Blue Star.
Xiao Lan was an ordinary citizen of Huadu.
The popularity of the game 《Deep Red Continent》 had been skyrocketing lately. Now, every time she opened her phone, she was being flooded with information related to it.
Lying on the bed in her rented room, the glow of the phone screen illuminated her face.
She had been scrolling through a short video platform for nearly two hours, her thumb swiping up mechanically, one clip after another, endless and repetitive.
This kind of fragmented information was perfect for numbing the brain; before she knew it, she would lose track of time.
It wasn't until she scrolled to a recorded stream of 【Ever-Crying Vine】 that her interest was piqued.
On the screen, a long-haired man sat behind a desk, holding a snow leopard in his arms. His face wasn't very clear in the shot, as if viewed through a thin veil, but even so, that face was enough to make her finger stop.
Xiao Lan watched the recording several times, then dug through 【Ever-Crying Vine】’s profile to find earlier screen recordings, watching them one by one.
In the earliest videos, the man's face was almost completely blurred, showing only a vague outline.
Even a candid video would have better quality than this.
However, the footage became clearer as time went on. In the latest video, she could already see his lowered eyelashes and the subtle movements of his fingers as they stroked the snow leopard.
Xiao Lan stared at the screen until her eyes grew sore before finally putting down the phone. She rolled over and buried her face in the pillow.
She didn't usually play games, but at this moment, she desperately wanted to enter the game and interact with such a strikingly handsome NPC. Most importantly, she didn't have to worry about the NPC letting her down with some scandal.
Unfortunately, she hadn't managed to snag a closed beta slot.
That evening, Xiao Lan met a friend for dinner at their usual hotpot restaurant.
The soup base boiled, red oil churning, and the steam blurred the face of the friend sitting across from her.
She picked up a piece of tripe and swished it in the pot a few times. Suddenly, she looked up at the night sky outside the window. “The moonlight is beautiful tonight.”
Her friend looked out the window in confusion. The glass was covered in a layer of condensation, making it impossible to see anything. “What moonlight?”
Xiao Lan froze for a moment and blinked. There was indeed nothing outside; the night sky was pitch black.
“It’s nothing. I think I’ve just been looking at my phone for too long; my eyes were playing tricks on me.”
After saying that, she stuffed the tripe into her mouth and chewed, but it felt a bit bland, like eating a piece of paper.
After dinner, Xiao Lan returned home, took a shower, changed into her pajamas, and leaned against the headboard to scroll through her phone for a bit longer.
She had eaten too much for dinner and was in a food coma. She could no longer process the content on the screen; the words and images flowed past her like water. Her eyelids grew heavier and heavier, and her finger could no longer swipe. The phone slipped from her palm and landed on the pillow.
Xiao Lan fell into a deep sleep.
An unknown amount of time passed when, suddenly, she heard a strange sound.
The sound seemed to originate from inside her body, vibrating in her chest—a low, long-drawn-out hum.
She tried to open her eyes, but her eyelids were exceptionally heavy. After struggling for a moment, she managed to open them just a crack.
Her familiar ceiling was nowhere to be seen. She was no longer in her bedroom. A powerful sense of weightlessness washed over her; she couldn't tell which way was up, feeling as if she were drifting.
Finally, she opened her eyes completely.
She was surrounded by an endless darkness, suspended within it with no sense of direction.
In the distance was a massive celestial body, faintly emitting a weak, grayish-white light.
The celestial body was so enormous that it exceeded her field of vision; she could only see the pockmarked surface of its craters.
She felt cold—the kind of cold one feels when they forget to wear a coat in winter. A ghostly wind seeped from the gaps in her bones, threatening to freeze her very blood.
Xiao Lan tried to hug her arms, but they had already lost all sensation. Her body seemed to be pinned in this void, unable to move an inch.
She struggled desperately, but it was completely futile.
The air was being sucked out of her lungs as if she were truly in a vacuum; she couldn't breathe at all.
Her mouth hung wide open, her eyes bulging from their sockets. Tears froze into ice crystals the moment they emerged, clinging to her eyelashes like glittering jewels.
After struggling for a long time, she finally couldn't hold on anymore. Her consciousness began to blur, and rings of light appeared at the edges of her vision, shrinking inward.
She died.
And then, she lived again.
There was absolutely no transition or buffer. One second she was suffocating, and the next, she felt that same cold seeping from her bones again.
The same weightlessness, the same boundless darkness, only the massive, dimly glowing celestial body seemed a bit closer to her.
She began to suffocate and struggle again, repeating the same agonizing process.
She died again, and then she lived again.
What’s going on? Is this a dream within a dream? Xiao Lan’s consciousness was torn between terror and confusion.
She wanted to pinch herself to see if she would wake up, but her arms wouldn't move, and she couldn't even scream. She could only be repeatedly frozen stiff and suffocated to death in this void, only to experience it all over again a second later.
Gradually, she began to understand. She seemed to be trapped in some kind of death loop.
She would be reborn every time she died, but the location of her rebirth was this void of vacuum, meaning that the moment she returned, she would immediately fall into a death trap.
Was there anything more terrifying in the world? She couldn't even die when she wanted to!
She could no longer remember how many times she had died—perhaps ten, perhaps twenty.
Every death had the same result, beginning with weightlessness and ending with suffocation, with no change or turning point in between.
Her mental state was like a piece of wire being bent back and forth; every death left an irreversible crack upon it.
Strange thoughts began to surface in Xiao Lan’s mind.
Maybe I’m already dead, and this is what it feels like when humans are dying—an infinite loop, never-ending.
Did I become a ghost? Do I have to find a substitute to be set free?
No, no, no, this must be karma.
She suddenly remembered that she had participated in bullying during her student days, which had resulted in the victim hanging themselves.
She had been a minor at the time and wasn't the ringleader, so she had only received a reprimand.
Over the years, she had completely forgotten about it. On the rare occasions she did remember, she only thought the victim had been too fragile. Realizing only now, could this be a vengeful ghost seeking a life?
Xiao Lan fell into a new wave of terror.
She didn't know that many other residents of Blue Star were undergoing the same torment tonight.
They lived in different cities but were trapped in the same horror, dying repeatedly in a dark, cold place with a massive celestial body before them.
The cause of all this was a streamer named 【Ever-Crying Vine】, who had widely disseminated the visage of the Evil God across Blue Star.
The power of the Evil God was slowly penetrating.
Xiao Lan had completely broken down. She no longer struggled or cried; she even refused to think. If she didn't think, she couldn't feel the pain.
Consequently, she didn't see the celestial body getting closer and closer to her.
Rate on N.U.
