Chapter 111: Sorting Things Out

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The moment Chen Hao saw the restaurant’s name, he was reminded of the White Bone Cave Cumin-Roasted Lamb restaurant he had visited before. He had even told Gu Mengyan about it at the time.

What was strange, however, was that according to Chen Hao’s memories, he had gone to that restaurant with Gu Mengyan and several other colleagues from the company, and had then fallen unconscious inside.

That had happened before Chen Hao entered the game for the first time. What he could not understand was that he clearly remembered everyone going to the restaurant together, yet when he awoke, Gu Mengyan told him that he had been unconscious for two days—and that he himself had warned her beforehand that he was about to lose consciousness.

As for the restaurant, she did not remember it at all. Nor did Bill Andre remember anything of the sort.

No—that was not quite right. It was not that they had forgotten. From their perspective, the trip to the restaurant had never happened in the first place.

To prove to Gu Mengyan that he had not merely been dreaming, Chen Hao had deliberately taken her to the place where the restaurant had stood in his memory.

Yet when they arrived, they discovered that the site where the restaurant should have been had become a collection of unfinished buildings, abandoned for many years. Refusing to accept the truth, Chen Hao wanted to search the buildings for some trace of the restaurant.

Unfortunately, there was not a single empty room that had anything to do with a restaurant. It was as if, when people had still occupied the place, every room had been used either as an office or a residence. Chen Hao could not make sense of it. The game world had been so incredibly real that it had not seemed like a dream at all.

But reality lay before his eyes, and Chen Hao had no choice but to temporarily believe Gu Mengyan’s explanation: he had truly only dreamed it.

Just as he was nearly beginning to forget the matter, Chen Hao entered the game world once more. There, he encountered Vivian again.

At the time, Vivian was being transported away after being captured by a group of unknown creatures from some unidentified race. Fortunately, the little girl managed to escape on her own and crossed paths with him.

What followed was a flight from pursuit and their eventual rescue. It was then that Chen Hao met a human game master—the very Dong Xin who was now traveling with them. Chen Hao simply failed to realize it.

Dong Xin’s appearance in the game was entirely different from the way she looked in the real world. Besides, Chen Hao had not dealt with her for more than a decade and no longer remembered that such a person existed.

Even when Dong Xin used the distinctive techniques of Hung Gar, Chen Hao still did not recognize her. Had she used the Dong family’s martial arts, he might perhaps have recalled something.

But Dong Xin had not wanted to reveal her identity, so instead of using her family’s techniques, she had employed an ordinary form of Hung Gar.

Naturally, she had failed to defeat Chen Hao, and the result had left her deeply frustrated. This was what eventually led to Dong Xin joining the technical department where Chen Hao worked and taking the position of supervisor.

What Dong Xin had never expected was that Chen Hao would resign. She had only just taken office, and this man had already quit. If so, had not her entire plan to approach him and observe him gone completely to waste?

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Dong Xin was unwilling to accept that, so she had someone investigate Chen Hao’s whereabouts. She discovered that he and Gu Mengyan had booked plane tickets to Kestall.

As a senior employee within Illusory Corporation, Dong Xin naturally knew exactly what existed in Kestall, and she understood perfectly what the place meant to the company.

That discovery led her to consider a great many questions.

First, Chen Hao had entered the game, still in development and testing, through an abnormal method. Almost immediately after entering, he had encountered Vivian, the native non-player character who had been waiting there.

Then, while helping Vivian escape, he had actually killed an NPC. Most frightening of all, the NPCs in the game were capable of infinite resurrection.

In plain terms, an NPC was nothing more than a collection of computer data. No matter how advanced its artificial intelligence became, it could never escape that fundamental nature. As long as its data had been backed up or recorded in advance, it could be copied infinitely afterward.

Yet the NPC killed by Chen Hao could not be resurrected. Its computer data seemed to have been damaged beyond repair. To bring it back, an entire set of programs and data would have to be written from scratch.

Perhaps that was difficult to visualize, so a simple example would help. An intelligent NPC was like a passage typed in a word-processing document. Each individual word had its role to play, and only together could they form coherent sentences that expressed the author’s thoughts.

If the wording was inappropriate or the punctuation incorrect, grammatical errors would appear, turning the passage into meaningless nonsense. This was much like a programming error that prevented an intelligent NPC from functioning properly.

Some authors possessed greater literary skill, while others possessed less. Both could successfully create an intelligent NPC, but differences in their writing would produce differences in the NPCs’ abilities, distinguishing the superior from the inferior.

Yet regardless of the kind, in the end it was still only a passage of text. A simple use of Control-C and Control-V could reproduce the same passage and create another identical NPC.

Even if a section were accidentally deleted, a prior backup would make restoration easy—one would merely have to copy and paste it again.

But the NPC killed by Chen Hao had been erased in a way that eliminated even that possibility. He had not merely deleted the text; he had directly destroyed the entire backup document, leaving it beyond repair.

It was as though Chen Hao had destroyed the physical or network hard drive containing the backup. To resurrect the NPC, one would have to create it anew—to write the entire passage all over again.

Yet after laboring painstakingly over a passage, if every word were suddenly deleted and someone demanded that it be rewritten exactly as before, doing so would be nearly impossible. Thus, in a certain sense, the NPC killed by Chen Hao in the game world had ceased to exist forever.

Chen Hao himself knew nothing of this. Dong Xin was the only person aware of it. She had not reported the matter to the company’s leadership. In fact, they did not even know that Chen Hao existed, much less that someone had entered the game world and caused such a tremendous disturbance.

As for why Dong Xin had kept the matter to herself, only she knew the answer.

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Although Dong Xin had not reported Chen Hao’s actions to the company, she herself was deeply concerned with him. Thus, as soon as she learned that Chen Hao and Gu Mengyan had arrived in Kestall, she came there as well.

Dong Xin was filled with curiosity and doubt about Chen Hao. He had resigned from his position as a company technician not long after entering the game, which was already suspicious enough. Then, immediately afterward, he had come to Kestall—a place of immense importance and extreme sensitivity to the company. Dong Xin would never believe that these events were entirely unrelated.

And yet the truth was precisely that. Although they appeared to be unbelievable coincidences, none of them had been deliberately arranged by Chen Hao.

Chen Hao had joined Illusory Corporation intentionally, but only because he was curious about the games it produced and wanted to learn more about them. He had possessed no ulterior motive.

His accidental entry into the game had been something he himself had never imagined possible. It had been an accident within an accident, with no conscious intention on his part whatsoever.

As for his later resignation, it was not because he had completed some undercover mission or feared that his identity would be exposed. He had simply decided to establish his own business and cooperate with Fan Yirou.

And as for his arrival in Kestall, that was entirely because of Gu Mengyan. Chen Hao had never intended to come here at all. Without consulting him, Gu Mengyan had unilaterally booked plane tickets for the two of them.

She was the one who truly wanted to come. Kestall was an exceptionally important place to her—a turning point in her life.

Gu Mengyan did not know whether, without what had happened back then, she would ever have met Chen Hao, the person she cared about so deeply. She did not know whether she would have enjoyed such comfortable living conditions, or whether she would have met Fan Yirou and become close friends with her.

But one thing was certain: her parents might still be alive, and she might never have become an orphan. Uncle Chen and Auntie Chen had treated her no differently from their own daughter, but they were not her biological parents. That distinction mattered greatly.

When the three of them arrived at the Spider Cave Cumin-Roasted Insects restaurant, each was filled with thoughts of their own. Chen Hao, meanwhile, remembered something else—something that had occurred to him only after seeing the restaurant’s name.

Earlier that day, a number of memory fragments had inexplicably surfaced in his mind. He could be certain that those memories did not belong to him. Looking at it from another angle, then, might the memories of his first visit to the White Bone Cave Cumin-Roasted Lamb restaurant also have belonged to someone else?

That would explain why Gu Mengyan and Bill Andre knew nothing about it. Thinking back now, Chen Hao remembered only that he had gone to the restaurant. Since he had been walking in front, Gu Mengyan and the others had indeed never appeared within his field of vision.

The moment he entered the restaurant, he had looked toward that eerie green light. After that, he had fallen unconscious and entered the game.

It seemed that his memories might have begun to diverge from reality at that very moment.

Chen Hao gazed at the strangely named signboard and fell into deep thought...