AUS Chapter 80: The Traces of Our Existence

I will come back safely.

—The truth of that statement was yet to be known, but I was indeed going to raise some hell.

I barely slept last night, but I didn’t feel particularly tired now. Instead, a sense of daze, like after staying up all night playing games in my youth, washed over me.

Dazed to the point of a little excitement.

In the past, the Normalcy Project was the only bridge between me and Liu Jiang. Here, I could see a “him” who was almost like him. I would compare every single thing I did at this moment with the past, either being smug or feeling ashamed, none of which were pleasant feelings. That’s why my dreams were full of him.

Now that I knew the truth, I felt less repressed.

Rather than a bridge, the Normalcy Project had been a prison that trapped me. Although I was unaware of it, the cycle had repeated countless times.

To say something magical and chuunibyou, the me now is a product of this karma.

But I planned not to think too much about it for now, because the familiar points of light had already appeared. I was about to face my final simulation.

Of course, the same was true for Liu Jiang in the current world.

After a moment of dizziness, my feet touched the ground firmly. The smell of the plastic running track after the rain hit me.

According to Liu Jiang, this was the initial room he used for testing in the beginning. This was the place closest to his cognition of the whole event—it could be said to be the beginning of everything.

With this thought in mind, I slowly opened my eyes, and the distinct red and blue colors entered my vision.

I had once met the initial version of Liu Jiang here.

He was just as I had subconsciously imagined him every time: white hair, wearing an oversized school uniform, holding a guitar, and waiting for me in what he considered the most handsome and mature posture.

The emotions when I saw him were very complicated, especially after knowing that he was mixed with the component of “him,” this feeling was even more indescribable.

According to Liu Jiang, I, the subject consciousness speaking now, am infinitely close to the original Yang Pingsheng.

I was not created out of thin air. This body of mine almost retained all the reactions of the me from the original world—muscle memory, conditioned reflexes, habitual actions. It was just that because of the excessive number of reincarnations, my memory had become chaotic.

Very good, very materialistic.

But the creation of “him” seemed less materialistic.

Liu Jiang said that he first noticed “him” when he observed one time that in the same period, the Liu Jiang in the Normalcy Project turned his head to answer my question, but the “him” in the mirror did not turn, his eyes staring forward eerily, as if he could penetrate everything and see the Liu Jiang outside the entire world directly.

It was last night when Liu Jiang explained this to me. We were lying side by side on the bed.

“At first, I thought it was an illusion, but I soon discovered that the code was changing. Someone was competing with me for the right to modify the backend.”

In the darkness, my hair stood on end.

The creation of “him” was not entirely without reason. After all, according to the inertia of this world itself, I would completely fall in love with Liu Jiang in the game.

A person who craved love, who should have received love, but was not surrounded by love, finally became someone no one could have imagined. This was not something that was hard to understand.

But while thinking about the process of “his” creation, my thoughts suddenly went back to the previous statement.

I am very close to the original me. What does that mean?

After I really asked the question, a look of evasion appeared on Liu Jiang’s face for the first time. I propped myself up from the bed. I looked left, he dodged right. I looked right, he simply covered his face.

Later, I thought about it myself. He should have taken my “thoughts.”

In other words—spirit, brain, the entire physical body, it was all possible.

Looking at it this way, it was not difficult to understand how “he” could become so crazy. After all, Liu Jiang also had his own crazy side, it just wasn’t shown in front of me.

At this moment, I was standing on the playground in front of the sports warehouse. I turned to look behind me.

This time, I didn’t hear the sound of a guitar. I stood and observed for a while, completely unable to determine whether the Liu Jiang in the game was here or not.

The clouds in the sky were still layered. There was no movement in the sports warehouse. Even the dust attached to the gymnastic mats was undisturbed.

After confirming that there was indeed no one in the sports warehouse, I slipped inside. The door was ajar, and my arrival only brought a slight sound of movement.

I stopped, hiding behind the gymnastic mats. The passage of time in my senses became a flow in milliseconds.

Very good, indeed no one.

I crept into the open area, stood up, and looked at the environment inside the sports warehouse.

It was the same as every time I saw it: a few open spaces where gymnastic mats were stacked, basketball and volleyball boxes covered in dust, sportswear of unknown age, emitting a smell that was hard to say whether it was the stench of rubber or the fragrance of camphor.

Before returning to the initial room, I asked Liu Jiang what the server looked like. He told me that I would know when I saw it.

Now, it seemed that what he said was not false at all.

Below the low window of the sports warehouse, a black server just appeared on the ground, without a speck of dust, as if it were a fresh layer independent of this world.

I walked around it three times and finally confirmed that this was it, that’s right.

Just as I was about to bend down to check, something in the pocket of the school uniform I was wearing suddenly vibrated.

I shrank back abruptly and subconsciously flipped up the hem of my clothes. Through the not-so-high-quality lining of the school uniform, I saw a phone with its indicator light flashing.

I had used this method to contact the Attendant before.

But now the Attendant was gone, so this was—Liu Jiang?

I took out the phone, unlocked the screen. The software icon still had a rather dated three-dimensional design. It was the message box that was flashing with a notification.

I opened the message, and just as I was about to think I was going to see a system prompt for clearing the stage again, I unexpectedly saw a message from Liu Jiang.

—”Yes, this is the server.”

I was silent, and he was silent too. It felt like we were secretly chatting during class time.

Pretty good.

I didn’t reply to him, because I had business to attend to now.

I came to the server, found the port, and started the destruction operation.

Probably because it had been a long time since things went so smoothly, it was not until the operation was over and I looked back in fear that I felt my fingers were cold and my neck was covered in cold sweat.

Actually, I should have realized that the Attendant was Liu Jiang long ago.

This thought only flashed in my mind for a moment before it was pushed aside by my excessive self-confidence and logical reasoning.

In fact, the truth was only one step away from the direction I was thinking, but the room I was in and that place were separated by a load-bearing wall. I needed to walk a long way and look back to find out where I was standing.

Wasn’t my real life the same?

It took me many years of looking back to realize that I had been held high by too much good luck and a too smooth life, without even the courage to be bruised by a fall.

Liu Jiang had walked a path full of bruises, and he even had to look up at me from time to time.

The server next to me made a sound indicating that it was about to shut down. After a few seconds of countdown, the red signal light flashed, and the server here was completely disconnected.

Okay, one-third done.

Coming out of the sports warehouse, the color of the sky in the entire city had not changed at all. It was still a quiet scene of a clear sky after the rain.

I looked into the teaching building from a distance and could see the lights on in the classrooms.

In this kind of gray weather, teachers would usually turn on the lights for the sake of the students’ eyesight, but in fact, the light was not dark enough to be unable to see the blackboard. And from a practical experience, not turning on the lights at least wouldn’t cause reflections on the blackboard, nor would it cause dizziness due to the large difference in light sources between indoors and outdoors.

Later, I thought about it. The teachers were probably just afraid that the students would be sleepy in this kind of weather.

It was better to be awake and uncomfortable than to be comfortable and sleepy.

But this time I appeared in the classroom, I was no longer a student who had to sit up straight in my seat.

When I entered the teaching building, I deliberately chose a side door where there were no teachers, but I soon realized that there seemed to be no one in this world.

I had discovered this the last time I came. There were traces of people’s existence here, but no actual individuals.

When standing on the playground, I could hear the distant sound of vehicles, and the faint sound of collisions and conversations on the basketball court. However, I had never seen anyone here, at least before Liu Jiang appeared, there would be no one here.

After stepping into the teaching building, this feeling became more and more apparent.

The lights in the classroom were on, and I could hear the sound of reading from a distance in the corridor. But when I really walked over and looked through the window, I could only see one empty classroom after another.

There was only the sound of my footsteps in the terrazzo corridor. The sound of the teacher’s lecture came from far to near. Just as I thought I would see a figure lecturing on a boring theory on the podium when I turned my head, I caught nothing.

Just as I turned my head, the rustling sound of the classroom disappeared in an instant, leaving only a room with the lights on.

And at almost the same time, I could hear the same talking sound from the previous classroom, without any lag.

This world seemed to be waiting for me to move forward.

—Then I’ll go.

The sound of the classroom disappeared from in front of me and then sounded from a distance and behind me at the same time. The world in front of me was constantly avoiding my direct gaze, but also tentatively looking at me.

The phone in my pocket started to vibrate again. It was a message from Liu Jiang.

He said, “Don’t be afraid, keep walking.”

The server for the teaching building was ahead, at the end of the corridor, in the classroom of Class Five of the year I transferred.

From beginning to end, only the sound of my footsteps echoed in the corridor. For some reason, after putting on this school uniform, my attention seemed to really return to the year I had just transferred.

What is the natural fear of a student? It’s not the fear of doing bad things, nor the fear of being caught by the teacher, but being caught by the teacher while doing bad things.

Not being in the classroom during class time was naturally a bad thing for a student. And now, if some teacher came to catch me—no matter what my identity was, it would be scary enough at this point.

However, when I walked all the way to the door of Class Five, nothing happened.

Stopping a short distance from the back door of the classroom, I heard the unique afternoon commotion of our class.

Class Five was not an advanced class. My father had used some connections to transfer me here. The school leaders had readily agreed to put me in an advanced class, but my father had rejected it even more readily.

My father said, “Give him some hardship to see if he can settle down and study.”

Many fathers are like this with their children, creating difficulties to push them forward even when there are none. Fortunately, I was competitive, and I still managed to stay in the top ten of the school in such a class.

This part of being competitive also included me having to study in countless such noisy self-study classes.

It was a characteristic of Class Five. The homeroom teacher was submissive and couldn’t control the class, so every afternoon during self-study, the whole class would naturally enter a so-called boiling state.

And while the whole class was reveling, I was the only one who was seriously doing my homework, without even needing earplugs.

According to Liu Jiang, I had once suddenly stood up when I couldn’t solve a problem. The movement was so big that the whole class instantly fell silent and stared at me. And after standing still for more than ten seconds, I sat back down and continued to solve the problem.

Like every other thing he had told me about myself, I had almost no impression of it, but I was very clear that when I sat back down at that time, it was because I had figured out the solution.

Back to the point, I was standing less than two meters from the front door of the classroom, holding my breath and listening to the commotion inside.

The sounds of shouting, laughter, discussion, and the movement of desks and chairs. The noise here did not stop because of my arrival. In the midst of the clamor, I even felt the flickering light and shadow in the classroom.

It was as if I had really returned to a certain ordinary and tedious afternoon.

This is the second server, I reminded myself again.

Inhale, exhale. After adjusting my posture and breathing, I lowered my head and opened the classroom door.