AUS Chapter 62: I Can’t See Liu Jiang Clearly

Standing in the empty hallway, I heard an alarm clock ringing.

At first, I thought it was coming from a nearby resident’s apartment or maybe a delivery person passing through the corridor. Then I realized the sound was getting closer and closer, ringing directly in my ears.

I woke up.

I was still sitting in the office chair used for the simulation. It took me a moment to remember that I had moved from one company building to another.

In comparison, the office facilities before me were practically brand new. I had the illusion of having returned to the world before the apocalypse.

After sitting there for a moment to get my bearings, I looked down at my wrist. I had set an alarm for myself every four hours to avoid staying in the As Usual Plan for too long.

I couldn’t quite explain why I was afraid of staying too long.

On one hand, I needed to return to reality to handle physiological needs like eating and sleeping. On the other hand, the Attendant had told me something when I first entered the As Usual Plan.

He said he wasn’t sure if things in the simulation would affect reality.

I was afraid of this potential influence—even though I couldn’t say what it might be.

I turned off the alarm and stared blankly ahead for a while before looking down and lighting up my digital watch. The time was 3:00 AM.

I stood up. The dizziness had subsided somewhat, and now my whole body felt light and airy, filled with the sense of unreality that comes after a fever breaks.

The twenty-four hours I had just spent in the simulation was my most unusual simulated experience yet.

First, I found a gap in the As Usual Plan and ended up beside a Liu Jiang who was likely in his teens. He listened to me and helped me solve the mystery.

As a thank you, I spent a rather pleasant afternoon with him.

Liancheng is a big city, but the places we frequented were few. Liu Jiang’s chosen destinations were all within my expectations—the places he usually loved to waste time.

After idling away the afternoon, the mystery remained unsolved, but I wasn’t as anxious as I’d expected. Sitting by the sea, he suddenly asked if I wanted to stay.

Then the system returned to normal operation.

Led by the Attendant, I returned to the stage I was originally on, because I realized that to find the reason for the present, I had to go back to the past—meaning, I needed to go to a time before the As Usual Plan was generated.

Although I didn’t know the specific method to uncover these secrets, I went back anyway, back to the timeline with the Liu Jiang I was passionately in love with.

As it turned out, love is not immutable.

After sensing that I was changing, Liu Jiang exhibited a subtle dissonance, but I couldn’t pinpoint its source.

Was he afraid of me changing? Or afraid I would leave him? Or was he simply worried that I was hiding something from him?

Every little move Liu Jiang made concerned me. I felt like I was wronging him, yet I was also afraid that “He” would pop out, mocking my choices while being able to accurately recount every single thing Liu Jiang and I had ever experienced together.

The wind picked up again.

From outside the office, I heard the distant rattle of glass. I walked out of the conference room. The office floor stretched out before me, a sea of cubicles with no end in sight—all neat, all gray, all seemingly on the verge of change at any moment.

I dismissed the various unrealistic thoughts bubbling up in my mind and decided to find a place to spend the night first.

The conference room was the safest and most secure option. It was closest to the server and had a break room next to it, so I decided to set up camp there.

But after tossing and turning in my sleeping bag for half an hour, I realized my earplugs were useless against the轟隆隆of the server. I gave up on the idea of sleeping there and got up to find another place to rest.

After being woken up for the third time by the dripping sound in the break room, I returned to the main office area.

This seemed to fulfill an illogical dream I used to have at work. On workdays, I’d often get so sleepy I’d drift into daydreams, even thinking about randomly finding a spot in the company and sleeping on the floor.

Well, dream fulfilled.

Except the experience wasn’t as great as I’d imagined. Now I had to find a third place to sleep.

Finally, as dawn broke, I lay in my sleeping bag under an office desk, my eyes wide open, staring at the underside of the desk above my face. I thought that if I had the chance to be a corporate drone again in the future, it might not be a bad idea to keep a sleeping bag like this under my workstation.

But I quickly realized that was just a fantasy. The world had ended, and here I was, still thinking about being a wage slave.

I closed my eyes.

Although the main office hall was vast, the noise was indeed much lower. I tried to shut my eyes and imagine the feeling of falling asleep.

I thought I would toss and turn again, but to my surprise, I fell asleep quickly.

This time, sleep was like a coma. It only took an instant to fall from consciousness into a dream. But my sleep wasn’t peaceful. I was periodically jolted awake by my own brief twitches and sleep-talking, only to fall back into a heavy slumber before I could even react.

Later, I had a dream that made me very angry.

But I couldn’t remember the specifics of the dream. I could only extract a few keywords about what happened.

High school, school uniform, exams, a rainy day, and Liu Jiang.

Unsurprisingly, Liu Jiang had appeared in my dreams for the countless time. When I groggily sat up, the numbness and powerlessness from the dream had not yet faded.

My eyelids were heavy as I looked at the watch on my wrist. The hour hand pointed to six in the morning. I had only slept for three hours.

The sun was already up. I sat at the round table in the break room, staring tastelessly at a can of food that was steaming. I turned off the alcohol stove and sighed deeply.

I didn’t want to be sighing all the time, but three hours of sleep provided almost no energy.

If I had to go to work in this state, I think I’d rather die.

But there was one piece of good news: the fever was gone.

The fever reducer from yesterday must have worked. The feeling of being top-heavy had disappeared, replaced by a weary hunger.

I got my outdoor picnic set and poured a can of beans in tomato sauce into the mess tin. The hot tin can burned my finger. I blew on it and pinched my earlobe, and was suddenly amused by my own actions.

Damn, if I can eat, I’m still alive.

But my smile didn’t last long. When I placed the tin can back on the table, I suddenly couldn’t smile anymore.

Because I noticed a piece of the can’s label was missing.

It wasn’t damage from external force or contamination. It was man-made. The ingredients list and production date on the back of the can were intact, but the cartoon character on the front had been scraped off—with the marks of a dagger.

The product name in the upper left corner was also scraped away. Everything else was perfectly fine.

What was going on?

My first thought was that someone was playing a meaningless prank on me.

I put the can down right away and looked around.

I was alone in the office. I had checked when I first moved in yesterday. After the apocalypse, no one besides me had been to this side of the building.

This batch of canned food came from the cafeteria. Before the cafeteria staff evacuated, these supplies were all stacked in the food storage.

Was it the staff’s doing?

It wasn’t entirely incomprehensible. To obscure the purpose and value of supplies, some people would deliberately scratch off the labels on survival gear.

But if you’re going to do it, do it all. What’s the point of only scraping off the face on the label?

Besides, this batch of cans had been brought to me specifically by the old man from the cafeteria. When I put them in my bag, they were all intact.

A wave of nausea suddenly surged up. I forced it down and shoved a few mouthfuls of food into my mouth, then stood up and opened the cabinet where I stored my food.

I had arranged the cans myself. The order didn’t matter, because now they were all facing me, every single one with a piece of its portrait missing.

They looked like a row of windows, with blurred figures standing behind them, gazing at me in silence.

Or perhaps, spying on me.

The hair on the back of my neck instantly stood on end.

After freezing in front of the cabinet for a few seconds, I suddenly reached out and spun all the cans I could see around, turning them so I couldn’t see the damaged parts.

It was an instinctive reaction to fear.

The desire to disrupt the situation, to stop it. My body moved before my brain could catch up.

Disrupt everything, rearrange everything, make it all stop.

Stop!

My movements grew larger. After knocking over one can, the others stacked on top of it also fell. After a loud, chaotic crash, the neatly stacked tower of cans in the cabinet had half-collapsed, with the remaining half teetering precariously.

The noise seemed to pull me back to reality. I stood there stunned for a few seconds before sensation finally returned to my body. I could feel my neck drenched in cold sweat, with a single drop sliding down my spine.

It felt as if someone was stroking my back.

I whipped my head around to look. Outside the break room window, the sky was a rare azure blue. But compared to the cloudless good weather of the pre-apocalypse world, this blue lacked a certain vitality. It looked like a spring of water inverted over the sky, and I felt I could fall into it at any moment.

I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths, telling myself to calm down.

Calm down, Yang Pingsheng, just calm down.

This is just a coincidence, or a misunderstanding, or simply an accident due to the poor quality of the printed portrait—in short, everything can be explained.

I took a step back, and my foot kicked one of the cans. The can rolled forward a short distance, stopping right under my gaze.

This can was slightly different from the others. Its label hadn’t been completely scraped clean; a single Chinese character remained.

I squatted down and set the can upright. It took a few seconds for my brain to start working. I saw clearly that it was the character “溫” (Wēn).

I immediately thought of someone.

The girl I once dated, whose name I could never seem to remember.

Her name was Winnie (溫妮).