Chapter 113: Putting My Thoughts in Order

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The four of them ate their insect feast to their hearts’ content. Even Fan Yirou, who had initially been deeply resistant to insects, eventually began to eat with gusto. She even ordered herself an additional plate of roasted silkworm pupae.

People were truly strange. Once they overcame their initial fear of the unknown, they could become utterly fearless. It was, undeniably, a fascinating thing.

Although Chen Hao was enjoying the meal as well, he kept part of his attention on the restaurant itself. He wanted to connect this place with the shop he had visited last time. Yet even now, he had discovered nothing unusual about it.

Everything was indistinguishable from an ordinary restaurant. Even the décor was perfectly commonplace, with nothing remarkable about it. It was completely different from the White Bone Cave restaurant Chen Hao had visited before.

He remembered that the previous restaurant’s décor had come much closer to the gloomy, terrifying atmosphere of Journey to the West. Nor was there any green light here capable of rendering him unconscious.

As for Dong Xin, she behaved perfectly normally throughout the meal, making no suspicious moves whatsoever. She simply chatted happily with the two women about topics peculiar to young ladies, behaving no differently from an ordinary white-collar worker. It was as though Chen Hao did not exist at all; the conversation had remained exclusively among the three of them.

Chen Hao was quite happy to be left in peace. It gave him an opportunity to carefully consider everything that had happened recently. He was doing his best to connect what he knew with the events he himself had experienced.

It had all begun on the night they worked overtime. After work ended, Chen Hao remembered that Gu Mengyan, as usual, had asked the wealthy young master to treat everyone to a meal.

He had not refused. After working overtime for several days in a row, everyone had been exhausted and hungry. Going out for a late-night meal was perfectly ordinary. At the time, Chen Hao had thought nothing of it. He had merely remembered a restaurant with an unusual name that he had passed a few days earlier.

That was where the problem had already begun. In Gu Mengyan’s memory, as well as everyone else’s, the outing for late-night food had never happened. They had simply gone straight home after work, and he had even told Gu Mengyan that he would be unconscious for several days and asked her to look after him.

There was another point: the strange restaurant did not exist at all. The site had been nothing more than an unfinished building. So how had he seen that restaurant two days earlier?

Judging from the condition of the unfinished building, it could not possibly have been abandoned only recently. It had clearly stood desolate for a very long time.

And so the question arose. Chen Hao now suspected that his memory had begun malfunctioning at that moment. For some unknown reason, a stretch of memory that did not originally belong to him had appeared in his mind. Whether it was passing by that restaurant two days earlier or dining there that night, none of those memories represented experiences he had truly lived through. They had been implanted in his mind by some unknown person—or perhaps by some unknown force.

It was much like the fragments of imagery that had suddenly appeared in his mind after he arrived in Costal. Yet the two situations were fundamentally different.

In Costal, he could clearly distinguish the extra memories in his mind as belonging not to him, but to the security personnel who had participated in the city’s defense.

But as for those memories concerning the restaurant, at the beginning... No! Even now, he still felt that they were memories of events he himself had experienced. That feeling was undeniably bizarre.

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The human brain was truly miraculous. After all these years, humanity had developed only a little over ten percent of it, leaving a vast portion unexplored. Even the greatest geniuses were believed to have developed no more than twenty percent of their brains.

Chen Hao alone had no way of understanding what was behind it. He could not even remember how those extra memories had appeared in the first place. Had someone tampered with him? Yet although he did not understand the implantation of memories, surely he had heard enough to know how difficult such a thing would be.

Anyone could realize, with only a little thought, how extraordinarily hard it would be to implant memories into another person. Chen Hao remembered watching a highly acclaimed film that had explored the subject of human memory. It had been an absolute classic.

Could his memories have been altered by the same method? Chen Hao shook his head, unable to make sense of it no matter how hard he tried.

What baffled him even more was that, setting aside the alteration of his memories, he had somehow entered the game world developed by Illusionary Corporation during the two days he had been unconscious.

The game had not even officially launched. It was still undergoing internal development.

Moreover, he had entered it without coming into contact with any network device, and Illusionary Corporation’s game had not been connected to any external network.

The game itself was not strange in the slightest. It still possessed that same familiar quality: dreamlike yet astonishingly realistic scenery, beautiful landscapes, and a vast world spread across an enormous map.

The only thing that had truly shocked Chen Hao was encountering an NPC with self-awareness there—Vivian. It was undoubtedly one of the most astonishing discoveries in human history.

A computer program had developed self-awareness. If she were also given a physical form, she could entirely be considered a living being. Would that not make her the third major category of life, alongside animals and plants? As for marine invertebrates, fungi, algae, and the like, those were beside the point.

Later, he had inexplicably returned from the game world to reality, only to enter the game again several days afterward. During those intervening days, he had constantly tried to figure out how he had entered the game, but he had never found an answer. This time had been the same. He had merely fallen asleep with his head on the desk, and he had entered the game world.

If one asked what the common factor was, that was difficult to say. His memories of the first time he entered the game had already been altered, leaving him unable to distinguish which parts were his own and which had come from outside.

All he remembered was that he had been lying facedown on the desk, with the computer still on and connected to the internet. Could it have been related to that?

Afterward, Chen Hao had tried tinkering with the computer and the network. He had even fallen facedown before the computer again, but unfortunately, he had never managed to enter the game world.

After that, he had resigned from his job and come to Costal with Gu Mengyan. Nothing had happened to either of them after arriving here, but Chen Hao had inadvertently learned much more.

Most important were the attacks that had taken place in Costal and the strange building. He had also roughly deduced that the founding of Illusionary Corporation must have been closely connected to Costal.

After all, Shaotian had said that many of the senior executives his father and the others knew at Illusionary Corporation had been among the researchers who had first come to Costal with Gu Mengyan’s biological parents.

What inspiration had the buildings here in Costal given them, allowing them to create such an extraordinary game?

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And now that he thought about it carefully, the fragments of his memories seemed remarkably similar in style to the game world. Could there be some connection between the two?

And what, exactly, did Dong Xin know? Her appearance had coincided perfectly with the period after his two trips into the game, and she was also an internal employee of Illusionary Corporation. Did that mean that, when he had entered the game for the first time and openly revealed his identity, he had attracted the company’s attention? Had they sent Dong Xin to monitor him?

Yet based on what Chen Hao knew of Illusionary Corporation, if that were truly the reason, they would never have sent only one person to watch him. At the very least, someone from within the company would have invited him to a cordial conversation...

Then there was his father, who had brought Shaotian to Costal as well. It seemed to be connected to the attacks that had occurred near the strange building in the forest. But what had caused Costal, which had remained peaceful for so many years, to suffer such a massacre?

What had the conglomerate that employed so many security companies known in advance that it had taken such extensive precautions?

Had Dong Xin come to Costal solely to follow him, or was she also carrying out some other task for Illusionary Corporation?

And finally, there was Gu Mengyan. How had this girl happened to choose this precise moment to book a flight to Costal for a vacation?

Chen Hao was not suspicious that Gu Mengyan harbored any ill intentions toward him. Having grown up together, he understood her very well. Gu Mengyan was a kind and adorable girl. Although she could be mischievous at times, her jokes were always harmless. She was also extremely close to him as her older brother—perhaps even excessively clingy.

That made Chen Hao somewhat awkward. They were all adults now, after all. Acting as they had when they were children seemed... a little inappropriate.

But that did not mean Gu Mengyan knew nothing. They had not been together for several years. Though they had both been studying away from home, surely Gu Mengyan had investigated Costal and the circumstances surrounding her parents while she was at school. Could she have learned from somewhere that something was wrong in Costal, then secretly booked the tickets and deceived him into coming here under the pretext of a vacation?

That girl... It seemed he would have to learn more about her.

Chen Hao did not doubt for a moment that Gu Mengyan meant him any harm. He could understand that her intense concern with Costal stemmed entirely from her parents.

But that was precisely what worried him. He was afraid Gu Mengyan would become too deeply involved and end up placing herself in danger. After all, judging from everything they had learned so far, Costal was anything but peaceful...