After Mu Ke was picked up, Mu Shicheng had already been woken by the noise.
He leaned lazily back in Bai Liu’s chair, holding the jacket Bai Liu had draped over his shoulders in one hand. Originally, Mu Shicheng had planned to firmly advise Bai Liu against entering the competition, but he soon discovered that Bai Liu’s determination was astonishingly resolute. Given Bai Liu’s usual way of doing things, Mu Shicheng felt that his desire to compete was not something that could be easily shaken.
So Mu Shicheng had merely stood by coldly and watched Bai Liu coax Mu Ke aboard his “thief ship.” Then, realizing there was no easy way to change Bai Liu’s mind, he had gone back to sleep without much urgency.
The only thing he could do was tell Bai Liu seriously that he would absolutely not fool around with him and take part in this high-risk league.
However, the jacket Bai Liu had placed over him made Mu Shicheng’s tone soften uncontrollably when he finally spoke.
“So? You managed to coax that little beauty onto your thief ship?”
Bai Liu glanced at him. “You call Mu Ke a little beauty? Are you gay? Is someone like Mu Ke sexually attractive to you?”
Mu Shicheng instantly choked.
“I’m straight!! Do you not understand jokes?!”
Bai Liu nodded perfunctorily. “I understand now. Judging from your expression, you have something to say to me?”
Before Mu Shicheng could speak, Bai Liu pulled over a stool and sat down opposite him.
Bai Liu’s posture was relaxed and casual, yet it somehow brought an invisible pressure with it. Mu Shicheng, who had been sprawled bonelessly in Bai Liu’s high-backed chair, unconsciously straightened his back.
Bai Liu looked at him calmly.
“I’m guessing you want to tell me that you absolutely won’t participate in this esports league with us.”
“Can you give me a reason convincing enough to persuade me?” Bai Liu leaned back against the desk, his fingers tapping once on the surface. “Why are you unwilling to enter this league?”
“High mortality rate. High risk. Not enough people. Not enough cleared dungeons.” Bai Liu listed the problems one after another, then raised his eyes toward Mu Shicheng. “All of those can be left to me. You only need to participate. Do you have any other concerns?”
Mu Shicheng was nearly laughed out of his composure by Bai Liu’s calm, matter-of-fact attitude.
If this had been the Mu Shicheng from one dungeon ago, he might truly have been fooled by Bai Liu’s “everything is under control” act. But after one dungeon together, Mu Shicheng was no longer that version of himself. He already had a fairly clear understanding of this guy’s personality.
Namely, that Bai Liu was an absolute gambler.
Even if the success rate was extremely low, as long as the return was high enough, Bai Liu would dare to try.
“Those are exactly the main problems I’m worried about,” Mu Shicheng said, rarely serious. “Bai Liu, the league really isn’t a joke. The player mortality rate is terrifyingly high. There’s no need for you to give up your real life for this game. Sure, the game can bring you a lot of things, but with your ability, you can earn points slowly. That’s much more stable. Besides the game, you still need to leave yourself some fallback options in reality...”
“Real life?” Bai Liu repeated softly, the meaning in his tone ambiguous.
He waited unhurriedly until Mu Shicheng finished his earnest persuasion. Then he suddenly asked an entirely unrelated question.
“What do you think of the single-player game Mu Ke cleared last round?”
Mu Shicheng paused, not expecting Bai Liu to bring that up so suddenly. But Bai Liu had indeed discussed it with Mu Ke earlier. Although Mu Shicheng had been exhausted, he had still listened.
The game Mu Ke cleared last round was called Graduation Day, a single-player game set against the backdrop of a Japanese campus.
The content of the game itself wasn’t what interested Mu Shicheng most.
What drew his attention was something else.
Mu Ke had said that the school in the game had a real-world prototype. It was a private high school he had attended while studying abroad in Japan. The school had supposedly become haunted after a girl jumped from a building, and afterward, many students died one after another.
The dormitory Mu Ke had lived in was even more extreme. Aside from him, everyone else had died in bizarre ways. That was also why Mu Ke had confused the game with reality and emerged injured—the background setting of the high school in the game was identical to the high school he had once attended.
This was very similar to what Bai Liu and the others had experienced.
The prototype for The Last Train to Blast Off was the exploding last train that Bai Liu had once accidentally boarded.
Mu Shicheng fell silent for two seconds.
“I don’t think it’s possible for it to be that much of a coincidence,” he said. “Two games in a row both having prototypes in reality.”
“Exactly. I think so too.”
“So personally, I believe there are three possible explanations.” Bai Liu pulled a sheet of paper from his desk.
Bai Liu had always been used to recording his thoughts whenever they came to him—especially now that he had confirmed their memories could be arbitrarily altered and deceived.
Since writing down specific information would cause the text to disappear under [Censored], Bai Liu only extracted a few simple keywords and wrote those instead. Once he finished, he pressed five fingers against the paper and spun it toward Mu Shicheng on the other side of the desk.
His explanatory tone was very steady.
“I lean toward the idea that many games in this system have prototypes in reality. It’s just that some people know those prototypes, while others don’t. For example, you and I both know the prototype behind the Jingcheng Explosion Case because we’re both in Jingcheng, but Zhang Kui clearly didn’t. As for the haunted Japanese high school Mu Ke mentioned, he knows it, but you and I don’t.”
“But the question is: how does the game select these design prototypes?”
Bai Liu wrote down: [Scene Selection].
“The first possibility: the game randomly selects real-world scenes and events as prototypes for designing horror games. But judging from the Jingcheng Explosion Case and that haunted Japanese high school, the game’s selections clearly have a certain bias. It chooses tragedies that already contain horror elements. So this possibility isn’t very likely. Pass.”
Then Bai Liu wrote: [Source of Inspiration].
“The second possibility: the game selects tragedies and supernatural locations experienced by players as prototypes for its games. You and I both know the game can edit people’s memories, so is it possible that it can also read players’ memories? That it extracts inspiration from them and uses those memories as references to construct its game worlds?”
“This would allow players to immerse themselves more easily in the horror game to a certain extent, while also making the scenes more realistic. For example, the train setting in the final minutes of the second dungeon was exactly the same as it was in my memory. That level of realism—realism so convincing that people can’t distinguish reality from illusion—is actually very difficult to achieve.”
Mu Shicheng folded his arms in thought, his index finger tapping against his other arm.
“I think your second possibility is already quite logically sound,” he said. “I lean toward that one. So what’s the third possibility?”
“No. That possibility has a very large loophole—the timeline doesn’t make sense.” Bai Liu raised his eyes and looked directly at Mu Shicheng. “Do you remember when the version of The Last Train to Blast Off we played first appeared?”
Mu Shicheng froze. He thought back.
“It seems like it had been around for a long time? It was already there when I entered the game.”
Bai Liu reminded him calmly, “But the Jingcheng Explosion Case happened this year. Which means the game The Last Train to Blast Off existed before the Jingcheng Explosion Case. Before the explosion ever happened, this game based on that explosion already existed.”
“Mu Shicheng, do you understand what that implies?”
Mu Shicheng’s expression began to change. As though realizing something, he slowly looked toward Bai Liu.
Bai Liu continued in an even voice, neither warm nor cold.
“It means we got the reference prototype backward. It wasn’t The Last Train to Blast Off that referenced the Jingcheng Explosion Case.”
He spoke with unsettling steadiness.
“It was the Jingcheng Explosion Case that referenced the game The Last Train to Blast Off.”
After saying that, Bai Liu wrote down: [Beta Stage].
Mu Shicheng stared into Bai Liu’s emotionless eyes and felt as if a bucket of ice water had been poured over his head.
His body went rigid as he looked down at the words Bai Liu had written. Chills crawled up his back in wave after wave. Even his hands trembled faintly. He understood what Bai Liu meant, but the very fact that he understood made him stare at those words in disbelief and argue instinctively:
“How is that possible?!”
To describe Mu Shicheng’s current state in game terms—his mental value had already fallen below the safety line.
Bai Liu’s tone remained calm.
“When every game finishes development, a version is released called the ‘open beta.’ Simply put, it’s a localized public test. It isn’t opened to all players.”
“If the developers are satisfied with the local players’ reactions to a certain dungeon, they then place that dungeon into the official game and open it to everyone. That becomes the final release version.”
Bai Liu lifted his eyelids.
“The third possibility I’m speculating is this: the game and the reality we live in are, respectively, the beta version and the official version of a game.”
“Inside the game, it tests the reactions of selected local players like us toward certain dungeons. If the [System] is satisfied with our performance in that dungeon, the corresponding game is deployed into our reality and opened to everyone, becoming the official version.”
“For example, when The Last ★ 𝐍𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 ★ Train to Blast Off was deployed into reality, it became the Jingcheng Explosion Case. And when Graduation Day was deployed into reality, it became the Japanese high school Mu Ke attended. Generally speaking, they are merely two different expressions of the same horror game.”
“In other words,” Bai Liu said, looking at Mu Shicheng with eyes devoid of emotion, “our world isn’t safe either. At any moment, it may be struck by the official release versions of the system’s horror games.”
“If that’s the case, Mu Shicheng, then the ‘real life’ you’re trying to preserve is essentially no different from surviving inside the game.”
“So I don’t think you need to refuse a competition for the sake of your so-called reality.”
“Because the reality you live in is nothing more than a game competition you cannot see.”
