Chapter 95: The Black-and-White World, Beyond Resurrection

The new day dawned, and morning came.

Ye Chao got up stiffly like a zombie.

He stood dazed for a moment, with that faint, inexplicable sense of loss...

As if he had dreamed something, beautiful at the start and bleak at the end.

He sat there blankly for several minutes. Only when recent events were written one by one into memory did his awareness finally return to its proper track, like an old computer waking after a long startup.

So there had simply been no waking-up BGM to sharpen the mind.

Then play one, why not?

On second thought, maybe not. Playing background music in the bathroom would inevitably carry a certain... scent.

He rubbed his eyes, scratched an itch, climbed out of bed, took a step, and was immediately tripped headlong to the floor.

It did not hurt, though. It was soft and fluffy.

Roly-Poly made two little grunting noises, utterly unconcerned about being crushed beneath him.

That panda had pulled another all-nighter.

Who knew how, exactly, that mute creature had managed to thrive so spectacularly in the game? Every team wanted it, all of them clamoring to form parties with it, even though nobody knew just who it really was.

He had even heard that at school, speculating about the true identity of that ruthless, taciturn fat guy had become a wildly popular topic...

The internet was indeed just as that famous pre-cataclysm actress Zhou Xun had said: you never knew whether the one going online on the other side was a human being, or a panda, or... a parrot.

Squatting on the toilet, Ye Chao instinctively opened the Imaginary Space communicator.

Senior Gu, are you there? When will you be back? I want to buy a helmet!

Senior Gu, are you there? When will you be back?

Senior Gu, are you there? I am terribly sorry, my pet secretly played with a helmet last night and caused you trouble.

...

It was Guan Junyuan.

So the chatty, narcissistic fellow from last night, the one whose identity nobody knew either, really was that demon parrot after all...

Miss Gu, are you out handling something? Need any help?

I may not compare to an expert like you in Imaginary Space, but even small people have their conveniences.

If anything comes up, just say the word. In the lands of Cloud Province, especially with the military, I, Ximen Qiong, still have some standing. Please, do not stand on ceremony!

...

This classmate of Guan Junyuan's usually seemed rather calm and composed, but judging from the chat logs, he appeared a little sanctimonious.

Aside from those two, the other buyers of the combat mode had mostly left messages as well, but they were nothing more than the two usual sorts: asking to buy a helmet, or trying to build connections and curry favor.

After the cataclysm, all the rubbish had been swept away clean. In reality and online alike, there were no red packets from Alipay, WeChat, Meituan, or Ele.me; no rumors and videos being endlessly spread and fabricated; and certainly no vulgar jokes copied and pasted God-knew-how-many times over...

Life was lonely as snow.

Huh, there was a message from Roly-Poly too? How rare.

Ye Chao clicked it open in surprise.

"No!"

"No,"

"No..."

In the end, the whole thing consisted of just one word: no. Every now and then there were little emoticons of clasped hands or flowers. What, exactly, was this panda trying to say?

Sitting on the toilet, Ye Chao fell naturally into deep thought.

And so, just like the internet-addicted youths before the cataclysm, he squatted on the toilet while scrolling on his phone. Time slipped by without notice, until Alpha Girl's voice rang out: "Switch to HoneyHoney!"

"Got it."

In the world after the cataclysm, there was no need to learn English anymore, but for programming class, a few English words were still required.

Ye Chao switched the song, then suddenly came to his senses and rose to his feet. Immediately afterward, with a solid thud, he dropped straight to his knees, both legs completely numb.

==========

Hoping for a good day,

one where work need not concern me,

you may think of anything at all,

oh, oh,

have a cup of tea if you like,

write a letter if you like,

do nothing if you like,

amid the busyness I think of you again,

you remain close and yet distant to me,

even when angry you leave no trace,

oh, oh,

...

To the song, Alpha Girl opened her eyes.

What a fine day it was!

She lifted her head to the sky—no, there was no need, because she was sleeping on the rooftop itself, beneath the open heavens, on the roof as her mat and blanket.

At that moment the sun had just risen in the east, crossed above the treetops, and scattered its light over the earth, making all things seem edged in gold, dazzlingly beautiful like a CG render.

What a magnificent desktop this truly was!

Here, here was simply too comfortable. This feeling of having slept fully, this state of radiant vitality...

Spread-eagled on the rooftop, receiving the sun's caress, Alpha Girl could not help sighing in satisfaction. And yet... very soon she grew restless.

Why?

Because it itched!

It itched terribly. It was enough to make one claw at the heart and scratch at the lungs!

Only after the pleasant haze of waking had passed did Alpha Girl realize that, after a whole night out here under the open sky, she had been savaged by mosquitoes, with countless welts from head to toe...

Such a thing could never be enjoyed in the virtual world.

"Ahhh, it itches, it itches so much! So itchy!"

Alpha Girl rolled about and crawled and scratched, but the more she scratched, the itchier it got; the itchier it got, the more she scratched. An endless loop!

And the worst part was: "My skin, so tender it can be pierced by a breath! My face, so breathtakingly beautiful it could topple nations!"

Looking at her mirror, at a face and body that were more or less ruined, she simply could not accept it. She crawled to the edge of the roof and flung herself forward.

Ye Chao only saw the earth hurtling rapidly toward him, and then, with a sharp smack, the world turned black and white.

Alpha Girl had fallen straight into a soul state. At last, it no longer itched!

Huh? She had not gone back?

The black-and-white Alpha Girl stared blankly at the blue-and-white soul emissary before her. She had thought that dying would send her back.

A soul emissary? Was that the setting?

Too lazy to run, unwilling to fight, and with no equipment on her body, Alpha Girl clicked the soul emissary to revive in a weakened state. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of something in the distance and froze.

Far away, a snake-headed man and a man in sunglasses, both in black and white, were wandering outside the city as though their souls had left their bodies.

Well, they were souls, all right.

Right. They had been dead for a long time already. Why had they still not revived? Was there some hidden mystery to this?

A thought stirred in Alpha Girl's mind. She interrupted the operation and walked over.

"What are you doing here?"

"Oh, you've come too, hiss! You came too, hiss! You finally came, hiss!"

The snake-headed man and the man in sunglasses, like a pair of artificial idiots, finally seemed to awaken. After a few silent seconds, their black-and-white faces turned even darker.

"You died too, so why... are we still unable to leave the time-space bubble? Are we... really dead? Are we never getting out of here?"

Seeing Alpha Girl suddenly appear, they had thought salvation had come, even if it was only in the humiliating form of being sent out of the dungeon.

But nothing happened. Nothing at all...

Could it be that they would be left to wander here forever? To become lonely wandering spirits?

"Don't hiss! I'm still young, I'm not even ten yet, and there are so many things I haven't done, hiss!" The snake-headed man collapsed and burst into tears. So this had been a child of more than two hundred pounds.

If he had simply died, that would have been one thing. But after spending a day and a night trapped between life and death, unable to die, unable to live, unable even to meet another person to speak with, he had finally reached his limit.

Alpha Girl's black-and-white face also darkened. These two had been wandering around here for nearly a full day, and the reason turned out to be— they could not resurrect!

Fine. She had underestimated how green the cataclysm's new humans could be.