shoulder, with hair sticking out on both sides. There was a dark circle around his eyes, and he looked like he hadn't slept for three days. His body was hunched with fatigue.

There was a Band-Aid slanted on the left corner of his forehead, and there was a red mark on his cheek made by a marker, but he himself did not seem to notice that there was a mark on his face.

The woman was startled by this. She remembered that Yuan Guang was still fine two or three days ago, but now it was simply...

Too haggard.

Yuan Guang shook his head while packing up his things: "Let's not light the candles. Sister Qian and the others are still living here, and there are no fire prevention measures here. It's a bit unsafe to light candles."

"Let's wait until the incense burns out and then leave."

The two of them stood quietly in front of the altar without saying a word.

Yuan Guang's eyelids drooped twice, and his body suddenly staggered forward and fell straight down, almost sinking his head into the ash burner.

This frightened the woman next to him, and she quickly reached out to support him: "Yuan Guang!!"

Yuan Guang's head hit the altar hard. He covered his head and screamed, then shook his head sleepily and began to fall backwards in a daze.

The woman helped him sit down, not knowing whether to laugh or cry: "How many days have you not slept?"

Yuan Guangtou leaned against the wall, breathing out but not in, and complained with a trembling and choking voice: "... Recently our company has a project coming up, and the chief artist has been leading us to work overtime like crazy. Because I want to take a leave tomorrow to play in a competition, the leader said that I can only do the work in the first two days in order to get the leave..."

The woman gasped: "You didn't sleep for the past two days?!"

Yuan Guang was dying, and nodded with tears in his eyes: "I just finished it this afternoon."

"You got the wound on the right side of your forehead the same way, right?" The woman was distressed and speechless: "You have a match tomorrow, you might die, can't you just let it go and stop working?"

Before Yuan Guang could say anything, his and the woman's cell phones rang at the same time.

[Your loan with the last number XXXX will be deducted 6437.96 yuan from 18:00 on September 29th. Please ensure that there is sufficient balance in your repayment account. Your credit record will be truthful...]

The two of them looked down at their phones, and the woman fell silent.

Yuan Guang looked at the woman with a gloomy gaze: "Don't you think that if you don't die, you still have to continue working to pay off the mortgage?"

woman:"……"

Fuck, can't refute that.

The woman sighed, patted her butt and sat down next to Yuan Guang, feeling both amused and sad: "Other guild presidents are able to call the shots, but look at you, Yuan Guang, you can't even pay off your mortgage."

"Don't other teams' ace players also have a huge following, millions of fans, and earn tens of millions from a single live broadcast?" Yuan Guang hugged his knees, put his head on them and stared at the woman, whispering, "Shi Qian, look at you, our guild's ace mist skill player, and now the audience can't even remember your face."

Shi Qian: "...I have a fog skill. I will use fog to cover my vision as soon as I enter the game. There is no way the audience can remember my face, okay?"

There was silence again when the two of them said this, and they sighed in unison.

"I'm so jealous of the wealthy big guilds."

Yuan Guangxian spoke first: "How many years have you been borrowing?"

Shi Qian recalled: "I borrowed the same amount of principal for 20 years. What about you?"

"Same, I chose this because I thought I would pay less and less as I paid." Yuan Guang looked down at the text messages and checked the balance in his bank card. When he saw that it was greater than 6437, he breathed a sigh of relief. "In the end, after three years, I only owed more than 200 yuan a month."

"Uncle Wang... have they been lending for how many years?" Shi Qian asked softly, lowering her head.

Yuan Guang was silent for a while. "For 30 years, Uncle Wang's family didn't have a high income, so the whole family paid off the loan together. They also pooled together the down payment, borrowing more than 100,000 yuan. They had just paid off the down payment when the developer ran away and got into trouble."

"When he entered the game, Uncle Wang couldn't hold on any longer. He persevered in the game for a while but still couldn't make it. Finally, he knelt in front of me and begged me to let him play in the league. I would consider it a good deed and let him die a less miserable death."

"I didn't agree at the time, so Uncle Wang... cut his wrists."

"Luckily, Uncle Wang lives in a shabby building, where there is no room to install a door. If anything happens, the neighbors will be able to see it quickly and send him to the hospital in time."

Yuan Guang was silent for a long time. He lowered his head and fiddled with the apples in the bag:

"I let Uncle Wang do it last year."

"During last year's mid-season tournament, hundreds of people came to me to sign up for a game. Some of them were owners of this unfinished building, and some joined the guild later. In short, for various reasons, they couldn't continue in real life or in the game. They were in a similar situation to Uncle Wang."

"Among the players who died last year, 47 were owners of this dilapidated building. They all entered the game with me and held on for several years. Now they couldn't hold on any longer and begged me to let them play."

"I... agree to everything."

Yuan Guang poked the apple, exhaled, and then pulled the corner of his mouth: "I know they have reached their limit, because I can't hold on any longer."

Shi Qian didn't say anything. She patted Yuan Guang's shoulder vigorously. The two of them huddled together, back to back, in a room at the end of the building that was unsealed and open to the public.

The red light from the four incense sticks on the altar behind them was faint and small in the darkness, flickering as if it would go out at any moment, but it was the only light in this building located next to the lights of thousands of homes.

Yuan Guang raised his head and looked at the colorful night scene outside the house. The dazzling lights were reflected in his eyes, shaking, like messy oil paints mixed together, melting into a tear that was about to drip out of his eye socket.

Yuan Guang sniffed and suddenly laughed: "It's funny now that I think about it. So many big guilds came to analyze our tactics before, saying that they were cruel, cold, willing to sacrifice, and that our members had brain problems and strange mental structures, so they were willing to take turns to sacrifice themselves."

"But at the beginning, these people would not have thought of the reason why we couldn't fix the team members."

Yuan Guang exhaled, his eyes reddened, and he smiled tremblingly, "It's because everyone has to go to work every day to save money to pay off their mortgages in real life, and it's inconvenient to take time off. We can't stay in the game all the time to compete, so we can only, we can only take turns to participate in the competition."

"I never expected that this would become a tactic that would always work for our guild."

He clenched his fists at his sides:

"Shi Qian, sometimes I find it very strange. In fact, everyone in the guild has a job, friends, family, and someone who likes them. They support each other and live so hard and seriously. No matter how hard it is, they will swallow it themselves. They would rather die than trouble others. No matter how difficult it is, they want to help others survive."

"We are all good people, why is life so difficult and hard that we can't even survive three years?"

"Today is the anniversary of Uncle Wang's death." The night wind blew Shi Qian's hair, and she asked softly, "Yuan Guang, we will go to the stadium tomorrow."

"Do you think that one year from now will be the anniversary of our death?"