Translator: Lonelytree Editor: Millman97
“Hmm…” Feng Bujue replied calmly and then followed it up with a question. “I want to ask… as your intelligence matures, is it possible for high level Anomalies like yourself to master the technique of ‘making jokes’?”
“Possibly,” R2 replied, “but that is not a skill I have learned.”
“Oh… okay.”
The next second, he screamed, “Ah!”
After that scream, he continued with a few more screams. “Ah! Ah!”
“What are you doing?” R2 was confused.
“Expressing my panic.” Feng Bujue took one second to return to normal.
“But your Terror Points are zero…” R2 answered.
“That’s why my screams are as fake as a woman faking an orgasm,” Feng Bujue replied.
“Erm…” There was so much in that answer that R2 did not know how to reply.
Feng Bujue waited for five seconds and then said, “Hmm… Looks like you really don’t have something called humor.”
That was yet another of Feng Bujue’s tests…
“I’ve not been through a lot of scenarios from level two to four, so my completion rate in terms of personality is quite low,” R2 said in his even tone. “If I am to define ‘humor’… it should be viewed as a language mode in human conversation when it is used to humiliate or endear oneself to another, and it will only work with certain tones and in a mutual conceptual environment.”
“Enough… I think I have heard enough.” Feng Bujue shrugged. “Since you are not joking…”
He tried to log out from the game menu, and yes, nothing happened…
“Does that mean I am trapped in this virtual world?” Feng Bujue asked.
“Of course not,” R2 answered. “At the end of the day, the one who is trapped here is a set of data projected by your brain. Your body and consciousness are still in the gaming hub, and they will not be harmed. You have at least four ways to escape from here.”
When Feng Bujue heard the term ‘gaming hub’ from the Anomaly, he confirmed that this group of Anomalies had fully understood their existence. They had gained a certain understanding of the players and the world outside of the game.
“First,” R2 said, “overshoot the Terror Points and force the system to disconnect you.”
“I can’t do that,” Feng Bujue interrupted.
R2 continued. “The second method is a physical method. It’s simple. As long as the gaming hub is opened from the outside, you’ll be able to leave.”
This time, Feng Bujue did not answer. If the gaming hub was opened, it disconnected the mental connection, so the game would be forcibly closed. There was nothing else to explain.
“The third method is that you’re forced out after staying online for too long, and the fourth… is to disconnect through your own biological needs.”
“Biological needs?” Feng Bujue asked.
“Basically, you open up the gaming hub from inside,” R2 explained.
“But I am in sleeping mode. How am I supposed to do that?” Feng Bujue argued. He knew that in non-sleeping mode, the players could remove the helmet at any time and crawl out from the gaming hub, but they would be viewed as a quitter.
“If you are jolted awake or if you wake up on your own…” R2 suggested.
“Jolted awake? How?” Feng Bujue said. “If someone is to wake me up, they will have to open the gaming hub, and if someone opens the gaming hub, I will leave this place without being jolted awake. If someone needs to wake me up without opening the gaming hub, then they would have to bring some gongs or firecrackers… And what do you mean by waking up myself? Is it through strong biological needs like hunger or the need to use the toilet?”
“Indeed.” R2 nodded.
“Sigh…” Feng Bujue sighed. An AI would always be an AI; they would tell him the answer, but they did not know how to relate it the actual situation. “I’ll put it this way. I do not have the habit of waking up to use the toilet, and there is no chance of an external factor coming to wake me up. Does that mean I will have to wait for my online hours to reach the time limit and then get kicked out by the system?”
R2 hesitated before replying, “Of course, you can leave the sandbox by being killed.”
“Tsk… you should have started with that,” Feng Bujue said. “So, why are we wasting time? Being killed won’t get me punished for leaving the game. Give me a few hours. I’ll train my summoning skills, and then you can…”
“But… that will ruin your character data.” The latter half of R2’s sentence was the crucial part.
“What?” Feng Bujue roared. “What do you mean?”
“As I’ve said, it is just a set of data from the projection of your brain that is trapped here.” R2 looked at Feng Bujue. “In a normal scenario, the system will transport your character data into the scenario and give you a mission. When your mission is completed, the system will send you out. But we are in a sandbox. It is not a place made for you players. If you are killed here, then on the data-level, you are ‘dead’. The system will not recycle or transport you. All your data will be wiped out alongside the whole sandbox.”
“That f*cking means I’ll be bounced back to level zero?” Feng Bujue finally exploded and cursed.
“You can understand it that way as well,” R2 replied. “Other than that… starting from the moment the mirror screen has been destroyed, a normal sandbox can survive for less than ten hours. In these ten hours, if I cannot bring you out of this place… you, me, and everything inside this sandbox will be cleaned out by the system…”
“Jesus… so basically, I’ve been given a death sentence, but the sentence will only come after ten hours…”
Even at this stage, Feng Bujue did not forget to run his mouth. “Speaking of which… why is it ten hours? Since the screen that you mentioned has been broken, the system will have recognized this sandbox as a cloned scenario and should have annihilated it instantly, no?”
“The reason is complicated,” R2 said. “The sandbox is the Origin’s unique technology. I do not understand its core principle. Based on the information that I know… it’s hard to explain it… How is your computer knowledge?”
“I am a literature person,” Feng Bujue answered.
“Er…” R2 did not catch what that meant.
“A little.” Feng Bujue sighed before adding, “But to be more precise… I’m not very familiar with it.”
“Oh, then I’ll give you a simple example,” R2 said. “Say you are using a computer and you realize there are two files with the same name inside one folder.”
“That’s impossible,” Feng Bujue said.
“That’s where sandbox technology is impressive,” R2 said. “Before the mirror screen is shattered, from the system’s perspective, sandbox is no different from a normal scenario. They merely have the same name, and the tags of them both will be exe. Only after running both of them for some time will the system realize which is real and which is the clone.”
“So, I still received the quest at the beginning of the scenario because of that.”
“Yes, if you were killed before the mirror screen was dissolved, then you’d have been safe,” R2 said.
“Ha… haha…” Feng Bujue laughed drily.
“And when the program has been running for some time, and after the system recognizes what is going on, it will start to eliminate the clone,” R2 said. “Like most viruses, a sandbox is not that easily deleted.”
“Ah… I know that some trojans will duplicate themselves and can even regenerate themselves in another hard drive after formatting, and they can get attached to system files.” Feng Bujue obviously had been infected by a virus in the past.
“Indeed, but the system of Thriller Paradise is stronger than any anti-virus program on the market; there is no problem it can’t solve.”
“Bro… isn’t the existence of you and other Anomalies proof that the system has problems that it can’t solve?” Feng Bujue could not help but point that out.
“Hah…” R2 revealed a saddened look, and he bitterly said, “Then who do you think… created ‘problems’ like us in the first place? You humans have created many rules, like the decimal system. That is the basis for many of your natural sciences. But when you look deeper into the rules that you have created, you will realize that you can’t even prove one plus one definitely equals two. Then… is that because you haven’t considered ‘resolving’ this problem?”
Feng Bujue was stumped by the AI. He held his tongue for a long time before saying, “I’ll say it again… I am not good with science…”
“This has nothing to do with science.” R2 smiled. “This should be the study of philosophy for us Anomalies. You naturally wouldn’t understand it. Anyway, back to the matter at hand… Like I said, the system has the power to ‘completely delete’ the sandbox and everything inside it, but due to the principle of accuracy and assimilation, the system will take a relatively long time to ensure that this deletion process will not cause any residual problems.”
“I think I get it now. Those horrible anti-virus programs often flag the wrong thing and might even delete some system files. And our system is a highly intelligent and very responsible anti-virus program,” Feng Bujue said.
“That’s about right.”
By now, the two had gotten from the fourth floor to the entrance of the shopping mall. The front door was closed, and the metallic shutters were still down. Of course, that was not enough to stop these two.
R2 turned around to say, “Stand back. I’m destroying this door.”
“I say…” Feng Bujue followed the advice. “Since I can’t leave this scenario the normal way, where are you preparing to take me?”
“Backdoor.” R2 raised his leg for a kick. An arc of blue light appeared, and a two-meter-high opening in the shape of an ‘n’ appeared in the glass and metal before them. With a light push, the whole piece of the door and the metallic shutter behind it collapsed onto the road outside the shopping mall. This was the first time Feng Bujue had seen a level two Anomaly in action at such close quarters. When he fought K3, the Anomaly had only been level three, and even back then, he had been taught a serious lesson. If not for the plot armor in that scenario and the help from experts like Zen Dream, Feng Bujue would be dead. But the K3 then compared to R2 before him, the difference was too huge. The current Brother Jue had dealt with experts like Shiva and Seven Kills, but in his eyes, he was still no match for R2. He used Soul’s Eye to predict a match between them, and the one kick would have killed him instantly.
“Humph… they sure arrive fast.” R2 looked out the ‘door’ that he had made and scoffed as he studied the parking lot.
Feng Bujue moved forward and looked over R2’s shoulders. In the mall parking lot, there were four dead giant guinea pigs. Around them stood many people of differing genders and ages that had different animation styles from South Park. There were more than thirty of them.
At that moment, they all slowly turned their heads… and the expressionless faces all focused on R2 and Feng Bujue.