Chapter 200

The next day.

Qiao Suisui came to the coffee shop to meet Ye Xi as agreed.

She specially arrived half an hour early, found the red velvet sofa, put a recording pen into the tissue box, and then walked to the bookstore across the street, waiting for the agreed time to arrive.

The clock pointed to two o'clock.

Qiao Suisui entered the coffee shop on time and saw someone already sitting on the red sofa.

It was a girl who looked to be in her early twenties, very thin, with short hair, delicate features, simple dress, and wearing black-rimmed glasses.

She walked over and sat opposite her.

Ye Xi saw Qiao Suisui, her eyes full of indescribable excitement.

"You came. I thought you wouldn't."

Qiao Suisui asked for confirmation: "Ye Xi?"

"It's me." Ye Xi was pinching her fingers nervously, clearly not good at dealing with people.

"How did you find me?" Qiao Suisui got straight to the point.

Ye Xi didn't expect her to be so direct. She adjusted her glasses with her hand and said: "This wasn't difficult for me." Then she explained a long string of operational processes mixed with technical jargon. Qiao Suisui didn't understand much, asked some questions, and the two chatted for a while. Qiao Suisui learned some information.

Ye Xi was a hacker, usually very homebound, loved mixing in the two-dimensional world, and the biggest amount of exercise in a day was going downstairs to take out the trash. She had been self-studying since middle school, and because she had extraordinary talent in the computer field, she was now exceptionally admitted by a foreign game company.

"You said you were player 1, what does that mean?" Qiao Suisui asked.

Ye Xi pondered for a while before saying: "I wrote this game."

She held the coffee cup with both hands, head down, her fingers unconsciously exerting a little force. "I just felt too lonely, I wanted someone to love me..." Her voice was very small. As she spoke, she looked up at Qiao Suisui, seemingly confirming whether she was laughing at her.

"... At first, INF Company found me, asked me to be the main creator of the game, and grafted their company's high-tech technology so that players could be immersive."

"I thought this idea was very good. Initially, I only treated the world I created as a game. I hoped someone would listen to me and play with me... But as the time spent entering that world every day became longer and longer, I found that I started to be unable to distinguish between reality and the game, and even... I hoped that world was reality. So I constantly repaired every grass and tree in the game, making it incomparably realistic, making the degree of freedom the highest, and endowing every character with the most real life. They were not cold keyword settings. I made special codes for every character's background story. Each of them had a complete growth trajectory. Their personalities and thoughts had completely broken away from my settings. They had truly experienced, lived, and felt."

"Gradually, I found that they had given birth to self-awareness."

Qiao Suisui felt that all this was somewhat absurd, but as one of the players, she also clearly knew that Ye Xi wasn't lying to her.

"So you terminated the game and made me log out?"

"No." Ye Xi shook her head, looking at her seriously: "The initial setting of the game was that the player and the protagonist Anubis were bound to live and die together. If Anubis died, the game judged the player to have failed, and they would automatically log out."

Qiao Suisui's fingertips trembled, and she heard her own chaotic heartbeat.

"You mean Anubis died..." Even though she clearly knew it was a game, and even though she had returned to the real world, she still felt real heartache.

The suffocation of being submerged by water swept over Qiao Suisui. She looked at Ye Xi, her eyes already red.

"So I can never go back into the game?"

Ye Xi felt the same sadness as her, and at this moment, there was some guilt on her face. "My original intention for making this game was not to make you sad. I just wanted everyone to experience the feeling of being loved. At the time, the beta test invitations were randomly sent to thousands of people. You were the first to enter the game."

She hung her head in frustration, murmuring: "I fell out with INF Company. They deprived me of my permissions. I tried many ways, but I couldn't return to the game."

"Because of what?"

"Because..." Ye Xi took a sip of coffee, feeling that the bitterness in her mouth was not as bad as the bitterness in her heart. She took out her phone from her bag and pressed it, and the screen lit up.

Qiao Suisui was stunned looking at her screensaver and blurted out: "Anubis?"

After saying it, she felt that the person on the screensaver didn't look much like him. The boy's appearance might be similar to Anubis, but the demeanor, smile, and details of the features were all different from Anubis.

Ye Xi said: "This is my first love, or to be precise, my unrequited love. Anubis is a character created based on him, and he is also my favorite character. When I first designed the plot, I didn't know that I would have such strong feelings for a character. I couldn't distinguish whether it was empathy or what, but I knew I wanted to be with him forever, even if it was in the game world, even if I lived in illusion for a lifetime..."

Qiao Suisui's thoughts were complex, and she listened to her quietly.

"But I don't know why Anubis would head toward a death ending. I clearly gave him the best arrangements, but no matter if I modified the game difficulty, rewrote that part of the code, or restarted more than a dozen times, I couldn't change his ending. Anubis would always die in various ways I couldn't think of... So I planned to overthrow the entire game and rewrite it, but INF Company didn't agree. They thought this was already a sufficiently mature game, and no one could guarantee they could surpass it, so we fell out..."

"Wait, you said you restarted more than a dozen times?" Qiao Suisui quickly grasped the point.

"Yeah, after Anubis died the first time, I logged out. After saving the file, I re-entered the game. My account has more than a dozen save files."

"Then after you re-entered the game, do they still remember you?"

Ye Xi shook her head. "No. For the characters in the game, every save file is an independent world. And for players, although you have played the plot once, everything has to start over. No matter what your progress and points were in the previous world, re-entering the game is equivalent to re-entering a world. Each world is not connected."

Qiao Suisui continued: "So every player has their own world..."

"That's right."

"Then is the plot the same? Will they also fall in love with every player?"

Ye Xi shrugged. "According to the settings, that's how it is. But recently, INF Company's backend received a large number of player complaints, saying that the characters' engagement was not high. Especially the character Zongfang. Players generally reacted that when they were talking to Zongfang, Zongfang would be distracted. Some were even more outrageous: one second they were being looked at gently by him, and the next second they were directly strangled by him... In short, the experience was very bad."

Qiao Suisui found it hard to describe her mood at this moment, only feeling that she was like drinking a cup of vinegar mixed with soy sauce, mustard, lemon, and toothpaste—a mix of five flavors.

In that world, the love she received was so real, so real that she didn't want to return to reality at all at the time. And if all this was set, what did her feelings for them count for?

(End of chapter)