It was a wasteland-style game.

The vastness of the ruined city, the eternal darkness of the sky, the scrap of metal, the rubble, the empty streets, all foreshadow the fact that the world once seemed to have been destroyed by some irresistible force, and that it is now an abandoned land.

For most of the first half hour of the game, Ji Lan's character has been running and trekking through this lifeless concrete jungle - she finds a few NPCs, and after having a conversation, she gets a large number of tasks, and as in normal games, these "starting tasks" are mostly errands.

But at the beginning, it took Ji Lan some effort to communicate with those NPCs - unlike other games, when Ji Lan clicked on those NPCs with the mouse, the interactive interface such as dialog boxes would not pop up, and finally, Ji Lan, who had lost his patience, typed on the keyboard and sent this string of garbled characters to the public screen of the game, but in exchange for the interaction of NPCs......

A dialog box appeared above the NPCs' heads, which read: "? ”

The way to communicate with NPCs in this game is to type directly into conversations!

Or ...... It's also a fertile land of life – waste, no taboos, freedom and creativity – a world that we can only reach in our dreams, and how wonderful it is to be able to come true and see everything right now. ”

After completing several tasks similar to delivering and delivering messages, one of the game's NPCs said this - as Ji Lan casually chatted about his views on the world.

The name of this NPC is Li Zhongqian.

The names of all NPCs in the game are such direct names, there are no naming rules like "Blacksmith Dennis", "Village Elder Wang", "Librarian Fergus", "Grocery Store Owner Malcolm" and so on, and those NPCs will not tell you the truth about the destruction of the world with bitterness, and no one asks you to save the world, as if there are no evil villains in this world.

Aside from the distinctly wasteland-style setting, everything in this game is day-to-day.

There are no treasure chests littered all over the world, and there are no dark secrets waiting for you to discover, how to recover the family heirlooms, rescue the children of NPCs, and escort a precious treasure...... None of them existed, and the tasks that NPCs gave Ji Lan were boring requests such as "It's good to chat with you, but it's better if you have a drink", and then "finding and getting a drink" was done by Ji Lan spontaneously...... If you think about it carefully, those so-called "follow-up missions" are simply what Ji Lan created for himself by following the previous "gameplay conventions......

In fact, Ji Lan only found out after playing for more than an hour that he had not received any hints such as "receiving tasks" and "completing tasks", nor had he received any substantial rewards!

But Ji Lan chose to ignore this series of doubts, and even after playing for a few hours, Ji Lan has begun to gradually become addicted to this unique "game......

By the time she came back to her senses from the game, it was half past ten the next night - she had been sitting in front of the computer for a day and a night, nearly twenty-four hours!

"I can't describe to you a hundredth of how amazing that game is, words can't express it, you can only experience it yourself. If I have to sum it up, all I can tell you is that it was a new world that was incredibly new and real, and even that first few days and nights gave me a taste of what I really dreamed of when I was playing the game - to have a strange and transcendent second life. ”

I looked at Ji Lan curiously, she said this with an almost absolutely pious demeanor, but her tone was not the fanatical shouting of a believer, her tone and choice of words were more like a choir singing hymns, gentle but firmer than anyone else.

She didn't lie, she didn't exaggerate, I made a judgment based on countless experiences: that is Ji Lan's true feelings.

I no longer dwell on the truth of Ji Lan's words, and began to wonder what the game she described had to do with "eternal life"? And is the form of "eternal life" the idealistic hypothesis of "quantum suicide" that is impossible to prove (and of course, impossible to falsify)?

A huge question mark popped up in my mind...... That is, everything Ji Lan is talking about "Eternal Life Game" now, it doesn't seem to be terrifying, why did it lead to the suicide of the previous 6 middle-aged single programmers?

And how can they do it, with a smile of great satisfaction, to die in the boiling of brains?

Is there really a "midnight brain-burning demon"?

I scolded: That's damn.

At this time, Ji Lan continued: "After finding out that I had been absent from work for a day because of playing this game, I simply called my boss immediately and asked for a week off on the grounds that I was suddenly sick. I started staying at home and playing the game almost sleeplessly. When I was playing on the fifth day, I suddenly discovered a very terrible thing......" Ji Lan looked at me and asked, "Mr. Ji, can you guess?" ”

I subconsciously shook my head, but I was only halfway through my shaking movement before I stopped, and I suddenly thought of an important doubt, and blurted out: "Those NPCs in the game-"

"I'm starting to suspect that those NPCs are not NPCs."

Ji Lan's answer was a bit awkward, but I immediately understood, because it matched my sparkling guess.

"So on the sixth day, I found a friend I met on the dark web and invited him to come to my house to watch me play games. In just half an hour, his expression was as solemn as if his parents had died, and he was shocked by the super AI NPCs that could have a free conversation with me. He almost yelled at him, saying that he was absolutely sure that there was no such real AI at all, and that he felt that they were all players - NPCs played by real people! I'll just point out that he's a very skilled hacker, but when he tries to decipher and hack the game, his laptop is completely locked. The truth is, it's simply not possible to have that many NPCs that are online 24 hours a day, played by real people. Unless there's a big group of people – definitely more than 100 of them – who are bored to the point of not sleeping 24 hours a day, just to chat with me when I need to. ”

"Hmm."

"Huh?"

"I suddenly had a very abrupt thought-" I snatched a stack of materials from Cheng Cheng's desktop, flipped through it quickly and found that line, "Huang Yilun, right?" The first 'suicide' is also the one who stole your hard drive - is he the hacker you are talking about now and invited to your house to watch you play games?! ”

"Mr. Ji, you have a terrible instinct, just like a beast." Ji Lan smiled suddenly, "No wonder K values you so much-you must have found out a long time ago, all of this was almost arranged for you." ”

"I'm a goddamn poor ghost, and I don't have the good family lineage and treasure I had in third-rate novels—that's actually what I can't figure out the most. I wonder, is there some misunderstanding in this? For example, what did you do with your intelligence? If I am worth billions, then I can still understand the 'eternal life' that K has fabricated and has been hinting at and reinforcing, nothing more than trying to cheat money, but now that K is so painstakingly luring me into the urn, it can't be the wrong person, right? "I couldn't help but sarcastically say something about it, and the annoying thing about me is that I am extremely cautious and like to take advantage of my tongue.

Ji Lan's smile remained unchanged.

"I only know what I want, I don't know what K wants." She said, "Mr. Taji, I'm starting to have a strange feeling too—if there's a very strange reason for it, it's because the answer is hidden in you. ”