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Tao Sai opened her eyes suddenly, her heart pounding. She reached out and turned on the small lamp on the bedside table. The old room was filled with light again, and she finally regained her composure.
My neck was wet, and when I touched it, it was covered in sweat.
She had just had a nightmare that was both terrifying and incredibly real.
She dreamed of a natural disaster. Countless dark and disgusting insects emerged from the ground, gathering into an overwhelming swarm of insects that devoured everything and swept across the world.
These bugs are exactly the same as the single-player game "Insect Tide" she has been playing recently. They reproduce at an alarming speed and have terrifying destructive power. All the insecticide toxins and biological weapons currently used by humans are ineffective against bugs.
Water is the only substance that bugs repel, so in her dream just now, the survivors of the world could only desperately flee to the ships floating on the water for refuge, just like the setting in the game "Bug Tide".
Leaning against the head of the bed, Tao Sai's heartbeat quickly returned to normal.
Perhaps she dreamed at night about what she thought about during the day. She must have been too engrossed in playing games these past two days, interweaving the game scenes with the real world and bringing them into her dreams.
She got up from the bed and prepared to take out the tissues from her backpack to wipe the sweat off her face.
Suddenly, my sight flashed, and a translucent system panel suddenly appeared in front of me, and the background music of the game was faintly ringing in my ears.
Tao Sai was stunned for a second. She was very familiar with this metallic sci-fi panel; it was the game interface of "Insect Tide".
Tao Sai couldn't help but laugh at herself. She must have been addicted to the game to the point where she even had hallucinations.
She sat down on the edge of the bed, closed her eyes, slapped her face several times, rubbed her eyelids, and tried to wake herself up.
But when he opened his eyes again, the translucent system panel did not disappear.
Tao Sai blocked her sight with her palm and found that the panel was not floating in front of her eyes, but seemed to be directly printed on her... retina?!
How is this possible!
Tao Sai stood up in horror, suspecting she had a dream within a dream, and hurried out of the room and into the bathroom. She turned on the faucet to the maximum, cupped her palms with cold water and poured it on her face, repeating the same action several times.
When I opened my eyes again, the panel was still there.
Drops of water that had not been wiped away slid across my cheeks. The touch was so real that I couldn't be dreaming.
At that moment, she seemed to be hit by something.
The game system is bound to her?
No, something must have gone wrong!
Tao Sai returned to the room, took out his laptop from his backpack, turned it on, and then searched around on the desktop, only to be stunned again.
Where's the game icon she put on her desktop?
Because the C drive of this laptop was too full and she had just flashed it not long ago, there were not many shortcut icons on the desktop, only two columns in total, but she just couldn't find that game.
Tao Sai suspected he had accidentally dragged the game icon into the Recycle Bin, but when he opened it, it wasn't there. He searched the disks where the game was installed, one by one, but still nothing.
She suddenly had a very bad feeling.
"Insect Tide" is a new game that Tao Sai came across when she was browsing a game store the day before yesterday. She clicked on the introduction and took a look. The background and gameplay were exactly what she liked, and the comment section was full of praise.
The only strange thing was that the game did not indicate the development team, development time and version number. She thought that the information might not be loaded due to network congestion, so she did not pay much attention to it.
She spent 68 yuan to buy the game. She still clearly remembers that the game was 12.1G in size and it took nearly an hour to download the game.
Tao Sai entered the game store again, entered the game name to search, and after a few seconds, the display was blank.
Can't find it? Was the game removed? Or was it renamed?
This time she opened Baidu and entered the game name to search again. All the relevant results did not have the complete game name. She flipped through several pages and browsed quickly, but all of them were content unrelated to the game.
Tao Sai stopped turning the mouse wheel and stared blankly at the computer screen.
At this moment, a light bulb suddenly flashed in her mind.
Yes, she had spent money on this game, and if she had spent money, there would be a record of her spending. She immediately took out her phone, flipped through the bill from two days ago, and checked it over and over again.
No.
Still nothing.
The game and everything associated with it vanished, all traces of it erased.
How is this possible?
Could it be that she had imagined a game out of thin air in the past three days?
Tao Sai quickly overturned his own idea. It was impossible, absolutely impossible.
She clearly remembers every detail of playing "Insect Tide", including shaping the face of the game character she created, giving it a nickname, choosing her birthplace... the gameplay, the background rendering, and every save and load of the game are all vivid in her mind.
Now, the only proof that the game "Insect Tide" ever existed was the panel floating in front of her eyes, as if the game had been transplanted directly from the computer into her brain.
Tao Sai lay back on the bed, the translucent system panel still projected on his retina.
She could smell the musty odor of the old wardrobe on the other side of the bed with just one sniff.
She calmed down and re-examined the game panel in front of her.
The metal mechanical frame has a cyberpunk style. The panel is composed of various functional modules, including [Character], [Mission], [Backpack], [Warehouse], [Mall], and [Refuge Ship]. However, most of the functional modules are in a gray lock state. The gray locked modules will be slowly unlocked as the countdown continues.
She then noticed the flickering red subtitles in the upper right corner of the system panel.
[Insect Tide Countdown: 9 days, 23 hours, 43 minutes, 57 seconds]
The seconds of the countdown were still jumping and changing. Tao Sai glanced at the wall clock. The passage of time on the panel was consistent with that in the real world.
In the game "Insect Tide", after the game starts, players will be given "ten days" of preparation time to collect supplies and stockpile resources.
During these ten days, natural disasters will continue to occur, including earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis. After the countdown ends, insects will emerge from the ground and gather into a swarm, marking the beginning of the end of the world.
Tao Sai couldn't help but think of the nightmare he had just had.
Since waking up, she had almost forgotten the contents of her dream. Tao Sai quickly opened the memo on her phone, her intuition telling her that what happened in the dream would be useful information.
She tried hard to recall and then wrote down every fragment of memory she could think of.
"Mount Fuji erupted... A powerful earthquake struck the Hiroling Snow Mountain... A massive tsunami struck the Usai Gulf... A powerful earthquake struck the Andes Mountains... Unknown black insects appeared in various locations... The world is in a state of panic. Experts say the insects are repelled by water."
"I climbed onto a rescue boat on the riverbank... I was thrown overboard... I swam to shore and a swarm of insects swarmed towards me."
The memories in the dream were fragmented but extremely real. She could even recall the despair of falling into the river and swimming desperately towards the shore in the turbulent current, as well as the foul-smelling river water she drank, and how she felt so uncomfortable after getting ashore that she vomited all over the floor.
Tao Sai looked over what he had written over and over again, constantly adding in what he had missed.
Half an hour later, I was able to organize the scattered fragments into a complete story line.
Her dreams were usually bizarre, illogical, and nonsensical, but this time it was completely different. She remembered many details, even the names of the places mentioned in the news reports about natural disasters.
In real life, Tao Sai has always been a geography idiot and never cared about domestic or international politics. She was sure that the place names written in the memo were the first time she heard them in her dream.
She tried searching several unfamiliar foreign place names on Baidu, and found all of them, even the homophones of the translated names were exactly the same.
Tao Sai expected this result. She was much calmer than at the beginning and began to think calmly.
Do you dream about things you have never come into contact with?
That shouldn’t be the case. Only when you think about something can you dream.
Everything that happened didn't seem like a dream, but rather a bit like rebirth in novels, movies, and TV dramas...
But reality is not fiction after all. Although this sounds a bit outrageous, she can't find a more reasonable explanation for the time being.
The subtitles show that the countdown to the insect swarm has advanced another hour. The shorter the remaining time in the dream, the more frequent natural disasters will occur.
Thinking of this, Tao Sai took out his mobile phone and opened the Weibo hot search list.
1 India Uttar Pradesh 8.6 magnitude earthquake [explosion]
2 Experts say Mount Fuji may erupt within 48 hours [New]
3 Orange Chen's new drama Reuters [hot]
4 Curry's fifth championship
5. The earthquake was felt significantly in Shannan City [hot]
…
The further you scroll down, the more you'll find that among the dozens of trending searches, more than half are related to natural disasters around the world.
Tao Sai put down his phone silently.
She was now increasingly convinced that what had just happened was definitely not just a dream, but something that would happen in the future. At the end of her life, when she was bitten to death by insects, an unknown supernatural force gave her a chance to be reborn, allowing her to return to this moment in time.
If she could do it again, according to normal development, she would return to the city to work for a few days, then learn about the natural disaster from the news reports, experience the panic and turmoil in the city again, squeeze onto the rescue boat with great difficulty, and then be thrown into the river because of the lack of food on board.
Maybe this time I won’t be so lucky and won’t even be able to get on the boat.
Tao Sai looked at the countdown on the panel and strengthened her belief that it was not too late now. She must take immediate measures to save herself and change the course of her fate!
But unlike before her rebirth, this time she was connected to the game system. The gameplay of "Insect Tide" involves players controlling their in-game characters, stockpiling food, collecting supplies, continuously upgrading their refugee ships, rescuing more civilians, recruiting crew members, expanding their team, fighting monsters, farming, and building infrastructure, ultimately surviving the apocalyptic crisis.
Tao Sai looked at the various modules on the translucent panel and found that the focus of her vision could replace the cursor control system of the mouse.
After clicking the [Refuge Ship] module, a mechanical AI voice sounded in my ears.
【Please find a suitable carrier for the refuge ship system! 】
Her eyes fell on the wardrobe, and the outline of the wardrobe was scanned, with a red frame flashing.
【Wrong carrier, please try again! 】
Tao Sai looked away, and the desk in his field of vision was scanned, with the red frame still flashing.
【Wrong carrier, please try again! 】
She went through the tutorial when playing the game, and found that only boats and boat-like objects could be used as initial carriers.
Tao Sai turned on the flashlight on his mobile phone, opened the door of the main hall, and walked through the old courtyard. Outside the courtyard wall was a winding river.
Grandpa's black-sailed boat was stranded on the river bank. As soon as his eyes fell on the old hull, the system voice came.
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