Chapter 1: Zeroes
When I should have taken a break, I was still driving on the busy streets to pay off my debts.
For Shen Siyuan, midnight in this city starts with the numbers jumping on the dashboard. He drives a dark gray new energy sedan and is a most ordinary ride-hailing driver.
Outside the car window, rain fell crackling onto the windshield. It was a rainy season. It was sticky and hot, and there was a weak fatigue in the cracks of people's bones. Shen Siyuan had been running for fifteen hours. His cervical spine seemed to have been filled with lead, and every rotation was accompanied by a stiff rattling sound.
Shen Siyuan, who had just finished a run, stopped by the roadside and smoked a cigarette to cheer him up.
On the sound, a magnetic male voice was narrating in a low voice.
"…Faced with the challenger's final blow that burned his life, "the Zeroer" didn't care, but just raised his eyes calmly. There was no anger in its voice, only a cosmic exhaustion: 'I had split myself into billions, to experience every possibility, to become a hero, a villain, a saint, an ant... but I had read all the scripts, all the endings leading to nothingness.'"
Shen Siyuan subconsciously loosened his seat belt while listening. He followed this novel called "The End Player" for a long time. Unlike other stories, its final boss, the being known as "Zero Returner", has no cheesy ambitions and just wants to... delete the game.
"'Now, I'm tired of playing.'" The announcer's voice became cold and indifferent, "'I will restart this game, and before that, I will take back all my 'characters'. Boy, this isn't destruction, I'm just... deleting my archive.'"
Hearing this, Shen Siyuan took a sharp puff of his cigarette. Instead of complaining, he fell into a deeper thought. Burnout, perhaps, is truly God's ultimate destiny. Like myself, running around the city's fixed routes day after day, occasionally I feel that if I could format it all and start over, maybe... it would be good too?
He was startled by his dangerous thought and immediately shook his head in self-deprecation. If the gods get tired of playing, they can delete the files. If they get tired of playing, they will still have to run around for life and mortgage tomorrow morning.
He cut open the screen of his phone, ready to set "on-the-road mode", take the last order home.
The moment his fingertips were about to touch the button——
"Boom! "
A huge thunder exploded out of thin air in the skull cavity.
Shen Siyuan's eyes suddenly went dark, as if the power supply to the entire world had been cut off in an instant. Then, an indescribable pain spread wildly up his spine from the back of his neck, like a red-hot iron braze, and pierced his brain.
"Sleeping trough"
He cursed instinctively, his hands gripping the steering wheel with a dead grip, his knuckles white from the excessive force.
The cold sound in the stereo seemed to be distorted and distant at this moment through a layer of heavy sea water.
"…the Zeroer reaches out his hand, 'character '1, erase…"
Erase?
Shen Siyuan's consciousness began to falter, and he felt that he was falling into a bottomless abyss.
But just when he was about to lose consciousness, a glaring, blood-red light suddenly exploded in his dark vision!
It was a round of demonic residual sun hanging at the end of the charred earth.
The wind and sand rolled up the fishy smell of rust and blood and poured into his nasal cavity frantically. He could feel the rough leather bracers on his wrists and smell the unique scent of the heavy, cold iron armor on his body. His vision grew unusually high, overlooking a battlefield littered with corpses.
In his hand, he held not a steering wheel, but a heavy, cold, long knife with a rolling edge.
A thought that was completely un-his, and was extremely angry, roared at the bottom of his heart.
"——The thief general An dares to deceive me!!"
A thunderous roar erupted from his chest. But this voice, cool, hoarse, with a golden and stone air, was not his own voice at all!
This earth-shattering roar hit Shen Siyuan's nerves, which were about to collapse, like a heavy hammer.
"Ah!"
He screamed in shock and his body trembled violently.
The illusion disappears instantly like low tide.
The bloody sun, the charred earth, the roaring general... everything disappeared without a trace.
Before my eyes, there was still the familiar night view of Shanghai, blurred by the rain.
On the stereo, the novel had automatically played the opening music of the next chapter.
Everything is no different than it was a second ago.
Shen Siyuan was like a fish out of water, gasping for air in large gulps, his back soaked with cold sweat. He didn't even have time to think about what had just happened. He just wanted to leave this strange viaduct as soon as possible and return to a place with light and people.
Fighting back the sharp pain in the back of his neck and the palpitations in his heart, he restarted the car.
Just as the vehicle merged into the main road, the speed increased to 60 kilometers per hour——
"Drop!!!"
At the rear right, a black Mercedes coupe, as if it were a fucking drunk driver, swung its tail sharply to the left without warning and crashed into it at a crazy speed!
Rainy night, elevated, high-speed.
The shadow of death came instantly within 0.1 seconds!
Shen Siyuan's mind went blank. All his driving experience was gone at this moment. His body was completely frozen, and he could only watch helplessly as the other party's front of the car rapidly expanded in his field of vision.
Finished the calf.
As soon as the thought arose, his body moved on its own.
No, that wasn't his own move.
That is a muscle memory that transcends thinking, transcends instinct, and is absolutely calm!
His hands, in a posture he could not understand himself, held the steering wheel with extreme stability. Instead of hitting the only brake he could think of with his right foot, he tapped the accelerator at the critical moment!
The front of the car suddenly advanced half a meter.
At the same time, his left hand struck a direction to the left at a tiny but incredibly precise angle.
"Zi ——!"
The harsh sound of tires grinding was almost ringing in his ears. The out-of-control Mercedes-Benz almost brushed the rear of Shen Siyuan's car, and with a strong wind, it crashed hard into the median of the lane where he had been just, making a loud bang.
Just a few centimeters apart.
If he had just hit the brakes, he would have been a complete cake by now.
The blood in Shen Siyuan's whole body seemed to have coagulated. He mechanically parked the car slowly on the emergency stop a few hundred meters ahead and made a double flash. Only then did the belated, overwhelming fear completely overwhelm him.
He looked down and saw his hands still on the steering wheel.
He noticed that his grip on the steering wheel had changed. It's not like driving a car, it's like being on a battlefield, with your hands slightly pressed down and your wrists relaxed, creating a delicate balance.
What made him even more creepy was his eyes.
He subconsciously glanced in the rearview mirror to observe the situation of the accident behind him, but that glance was... sharp and calm, as if he was assessing the battlefield situation and instantly judging that the other party had no fire and no risk of a secondary accident.
This look does not belong to Shen Siyuan.
This look belonged to the ancient general who had just roared under the bloody sunset.
Shen Siyuan suddenly raised his head and looked at himself in the rearview mirror.
In the mirror, there was still that tired face. But deep in those eyes, there was no longer the same confusion as before. Instead, there was a sense of control that was unfamiliar to him...cold.
"Hallucinations..."
He muttered to himself, that general, is not an illusion.
He, or "it", just now, saved his life.
Shen Siyuan took a deep breath and recalled the dream-like situation just now.
He was about to get out of the car to see what was going on when a cold sound came from the stereo——
"Zeroer".