I can't see anything.
The rain was still falling, pattering on the scattered fallen leaves, and the streets smelled of earth. The school had been working on the roads since the holidays, and it was still not finished two months after the start of the semester. Apart from the narrow, overgrown path, the other routes from the teaching building to the girls' dormitory took you around most of the campus.
Lin Yehuan hesitated for a moment at the intersection, then resolutely walked in the opposite direction.
Just like when she was a child, she still disliked the grassy areas along the cement roads that seemed to hide "unknown surprises," the slippery surfaces, and the crunching sounds that came from underfoot, which were inexplicably repulsive.
If presented with a well-drained path and a main road flooded to the point of being a swimming pool, she would absolutely, without hesitation, transform into a stubborn fish.
After listening, Lu Xingzhi seemed to be deep in thought: "If Xiao Hei were chasing you from behind, would you run away?"
“Of course not,” Lin Yehuan glanced meaningfully at the burly woman who insisted on getting a rabies vaccine after having a nightmare, “I’m not afraid of dogs.”
"What if it's a crocodile?" Xu Pengpeng noticed the gaze and quickly retaliated.
"No." Lin Yehuan said slowly and deliberately, with a look that said, "Come and hit me if you dare."
“Oh, I remember now,” Lu Xingzhi said with a sudden inspiration, “What if it’s a snail, a millipede, or a snake?”
"..." Lin Yehuan rubbed his shoulders a few times, getting goosebumps all over.
She had only said that she was most afraid of animals without legs or with six or more legs, so how could this guy so accurately pinpoint her most disgusting spot?
"Your associative thinking is too strong," Xu Pengpeng couldn't help but complain as she watched her shiver several times as if she had been electrocuted. "I never realized you were this fragile when you were little."
"Hey!" Gu Ye, who had been standing by as a background character, suddenly chimed in, "Which do you think is scarier, a mosquito with one leg missing or a frog with two extra legs?"
"You're the scariest one." Lin Yehuan was just a second ago marveling at how unusually quiet this guy had been lately, but now he felt it was better for him to stay quiet.
"By the way, speaking of frogs... don't you guys think Xinghui Pharmaceuticals has been unusually well-behaved lately?" Lin Yehuan thought of eight hundred ways to change the subject, but finally chose the one that made no sense at all.
“Although this transition is abrupt,” Gu Ye suddenly emphasized, “what you said makes a lot of sense.”
"Thank you, but your nonsense sounds just as nonsensical." Lin Yehuan smiled briefly for a second, anticipating the reactions of the others.
"The only time they've been able to endure this long is because they're absolutely confident in their product and have already planned how to kick someone when they're down," Lu Xingzhi said thoughtfully. "To put it bluntly, they're 'nothing special'."
Lin Yehuan fell silent. Although he had experienced Lu Xingzhi's sarcastic version before, hearing this sentence from his mouth still gave people a strange feeling that the dimensional barrier had been broken.
This art style...this direction...is this right?
The system remained silent, and Lin Yehuan silently accepted what was no longer a shock.
“However, if they knew things would turn out this bizarrely, they’d probably go crazy,” Lu Xingzhi said casually, making a vague statement. “After all, sometimes even I find it strange.”
"What?" Gu Ye asked sincerely, "What bizarre thing?"
"It's nothing, I'm just marveling at how smoothly things have been going for us."
Lin Yehuan's mind was in complete disarray, no, it was extremely disorienting. Lu Xingzhi had definitely figured something out.
There are only two kinds of people in this world. One kind is like Xu Pengpeng, whose consciousness fragments are trapped in the system due to the assessment. They don't care about anything else except completing the love mission, and they don't care about logic or common sense. The other kind is like Gu Ye, who are characters created by the system itself. They mostly play the role of driving the plot forward. The system sets the program, and they act within the scope of this character setting. Once they deviate, they will be forcibly corrected.
For example, Yi Jie's character is a positive, sunny, healthy, and motivated young person who cheers herself up every morning. The only time she swore was when she bought a box of mango slices disguised as mango pits for fifteen yuan at the supermarket, but she was forced to return to a normal tone before she could finish her sentence. Gu Ye also went through a period of depression after that fashion show, but in the end, the plot brought him back to his original character.
Lu Xingzhi was different. His personality was gradually perfected in the process of completing the mission. He kept going astray and being corrected. Sometimes he was like a wild horse, and sometimes he had zero presence. As a result, Lin Yehuan had to admit that he had not taken him seriously for a long time. Even though he was doing upgrade missions with him, he still had the illusion that "this person just appeared out of nowhere".
Ultimately, her task was to mold him into the image she had written on those few pages, and the system was also setting tasks according to theory to improve his various stats.
But did it really achieve that?
Like putting fruit into a ginseng doll mold, Gu Ye always says he's changed. But what was he like before? Did he even have a past? Is she saying he should have existed before she wrote these words? Perhaps this is also a program set by the system, just meant to serve as narration for their stage of achievement, and she can't think of any other meaning besides that.
Lin Yehuan recalled bit by bit, piecing together as much of his image as possible: humorous, restrained, gentle...
Is he like that? If we break a person down into several aspects instead of viewing him as a complete and complex individual, then it seems that way.
The fruit grew into the standard baby face she had expected, but she could sense that as soon as the mold was removed, the flesh on the fruit's face would peel off piece by piece, oozing out the already rotten juice inside.
The system upgrade task seems endless, even after several days and nights. How much longer will she have to wait here? Despite not experiencing the pressure and tension of real life, she suddenly feels that being here is more terrifying than anywhere else.
This can't go on any longer, Lin Yehuan thought; she had to escape.
"Leaves? Leaves?"
Lin Yehuan snapped out of his daze at Xu Pengpeng's persistent calls. He was about to remark that this was the only time his thoughts hadn't been interrupted by the sudden downpour, but after fully regaining his senses, he clearly heard the sound of rain coming from above.
Lu Xingzhi squeezed four people under the only umbrella. Xu Pengpeng and Gu Ye stood side by side in front of them, having misjudged the wind direction more accurately than they could have.
"I told you one to go first and one to go last! You weren't listening to me, were you?!" Xu Pengpeng pulled Gu Ye out, and the two stood facing each other in the heavy rain. "Fine! Let's just come out."
"I anticipated that the wind would blow inwards, so I wanted you to walk in the back, okay!" You could tell that Gu Ye really wanted to yell, but he tried his best to suppress it.
Lin Yehuan and Lu Xingzhi stood by, completely bewildered, watching the two accuse each other. The sheer volume of information conveyed in those two short minutes was unbelievable.
Even more unbelievable is that Xu Pengpeng, who was still bringing up old grievances, disappeared right before the eyes of the three of them in the next second.
Lin Yehuan really didn't know what expression to make, so he forced a strange smile: ...What a stupid system, you're not even going to act anymore, are you?
Gu Ye froze for a moment in the rain, as if he had fallen asleep halfway through his walk and was suddenly woken up by the downpour. He ran back to the umbrella in three quick steps: "Xiao Ye, you guys are so heartless. How can you bear to watch me get soaked in the rain?"
It's so noisy... Lin Yehuan's determination to escape became even stronger.
Lu Xingzhi was briefly surprised for two seconds, firstly because of the sudden disappearance of the living person, and secondly because Gu Ye seemed to have instantly forgotten what unimaginable thing had just happened, as if he had guessed correctly.
Just as Lin Yehuan covered his left ear, his right ear was filled with Lu Xingzhi's inexplicable maniacal laughter. Oh no, this has scared another one crazy.
[Congratulations on completing the mission: Rescue all trapped people. Please check your reward.]
This doesn't make sense, does it?
Where's Xie Zhi? Where's An Xiao? Oh, right, and where's Chen Mo?
Lin Yehuan fell silent. The reward page that popped up from the system was almost blinding to her 24k pure gold eyes. In short, as long as she wanted, she could live a carefree life in this world without any effort, although there was still no way or item that could take her back to her original world.
If that's the case... then it's not impossible...
Lin Yehuan turned to face Lu Xingzhi's eyes, which were filled with a mixture of chuunibyou (middle school syndrome) and worldly wisdom, yet also a look of someone struggling desperately without finding a way out.
no.
Lin Yehuan tossed and turned for most of the night, but finally got up and bought two tickets to L City, out of conscience.
I just don't know if Lu Xingzhi can endure more than forty hours in a hard seat on a train.
If the system won't let her leave City A, then she might as well live on the train every day. Maybe she'll see a few unfamiliar faces there, instead of being busy day and night with a bunch of nonsensical trivialities, only to wake up to the same few fixed NPCs.
Lin Yehuan has always admired unreasonable people since she was a child. They can completely convince themselves to accept the illogical fallacies they imagine. But admiration is one thing, and it is also true that she can't help but want to slap them. The unreasonable system can avoid this problem well. Without a physical body, no matter how unreasonable it is, it only gives people a sense of powerlessness that they cannot reach into the screen.
There were only the two of them in the entire carriage, and perhaps they were the only two on the entire train, but who could know?
To make things easier, the system didn't even bother to put in many faceless pedestrians, leaving all the seats empty, but it still insisted on simulating the suffocating feeling of a crowded bus and the sense of space being compressed.
Lin Yehuan wanted to get a glass of water, but he had to keep saying "Excuse me" to the empty passageway as he walked to barely squeeze out some space.
A few wisps of pungent smoke drifted out from the smoking area, but there were too many people and the door couldn't be closed, so the smell could only be allowed to spread in the carriage, which we had to silently endure.
Lu Xingzhi sat quietly by the window, watching.
Lin Yehuan didn't want to ask him what he had seen. Although he rarely spoke, the system in her head had been ringing non-stop since she got on the bus.
"There's no one here," Lu Xingzhi finally spoke. "I can't see anything."
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