92: Chapter 93 of the game can be closed.

For the first three seconds after the streaming signal connected, the screen was black.

Then the light flickered on, revealing a thirty-watt incandescent bulb in an old house, covered by a plastic lampshade coated in dust.

Su Yun sat in the center of the frame.

Behind him was an old, peeling wall; Grandpa's portrait hung in the top right corner, its frame marred by a crack stretching diagonally from the bottom left to the top right.

On the table, the red silk ribbon of a medal had faded, its copper surface polished to a shine; a pair of cotton shoes sat nearby, the ink of the characters Zhenbang on the uppers faintly visible under the light.

The scene was cramped and dim, like an old house on the verge of collapse.

1.9 billion people from around the World flooded into the livestream at the same time.

The server load spiked to its limit, and the technical team had to perform three emergency expansions before it stabilized.

Su Yun wasn't wearing a Zhongshan suit.

He wore a White T-shirt and a buzz cut; his dark circles were heavy, and there was a red mark on his cheekbone from wearing a VR headset for too long.

He spoke.

His voice wasn't loud, carrying the rasp of a throat that had been strained for too long.

"I know you don't want me to close it."

The density of the bullet chat peaked the moment those words left his mouth, exceeding four million messages per second, and the server automatically began throttling the comments.

Su Yun didn't look at the comments.

He paused for two seconds, pressing his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

"I don't want to either."

The bullet chat went quiet for a brief moment before surging back with even greater intensity.

Su Yun lowered his head and picked up the iron box from the table.

He opened the lid, took out the contents, and held them in his palm toward the camera.

A baked sesame cake.

It was cold and dull, but it was a complete, real baked sesame cake.

"I want to tell you something, something you don't know."

He cradled the cake in his palm, letting the camera capture every sesame seed on its crust.

"This... was brought out of the game yesterday."

The entire internet went silent.

It wasn't the silence of throttled comments; it was the silence of everyone stopping their typing at the same time.

Su Yun's voice was flat, as if he were delivering a weather report.

"The rules in the game were written by me. NPCs cannot touch real-World objects; that's the base code, hard-coded and unchangeable."

He flipped the cake over, showing the small charred edge on the back to the camera.

"But it appeared."

He pressed his thumb lightly against the crust, his fingertip leaving a shallow indentation.

"You see. This isn't CG; it's not a model. It's made of flour. If you press it, it yields."

He put the cake back into the iron box, closed the lid, and laid his hands flat on the table.

His ten fingers were slightly spread, his nails short and unevenly trimmed.

"The tears you shed, your anger, those moments where your heart ached so much you couldn't breathe—those emotions weren't fake."

His gaze drifted from the camera to the medal beside him before returning.

"They accumulated to such a magnitude that they 'crossed' over."

The bullet chat began to slowly recover, but its density was only a tenth of its usual rate, and every message was very short.

[What does that mean?]

[Impossible.]

[He hasn't gone crazy, has he?]

Su Yun didn't explain.

He continued.

"If I don't shut down the server, more things will 'cross' over."

His gaze fell on Grandpa's portrait, lingering for three seconds.

"Perhaps they would stay in the real World, forever unable to leave."

He paused.

The entire livestream was waiting for his next words.

1.9 billion people were waiting.

Su Yun's lips twitched, pulled back, and twitched again.

"He has seen it."

His voice was slightly softer than before.

"He has eaten something hot."

Softer still.

"He said, watch over it for me."

Su Yun looked up, staring directly into the camera.

There was light in his eyes, a dry light without tears—a searing heat left behind after all moisture had been evaporated.

"I can't let him be unable to leave; it's time for him to go back."

He swallowed.

"They should all go back."

The livestream went completely silent.

The bullet chat dropped to zero.

The silence of 1.9 billion people weighed down under the incandescent bulb of the old house.

Su Yun lowered his head, picked up the medal from the table, and flipped it over in his palm.

On the verdigris-covered surface, the inscription was so blurred that only traces of strokes remained.

"The game can be closed," he said, his voice as raspy as sandpaper rubbing against wood.

"But memories cannot."

He placed the medal back on the table and gave a nod to the camera.

"Tomorrow at 2:00 AM, the server will shut down as scheduled."

The feed cut out.

The livestream ended.

Jack sat at his computer in his Shanghai apartment, his right hand still hovering over the keyboard in a typing position, with a half-written long-form rebuttal frozen on the screen.

He stared at the blacked-out screen for a long time.

Then he selected the entire long-form text and deleted it.

He opened a social media platform and typed six characters into the post box.

"Su Yun, I understand."

Send.

Brother Bao's livestream was still on, with thirty million viewers waiting for him to speak.

Brother Bao opened his mouth three times without making a sound; on the fourth attempt, his vocal cords finally squeezed out a syllable.

"Damn it."

He covered his face with both hands.

"He's right."

Dai Dai sat in her rented room in Nanjing, the screen of her phone frozen on the last frame of Su Yun.

She didn't cry.

She stood up, walked to the window, and pushed it open.

The night breeze blew in, carrying the greasy smoke from the snack stalls downstairs.

She took a deep breath and smelled the scent of toasted flour.

She remembered the smile lines of the Company Commander as he looked at the red flag, remembered the frozen potato Little Shandong kept in his coat, and remembered the bowl of fried flour Second Pillar muttered about before he died.

She turned around, picked up her phone, and opened a social media platform.

She posted an update.

"It's time for them to go home."

The comment section below was quickly filled with the same sentence.

"It's time to go home."

"It's time to go home."

"It's time to go home."

1:40 AM.

Su Yun sat before the backend, performing the final operations.

He opened that wall.

1,731 facial screenshots automatically recorded by the system were arranged on the screen, packed closely together like a mosaic built of smiles.

Little Shandong's: sixteen years old, bucktoothed, with a left dimple deeper than the right when he smiled.

The Company Commander's: deep wrinkles, with smile lines at the corners of his eyes like a parched riverbed.

Platoon Leader's: square face, even teeth, with a smile that carried a kind of honest earnestness.

Second Pillar's: thin, prominent cheekbones, showing two canine teeth when he smiled.

1,731 smiling faces.

Each one was the very last frame before they disappeared.

Su Yun packaged these screenshots into a compressed file.

He thought about the filename for a long time before finally typing seven characters.

"Their Final Appearances."

He set it for a scheduled release: to be automatically pushed to the entire internet after the server shut down.

Then he opened the system's core deletion permissions.

A confirmation box popped up on the screen.

[Confirm deletion of the emotion database? This operation is irreversible.]

The cursor moved to the confirm button.

Su Yun's right index finger rested on the left mouse button, but he didn't press down.

He looked at the time in the bottom right corner of the screen.

01:53:22.

Six minutes and thirty-eight seconds left.

He shifted his gaze to the data preview panel, where the final piece of data was queued for deletion.

Data Source: Camp Administrator, Su Yun.

Scene: Final Chapter, in front of the baked sesame cake stall.

The emotion type tag was only two characters.

Missing you.

Su Yun closed his eyes.

01:59:58.

01:59:59.

02:00:00.

He clicked the mouse.