Chapter 2-Game Descent: I Am the Sole Player
Bai Shan knew that the most important task for a seventeen-year-old high school student was studying.
Whether it was the strange noises coming from the pipes in the middle of the night, the frequent power outages, or the eccentric elderly neighbor who kept loitering around her front door—none of these could stop a senior-year student from studying.
But Bai Shan was clearly no ordinary senior.
To outsiders, her future prospects were blindingly obvious—big-name establishments like Starbucks, KFC, and McDonald's would be waiting for her, and if all else failed, she could always make bubble tea. At least she'd never have to worry about her qualifications not matching her job, or being stuck between overqualified and underqualified.
The strange noises in the pipes were because some people had been dumping catfish into clogged toilets. The power outages were because the building was too old. The unhinged neighbor would sooner or later be detained by the police—
In short, none of these factors could stop her from playing games.
The vast majority of things in life were predictable at a glance, which made the mysterious game of unknown origin on her computer all the more intriguing.
The game's backstory told of humanity vanishing overnight, all living creatures evolving without limit, and the planet becoming unrecognizable in a short span of time.
The protagonist, seemingly the only surviving human, had to survive in a perilous environment while completing mysterious commands transmitted through an earpiece, embarking on an unknown journey to uncover the truth behind the world's upheaval and humanity's disappearance.
After spending a day pushing through the early game, Bai Shan skillfully followed the blueprints and crafted an RV using item materials, stockpiled the necessary supplies, and then followed the mission instructions to head toward another city on the game map.
At the same time, she successfully reached Level 20, and her Talent [Tyrant's Grip] finally unlocked its second Skill!
[Talent: Tyrant's Grip (SS) Skill 1: Inspection Make physical contact with a target to view their Talent. Skill 2: Tyrannical Command Can manipulate any object touched by the right hand within a 10-meter diameter. Skill 3: Unlocks at Level 50 Skill 4: Unlocks at Level 90]
The new Skill, Tyrannical Command, was essentially equivalent to "telekinesis" seen in many movies and games—generally a very powerful ability. But after experimenting with it, Bai Shan found it rather unwieldy.
Due to the limitations of the game format, she couldn't manipulate things freely with a mere thought like protagonists in those superpower stories. She still had to operate through mouse and keyboard, and the process was complex.
Therefore, Bai Shan's current strategy remained caution-first. She wouldn't risk provoking powerful monsters—she would play it safe until Skill 3 unlocked.
The downside of this strategy was that experience and resources accumulated slowly, meaning the ninth run would take considerably more time.
Bai Shan reflected on her eight failed runs. Impatience was one of her biggest flaws. In the last run, she'd died because she hadn't gathered enough information or prepared adequately before recklessly charging into an unknown map, foolishly challenging a Great Ruler-level sea monster at only Level 50.
She'd been thinking she'd grab a bite of jellyfish, and then got killed by what was apparently a box jellyfish monster.
The more failures one accumulates, the easier it is to become restless. Bai Shan consciously reined herself in.
As the saying goes, ninth time's the charm. With the resolve of someone ready to make bubble tea for a living, this time she would beat the game!
Brimming with confidence, Bai Shan drove to the next city.
The game's ultimate destination was a secret room somewhere in the Arctic. She had to reach it within one in-game year, and she needed to kill 5 Great Ruler-level monsters and unlock the title of [King of Kings] to open the secret room and reach the truth.
Nine runs total so far. Her current Great Ruler kill count: 0. Times killed by a Great Ruler: 1.
The road ahead was still long.
According to the game clues she'd collected, the city she was approaching had been taken over by a flock of mutated migratory birds. The city was blanketed in white—not snow, but bird droppings.
It sounded rather disgusting, but Bai Shan only had to wiggle her fingers in front of the screen. The one getting showered in bird crap wasn't her—it was her character, [Tyrant].
And so, the character on screen drove the vehicle fearlessly into the white city.
*
"What bullshit! Our household uses electricity normally—how could the bill suddenly double?!"
"Sir, please calm down..."
A crowd was pushing and shoving in the lobby, demanding answers from the property management. Bai Shan, wearing her earphones and carrying a supermarket shopping bag, walked past.
She was puzzled too. Her electricity bill had skyrocketed this month. Anyone who didn't know better would think she was secretly running an internet cafe at home.
"And the water coming out of the faucets—I don't even dare use it to shower! When are you going to fix this?"
"We're already investigating the situation..."
"The weeds on the rooftop are practically swallowing the top floor! There's nowhere to hang laundry. How long have we been reporting this?!"
Bai Shan suddenly sighed, wondering when her mother would finish her business trip and come home. Otherwise, Ms. Bai would surely be leading the charge in the residents' group chat—she would never allow her money to just slip away like that.
Thinking of her mom, Bai Shan held the shopping bag in one arm and pulled out her phone with the other, snapping a photo of the chaotic scene to share with her, while also angling for some pocket money.
Ms. Bai didn't reply immediately. Bai Shan opened her phone's photo gallery to delete the picture she'd just taken, but accidentally zoomed in on it.
In the corner of the photo, the old security guard in the lobby was slumped on the sofa. Ignoring his flushed, sweat-drenched face in the dead of winter, he looked as if he were simply asleep—undisturbed by the dozen-plus people arguing around him.
Bai Shan yanked out her wired earphones. The cheerful music cut off abruptly. She shouldered her way through the crowd, grabbed the property manager's arm, and gestured toward the security guard.
The lobby's old security guard was dead.
Bai Shan was the first to notice the guard's condition. The people on scene, who had been on the verge of a fistfight, quickly ceased hostilities and called an ambulance when they realized something was wrong with the old guard.
She heard he'd stopped breathing before the ambulance arrived. Apparently it was sudden death from high blood pressure.
News of the death spread quickly through the entire complex. An elderly person dying suddenly wasn't uncommon, so people expressed brief sympathy and moved on.
Perhaps because of winter, an unusually high number of elderly people had been passing away recently, with funerals one after another.
None of this concerned Bai Shan. Plenty of young people died from staying up too late as well—she'd better worry about herself first.
At one in the morning, Bai Shan sat before her computer feeling dizzy, her thoughts sluggish.
[Please slow your ascent rate, or you risk "oxygen toxicity."]
[Tyrant] had already obtained the materials to craft the weapon "Pardon Ruler" and was swimming upward from the deep sea. A red warning flashed on screen.
Bai Shan yawned and paused the game.
She pulled open the window. The cold night air rushed in, but it didn't clear her foggy head—it only made the palpitations more noticeable.
The entire city was asleep. Faint neon lights flickered in the distance. Perhaps the night was too dark, or maybe it was from too much screen time lately—Bai Shan suspected her eyesight was deteriorating.
She seemed to be developing floaters too.
Otherwise, why would a black thread keep swaying back and forth before her eyes?
Bai Shan's hand suddenly shot out the window and grabbed the black thread.
It felt coarse and wouldn't budge. On closer inspection, calling it a black thread wasn't quite right—it was brown, somewhat like a tree root tendril.
Bai Shan leaned her head out the 25th-floor window, braving the howling cold wind, and looked up—
Thick white tree roots were knotted around the building's exterior walls, as if a pair of enormous white hands had descended from the sky to grip the thirty-story building.
Slender brown tendrils hung down from the top floor. Bai Shan could see a lush tree canopy that, in the darkness, looked like a massive storm cloud shrouding the building.
Bai Shan held her position, eyes wide open. She tightened her grip on the tendril and snapped off a piece.
Immediately after, the window was slammed shut with a whoosh.
The chill of the night wind still lingered on her neck, cold to the bone. Bai Shan stared at the tendril in her hand, now certain that what she'd seen wasn't a hallucination from sleep deprivation.
She knew the rooftop was being used as a private vegetable garden by some residents. What on earth had those people planted? The plants were practically growing down to her apartment!
A tree with enough vitality to root itself into walls—Bai Shan's first thought was a banyan tree. But surely no one would have the bright idea to plant a banyan on a rooftop. Could a bird have carried a seed up there?
Regardless of who planted it, the one thing Bai Shan could confirm was that when she'd gone up to the rooftop to sun her blankets just two weeks ago, there hadn't been a trace of any tree!
No tree could naturally grow this large in two weeks.
Bai Shan began to wonder again if she was hallucinating from sleep deprivation. She might have mistaken rooftop clutter for a tree canopy, and the tendril in her hand could be explained by some extremely unlikely event—like being blown over by the wind. After all, Rong City had pretty good greenery.
It was too late at night for her to go confirm the eerie situation in person like a horror movie protagonist.
...She had a nagging feeling that something bad was about to happen.
Bai Shan quickly washed up, turned off the lights, and burrowed into her blankets. Her phone screen illuminated the part of her face peeking out from under the covers.
#AbnormalTreeGrowth#
#RongCityBanyanTree#
#AbnormalPlants#
She searched these keywords across major social media platforms, hoping to find similar cases, but only turned up plant disease information and scenic photos of Rong City.
Bai Shan switched to foreign platforms and searched again.
Equally calm and peaceful. Everything looked fine.
Bai Shan found this strange, because she was used to disturbing and graphic content popping up unexpectedly on foreign platforms.
But tonight's feed was practically like stumbling into a domestic youth-protection mode.
The only post that could be considered "discordant" was a foreigner's frantic accusation: "My cat ate my child!"
The attached photo showed a bloodstained living room sofa.
The comments below were full of skepticism and mockery.
It wasn't unheard of for large dogs to kill infants at home, but judging from this person's profile, his child was a boy who stood at least 5'11", while his cat appeared to be about the length of an adult's forearm.
The absurdity was like accusing a mouse of killing a cat. The comment section had already been overrun with mocking memes.
Bai Shan studied the attached photo carefully. The sofa was nearly shredded, and the corner of the floor visible in the photo bore deep scratch marks that didn't match a house cat's size. Scratches that deep would have to come from at least a leopard.
If this person wasn't joking, then either he also kept a leopard at home, or an animal had escaped from a nearby zoo.
Amid the sea of mockery, Bai Shan caught the person's replies.
[Katie ran away. We can't find her. We've already called the police.]
[But I keep feeling like she's nearby. At night, I sometimes see glowing eyes.]
The last reply was from a month ago. After that, the person had posted nothing more.
Bai Shan didn't join the mocking crowd. She had an eerie, deja vu-like sense of familiarity...
After thinking carefully, she realized—she'd been eaten by a cat too!
To be precise, she'd been eaten by a cat in the game Tomorrow's Dominator.
That was during her first run. The tutorial had been incredibly half-hearted, and Bai Shan had no idea what she was supposed to do when she first started playing.
She'd picked up a few small items at home and was about to go outside to look around, only to be killed the moment she opened the door.
It was a longhaired cat, its body the size of an adult leopard, retaining a feline's swift speed and brutal lethality.
[Seems like the neighbor's Ragdoll cat, Kiki...]
The protagonist's fleeting thought flashed across the screen, and then the computer went black.
Quite suddenly, Bai Shan recalled the backstory of Tomorrow's Dominator.
The game was set against the real world.
First, Earth's oxygen levels became abnormal. Anomalous life forms appeared across the globe, and death tolls soared.
Governments worldwide concealed the situation to prevent panic, restricting civilian movement under the pretext of a "major epidemic."
Then, militaries were deployed to locations where anomalous life forms were active.
One day, the roughly hundred thousand people living within the Arctic Circle simply vanished. Scientists and soldiers sent by various nations never returned. The Arctic became the literal end of the world.
The more they investigated, the more unbelievable it became.
But fortunately, after paying countless costs, human governments finally determined that the anomalies seemed to originate from an unknown entity in the Arctic, and they obtained clues on how to deal with it.
Led by three military superpowers, humanity assembled its most cutting-edge technology. Hundreds of new satellites were launched into space for real-time monitoring. Drones, gunboats, aircraft carriers, ultra-long-range missiles, and never-before-disclosed superweapons... enough firepower to obliterate the entire Arctic.
The cost of losing the Arctic would be devastating. Rising sea levels would flood countless coastal cities worldwide. China would lose its economic hub, Shanghai. America would lose its most important port city. Some island nations might face total annihilation.
Beyond human cities, ecosystems would suffer severe damage, followed by climate crises, food crises—the world would descend into chaos.
Despite the nearly unbearable cost, the United Nations passed the operation unanimously. The unknown organism discovered in the Arctic had already threatened humanity's very existence. Humanity had no choice but to strike with the resolve of burning all bridges behind them.
———The above was the game's opening storyline, which Bai Shan could practically recite from memory by now.
As for the outcome of this massive military operation, Bai Shan didn't know.
Because the game's protagonist had always been an ordinary civilian sheltered under the guise of a "major epidemic." Then one day she woke up to find that she seemed to be the only human left in the world—like a castaway on a deserted island.
"What's it called—the Barnum effect or the Disneyland effect..."
Bai Shan rolled over, staring at the ceiling and muttering to herself.
Rapidly growing trees, man-eating cats—these were things that should only appear in games.
Tonight, Bai Shan had felt an absurd, unsettling sense of dissonance, but she concluded she was overthinking it.
Excessively linking the virtual to reality didn't just sound like a delinquent teen addicted to games—it sounded like something that might warrant a hospital visit.
"Well, that works out—gives me an excuse to ask Mom for more living expenses."
Bai Shan mumbled as she rolled over again, lying on her side with her phone. The screen lit up to show it was already 6 AM, so she dropped the idea.
Knowing her daughter as well as she did, Ms. Bai would immediately guess that her school-skipping daughter sending messages at this hour wasn't an early riser—she'd pulled an all-nighter.
Forget a raise in living expenses—she might get cut off entirely.
"Sigh..."
Before she could even finish the sigh, Bai Shan suddenly made a choked sound.
"Huh?"
[Forwarded to all class groups: Due to the severity of the infectious epidemic, starting today all students will study from home until further notice. Teachers will prepare online courses.]
[Students who are already up, go back to bed! No school today!]
Two class group messages lit up her phone screen in quick succession.
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