Chapter 35: Everyday Wickedness (1/2)

After returning to the real world, Bai Yan was mentally exhausted.

Since he didn’t get any sleep the whole night, he ought to have laid down and tried to sleep. Yet, he didn’t rest, rather, the first thing he did was to save the video taken by the laptop.

He played the video, which was only a minute and a few seconds long, and in it showed him lowering his head and clenching his phone, moving his thumb and pressing the screen. The moment he clicked on a part of the phone screen, his entire body suddenly went rigid, and his eyes looked empty and lifeless as if his soul was dragged out his body, motionlessly sitting on the chair for a full minute.

It wasn’t until he came back from the game’s world that his body began to shake as his eyes had once again regained their focus.

Bai Yan felt his body and touched the tool pouch hanging on him. It was as clean as the clothes he was wearing on his body. When he jumped from the second floor, he landed on the bushes, so his clothes should be fully covered in mud stains and specs of grass. But, the clothes he had on were as if he had just put them on, not having any creases or wrinkles on them.

“So, my conscience enters the game and not my body?” Bai Yan instinctively rubbed his arms. These places should have cuts and bruises on them, but right now, they were unscathed, “Then, what happened during the first level?”

He recalled the first level in the game. When he returned, his entire being was stained by the blood inside the bathtub. He even tried to clean the blood-stained clothes as well as mop the bloody water on the floor, making him spend a lot of effort.

In addition to that, when the next round came by, although his body didn’t show any traces of being soaked in the rain, he experienced a fever that night and was only able to get back on his feet the next day.

The contents in the forum were all comprehensive. But after half a month, he had already come across everything in the forum. Bai Yan tried to search keywords to change the results in the search engine, but the unrelated topics were far too vast, so he couldn’t find even a sliver of relevant information pertaining to the game.

“Is it because there’s already an official forum that the community doesn’t want to discuss it anywhere else?”

Bai Yan stared at the red and blue patterned web page as his excessively pale face incessantly flickered from the bright light from his phone.

After wasting an hour browsing online and changing up a few keywords, Bai Yan still came up empty-handed. At this moment, he suddenly became aware of something, instantly opened his laptop, and tried to upload the one-minute video he had just recorded into the Internet.

Bai Yan hit upload and a new window quickly popped up indicating that the upload was a success. He then pressed on refresh and the recently uploaded video had mysteriously disappeared without a trace. Moreover, even the original video file he had had also vanished as if it were a fleeting dream.

“As it turns out, the app doesn’t allow the players to post outside the forum. Along with erasing the video, it also doesn’t allow it to be uploaded?” Bai Yan gently stroked his chin as he pondered, “Also, no one had talked about using one’s spirit or one’s body to enter the game in the forum. It’s probably not because others haven’t thought of it, but that it was deleted as soon as it was published.”

The app’s grip on the public’s opinion was especially tight as though it doesn’t want anyone outside the inner circle to know more about matters concerning the game.

Right now, Bai Yan knew that releasing opinions on the Internet was completely useless. The app easily controlled the web and any statements about the game online can’t escape the system’s reach. Then, was there another way around this that didn’t use the Internet?

Bai Yan thought about this and opened his drawer to take out a blank sheet of paper, grabbing a pen and writing something down the next second.

He intended to write information about the app on the piece of paper, but as he hung his pen in mid-air, the tip of his pen that touched the paper’s surface created a row of distorted black text, wherein not even half of the text could be deciphered for any meaning.

“Passing information through the Internet isn’t allowed, nor is simple writing.”

Bai Yan changed his style of writing and started drawing the app’s icon. However, since he had this idea, his drawing came out as an incomprehensible lump of scribbles. It was a million miles away from the image he wanted to sketch.

After a series of failures, Bai Yan still hadn’t given up.

He tried to use Morse code, riddles, phone recordings, and even created a secret language to write something about the app, but all of them ended in failures.

Bai Yan had finally put his pen down when he reached this extent.

He already knew that no matter what, he wouldn’t be able to pass on his experiences on the game to another person.

Yet, he didn’t feel dismayed. Towards this private matter, he originally didn’t want to talk to anyone about it. Furthermore, other than that deceased nosy person that loved to get into everyone’s business, he didn’t have any close friends that he could openly speak his mind to.

Bai Yan threw the paper with the messy drawings into the wastebasket and then browsed through the news in his laptop.

He inputted the keywords, ‘sudden death,’ into the search box and came across a large number of articles in the results.

In a shocking turn of events, an 18-year old had oddly died while playing on his phone. The cause of his sudden death was due to a cardiac arrest.

Due to staying up late to play on his phone, a student from XX University died while staying in his college dorm room. While he already had one foot in the grave, the student still managed to hold his phone firmly in his hand and had his eyes glued to the game’s screen.

The aforementioned student’s roommate told the reporter, on May XX, Liu Mou was playing on his phone like any other night. Liu Mou had always been antisocial and had been entranced by his phone’s game for over a month. Every day he was watching his screen closely, not even bothering to acknowledge the people around him. He played until late at night and didn’t reply if he was asked what he was playing.

“In the morning, we were calling him to go to class. We already shouted for him a number of times but still no reply. We instantly knew that there was something wrong when we found him leaning against the wall with a phone on his hand and staring intently at the screen.”

He looked at the comments below. A lot of people were assuming that the game was harming people and that we should be shutting this game down. There were also others that have been more sensible and cautioned people to use their phones wisely and not to stay up too late.

Frequently staying up late led people to feel unwell. Bai Yan used to stay up late a lot, but sleeping late for an extended time could cause heart problems and chest pains, which could easily bring about a sudden death.