Global Collapse

Chapter 470 The Paper Doll Sings
This hotel belongs to Liu Ruyan.

Gu Mian had always felt that Liu Ruyan's aesthetic sense was somewhat indescribable.

The ornate chandelier overhead, reminiscent of the Republican era, was already there before Gu Mian moved in.

Gu Mian was once afraid that it would fall and hit her, but fortunately, the magnificent chandelier has been hanging on the ceiling for several years and seems to have no intention of hurting Gu Mian's head.

Gu Mian had once imagined what it would be like if someone were hanging from a chandelier.

Unfortunately, this idea has been realized today.

Gu Mian silently looked up at the little red thing above her head.

At this moment, she was staring at Gu Mian with wide eyes. Gu Mian was silent for two seconds: "Can you tell me how you got up there?"

Little Red's innocent eyes were wide open, and unsurprisingly, she didn't say a word.

Okay, let's just assume she climbed up there herself.

Gu Mian turned her gaze toward the bedroom door and saw Chu Changge sitting on the sofa outside, flipping through a book. Gu Mian noticed that Chu Changge was usually reading a book whenever she woke up.

This time, he was flipping through a dozen or so pages from a file he'd gotten the night before—let's just call it a book for now…

"Where's Fatty?" Gu Mian looked around but didn't see Fatty.

“They went to the supermarket,” Chu Changge stopped what she was doing and looked up. “They said they went to buy food and took the hearse with them.”

Speaking of which, Gu Mian's hearse was actually bought at this supermarket in Lianhua City. I never expected that after wandering around for half a year, it would end up back here, and the same salesperson would be the one to rip her off.

Meanwhile, the fat man had already found the familiar salesperson.

To this day, he still remembers the joy of the salesman when he finally sold the first hearse, though his expression then is in stark contrast to now.

“Um…” The fat man looked at the gloomy face of the sales clerk in front of him, shrank his neck and pointed to the dilapidated hearse that he had just taken out, “This one is broken. I bought it from you. Do you remember?”

For some inexplicable reason, the fat man felt that the saleswoman's expression was somewhat similar to the doctor's "smile" from yesterday.

The salesperson forced a smile and said, "Of course I remember. Thanks to you guys, I've only sold this one car in the last six months, so it's definitely memorable."

Because Gu Mian messed up the driver's license copy, the hearse's sales were dismal.

"Oh really... Hahaha..." The fat man laughed awkwardly a few times. "See, we got some business today... I told you this car is under warranty, right?"

"Look, we are your only customer after all, and you were the one who sold the hearse to us in the first place... Shouldn't this vehicle be under warranty?"

The salesperson turned to look at the hearse, whose hood was almost completely rotten, its two headlights were completely out, and its windshield was shattered into tiny fragments, looking completely beyond repair: "You know I'm the one who sold the car to you, so why are you repaying kindness with enmity?"

Not only did they repay kindness with enmity, they also took the opportunity to shut down the event that was taking place in Lianhua City.

The sales clerk turned and walked a few steps away, leaving her back to the fat man: "It can't be fixed, you can leave."

"Um... the doctor said if it can't be fixed, he knows of a copy that can fix cars, so we won't bother you..."

The sales clerk, who had her back to the fat man, suddenly turned around and said enthusiastically, "It's okay, we have a trade-in service now. You can exchange your old hearse for a new one for free!"

When the fat man returned, he brought back a brand new hearse.

"Is this a new car?" Gu Mian looked down from her bedroom window and could see the fat man placing the hearse below.

“Yes,” the fat man looked up happily, “the sales clerk was very understanding, saying something like ‘nobody buys anyway’ and gave us a trade-in.”

Yeah.

Gu Mian touched his chin. The shop assistant in his hometown was indeed very kind to him. To express his gratitude, he should visit the supermarket more often in the future.

While he was thinking, the fat man returned carrying a bag full of things.

He slammed the overflowing shopping bags onto the table in front of Chu Changge and started taking things out one by one: "Summer's almost here, these are new clothes for the doctor, these are new glasses for Brother Chu... I really don't understand why you wear glasses without a prescription, and here's Xiaohong's lychee soda..."

As for his older brother, he would only call her "little sister".

When asked what he wanted, he would only shout this, so the fat man automatically ignored his needs.

As he carried things out, he said, "Because I haven't entered the dungeon for a long time, I'm a bit short on in-game currency. Luckily, Doctor, you crashed the event..."

Although something seemed wrong with what the fat man said, upon closer inspection, it made perfect sense.

The fat man reached for a bag and said, "Lunch is mutton soup today. Since you got up too late, Doctor, we can only have lunch here. I'm going to the kitchen." With that, he took a small white scallion, a bunch of cilantro, and a piece of mutton and went into the kitchen.

Chu Changge put on his new glasses and continued reading the book in his hands.

In just a short while, Gu Mian saw him flip through those dozen or so sheets of paper several times.

Gu Mian had already read the contents of these pages last night. The general idea was that in order to prevent a terrible apocalypse, the world's higher-ups secretly built these laboratories to obtain "suitable humans".

The contents of these dozen or so sheets of paper tell the story of the beginning and end of the underground laboratory at Songcheng Academy.

The beginning is nothing special, it's just a group of people creating a group of children; and the ending is that the laboratory finally succeeded, and in order to prevent the secret from being leaked, most of the people who knew about it and the children they created were secretly killed and left underground.

It is worth mentioning that the book mentions that there are countless such laboratories in the world, but only this laboratory has achieved success.

As for what exactly "suitable humans" are, and what "doomsday" is, these few pages do not explain.

At this moment, Chu Changge adjusted his newly acquired glasses: "I come from here, so I can confirm that these pages were taken from the real Second World, but there's a problem..."

what is the problem?
"Did you notice that the page numbers on these dozen or so pages are consecutive, starting from 1 and ending at 14? But looking at the beginning of the first page, you can tell that there is definitely other content before this page, so this first page is definitely not the first page of the book 'Second World'."

“I have an idea,” Chu Changge said. “As we have seen, the Second World has been split into countless fragments. These fragments have become independent entities, and some of the dungeons we have experienced are the contents of those fragments. Only by collecting those fragments can we synthesize the complete Second World.”

Upon hearing this, Gu Mian paused for a moment: "Why does this setting feel so damn familiar?"

He remembered watching an animated film when he was a child, which was about a person who shot a glass ball and shattered it into pieces, and then this person had to collect all the glass pieces.

When they were children, a group of people in the orphanage would gather together to watch cartoons. Gu Mian had watched them, and Chu Changge had naturally watched them too.

"The story won't unfold like that animated film, will it?" Gu Mian silently looked at the dozen or so pages in Chu Changge's hand. "I didn't tear the book..."

If Gu Mian were to tear it up, he would definitely rip the book to shreds, rather than tearing it page by page like this.

"There's no need for that. Gu Mian, if you want to know why you're so special, you just need to find that key piece of paper. It's like if you just want to know the ending of a novel, you can just drag the progress bar to the end to see the ending."

"But I suspect that the answer you're looking for might not be in the secondary world. We've previously speculated that these copies don't just come from one world, and we don't know how many other worlds there are besides the secondary world. Perhaps the answer you're looking for is hidden in other worlds."

“Speaking of which,” Gu Mian looked at Chu Changge, “you don’t have any colleagues, do you? Colleagues from all over the world.”

Chu Changge shook his head expressionlessly: "No."

It seems quite certain.

Liu Ruyan and Chu Changge are similar in nature; Gu Mian remembers they share the same title.

If that's the case, then Liu Ruyan must be from another world. Gu Mian had long had the idea of ​​tying her up and beating her up, and now this idea finally had a legitimate reason.

“However…” Gu Mian did not immediately put her idea into practice, but looked at Chu Changge, “Although you may not know, I still want to ask.”

Chu Changge raised her head and looked at Gu Mian quietly.

"The second world can be considered a low-dimensional world. You probably didn't know you were in a low-dimensional world at first."

"Yes."

"So... how did you find out later?"

After Gu Mian asked her question, there was an eerie silence in the living room for a few seconds before Chu Changge finally spoke: "Wrong."

mistake?

"Because of an error, at some point someone suddenly discovers that something that happened in the past is completely different from their memory; people's memories are faulty. If not many people knew about that event, it wouldn't cause much confusion, but the error was too big; it was something everyone knew about."

"The Internationale, the Internationale that everyone knows, has a problem. People remember the lyric 'We will eventually see the sun rise,' but one day, someone suddenly discovered that the lyrics had changed to 'We will eventually see the sunrise.'"

"Some people started searching and found that in books, online records, and records, all the lyrics had been changed to 'We will eventually see the sunrise,' which was completely inconsistent with people's memories."

"It's like when you use the wrong word in an essay, you quietly erase it and replace it with a new word, and then all the data becomes 'sunrise'."

"At that time, some people realized that we... live in a low-dimensional world."

Chu Changge said calmly, "Of course, the public won't know about this. In this age of advanced internet, controlling public opinion is not difficult, and it's not a big deal for people. Compared to work and life, no one will hold a grudge over a song lyric; so the public will think that they just remembered it wrong, rather than that the data has been tampered with."

Thank you so much for the 40,000 reward from Thin Smoke! (づ￣3￣)づ╭～
GuGu is still working hard to update more frequently.


(End of this chapter)