“Damn it!” Mu Shicheng stared at the shattered mirror fragments lying inside the mirror and cursed under his breath. “How the hell are we supposed to get those shards out?! Zhang Kui got burned alive in there! Don’t tell me we actually have to go inside?!”
“Calm down, Mu Shicheng.” Bai Liu’s tone remained perfectly steady, not a trace of panic on his face. “Zhang Kui was burned because this mirror drove his alienation value to zero. According to the game rules, once that happened, he had to be transformed into one of the monsters in this instance. That’s why the mirror burned him into a charred corpse.”
Bai Liu spoke as though he were merely discussing the weather.
“So if we infer from that logic, as long as our Mental Values don’t hit zero, entering the mirror should be relatively safe.”
As he spoke, he removed his diving mask and bit open a bottle of mental bleach. Then he glanced meaningfully at Mu Shicheng, signaling for him to hurry up and drink as well so they could enter the mirror immediately afterward.
Mu Shicheng nearly lost his mind.
This bastard Bai Liu had absolutely no awareness that he was marching straight toward death.
His Health Points were already at 1!
Mu Shicheng wanted to scream, but failing the game meant death anyway. In the end, he grit his teeth and downed a bottle of mental bleach too.
The moment they finished drinking, both of them dove into the mirror from the surrounding water.
The mirror’s pristine surface rippled twice like disturbed water before returning to perfect stillness.
Bai Liu’s sanity remained intact.
The audience outside, however, ★ 𝐍𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 ★ nearly lost theirs.
In front of the countless small televisions, the viewers exploded into chaos.
“Holy shit—another God-level NPC?! And now he’s entering the mirror?! This is nightmare difficulty at this point!”
“My hands and feet went cold watching Bai Liu go in... he only has one HP left...”
“Damn it, I’m not accepting this outcome!! Liu-ge, hold on! I’m sending likes and charging points!! We’re at the final prologue already! Stay steady—we can still clear this!”
“Liu-ge, stay strong!!”
Wang Shun’s face was so tense it looked like water could drip from it.
Xiang Chunhua and Liu Fu dumped every point they’d earned from clearing their own games into Bai Liu’s support pool. The two were so terrified that they had shut their eyes completely, not daring to look at the screen. Hands clasped together, they muttered frantic prayers over and over:
“Bodhisattva, please protect him... Please protect Bai Liu... Let him be safe... He’ll definitely be okay... Good people live peaceful lives...”
Inside the mirror, Bai Liu had no idea that the viewers outside were panicking so hard they practically wanted to stomp holes through the floor.
And despite sitting at one miserable Health Point, Bai Liu himself remained astonishingly calm.
Mainly because there was nothing inside the mirror worth panicking over.
The subway rattled steadily down the tracks.
Around him were noisy high school students who had just finished evening study sessions and exhausted office workers hunched over their phones, yawning endlessly. Human voices overlapped in a mildly chaotic buzz. At every station, crowds boarded and exited with tired, numb expressions.
It was the painfully ordinary life of a commuter.
No charred corpses.
No raging flames.
No grotesque abnormalities.
If Bai Liu hadn’t known he was still inside a game, he might have believed he had returned to reality.
His gaze shifted toward the LED display inside the carriage.
20XX Year, Month Y, Day Z — 10:57 PM.
A late-night train.
Bai Liu’s memory was excellent. He clearly remembered that the train from the explosion case had detonated at exactly 11 PM.
If this truly was a projection of the real incident, then the train would explode after one more stop.
A sweet female voice rang through the carriage speakers:
“Next station: Lujia Lane Entrance. Terminal direction: Antique City. Passengers exiting the train, please hold firmly and line up in order. Please allow exiting passengers to leave before boarding—”
Bai Liu stood still for a moment.
He remembered this station.
Back then, he and Lu Yizhan had gotten off here.
If this really was a recreation of the original explosion incident...
Bai Liu turned and walked through several carriages, scanning the passengers one by one.
Then he found them.
Or rather—
He found himself.
In the middle of one carriage sat “Bai Liu” and Lu Yizhan.
The version of Bai Liu inside the train looked just like every other exhausted office worker around him. His eyelids drooped lazily as he stared at his phone, occasionally yawning from exhaustion.
At that time, Bai Liu still hadn’t lost his job and frequently worked overtime until very late. Whenever Lu Yizhan worked late too, he would wait at the subway station so they could ride part of the route home together before splitting off.
Bai Liu had never really understood why Lu Yizhan insisted on doing this.
To him, it sometimes felt absurdly childish—like elementary school kids insisting on holding hands to go to the bathroom together.
But Lu Yizhan had always been stubborn about it.
He worried about Bai Liu walking home alone so late at night. If he could accompany him for even part of the journey, he would.
The two of them had grown up together, and Lu Yizhan had long since become accustomed to taking care of Bai Liu because—
Quite frankly—
Bai Liu was genuinely worrying.
For example, at this exact moment, “Bai Liu” was leaning against the seat divider with his arms crossed, head drooping as he nodded off to sleep.
Lu Yizhan sighed helplessly.
He removed his trench coat and draped it over “Bai Liu’s” shoulders.
The instincts of a police officer remained sharp even during mundane moments. After covering him with the coat, Lu Yizhan straightened and casually swept his gaze across the entire carriage.
For one brief instant, his eyes passed directly over the Bai Liu standing here now.
And then—
As though he had seen absolutely nothing—
Lu Yizhan calmly looked away.
Bai Liu stood silently at a distance, his own body appearing strangely translucent, almost unreal. It felt as though he had become a phantom copy of the real [Bai Liu] currently sitting there under Lu Yizhan’s coat.
Lu Yizhan couldn’t see him.
Soon, the train arrived at Lujia Lane Entrance Station, and the doors slid open.
In Bai Liu’s memory, they had gotten off here because Lu Yizhan received an urgent phone call. Meanwhile, Bai Liu himself still needed to ride all the way to Antique City to transfer trains.
Logically speaking, he should have died in that explosion during the transfer.
But Lu Yizhan, stubborn as always, had dragged him off the train early instead. Bai Liu later made a detour from Lujia Lane Entrance to transfer elsewhere.
This time, however—
“Bai Liu” did not get off the train.
Lu Yizhan had clearly received the same urgent call and needed to leave immediately. But “Bai Liu” kept pretending to sleep against the seatback.
Lu Yizhan tried several times to wake him and pull him off the train together, but failed.
Eventually, left with no other choice, he abandoned the effort.
He left the trench coat draped over “Bai Liu” and exited the train alone.
It was obvious that “Bai Liu” had merely been pretending to sleep because he didn’t want Lu Yizhan wasting more time accompanying him.
The train doors remained open.
“Bai Liu” stood motionless beside them, eyes closed in exhaustion, while crowds of passengers streamed out around him alongside Lu Yizhan.
As the departure chime sounded and “Bai Liu” still made no move to exit, strange distortions suddenly flickered across Bai Liu’s own face.
Like corrupted data.
Like a failing signal.
The sweet broadcast voice echoed once more:
“The train is about to depart. Arriving next at the terminal station—”
[System player information data loading error...]
[Detected: Player Bai Liu is already deceased.]
[Status: Died in the explosion case. Cannot enter the game.]
[Initiating deletion of player Bai Liu data...]
[Player Bai Liu character data being erased...]
More and more unstable patches spread across Bai Liu’s body like digital static, flickering over him in broken pixels.
Yet Bai Liu showed no fear whatsoever.
Instead, he raised an eyebrow slightly.
“So it really is reality.”
Originally, Bai Liu had assumed this hyper-realistic reconstruction was simply generated from player memory.
But this game exceeded the technological and conceptual limits of the real world entirely. After seeing this train recreated down to the smallest detail, Bai Liu began suspecting something else entirely.
This was not a memory projection.
This was reality itself.
The game had brought him directly back to the original explosion case.
Because there was one critical discrepancy between this scene and Bai Liu’s actual memory—
That night, although he’d been exhausted, he had never fallen asleep on the train.
It had been too cold.
Only reality could differ from memory this precisely.
He had simply been waiting for the train to depart.
Once it departed, the existence known as [Bai Liu] would die in the explosion. Consequently, the later version of Bai Liu who entered the game should never exist.
Which meant his current presence here was a paradox.
And as expected, the system immediately identified him as corrupted data.
Inside the carriage, “Bai Liu” leaned against the seatback, half-asleep from exhaustion.
Bai Liu knew exactly how tired he had been back then.
But even if he was now nothing more than a projected data construct, Bai Liu had no intention of standing by and watching himself die in the explosion.
Data could still influence reality.
Calmly, Bai Liu opened the system shop and bought a cellphone.
Then he entered his own number and made the call.
The other Bai Liu answered almost instantly.
Through the connection, Bai Liu watched himself pick up the phone.
A faint smile curved his lips.
He subtly altered his voice before speaking.
“Hello. Is this Mr. Bai Liu?”
“Yes, speaking.” The Bai Liu on the other end sounded tired and lazy. “Who is this?”
“I found Mr. Lu Yizhan’s phone and wallet near the exit gate at Lujia Lane Entrance Station,” Bai Liu lied smoothly without missing a beat. “His ID and driver’s license are inside. Your number was listed as his emergency contact, but his phone battery is nearly dead, so I’m calling from my own phone.”
He paused briefly.
“Could you come pick them up?”
Bai Liu remembered that Lu Yizhan had only recently bought a new phone at the time—a relatively expensive one. Lu Yizhan usually took very good care of his belongings.
Unfortunately, he was also absurdly clumsy and constantly lost things anyway.
A new phone plus a wallet.
That was more than enough motivation.
The Bai Liu on the train paused briefly before straightening and standing up.
Then he started walking toward the train doors.
In the final second before they closed, he stepped off the train.
Softly, he said into the phone:
“Okay. Stay by the exit gate and don’t move. I’ll come get them. Sorry for troubling you.”
The unstable distortions covering the Bai Liu standing inside the carriage immediately stabilized the instant “Bai Liu” exited the train.
Standing on the platform, Bai Liu looked through the closing train doors at the version of himself inside.
Then he lowered his eyes and smiled faintly.
“I’ll trouble you to wait there, then,” he said quietly.
“I won’t move.”
