"Hm?" Alain looked at the strange window, then examined its edges, confirming there were absolutely no mechanical structures.
Yet, it still opened, revealing a gap...
Alain was completely baffled, his gaze focused on the edge of the open slit.
He could also determine that there were no devices at the spot where Mila opened the window; it was truly just the glass splitting into a smooth cut. And all of this contradicted Alain's previous actions.
If the window had such a pre-existing crack reserved for opening, then why, when he was imprisoned in the mansion earlier, did it forcefully withstand over a dozen full-power slashes from his greatsword? How was that possible?
He looked at the smooth gap of the crack and discovered another strange point.
"Huh?"
He saw that the window, opened a crack, revealed a strip of scenery outside. But contrary to Alain's expectations, that so-called outside scenery had nothing to do with the greenery reflected on the window glass...
If he had to describe it, the upper half of the slit looked like a sky with drifting clouds, while the lower half was the silver-gray of buildings... he could even see building windows the size of fingernails. In short, the view on the window glass and the view outside the window were unrelated, as if each was reflecting its own reality.
What... is going on here?
While Alain pondered, he simply pushed the slightly angled window open further. Just as he expected: the scene outside was definitely not the green plants in Alain's memory, but was situated in mid-air...
It was like opening a window on the twentieth floor while standing in a first-floor mansion.
Outside, it didn't touch upon "green" at all. The upper view was the sky, while high-rise buildings stood like spears directly beneath the sky. As the angle of the opening approached a right angle, waves of noisy sounds penetrated Alain's ears.
"Eh? Aren't we inside a forest?" Mila was confused. "Why is there... the sound of cars?"
Beep beep—
Just as Mila said, Alain also heard the honking of vehicles and even the chatting and laughing of passersby. At this moment, the window was completely wide open. And a field of high-rise buildings stood towering before Alain's eyes.
Under the red-dyed sky lay a cold, silver-gray steel forest. The high-rise buildings standing in disorder seemed like towering trees, and those tiny windows reflecting the setting sun were the leaves of these steel trees.
He lowered his head, gazing at the ground in the distance. The people on the ground were reduced to mere dots, moving slowly. They walked in groups through the streets downstairs from Alain, talking and laughing. Although they were "chirping" away down there, to Alain's ears, it seemed like a Chaplin silent film.
As for the road beside the street, it remained in a red-light state. Private cars, taxis, and even other special vehicles were parked behind the stop line like children's Lego toys. The stationary vehicles watched the crossing vehicles pass through the intersection. Helpless, they just stood there, watching awkwardly.
"What on earth... is going on?"
Alain swallowed his saliva and looked at the window glass to the side. He rubbed his eyes and opened them again—he wasn't seeing things: the window glass still showed a lush forest scene.
Alain focused outside the window again: he also wasn't seeing things; outside was indeed this steel forest rising from the ground.
Wilderness and human civilization intertwined before his eyes simultaneously, giving Alain an indescribable sense of... fragmentation.
He closed the window. As the closing angle went from a right angle to an acute angle, and finally to a flat angle, the noisy sounds of cars and the flow of people outside vanished. Reflected on the window glass was the harmless forest.
He opened the window again. As the width increased, the sounds of honking and noise rose and fell, drowning out all the soothing greenery.
"Does the real world..." Mila's voice attracted his attention, "...also have bugs?"
"..."
The young girl's words perfectly articulated the feelings and sentiments in his heart. Yes... currently, only a "bug" could explain all this, could explain why... the window glass was a forest, but outside the window was a view of high-rise buildings.
But if it were a bug, this would be too ridiculous! Reality isn't a game, so how could a bug appear? Did the Creator build a pile of spaghetti code and forget to fix the bug with this window? Or perhaps, it really is like spaghetti code: everything is already complete, but if this window's bug is fixed, everything will crash?
How is that possible!
"..."
Alain originally intended not to believe any of this, yet the scene before him forced him to believe—
"What exactly is wrong with my reality?"
Alain asked himself deeply. While Mila was worried, her peripheral vision swept over the windowsill, and she unexpectedly discovered something.
"Alain, look at that!"
"?"
Following the direction Mila pointed, Alain's gaze landed below the tiled windowsill, where a black plastic right-angle was exposed. He frowned and groped around that spot for a moment...
Soon, with a rip—the sound of tape tearing—a USB drive appeared in Alain's palm.
"Is this Monika's hint?" Mila hit the nail on the head.
Alain looked at that Rupert's Tears window, then looked at the scenery outside. His gaze focused again on the USB drive in his palm... Indeed, could it be... the thing Monika wanted to tell him was this scenery outside the window?
Alain recalled the words Monika had said to him at the end of Version 1.0F:
[Do not treat your reality as a comfort zone]
Perhaps, Monika had understood the abnormality of his reality long ago. She had done so much, all synthesized into one sentence, just one short sentence:
[Your reality has a problem]
Zzz—
As the USB drive was inserted into the computer, Alain sat in the computer chair, having returned to the Secret Room with Mila. The hint Monika wanted to tell him was already in hand. And an extra harvest—the USB drive was also in his grasp. It seemed she had prepared this USB drive because she had something else she wanted to tell him.
Alain watched the system waiting to read the USB drive, feeling irritable for a moment. This was just as he had thought before—as he learned more things, he knew less about what to do. The things Monika was telling him now were all heavyweights, one after another. And she gave him absolutely no time for mental preparation.
So, what information... was in this USB drive?
Soon, a brand new partition appeared in the [My Computer] interface, and Alain clicked directly into it. Inside the partition, there were two files. One should be something like an application. The other was an EXE program with an old computer logo.
"Eh? I know this one!" Mila said, pointing at the second file.
Alain turned his head, having no doubt about Mita's programming skills. "How so? Can you guess what content this is?"
The young girl looked into his eyes and slowly said one word:
"Patch."
"..." Alain fell silent. Was it the patch he was imagining?
"Yes, it's the patch you're imagining." The young girl understood what this guy was thinking as soon as she saw his expression. She changed the subject, "The installation of this kind of patch is idiot-proof, a bit like installing a driver; it automatically locates the installation path. You just double-click it. It's just... I don't know what kind of patch it is."
"Click it and we'll know." Alain double-clicked the so-called patch file.
Tap tap.
A control box quickly popped up on the computer taskbar. But the black control box appeared for only the blink of an eye before vanishing instantly without a trace, as if nothing had happened.
"...This, were there any changes?" Alain used Win+D to quickly switch back to the computer desktop... just the usual blue sky and white clouds, without any changes.
"I don't know..." Mila expressed her inability to help. "Unless we look at the system's operation logs."
"Alright, alright, let's look at the other file first." Alain clicked on the last remaining file.
This file was an application, containing an EXE format launch icon inside. Alain clicked it seamlessly—
Rumble—
At this moment, the tower fan on his right began to roar, making his eyebrow jump.
Soon, the desktop went black, and a logo that looked like a game occupied the entire screen.
"...What is this?"
Following Alain's question, the logo disappeared. After a long string of loading programs, a semi-gray image appeared before his eyes.
"?"
In the exact center of the screen, [You're dead] was written. And the background of this string of characters was a game scene that looked somewhat familiar to Alain.
"This place looks very familiar." The semi-gray background made the scene appear incredibly gloomy; one could only judge from some dark red flowing lights that this was a [Place].
"A place with dark red flowing lights?"
Alain held his chin, his brows locked tight, and a noun quickly jumped out in his mind: Core.
In order to see the darkness on the screen more clearly, Alain turned on the Secret Room's lights. Soon, he confirmed exactly what the background information for [You're dead] was.
First, it was definitely the Core. Secondly, this file should be a "first-person" game. And the reason for [You're dead] was that the character on the screen had died, and without any chance of resurrection.
Alain adjusted the monitor's brightness to the maximum, hoping to see what state this first-person controlled character was in... His gaze focused on the lower half of the screen, seeing a few scattered bits of a "body."
It was black, blending in with the gloom of the Core. If not for Alain's careful observation, he might not have discovered that the entire lower half of the screen was the controlled character's body. Its body... was bloated, and the surface was somewhat dented, obviously killed by some kind of monstrous force.
This kind of bloated body, along with the physiological discomfort it caused him... linked up with a certain virus Alain had encountered:
[The Big Bug—the Devouring Entity]
____
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