Matrix Survival: One random treasure chest per day

Chapter 562 I'm Not a Normal Person
"You're insane! What did I ever do to you?" Li Zheng cursed.

Zhan Zhouzhou's sword-wielding hand suddenly stopped, and she stared in astonishment at the prompt given by the Eye of Prey: [Although it's shameless to say this, the guy with the handsome eyes in front of you is indeed someone you know, not someone else in disguise.]

Also, a friendly reminder: if you don't stop, the outer city enforcement team will come to arrest you.

"Are you really Li Zheng?" Zhan Zhouzhou dispersed the Purple Extreme Sword, and out of the corner of her eye, she noticed several men wearing insignia of law enforcement officers had stopped in their tracks. "Where are those little guys with you? I don't see them."

Players' capsule homes cannot accommodate pets. Li Zheng's two pets usually follow him around. After meeting the guy who looked a lot like Li Zheng, Zhan Zhouzhou set a standard for himself.

It's possible that someone exactly like Li Zheng will appear in the future. The most direct way to distinguish the real from the fake would be to see if he has two pets with him.

If it doesn't exist, then it's definitely fake.

So when Zhan Zhouzhou returned to the outer city, she saw that Li Zheng didn't have any pets with him, and subconsciously assumed that he was an imposter.

"Are we meeting for the first time?" Li Zheng said speechlessly, "You're trying to figure me out by relying on Xiaoying and the others? Come on, don't just stand there like an idiot, come sit down and let's talk."

Inviting Zhan Zhouzhou to sit with them by the roadside, the two of them summarized the events of the past two days in the shortest possible terms.

"If it weren't for your ability reminding me, I might have already chopped you down for you." Zhan Zhouzhou picked up her teacup and took a sip of tea.

"What you're saying sounds really weird," Li Zheng frowned. "What do you mean by 'help me chop me up'? Does that mean if you chop me up, I should thank you?"

"Of course!" Zhan Zhouzhou said matter-of-factly. "I only cut down those guys who were trying to impersonate you. I put in the effort, and you should give me gratitude. It's only fair."

"By the way, who exactly did you offend? Why is someone disguising themselves as you and causing trouble in the wilderness?"

Zhan Zhouzhou had just told Li Zheng about her mission outside, and she mistook the hooded man for an enemy who wanted to smear Li Zheng's reputation.

“Actually…” Li Zheng hesitated for a moment, then finally decided to tell the truth: “You might not believe it, but I’m not actually a normal person.”

"I can tell." Zhan Zhouzhou took another sip of tea. "Sometimes your brain doesn't work so well. What normal person would act like you?"

Li Zheng: "..."

We're talking about serious matters, can you please stop interrupting?

"Then guess why I have intermittent mental lapses?" Li Zheng smiled wryly: "I guarantee you won't be able to guess."

“I really can’t guess.” Zhan Zhouzhou said seriously, “Because there are many reasons that can cause intellectual disability, some are congenital and some are influenced by acquired factors. If I were to guess them one by one, I could name at least fifty.”

"You son of a bitch..." Li Zheng glared and roared, "Can you stop saying I'm not smart? I didn't want this either, okay? As a clone, this is a defect I was born with, and it can't be fixed..."

"puff!!!"

Zhan Zhouzhou spat out a mouthful of tea onto Li Zheng's face, interrupting him: "What did you just say?! You're a clone?"

That's pretty awesome...

This reason is not among the fifty speculations that Zhan Zhouzhou just mentioned.

"Are you kidding me?" Zhan Zhou scrutinized Li Zheng closely, trying to find something different about him. "Whose clone are you? Why would they clone you?"

Li Zheng took out a towel to wipe his face: "If you were even a little bit ugly, I would slap you across the face if you sprayed water all over my face..."

"You clone, you've got quite the temper." Zhan Zhouzhou rolled her eyes at him and steered the conversation back on track: "You still haven't said whose clone you are."

Who exactly is worthy of being cloned? And who cloned them?

Zhan Zhouzhou was quite curious about these two points.

Li Zheng slowly wiped his face clean, his affected manner almost making Zhan Zhouzhou hit him.

Just a second before Zhan Zhouzhou went berserk, Li Zhengcai spoke up and gave the answer: "I am a clone of the Matrix Terminal."

"Matrix...terminal?" For some reason, Zhan Zhouzhou didn't feel particularly surprised after hearing the answer. Instead, she felt a sense of 'I knew it'.

It seems... apart from the matrix terminal, there's nothing else that's worth going to such lengths to clone, right?

"Then do you know who cloned you, and what the purpose of cloning you was?" Zhan Zhouzhou continued to ask.

Everyone has a clear purpose for doing anything. Since someone is making clones, it means that the other party must have some ulterior motive.

"and many more……"

Before Li Zheng could answer, Zhan Zhouzhou suddenly remembered something and raised her palm: "You and we all started as players from the first day of this survival competition, and you have the same permissions as us. It seems there is only one answer to how you can achieve this level."

Zhan Zhouzhou wasn't stupid; after a brief period of reasoning, she arrived at the answer she wanted.

"The person who cloned you... no, it should be said that the person who cloned the Matrix Terminal is actually the Matrix Terminal itself." Zhan Zhouzhou looked thoughtful: "But after the Matrix Terminal cloned you, why did it put you into the player community? What was its purpose in doing so?"

This is rather puzzling, because doing so doesn't seem to benefit the matrix terminal.

It's impossible that the matrix terminal is bored from living too long and is using this method to amuse itself, right?

That's ridiculous.

“I’m not the only one who was put into the matrix as a player,” Li Zheng said. “To be precise, the terminal puts a clone into each generation of players. The one you met in the wilderness was very likely one of them. It’s just that he couldn’t enter the outer city and went to the wilderness instead… The reason is simple. Judging from your description, that clone was probably an early creation of the terminal. It was not yet fully developed in terms of intelligence and could only act according to a fixed logic.”

At this point, Li Zheng couldn't help but complain, "Compared to others, I guess I'm pretty smart..."

For a moment, I didn't know whether this was a blessing or a curse.

"But... what's the purpose?" Zhan Zhouzhou still couldn't understand why the matrix terminal did this.

"Purpose..." Li Zheng countered, "Do you remember when we were chatting, what you mentioned about the moment you were captured and put into the matrix?"

Zhan Zhouzhou certainly remembered that indescribable thing; she had only glanced at it, yet it had stirred up intense negative emotions within her.

Fortunately, the matrix terminal would confuse people when it was arresting them; otherwise, Zhan Zhouzhou couldn't imagine whether she would have suffered a mental breakdown under such negative emotions.

"You mean, the reason the Matrix Terminal inserts a clone into each generation of players is mainly to fight against... that thing?" Zhan Zhouzhou thought carefully for a moment, but couldn't find an accurate word to name what he saw.

“That’s right.” Li Zheng nodded: “After all, the purpose of the matrix is ​​to fight against that thing.”

He lowered his voice and succinctly relayed everything Xu had told him to Zhan Zhouzhou.

"Wow!" Zhan Zhouzhou exclaimed after hearing this, "Goodness, your background is really bizarre. If it were written down, you would definitely be the protagonist of a web novel... with the treatment of a clone tool."

(End of this chapter)