Chapter 283: Otherworld

"The Bureau takes this very seriously and has already classified it as an A-rank incident."

Yuan Zhixia sent over the address of a hotpot restaurant. "I'll tell you the details in person."

"Okay."

Li Cheng crawled out from beneath the turret and said to Hui Yu, "You hold down the fort here. I'm heading out for a bit. Anything you want me to buy?"

"Something to buy?"

Hui Yu thought about it seriously, then held up her phone. "I want to raise a fire dragon."

Her phone screen was playing a short video — a man in a powered exoskeleton and a heavy burn-proof suit was using an iron chain to strangle a fire dragon's neck with all his might.

The uploader's ID was prominently displayed as 【Crimson Rider Loves Playing With Dogs】.

The rider belonged to the Thousand-Throated Beasts Guild and walked the Summoner path. Upgrading his magical pets required massive resources, so he'd always been pretty broke.

To make money, he'd recently started a short-video account, specifically taking in unruly magical creatures other players sent him — griffins, abyssal magic fish, trolls, ogres, hellhounds, and so on.

Using his own "miraculous" taming method, he would subdue the magical creatures and make them obey their master's commands, earning himself a fee plus short-video ad revenue.

As for this "miraculous" taming method — first, he'd cast Comprehend Languages to communicate with the beast and try verbal pua.

If pua failed, he'd move on to mind-control brainwashing and hallucinogenic drugs.

If that still didn't work, he'd hit them with the dragon-fruit, heart-and-lungs, solar-plexus kick, blueberry juice, fanning combo meal.

"Brothers and sisters, smash that follow button! Double tap! Double tap—"

The crimson rider in his burn-proof suit was screaming himself hoarse at the camera, getting blasted by the fire dragon's flame breath on one side while yanking desperately on the iron chain to tighten it around the dragon's neck.

There was a subtle, strangely familiar sense of déjà vu.

"Want to raise a fire dragon? You look like a fire dragon to me."

Li Cheng's eyelid twitched. He confiscated the phone over Hui Yu's protests. "Go do your homework."

Leaving the three-dimensional warehouse, Li Cheng rode his bike to the hotpot restaurant. Yuan Zhixia had already ordered and was waiting for him. The table was also fitted with standard-issue Special Affairs Bureau talismans for soundproofing and presence dampening, so they could talk business without being disturbed.

"It's been a while — you've changed quite a bit."

Yuan Zhixia raised an eyebrow. Both sides knew each other's true identities, so there was no need for pretense.

Up close, she could tell his physical conditioning from Li Cheng's breathing rate, pulse, and heartbeat.

Yuan Zhixia was now a member of a Mobile Task Force under the Special Affairs Bureau. She'd gone on several routine missions with them and was currently Level 16.

And Li Cheng, a lone wolf player with no guild and no routine mission resources, was also Level 16 — proof in itself that his final rating on every script mission was absolutely no lower than A.

"Likewise."

Li Cheng sat down. He could sense that Yuan Zhixia's physical conditioning wasn't far beyond an ordinary person's, but there seemed to be some indescribable barrier wrapped around her — probably some kind of magic-class profession.

"This is the data the Bureau has compiled so far."

Yuan Zhixia handed Li Cheng a rugged, perfectly rectangular tri-proof phone and said casually, "Since some of the victims in this incident are players or players' relatives, this portion of the data will be posted on the forum soon to ease public panic. So this isn't exactly a leak."

"Thanks."

Li Cheng took the phone, activated his Multi-Thread Brain Domain spell, and skimmed the data at a glance, gaining a rough understanding of the incident.

The earliest trace was two months ago, when a phone app called "corda" began circulating in small numbers on foreign darknets.

The software disguised itself as a game app, was a hefty 5GB in size, required no registration, and let users play straight away — Sudoku, English word puzzles, trivia quizzes, and the like.

On the surface it looked perfectly normal, but if a user finished a game, their brainpower would get a considerable boost over the next eight hours — sharper memory, quicker wits, silver tongue, overflowing confidence.

The feeling was addictive and worked wonders for exams.

If the user wanted to keep that state going, they had to sit through a full minute of ads to restore in-game stamina.

"The app was first posted on the darknet. After a few hundred downloads, the uploader deleted it himself. And the internal code restrictions are extremely complex — no one is allowed to re-upload it online.

It can only be transferred as an app package via Bluetooth between two phones offline. It spreads very covertly."

_Co

Yuan Zhixia picked up a slice of fatty beef with her chopsticks and said calmly, "Also, after trying the games, the user's cognition gets rewritten — they can't perceive anything off about it, won't tell any adults, and instead spread it to close friends their own age.

That's why official agencies in Europe and America, and the Global Occult Coalition GOC, never caught on."

"Your younger cousins got the app from a classmate's phone at their tutoring class."

Li Cheng frowned. "Like a memetic brainwashing?"

"More or less."

Yuan Zhixia nodded. "The key is this — in the app's user agreement and privacy policy pages, there's a very strange passage."

She took the phone back, opened the corda app in safe-box mode, and tapped the user agreement page.

The user agreement ran to tens of thousands of words. The rest was utterly unremarkable, except for one line of tiny text, almost too small to read—

【The user voluntarily relinquishes ownership of their own soul, assumes all risks arising from playing the game, and serves as an anchor.】

"Relinquishing soul ownership is easy enough to grasp — some Lawful Evil devils slip nasty clauses into their contracts too."

Li Cheng said, surprised, "But what does this 'serves as an anchor' mean?"

"That's the main event."

Yuan Zhixia exited the user agreement, opened the gameplay screen, deliberately lost a quick game, and the screen immediately popped up the option to "watch an ad to restore stamina."

She tapped to watch. The ad wasn't some money-grabbing mobile game, browser game, short drama, or short video.

It was a montage of unclear meaning.

Sky-blanketing red fire clouds, a tsunami over a hundred meters tall, a modern city in ruins after an earthquake, heavily mutated animals, scavengers wearing pig-snout gas masks — finally freezing on a massive floating eyeball resembling the Eye of Sauron from Lord of the Rings.

"After layers of analysis, the Bureau's analysts confirmed the video has no fakery or AI generation. It's raw footage."

Yuan Zhixia said, "If we're not wrong, the souls of those comatose teenagers have somehow fallen into the ruined otherworld where the video takes place.

This is the first large-scale, premeditated otherworld infiltration anomaly."

Yuan Zhixia's tone was deadly serious. Getting dragged into another world was no joke — god knew if it was Sword Art Online, Re: Zero, Mushoku Tensei, or some gag manga's poop-and-fart planet.