Chapter 58

Sharp stabs of pain burst in her chest with each breath.

She felt a weariness of spirit she'd never known before.

Liu Zhiyi: "In the dungeon there was a breath holding me up, and now any big swing of feeling makes my chest ache."

Grieve long enough and the spirit and the body wear out too.

Shen Songyue sighed.

"Let me tell you the details about the cat."

Shen Songyue: "By his account, when he was being dismembered a stray black cat happened by, so he struggled, and his consciousness transferred into the cat."

Liu Zhiyi recalled that when she first met the cat, she really had mistaken him for the one she used to feed.

Shen Songyue: "That cat liked you. Swayed by its feelings, he followed you without meaning to."

Liu Zhiyi: "The cat I used to feed — what's happened to it now?"

Shen Songyue startled. "Assimilated, I'd say… that situation was rather urgent, no room to worry about everything. You were very fond of that cat?"

Liu Zhiyi felt a pang of loss, but there was little she could reproach — all the more since the cat and Shen Songyue had helped her so much afterward.

"…Go on."

Shen Songyue: "We knew he'd been locked inside that otome game, and searched a long time without finding him — until you turned up."

Shen Songyue rubbed her own nose.

"It seems it takes love."

Love? What love?

Hearing it, Liu Zhiyi even doubted herself — could she love the cat without knowing it?

Liu Zhiyi: "What love? And — you've talked all this while, so what exactly is that game?"

Shen Songyue: "Love Heartbeat."

Liu Zhiyi had heard a little of this game.

Because among the countless otome games — dating sims where the male characters throw themselves at you — this one could be called a cult title.

Not only a horror setting, but the player had to actively pursue the male characters.

And one wrong step meant death.

It made a perfectly good dating game play like a horror game.

Liu Zhiyi hadn't played it, but she'd seen the game blasted into the trending topics.

The comments were all questioning how such a horror game had gotten a license, how a game that manipulated its players like this had even climbed the download charts.

While they talked, Liu Zhiyi quickly looked up Love Heartbeat and read about how it played.

She found the player had to pair it with an official-issue wristband, used to detect the heartbeat.

Liu Zhiyi drew a sharp breath. "That mechanic."

Shen Songyue: "Isn't it a lot like your starter item? A player's starter item differs once they're in a dungeon, but the core's about the same — all to detect a player's swings of feeling."

Shen Songyue: "This otome game is preparation for the large-scale descent of dungeons later on…"

Liu Zhiyi drew a sharp breath.

"It's come to that already?"

Shen Songyue paused first, then was tickled by her expression.

"Don't be nervous — it's just making all kinds of preparations."

"The false god's invasion… internally we call that shadow-like thing the false god." Shen Songyue explained. "This is everyone's first time going through it, without much experience — a lot of it is trial and error."

Liu Zhiyi: "The otome game is trial and error too? No wonder it sounds a bit off."

She couldn't put the feeling into words.

Shen Songyue: "It doesn't feel like the kind of thing officials would make, does it?"

Liu Zhiyi nodded, working to describe her feeling.

"The moment I hear about this game, it seems full of problems… it doesn't look very professional…"

Shen Songyue laughed out loud.

"So in your eyes the authorities are very professional, all-capable?"

Liu Zhiyi thought a moment and touched her own watch.

"It's a feeling I can't name, but all-capable is going too far — it's just that the otome game feels a bit like a joke."

Shen Songyue: "Because nobody knows what the right thing to do is. Plenty of us internally hold different views — some think the false god draws energy from a person's spirit to remake the environment."

She paused a few seconds, thinking how to word it.

"You must have felt it in the dungeon — the more you know, the more your thinking shifts, and that affects the dungeon too… which really means that sometimes, knowing more isn't a good thing."

Liu Zhiyi grasped her meaning, and couldn't help a rise of worry.

"Letting ordinary people who've never been in a dungeon… make contact ahead of time with things tied to the false god — is that really a good thing?"

Shen Songyue: "Some of us internally have the same doubt as you. But think of it the other way — if you went into a dungeon knowing nothing, with only the official notices your starter item receives… could those novices really adapt fast enough to start clearing it?"

Of this too Liu Zhiyi had deep experience.

If the cat hadn't kept guiding her, she'd have been blind when she first entered the dungeon — not only slow to adapt, but not even sure to survive.

Shen Songyue: "So there are the two conflicting views."

Liu Zhiyi: "Is that why this otome game looks so contradictory? They made this game to get ordinary people to play, and yet they raised the difficulty, made players pursue the male characters, and manipulate the players besides."

"Yes." Shen Songyue spread her hands. "It may grate to hear me say it… but the way I see it, in this world — companies, organizations, governments alike — they're all rickety amateur outfits."

Having said so much, Shen Songyue gave a laugh.

This one was unlike the ones before — with a thread of scorn in it, and something like gritted teeth.

"Just as Miss Jin said — anywhere, if it's 'people,' there's no escaping the infighting… People, they just have too many different ideas."

Liu Zhiyi cut Shen Songyue off.

Honestly, Liu Zhiyi wasn't much interested in infighting or people's views; think too much sometimes and you only wear yourself out — better not to.

Liu Zhiyi: "Who's Miss Jin?"

Shen Songyue gave only one keyword: "The insect-mother."

Liu Zhiyi: "The woman's voice, then."

Shen Songyue smiled. "I quite admire her nerve."

Seeing it about to turn deep again, Liu Zhiyi quickly waved a hand.

"All right, all right — right now I just want to finish what's in front of me: burying Grandma and finding the cat's body."

Shen Songyue sighed, deeply let down.

The expression was like the crazed way Liu Zhiyi's sort push their favorite idol on someone and fail to win them over.

Shen Songyue: "…It's very simple — just download Love Heartbeat onto your phone."

It was unexpectedly simple, indeed.

Liu Zhiyi opened the app store on her phone.

Love Heartbeat even had a trailer.

Just as she was about to tap it, Shen Songyue caught her hand.

Shen Songyue: "Download the game and log in first, do the real-name verification."

Liu Zhiyi: "Why?"

Shen Songyue: "Because this game has a matching system — it adjusts the order the male characters appear in according to the player's real-name info and preferences."

Liu Zhiyi was stunned; no wonder a game that manipulated its players could still make the charts.

She downloaded the game.

The otome game's icon was a heart drawn inside an all-black square.

Liu Zhiyi tapped in first, but instead of entering the game, a real-name verification web page popped up.

She spent some time filling in her information, and after uploading —

the page brought up facial recognition, so she held the phone farther off and, following the prompts, showed her whole body.

You could already feel this otome game really didn't want anyone to play it, Liu Zhiyi thought.

And after her whole person appeared in the frame, the watch on her wrist was circled by a red box.

The next second her phone screen flickered and switched to another interface.

[Welcome, horror-game player.]

Shen Songyue explained at the right moment.

"This otome game is hooked into the official data platform. Players like us don't need to get the paired wristband."

Fair enough.

Liu Zhiyi picked up the phone.

Only once the facial-recognition check ended did the large characters Love Heartbeat surface on the screen, and the game formally began.

Shen Songyue handed her a little box — Bluetooth earbuds.

Liu Zhiyi connected them to the phone, put them in her ears, and tapped the icon.

—Drip.

A drop of rain fell on the screen.

Then, through the earbuds, came a sound like static.

And then a woman's voice sounded.

The woman's voice: "It's raining. Do you like rain?"

Liu Zhiyi startled, and saw two options appear on the screen: Like and Don't Like.

She pressed Don't Like.

The rain faded, and the screen brightened.

—Whoosh.

Wind blew past; the screen flickered and arrived on a busy street.

Liu Zhiyi saw a few figures on the street with their backs to the screen.

The woman's voice: "Hurry and catch up — we're almost late."

As the words fell, the several figures flickered.

There was a girl in a T-shirt and jeans with a ponytail, a working woman in a suit skirt and low heels, and a hot girl in a slip dress with dyed pink long hair…

Liu Zhiyi swept quickly over the figures.

A game prompt surfaced, telling her to pick one to go up to.

Late? Late for what?

Too few clues; Liu Zhiyi couldn't work out the link for the moment, so she went by feel and tapped the T-shirt girl.

The instant she tapped, the T-shirt girl turned around, smiled, stepped forward a few paces, and reached out past the screen, as if catching the hand of the player beyond it.

The T-shirt girl held up the phone in her hand and shook it.

"Hurry up."

At the same time the screen of the phone in the T-shirt girl's hand enlarged, and a few options were laid before Liu Zhiyi.

Hotpot, barbecue, stir-fry.

Liu Zhiyi again went by feel and tapped barbecue.

The T-shirt girl put her phone away.

"The barbecue number's almost up. You know this barbecue place is hard to get into — miss your number and it's void!"

As the T-shirt girl's words fell —

the "screech" of wheels grinding on the ground sounded.

Liu Zhiyi saw a prompt on the phone screen telling her to turn the phone toward the sound.

—Bang.

A huge crash came through the right earbud.

Liu Zhiyi raised the phone and turned it to the right, her movements slow.

That was the dungeon's lingering effect.

First she saw the road, and in one corner of the frame she saw black smoke.

So Liu Zhiyi kept turning, and saw a yellow sports car that had collided with a truck.

The sports car was all but stuffed under the truck's chassis, some liquid faintly seeping out from beneath it.

The scene was rather cruel, really.

But the game's controls prompted her to walk forward.

Liu Zhiyi held up the phone and walked ahead.

The image in the phone kept enlarging, closing in on the crash scene bit by bit.

She saw something other than the truck and the sports car.

A ghastly-pale thing, like an arm, rolled out of the twisted, folded knot of the sports car.

And at that moment, Liu Zhiyi felt the phone in her hand vibrate.

A golden wheel surfaced on the screen.

Only now did this game show the usual face of an otome game — the gacha pull.

Only, the pull screen popped up quite abruptly; still, Liu Zhiyi followed instructions and swiped a circle on the wheel.

With her motion, the wheel turned.

The next second gold light blazed, and a card flew out from behind the wheel, six stars lighting up on it.

Liu Zhiyi was rather surprised to see the six-star mark noted at the bottom of the card.

The card face was a handsome man.

The game's art was good; the man's looks were even her type — high nose bridge, black hair, and a pair of almond eyes shaped like a cat's.