34: Medical shockwaves from amnesia cases

The screen went black for half a second before lighting up again.

The maze had changed.

Walls shifted, gravity rotated, and the perspective distortion lasted for two seconds before returning to normal. Cheng Mo's lips curled up, his finger resting on the Enter key, ready to record the initial reaction time of the first live test.

"Lin Wanqing, are you ready?" he asked without looking up.

"Mhm." Her voice came from behind him, as calm as if she were ordering a cup of milk tea.

She sat in the testing pod, the black brain-computer interface headband slowly descending as its metal contact points pressed lightly against her temples. Her waist-length purple hair was tied in a low ponytail, and the mechanical watch's hand swept past 9:23. She bit into a lemon-flavored lollipop and casually tucked the wrapper into the edge of the equipment—this was her habit, something she did for every high-risk test, as if leaving a mark for the system: I was here, and I didn't back down.

"Initiate synchronization protocol," Cheng Mo tapped out the command.

The projection screen was split into three zones: the left showed the in-game perspective, the right displayed physiological monitoring waveforms, and the middle column scrolled with a real-time stream of neural signal data. Alpha waves were stable, heart rate 82, breathing rate normal. Everything was ready.

"Enter program."

The screen cut to the first level of "pixel maze." The gray-and-white checkered floor stretched infinitely, with three forks in the road ahead. There were no hints, no guidance, only a flickering fluorescent light overhead casting irregular shadows.

Lin Wanqing took her first step.

Cheng Mo stared at the monitor, his finger hovering over the emergency abort button. He knew how brutal this thing was—a 78% cognitive reconstruction intensity, something even he wouldn't dare try on himself. But he needed real feedback, someone who could withstand high pressure and still articulate their experience. Lin Wanqing was the only candidate.

She took the middle path.

A trap was triggered, the ground collapsed, and the character fell into darkness. A second later, she respawned, and the map reconfigured. The hallway folded into a loop, the ceiling became the floor, and control inertia instantly failed. She froze for 0.3 seconds before recalibrating her direction.

Upon the second death, the perspective flipped 15 degrees.

On the third, the audio channels reversed left and right.

Starting from the fourth, her breathing became shallower, but her rhythm remained steady.

Cheng Mo watched her brainwaves; signals in the hippocampal region fluctuated slightly but didn't exceed the threshold. Normal. The brain could still handle this level of spatial displacement.

On the seventh death, the reconstruction time extended to 1.8 seconds.

On the eighth, visual latency appeared.

On the ninth, her right hand trembled slightly, slipping once on the controller.

On the tenth, alpha waves vanished briefly for 0.6 seconds before recovering.

Cheng Mo narrowed his eyes. This was getting interesting.

At the thirteenth death, a low-priority warning popped up in the system log: "Spatial memory reconstruction frequency exceeds conventional model prediction range." No manual intervention required; automatically ignored.

At that exact moment, Lin Wanqing's movements stopped.

Her hands hung limp over the controller, her eyes open, but her pupils had lost focus. Her breathing was rapid, her chest heaving violently. Cheng Mo looked up sharply to find her theta waves soaring while gamma waves were nearly zero—this wasn't fatigue; her cognitive system was collapsing.

"Exit!" He slammed the emergency termination key.

The headset rose automatically, and the latch clicked open. Lin Wanqing removed the equipment two beats slower than usual, looking as if she had just surfaced from underwater, her gaze vacant.

Then, she moved.

She grabbed Cheng Mo's collar with a strength that didn't seem like someone who had just undergone a massive cognitive load.

"Who am I?" her voice trembled with a primal panic. "What are you doing to me?"

Cheng Mo didn't pull away. He knew this wasn't an emotional outburst, but a genuine memory gap. He let her clutch his clothes and said in a low voice, "Lin Wanqing, chief experience officer of Extreme Challenge Studio. You just finished the thirteenth round of the pixel maze test. You're safe now."

She didn't let go, her eyes scanning Cheng Mo's face as if verifying the reality of a stranger. Five seconds, ten seconds, seventeen seconds passed before her fingers finally loosened bit by bit.

Her body slumped back. Cheng Mo reached out to steady the back of the chair so she wouldn't fall out of the testing pod. She panted, sweat on her forehead, as the mechanical watch ticked, its hand passing 9:41.

"I... just now..." She opened her mouth but couldn't finish the sentence.

"You don't remember what happened in the last three minutes," Cheng Mo finished for her, his tone flat.

She nodded, her face as pale as paper.

The ambulance arrived quickly. The partner clinic sent a neurologist directly to the door, who performed a brief on-site assessment and recommended an immediate brain MRI scan. Cheng Mo went along, remaining silent the whole time, only signing his name in a scrawl on the medical chart.

Two hours later, the report came out.

"Hippocampal overactivation," the doctor said, pointing at the scan. "The blood flow density is 2.3 times that of a normal person in a waking state, and the neuronal firing frequency is close to the deep dream phase. Short-term memory encoding has experienced a temporary disruption, medically known as 'situational amnesia attack.' The trigger is clear—high-intensity, high-frequency spatial cognitive reconstruction tasks."

Cheng Mo took the film and held it up to the light.

In the gray-and-white image, an area in the center of the brain was exceptionally bright, like a lighthouse in the night. That was the hippocampus, the key part responsible for spatial memory and situational recall. In the game logs, every terrain reconfiguration forced the system to call upon the player's spatial modeling capabilities—essentially forcing the brain to constantly redraw the map. A normal person would at most feel dizzy, but once the parameters were pushed to 78%, this mechanism became a memory shredder.

He suddenly laughed.

It wasn't a sneer or a smirk, but a relief that bordered on the devout.

"This is the 'Extreme Cognitive Experience' we want," he said, his voice soft but piercing the air like a nail.

The doctor frowned. "Do you know how dangerous this is? Any higher and it could cause permanent memory damage."

"I know," Cheng Mo put the film away. "That's why it needs to be controlled at a level that's just short of breaking."

When he returned to the studio, Lin Wanqing was already awake, sitting on the sofa in the lounge area. She had changed into a loose hoodie, her hair down, the mechanical watch resting quietly on her wrist. Seeing Cheng Mo enter, she didn't speak, but simply raised her hand and adjusted the watch face back to the standard time—it was her habit, something she did after every experience of chaos, as if telling herself: I'm still alive, and time is still moving.

Cheng Mo stood at the main console, inserted a USB drive, and imported the comparison table of MRI data and game log timestamps. The screen displayed two sets of curves side-by-side: one for hippocampal activity and the other for the number of maze reconstructions. Every peak aligned perfectly.

"With every death, it's working," he muttered to himself. "It's not being passively affected; it's being actively requisitioned. We aren't just playing a game; we're hijacking the brain's navigation system."

His right fingertips unconsciously rubbed his earring, the cold metal pressing against his skin. Sunlight slanted in through the window, falling on that old arcade machine. The screen still had the curse notes stuck to it, the latest one reading: "You'll go to hell sooner or later."

He didn't tear it off.

He knew those words would eventually come true.

But he also knew that no one could stop this from continuing. Players would curse, collapse, smash their keyboards, and log out in tears—and then, in the middle of some night, they would quietly click the update package and say, "One more time."

Because pain isn't the end; losing control is the starting point of pleasure.

Lin Wanqing sat on the sofa, her right hand still trembling slightly. She looked down at her hand, trying to make it stop, but failed. She didn't complain or question Cheng Mo on why he set the parameters so high. She just sat there quietly, like the sole survivor after a storm.

Cheng Mo glanced at her but said nothing.

He knew what she was thinking. He also knew she would probably come back for more testing tomorrow.

After all, she was the first person to truly walk into the depths of the maze and come out alive.

And what he had to do was make the next person who walked in go further, hurt more, and forget who they were even more thoroughly.

He opened a new document and created a project note, the title reading:

【pixel maze - COGNITIVE RECONSTRUCTION MODE】

【Goal Achievement Verification: Hippocampal Controllability Confirmed】

【Next Step: Introduce Time Perception Distortion Module】

The cursor blinked, waiting for input.

His fingers hovered over the keyboard, not yet descending.

Lin Wanqing looked up toward the main console. Her lips moved as if she wanted to say something, but in the end, she only lightly bit the wooden stick of her lollipop.

Cheng Mo's back was still turned to her, the silver stud in his right ear glinting in the sunlight.

He pressed the Enter key.