Wei You stared at the phone in his hand.
Half a minute passed, and the game interface was still white.
The progress bar is stuck at "99%" and keeps showing "Loading". I can't exit or turn it off, and even long pressing the power button doesn't work.
He frowned and had to shift his attention to the trouble at hand.
He was in a strange, old-fashioned two-bedroom house, and in front of him was a half-open door.
It had been some time since he had inexplicably appeared in front of this door.
As a fan of online literature, when faced with the sudden changes in his environment, the first word that Wei You thought of was time travel.
Normally when this happens, the protagonist should feel curious, excited, or uneasy for a while.
However, when the matter came to Wei You, it did not give him much time to think or be surprised. The constant sobbing of the child coming from the room grabbed most of his attention.
It's a bit like a horror movie...
Wei You's heart was pounding like thunder. He repeatedly strengthened himself mentally several times, then took a deep breath, raised his hand and pushed open the door lightly.
Dim natural light overflowed from the room. He mustered up the courage to glance inside, and his expression suddenly froze.
What he saw was a room that was not very spacious.
The lower half of the wall is painted light green. Solid wooden wardrobes and tables and chairs are placed on both sides of the windows, and a bed is placed in the middle. The decoration and furnishings are very old-fashioned.
But these are not the main points. The main point is the child sitting at the end of the bed.
The child was wearing a pair of green dinosaur pajamas, with his back facing him. The tender yellow "little spikes" on the back of the pajamas moved up and down, and intermittent crying sounds could be heard along with the twitching rhythm.
If the layout and furnishings of this room only made Wei You feel a little familiar, when he saw the child in dinosaur pajamas, a strange guess suddenly flashed through his mind.
Dark blue curtains, bed sheets with Doraemon patterns, half of the wall painted green, a boy wearing dinosaur pajamas...
This place seems to be exactly the same as the game scene in "Zi Zi's Growth Plan" that he played half a month ago.
Perhaps, he not only traveled through time, but also traveled into a game.
As a full-time UP host, Wei You often needs to take some game trial promotion orders to make a living, but "Zi Zi's Growth Plan" is not an advertisement he took.
About a month ago, this simulation development game suddenly became popular on the Internet, and Wei You opened the game purely to follow the trend and take advantage of the popularity.
He remembered that he adopted a little boy through random selection, and because the character had flat watermelon bangs, he nicknamed the child "Guazi".
At first, perhaps influenced by external trends, I was really addicted to playing this game.
In addition to the time spent recording the video, Wei You also raised the cub seriously for a period of time. He performed cub-raising tasks at a fixed time and place every day, dressing the cub, feeding it, coaxing it to sleep, and tutoring it with homework, and he never got tired of it.
However, games with the same content and pattern will become boring after playing for a long time. Therefore, after the craze of raising cubs online passed, he naturally gave up the game.
Until just now, when he was waiting for the takeaway and wanted to play a relaxing game to kill time, he clicked on this game that he hadn't played for half a month.
Unexpectedly, before the game was loaded, he felt a black screen in front of his eyes and came to this strange world.
The old-fashioned clock on the cabinet in the living room suddenly made a crisp "clang" sound, which startled him.
The bell struck five times in succession, announcing that it was now five o'clock in the afternoon.
Wei You glanced at his phone again. The game progress bar was still stuck at "99%", motionless, like a beautiful brick.
He had to realize that he had really traveled into this game called "Baby's Growth Plan".
The child at the end of the bed was still sobbing intermittently, crying softly, and shrugging his shoulders, looking very pitiful.
Wei You stood at the door hesitantly. After thinking for a moment, he called out tentatively, "Idiot?"
The "little dinosaur" paused with its slightly trembling body, remained quiet for a few seconds, and slowly turned its head.
The boy's face looked particularly small in his pajamas and hat. His big red eyes, which were all from crying, were set in his fair and round face. He looked to be only six or seven years old.
As if to confirm Wei You's guess, the moment he saw him, big, crystal tears slid down the boy's cheeks.
The child raised his hand to wipe away his tears, stared straight at the person at the door, and asked with a pout, "Brother, you haven't come to see melon boy for so long, don't you want melon boy anymore?"
Wei You: “…”
Wei You felt regret at that moment, very regretful.
As to whether he regretted clicking on the game or regretted giving up the game so easily, he couldn't say, maybe it was both.
Now he didn’t know how to go back, and his cell phone was like a piece of wood and couldn’t move at all. Wei You could only deal with the current situation for the time being.
"Brother is here."
He subconsciously coaxed her first.
After searching the room for a while and not finding any tissues, he picked up the folded floral handkerchief on the table, walked to the bed, squatted down, and gently wiped the water drops from the corners of the eyes on Guazi's face with the handkerchief.
Wei You always kept his distance from unfamiliar human cubs. Normally, when he saw other people's children, he would just take a detour for fear of getting into trouble.
But the child in front of him was different. This was a paper man he had been raising on his phone for half a month. Half a month ago, he was his own son whom he took screenshots of and posted on WeChat Moments every day.
For this reason, he did not feel the slightest bit of discomfort facing the boy even when they first met.
Besides, the little melon cub is very pretty, with fair and tender skin and neat and delicate features.
Maybe because she is young, there is still some baby fat on her cheeks, which makes her look more adorable.
Wei You felt that no one would dislike such a cute human cub, and he was no exception.
"How did you recognize me?" Wei You pushed aside his slightly long bangs and asked patiently, "Have you seen me before?"
The boy shook his head. Although he stopped crying, his body still couldn't stop sobbing.
He looked at Wei You and answered slowly, "Voice, bedtime story."
Wei You thought about his words carefully, and then it dawned on him.
Indeed, when he first started playing the game, one of his daily tasks was to use voice to lull his child to sleep.
"So you recognized my voice?"
The boy nodded.
"Will that kid be scared when he sees his brother suddenly appear here?"
The child shook his head quickly, stretched out a hand from his sleeve to grab Wei You's wrist that was placed beside his leg, and said, "Guazi missed you very much."
Being stared at by the other party with eyes that contained such fondness and expectation, Wei You actually felt a sense of guilt in his heart.
He coughed lightly and deliberately changed the subject and asked, "Why were you crying just now?"
The boy lowered his head, dropped his eyes, and remained silent.
Almost at the same time, Wei You heard his stomach making two "gurgling" sounds.
"Are you hungry?"
The "little dinosaur" raised its reddish eyes and looked at him, nodding its head sheepishly.
Wei You sighed, rubbed the little boy's head through his hat, then stood up and said, "Then wait for me here for a while. I'll make you something delicious."
The boy nodded again and watched Wei You turn around and walk out.
After sitting on the bed for a while, he also climbed off the bed, put on slippers, and walked out of the room.
To cook for your baby in the game, you usually just need to use points to buy ingredients, put the ingredients on the stove in the kitchen, and wait for a while for the food to be cooked.
But it’s different now. In reality, you have to cook what you want to eat yourself.
Fortunately, Wei You is a single person living alone and is a bit stingy. Unless he is really short of time, he would rather go to the market to buy ingredients and cook his own meals than spend extra money on takeout. As a result, he has developed good cooking skills.
When Wei You said he would make something delicious for Guazai, his tone was full of confidence. However, when he walked around the kitchen, his confidence was immediately killed.
The cupboards and stove were empty. He searched the entire kitchen but couldn't find any ingredients that could be used.
When he opened the refrigerator, Wei You was shocked.
Except when he went to an electrical appliance store, he had never seen such a clean refrigerator.
The refrigerated area was empty except for a few bottles of beer, and the frozen area was even more shabby, with only a bag of pickles frozen into stones. A faint rotten odor could be smelled through the bag.
"There's nothing to eat at home."
Just as Wei You was holding the bag of pickles in the red plastic bag, considering whether to put it back or throw it away, a soft, nasal voice of a boy was heard beside him.
Wei You turned around and saw Wei Xu standing at the kitchen door with a melancholy look on his face.
He asked, "What did you plan to eat tonight?"
Wei Xu turned his head and looked at the dining table on the right side of the living room.
Wei You casually stuffed the pickles back and closed the refrigerator door.
When he walked to the dining table and took a look, he immediately frowned: "Is this what you're going to eat tonight?"
Wei Xu nodded.
Wei You frowned as he looked at the small bowl of leftover rice on the table, as well as the pickled mustard greens that had only a little oil left at the bottom, and suddenly realized something was wrong.
In the game, it can be said that he adopted Guazai and became Guazai's guardian by default, but if this were in reality, Guazai should have his own parents.
He looked up at the tightly closed door of the room opposite Wei Xu's room.
If he remembered correctly, there was no such room in Guazai's house in the game. But now that this room appeared here, it should be Wei Xu's parents' room.
Wei You confirmed his thoughts, turned around, squatted in front of Guazi and asked, "Where are your parents?"
The boy seemed to have not expected him to ask this question. He paused for a moment before answering, "Dad only comes home on weekends."
After a pause, he continued, "Mom ran away from home."
Wei You was surprised by the result and didn't know what to say for a moment.
He thought that it seemed that this child's family environment was far more special than he had imagined.
He thought for a moment and asked, "When your father is not around, how do you solve your three meals a day?"
"I eat lunch at school and cook dinner myself," Wei Xu said vaguely, "My father gives me pocket money to buy breakfast."
"How much did he give you?"
Hearing him ask this, Wei Xu led Wei You directly to the TV without any vigilance.
He opened the drawer of the TV cabinet and took out a small paper box. The box contained some coins, most of which were dimes, but there were also some one-dollar and fifty-cent coins.
"Dad would put a few dollars in it every time he came back," Wei Xu held the small paper box and tilted his head to look at Wei You. "He said he knew all the money in it. I could only take one dollar a day. If I took more, he would find out."
"So you only have one dollar pocket money every day, and you have to use it to buy breakfast?"
"Fifty cents is enough to buy breakfast," Wei Xu said, "and there's still fifty cents left to save."
Wei You raised his eyebrows in disbelief.
In his opinion, fifty cents could never buy breakfast. Even a vegetable bun without any meat would cost one dollar.
He glanced around the living room, his eyes lingering on the old desktop TV for a while, then sat on the sofa and asked, "Guazi, can you tell me what year, month and day it is now?"
"2005." Wei Xu answered the year easily.
As for the question of what day it was, he thought for a while before answering, "School starts on September 1st, September 1st was last Thursday, and today is also Thursday, so today is September 8th."
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com
