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墨書 Inktalez
For Xu Nuan, who was in a well-lit area, the same method could only be used once. Therefore, she had only managed to successfully deal with one Zombie and obtained a chip.
As the Zombies closed in again, Xu Nuan found herself too exhausted to fight. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a glimmer of light at the edge and widened her eyes in shock, cursing under her breath. It turned out that the people in the monitoring room had set a trap, and she had foolishly walked right into it.
Regret was useless at this point. Xu Nuan gritted her teeth and resolutely lifted a chair, smashing it down onto one of the Zombies. She then knocked everything off the table and overturned the nearby bed. Seizing the moment when the Zombies paused, she dashed out.
The desert brightened quickly; at first, there was just a hint of white at the horizon, followed by vibrant reds and purples crowding around the clouds. But soon, it was engulfed in blinding light, with the entire desert bathed in gold. The shifting sands shimmered like waves of hope surging forward.
Though she was in the desert, it felt as if she were on a golden sea.
The brightness stung Xu Nuan's eyes. Without any rest, she felt a sharp discomfort, and almost immediately tears began to well up. As she peered through the mist, she realized ahead lay darkness—there was no sign of the sunrise she had seen earlier.
At first, Xu Nuan thought she was hallucinating due to exhaustion. However, as she turned around with tears in her eyes, all she saw was darkness; yet she could still make out the faint outline of the sand surface.
"What’s going on?"
A spark of inspiration flashed through her mind. Without fully processing it, Xu Nuan wiped away her tears. What she saw was still a magnificent sunrise, with rows of houses beside her and their lights gradually dimming, indicating that the Zombies would soon receive their orders to emerge.
Xu Nuan pinched the inside of her arm to force more tears from her eyes. Through that layer of mist, darkness remained visible. This time, she finally grasped that fleeting inspiration and uttered two words.
"Mirror Surface!"
In a flurry, Xu Nuan fumbled through her backpack for a pair of sunglasses that Gu Ze had stuffed into it before they entered this level. In the desert, wearing sunglasses would protect against sunlight and block some sand. However, she preferred to observe her surroundings with her naked eyes to avoid missing any crucial information and had never worn them.
As she quickly put on the sunglasses, all she saw was blackness. Naturally, wearing sunglasses would render everything dark. But this time, what lay before her was a black desert—no houses, no lights, and no Zombies—just endless sand and a few pitiful sagebrushes. Looking up revealed a crescent moon; its already faint light was further obscured by the sunglasses.
She stood there motionless, seeing no Zombies and feeling no pain from an attack.
"What can be seen exists; what cannot be seen does not exist."
Xu Nuan suddenly realized that the boundary between illusion and reality was difficult to discern. She had been searching for the surprise between the two, thinking she had grasped the trick, yet she still observed the mechanisms in place.
In this way, if Gu Ze and the others discovered this, they wouldn't have to worry about not understanding what those Zombies represented and falling into danger.
Relieved, Xu Nuan sat down on the sandy ground and began to sort through everything that had happened since she approached the lake.
She remembered leaving the Supply Station in the morning. After a tiring walk throughout the morning, it was noon when she saw the lake. As she approached it, she entered a Black Building; at that moment, it was evening inside the structure. Then came her solitary encounter with a Zombie that lasted until deep into the night. After dealing with those Zombies, she later realized the subtlety of both experiences. In other words, her deep night in that scene was actually afternoon in reality, while what she saw in that scene was nighttime in reality.
There was a time difference between the two, but the passage of time felt the same.
“Was what I saw before and now real, while the Zombies were an illusion?”
Xu Nuan murmured to herself, then casually set down her backpack and rummaged through it. Suddenly, her fingers brushed against several damaged chips.
Seeing the chips lying quietly in her palm, Xu Nuan pressed her lips together.
“If I had been hurt in that previous scene, then I would have truly been hurt.”
Therefore, strictly speaking, she could not rely solely on subjective consciousness to distinguish between the two. The key point here was that what a Player saw determined what environment they were in. In other words, what was seen was real; what could not be seen did not necessarily mean it did not exist.
Holding onto this thought, Xu Nuan tried to take off her sunglasses again.
The sun was slowly rising; its rays were not yet intense, but it was already quite hot in the desert. The doors of familiar houses stood wide open as various Zombies emerged from within, their bodies stiff and movements mechanical as they turned their heads as if searching for a target to attack.
As one of the Zombies shifted its gaze toward her, Xu Nuan quickly put on her sunglasses.
Once again under the cool moonlight in the silent desert, she found herself alone.
Looking through a medium reveals a different landscape, experiencing another kind of reality. Xu Nuan felt at this moment just how immersed she was in this game. Such mechanisms must have gathered technology from various fields to allow players to experience two extreme worlds in an instant.
Xu Nuan even wondered if every Survival Game they had experienced before also existed in this other world, where one could see a different scenery simply by looking through a medium. However, the financial, material, and human resources required for that would be incalculable. Therefore, the funds that Chi Ming had deceived from Chi Securities could not support such operations.
No, to be precise, even if it were just this one Survival Game operating such mechanisms, it would still require a substantial amount of funding. The one-time funds provided by Chi Ming could not sustain it. Moreover, Qin Yaojie and Another Founder had started researching this in their youth, which also required funding at that time. However, the intelligence Chi Xiaoming found before entering the game indicated that Chi Ming did not join Qin Yaojie and the others' team until relatively late.
Heng Technology, Fengtong Technology, Chi Securities, An Insurance. Since there were these four forces involved, the funding could not solely come from Chi Ming; thus, Chi Xiaoming's purpose for entering the game needed further consideration.
Xu Nuan nodded to herself before realizing that she was alone at that moment.
"I wonder how Ze and the others are doing?"
Xu Nuan murmured softly as she recalled the appearances of Gu Ze and the others. When Xie Huai's image popped into her mind, her attention focused on the glasses he wore.
"Xie Huai!"
She stood up excitedly. Xie Huai wearing glasses represented two things. First, it meant that the previous Survival Game did not have this mechanism; otherwise, Xie Huai, who viewed the world through glasses, would have noticed something amiss. Second, it indicated that the world Xie Huai saw had always been this vast desert.
"If that's the case, if..."
Xu Nuan hurriedly turned around and looked back through her sunglasses. She wanted to verify whether the path she had taken along that building started from where they had entered the mechanism.
With night blindness and sunglasses on, Xu Nuan's view was severely limited; she couldn't discern much.
After taking a few steps, Xu Nuan quickly realized she had entered a misunderstanding. Even if they all started at the same point when entering the mechanism, their entrances into another world were different. They must have triggered some mechanism at that time and been sent to various places in the desert. Those like her who did not wear glasses would see buildings and then encounter zombies, facing different situations. Meanwhile, even if Xie Huai was sent to a certain place, he would still see only desert. Thus, among them, Xie Huai had never faced danger while others might have stumbled upon clues by coincidence or found themselves surrounded by zombies.
"How can I find them?"
Xu Nuan turned back in the opposite direction, hoping to find Gu Ze and the others. However, she had no idea which world they were in. It was possible that she was on the inside of a mechanism while they were outside, making it impossible for them to meet.
Suddenly, Xu Nuan's eyes widened as she thought of a possibility.
She might have brushed past someone without seeing each other.
Was this possibility significant?
Xu Nuan dared not judge the wonders of this game with her limited knowledge any longer.
She was currently at the lower end of a Dune, with a Ridge not far away that was relatively high. The area where she stood had little wind, making it quite suitable for resting. Despite having gone through a night without rest, in her current environment, it felt like she was in a place just entering nightfall, which should allow her to rest.
Xu Nuan attempted to climb up the Ridge, taking careful steps. Once on top, she faced the biting cold wind of the desert and stood there, using the faint moonlight to gaze into the distance through her sunglasses.
The view ahead was blurry, with too few sights filling her vision, and her heart began to chill. Even when facing those Zombies before, she hadn’t felt this way; now, at this moment, fear crept back into her heart.
After standing atop the Ridge for a long time against the wind, Xu Nuan decided not to rest. Instead, she chose a direction based on her instincts and began walking alone in the desert. Neither the cold wind nor the uncomfortable moonlight nor the creatures emerging from the yellow sand deterred her in the slightest.
It was unclear how long she walked until her legs grew weak and she could barely move. She finally stopped, feeling the sharp edges of the chip in her palm cut into her skin. She used that pain to keep herself alert.
However, when she took off her sunglasses again and saw the scene before her, Xu Nuan's eyes widened, emotions flickering in her gaze.
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