87: Chapter 88 The Day They Didn't Live To

Su Yun stared at the line of text on the screen for eleven minutes.

"The final scene has been unlocked: This Prosperous Era as You Wished."

Sender: Unknown Source. Timestamp: 3:17 AM.

He brought up the backend permission panel, tracing the trigger chain of this log layer by layer.

Every record in the system log database had a clear trigger source—player actions, scheduled scripts, server heartbeat checks; all were traceable.

Except for this one.

Its data signature did not belong to any known module.

Su Yun tore apart the underlying code and examined it three times, his pupils constricting bit by bit.

The code structure of this log was highly correlated with the "Emotion Collection" module.

They shared the same data interface, yet it ran independently. No one had written this program. No one had deployed this logic.

It had grown on its own.

Billions of pieces of emotional data—tears, anger, awe, grief, everything collected and quantified—

player emotions stored deep within the servers had reached a critical threshold he had never set, and this code had spontaneously emerged.

Su Yun leaned against the back of his chair, his back tensing instantly.

He created an independent tag for this log and typed two words:

"Collective Memory."

Then he clicked on the automatically unlocked scene folder.

The screen went black for a full eight seconds.

When the image lit up, Su Yun thought he had opened the wrong file.

A modern highway. Six lanes, the asphalt bleached white by the sun.

On both sides of the road were stretches of rice paddies, golden ears of rice weighing down the stalks, with drones operating at low altitude. In the distance were high-speed rail piers, where a Fuxing bullet train glided silently past, the reflection from its body blindingly bright.

He recognized this place.

Dandong. Seventy years ago, it was called Antong. By the Yalu River. The crossing point amidst ice and snow.

But standing in the center of the frame was a person who did not belong to this era.

A young boy wearing thin cotton clothes stood on the central median of the highway.

His neck was twisted as his eyes followed a roaring heavy truck, his head turning from left to right, then right to left. His mouth was agape, and a small, dry blood scab hung from his chin.

Su Yun zoomed in on the image.

He had seen that face before.

Little Shandong.

Sixteen years old. The Little Shandong who had frozen to death at the Chosin Lake. A smile like an ice sculpture hung on the corner of his mouth.

Su Yun's hand paused on the mouse for two seconds. He had never designed this scene. Never.

He forced himself to keep scrolling.

There was more than one scene.

The folder contained one thousand, seven hundred and thirty-one independent miniature scene packages, neatly arranged.

Each one corresponded to an NPC who had fallen in the game.

The system had extracted their appearances, their habits of movement, and their status parameters at the moment of death from their data remnants, and then—

it had placed them in modern China.

Su Yun opened them one by one.

The Platoon Leader stood in the waiting hall of a modern railway station.

The high-speed rail schedule on the LCD screen refreshed constantly: G1234, Beijing South—Shanghai Hongqiao, 09:47.

The Platoon Leader raised his hand, wanting to touch the screen, but his fingertips paused three centimeters away. He withdrew his hand, clenched his fist, and then relaxed it.

The NPC based on Yang Gensi sat on the concrete steps outside a primary school classroom window.

One side of the window was open, and from inside came the uneven voices of children reading aloud—'Why the battle flag is as beautiful as a painting—'.

His lips moved along with them, but no sound came out. When they reached the line 'the blood of heroes dyed it red,' his lips stopped, and he lowered his head.

The young soldier who played the harmonica sat on the river embankment of the Bund at night.

The lights of Lujiazui on the opposite bank turned the river surface into a golden ribbon.

He pulled the harmonica, flattened by the blast of a shell, from his chest and wiped it with his sleeve over and over again. He didn't play it.

Su Yun stopped at the 147th scene.

The image showed a wet market. It was five in the morning, and a sliver of gray-white light had just appeared on the horizon.

An older woman selling tofu set up her wooden stall and lifted the cloth cover; steam rose from the square blocks of white tofu.

A young soldier, curled into a ball from the cold, crouched beside the stall.

His knees were tucked into his chest, his hands clutching his shins, his chin resting on his knees as his eyes stared fixedly at that piece of tofu.

His lips were blue-purple. There were layered scars on his fingers where chilblains had cracked and healed, healed and cracked again.

Su Yun pulled up the data file for this NPC.

Anonymous. ID: LJH-BG-2847.

Survival time in the Chosin Lake dungeon: two seconds. He was judged dead after being blown away by a shell's blast wave; he had never triggered any plot dialogue, had no exclusive voice pack, and his model precision was of the lowest-tier batch-generated type.

A background character.

But the wish data package the system generated for him contained only one line:

"I want to drink a bowl of hot tofu pudding."

Su Yun's vision blurred.

He spent nearly four hours watching all one thousand, seven hundred and thirty-one scenes.

Not a single person's wish was grand.

"I want to see if the road in front of my house has been paved yet."

"I want to eat a bowl of hot white rice, without sand in it."

"I want to know what kind of man my sister married."

"I want to hear Mother call me for dinner one more time."

"I want to touch a train, to ride it once."

After watching the last scene, Su Yun closed the folder and covered his face with both hands.

He sat for about ten minutes, motionless. The hard drive hummed, and the warm light of the desk lamp fell on the back of his hands, illuminating the wet marks seeping through his fingers.

Beside him, his Grandpa's portrait stood quietly. The old cotton shoes were placed to the far right of the medals. On the side of the shoes, the two characters for "Zhenbang" were written in a bluish-black ink.

Su Yun lowered his hands. His eyes were red, but his face was dry. He picked up his phone and dialed the number of The man surnamed Chen.

It was two in the morning. The other party answered in a second, as if he hadn't slept.

Su Yun explained the situation in three sentences.

There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

"What do you plan to do?"

"Open it to everyone."

"Have you thought about the consequences?" The man surnamed Chen's voice was very low.

"This scene has no combat, no excitement, and zero gameplay. You're basically asking hundreds of millions of people to spend time watching a bunch of NPCs walk around the streets."

Su Yun's gaze fell on those old cotton shoes.

"They aren't just walking the streets."

His voice was very soft, yet every word was solid.

"They are looking at the things they gave their lives for."

Both ends of the phone fell silent.

A dozen seconds later, The man surnamed Chen said one word: "Fine."

Before hanging up, he added one more sentence. His tone had changed, carrying something Su Yun had never heard from him before.

A tremor.

"Have you thought of a title?"

Su Yun stared at the face of the young soldier in the portrait.

Su Zhenbang at twenty-one years old had high brow bones and a slight curl at the corners of his mouth, as if he had something happy he hadn't had time to say.

"I've thought of it."

—

3:00 AM.

A server-wide push notification.

No special effects, no music. Just two lines of white text on a black background.

The first line:

"Final Chapter: This Prosperous Era as You Wished"

The second line:

"Please enter quietly. This scene has no combat, no rewards, and no achievements. You only need to—accompany them for a look."

The announcement stayed up for three seconds. In all the discussion forums, social platforms, and livestreams for ice and snow world across the globe—the traffic curve did not spike.

It collapsed.

The density of the bullet chat dropped off a cliff. The forum posting speed fell to 0.3 posts per second. In the real-time feeds of hundreds of livestreams worldwide, there were only the silent silhouettes of players putting on their VR headsets.

Keyboards stopped clacking.

Jack sat at his computer in his New York apartment, looking at those two lines of text, his nose stinging. He didn't wipe it. He reached out for the headset beside his desk, pulled it over his head, and pressed the connect button.

Dai Dai was already crying. She covered her mouth with one hand while the other fumbled with the login interface. Her livestream had four million people online, yet the chat column was empty.

Brother Bao crushed his newly lit cigarette into the ashtray, the butt bending as it emitted one last wisp of white smoke. He said nothing and pressed enter.

Su Yun watched the concurrent user count jump in the backend.

500 million.

700 million.

900 million.

The numbers were still rising.

His fingers hovered over the keyboard for three seconds. Then he pulled open a drawer and took out his own VR headset.

This time, he wasn't the "Administrator."

He was just a player.

The moment the headset was fastened, his vision sank into darkness. All senses were stripped away. No images, no sound effects, no system HUD—nothing.

Then, he heard a voice.

It wasn't any audio from the preset voice packs. It wasn't a system-synthesized electronic voice.

It was the voice of a young man. With a thick Shandong accent, the tone rising at the end and the final sound trailing off long, as if shouting to someone very, very far away—

"Chief, has the road been paved?"

Su Yun's tears slid down in the darkness.

He recognized this voice.

The speaker was named Su Zhenbang, twenty-one years old, a squad leader in a certain unit of the Volunteer Army.

His Grandpa.