"So you were having secret conversations behind my back?" Gu Mian scratched his chin.
Lu Yi laughed. "We just happened to run into each other, so we took the opportunity to discuss so matters."
"What matters?" Gu Mian inquired.
"About you, about this world, about their world, and… about Earth."
The worlds within instances were all derived Low-Dinsional Worlds. Two people from different Low-Dinsional Worlds, discussing a higher-dinsional world, all while in Jin Hu's hospital—a place supposedly filled with love and hope. The re thought of that scene is rather amusing, Gu Mian mused.
Gu Mian curiously asked, "Did the conversation yield any results?"
Lu Yi shook his head. "We don't even know why this world was created, nor why the ga began. If I hadn't ascended to this position, I wouldn't even know that I'm in a Low-Dinsional World."
He said this without any reservation, even with Teacher Slaughter nearby.
Gu Mian spared a glance for the little pink figure. Teacher Slaughter's expression was starting to turn vacant.
"Speaking of the Low-Dinsional World," Gu Mian began, "how did you realize you were in one?"
He had asked Chu Changge this question before.
The answer Chu Changge had given back then was "errors."
'Errors' appeared in the world, which were then corrected. This led to severe discrepancies in people's mories. They rembered the 'error,' but in reality, only the corrected version—the 'correct chapter'—existed.
After that, the intelligent ones began to question the authenticity of the world.
Lu Yi was unaware that Gu Mian was pondering Chu Changge's words. He sat in his chair, watching the fireworks still crackling outside the window, and began to speak of the signs that had appeared in this world.
"Déjà vu... At first, soone would experience a peculiar feeling, as though they had lived through the current events before. For instance, we might be eting for the first ti today. You and I are sitting here, chatting, but suddenly you find this mont familiar, as if it had already happened.
"Then, more and more people experienced this phenonon, leaving everyone baffled. So, we coined a specific term for it: 'déjà vu.'
"At the ti, we didn't connect déjà vu with the Low-Dinsional World. That changed when soone, while constructing an underground cave to imprison Lower Class People, discovered a set of ruins in a subterranean corner. That was about ten years ago.
"The entrance to these ruins was in a large forest. Initially, the person didn't think anything was amiss. However, as he explored deeper, he was shocked to find that the ruins consisted of countless identical buildings."
No sane person would construct a vast cluster of identical buildings in the caverns beneath a prival forest, Gu Mian thought.
Lu Yi continued, "When the ruins were discovered, only building debris remained. But the person keenly noticed the anomalies. The patterns on the debris, the smudges on the broken plaster, even the textures on the exposed bricks—they were all identical. It was like they were copied and pasted.
"If you picked up any piece of broken debris, you would inevitably find countless identical fragnts in the underground cave, right down to the cracks. It was then that we realized this was the 'corpse of the world.' We understood that our world could be manipulated at will by others. At that mont, we knew: this is a Low-Dinsional World."
The corpse of the world…
Gu Mian repeated the phrase to himself, a thought crossing his mind. "Loading a previous save?"
Lu Yi looked at Gu Mian and nodded. "Correct, like loading a previous save."
"It's like playing a ga," Lu Yi explained. "At a certain point, the player might be dissatisfied with the current situation and decide to load a previous save, returning to the past. The characters in the ga would lose their mories of this skipped period, and the ga world itself would revert to that earlier point in ti. Perhaps we had constructed magnificent buildings or created astonishing works of art after that point, but the mont the save was loaded, all of it would vanish without a trace.
"This is also the reason for our déjà vu. We might have experienced this very mont countless tis, but we don't rember. Only in a fleeting instance does our brain resonate strongly with our past self from that exact ti. Then, the feeling of familiarity imdiately vanishes under the world's oppressive influence.
"And that underground cave"—he was referring to the one he ntioned earlier—"was a BUG."
A BUG. Gu Mian nodded in agreent. Being able to leave traces despite the world reloading a save definitely sounds like a BUG.
"That place is still affected by the world reloading saves," Lu Yi went on, "but the world can't completely erase the traces in the underground cave. Each ti a save is reloaded, the structures underground collapse further, yet they don't vanish entirely. After each reload, a new, identical structure appears upon the old ruins. Through countless reloads, the site beca a vast field of ruins. It wasn't until we discovered it that we realized our world had reloaded saves countless tis."
Gu Mian frowned. "When you discovered the cave, was there still an intact building inside?"
Why only that place could leave traces when the world reloaded was a question. Gu Mian suspected that building might hold the secret to the Low-Dinsional World.
"Yes," Lu Yi confird. "When we discovered the underground cave, there was indeed an intact building standing amidst the ruins. To be precise, it wasn't just a building; it was a temple, about two stories high."
A temple? Could it be…
"An Evil God Statue?" Gu Mian asked. Is this Evil God trying to make a cao in a TV drama or sothing? Popping up to remind everyone of its existence ti and ti again.
Lu Yi nodded. "Yes."
So it seems the Evil God Statue was what affected that area, Gu Mian thought. To be able to interfere with the world's save reloading... this Evil God isn't as pathetic as I imagined.
"You didn't move it to suppress the forbidden area afterward, did you?" Gu Mian thought of the Evil God Statue in the forbidden hospital area.
"Of course, we wouldn't dare touch the intact one," Lu Yi said. "But there were quite a few damaged statues among the ruins."
"So, you pieced together the broken statues and moved them into the forbidden area?"
"Yes, that's right," Lu Yi replied. "We collected all the Statue Fragnts we could find and cleaned up the entire area, leaving only the one intact temple…"
No wonder that statue looked so dilapidated when I first saw it, Gu Mian thought.
Then, he considered another issue. "So, if what you're saying is true, your world hasn't undergone a save reload spanning a very long period for quite so ti. Specifically, after soone discovered that underground cave, you haven't experienced any further long-duration save reloads."
"Why do you say that?" Lu Yi asked, puzzled. "Is it because we still rember the underground cave? But that mory itself could be from after a reload. Perhaps many years after we first discovered the cave, the world reloaded a save. Then, following the original trajectory, that sa person discovered the cave again, and thus we 'regained' the mory of it."
"No," Gu Mian suddenly stood up and drew a horizontal line on the dust-filled windowpane. "Look, this line is your world's tiline."
He marked a point in the middle of the line and circled it, making the line sowhat resemble a number line with a zero point.
Lu Yi stared at the line on the window. "So this point is when we discovered the statue?"
"No," Gu Mian dismissed his interpretation. "That point is when the statue was created."
He then marked another point not far to the right of the zero point and labeled it 'X.' "This is when the statue was discovered."
His finger moved further to the right, marking a point beyond 'X' and labeling it 'Y.' "This is now."
User Comments
0 comments from readers