Chapter 110: Master Fu’s Secret
Song Yuqing and Little Meat Bun exchanged a sharp glance, linked hands, and stepped through the dimensional threshold into the pocket dimension.
Song Yuqing was completely unprepared for the reality that met them.
Instead of landing in the familiar, dark, and narrow gallery corridor, she and Little Meat Bun materialized inside a massive, transparent glass tube. The structure twisted and turned, spiraling upward into the empty air with no discernible end in sight.
Beyond the glass walls lay a world that had been magnified several times over.
They were inside an ordinary computer server room with stark white walls. A single, colossal computer chassis occupied nearly half of the entire floor space. In the center of the room sat a middle-aged man with slicked-back hair and gold-framed spectacles, his fingers flying rapidly across a giant keyboard.
Song Yuqing’s legs instantly went weak. She clung tightly to Little Meat Bun for support, but the panda was equally terrified, his thick limbs trembling so violently that both of them lost their footing and slid down to collapse at the very bottom curve of the glass pipe.
They were positioned a mere meter away from the middle-aged man. From their shrunken perspective, one of his eyes was significantly taller than their entire body heights combined.
The little panda let out a sharp whimper, aggressively covering his eyes with his paws as he burrowed his face into Song Yuqing’s shoulder. To him, it felt as though they were dangling over a bottomless abyss.
Song Yuqing’s heart hammered wildly against her ribs.
What on earth is happening?!
Where are we? Is this another parallel reality?
“Teacher Fu, the mistress is here…” The heavy door to the server room swung open, and a young man poked his head inside, offering a cautious reminder. “You really need to eat your lunch first…”
“Alright, I’ve got it,” the middle-aged man responded flatly, his fingers never missing a beat on the keyboard as he refused to cast even a brief glance toward the doorway.
Song Yuqing, who had been taking deep, ragged breaths to steady her racing mind, froze the instant she heard the youth address the man as “Teacher Fu.”
Teacher Fu. Master Fu…
She slowly lifted her gaze to study the giant middle-aged man. His facial structure bore an undeniable resemblance to Master Fu—or at least, the version of Master Fu native to the other parallel timelines. However, this individual carried himself with a noticeably more mature, weathered experience.
Gently stroking the trembling panda, Song Yuqing whispered a soft comfort. “Don’t be afraid, Little Meat Bun. Look… it’s just another version of the Master.”
Master Fu!
The little bear snapped his head up. He stared at the giant man towering outside the glass tube, then looked back at Song Yuqing’s pale, exhausted face, his mouth puckering into a small, processing pout.
“Let’s move,” the middle-aged man said, pushing himself out of his chair and walking toward the exit.
Behind him, the massive computer monitor continued to emit a flickering, unstable white light. As Teacher Fu walked, his giant silhouette smoothly intersected the transparent pipes, his physical form passing right through the glass loops as if they were nothing but thin air.
“Come on,” Song Yuqing urged, nudging the panda forward the moment Teacher Fu stepped out and closed the heavy server room door. “Let’s go take a closer look.”
Little Meat Bun quickly acclimated to navigating the curved interior of the pipe, his acute fear of heights beginning to subside. Seeing that his manager displayed zero traces of hesitation, the panda straightened his spine, determinedly marching ahead to act as her vanguard.
The pair advanced along the transparent line toward the massive computer monitor, looking exactly like two tiny mice sneaking through a house. It took them an eternity of frantic scurrying just to cover a distance that would normally equate to a human’s single, casual stride.
When they finally reached the display, they looked down at the interface. Rendered in vivid detail between blocks of streaming source code was a miniature, real-time rendering of Chen Town in ruins. Sweeping across the dead landscape, the only structures left standing between heaven and earth were the silver reflective walls of God’s Supermarket and the bald, battered canopy of the plastic-wrapped Chinese tallow tree.
“It’s our supermarket!”
Song Yuqing and Little Meat Bun stared at one another, absolute shock written across their faces.
They resolved to press forward along the transparent pipeline. Since they couldn’t begin to comprehend the foundational rules of this giant reality, returning to their storefront was out of the question.
The pipe systematically pierced straight through the server room walls without leaving a single gap or scratch in the drywall, transitioning directly into a massive structural corridor. Had they lacked the external environment to serve as a visual anchor, Song Yuqing and the panda would have completely lost their bearings inside the transparent labyrinth.
Gradually loosening their tight posture, the pair broke into a steady jog. After a considerable amount of physical exertion, they finally caught up to Teacher Fu again.
They quickly realized that the man was entirely incapable of seeing the winding glass tubes wrapping around his environment.
Teacher Fu stood outside a grand laboratory building, deep in a low-voiced, serious discussion with one of his graduate students. Song Yuqing and Little Meat Bun carefully synchronized their steps with his movements, following the pipeline until they reached the absolute closest node to the man’s face.
“Teacher Fu, we have to terminate this simulation,” the student urged, his expression grim. “The institutional funding has dried up completely, and the rest of the research staff has already abandoned the project.”
“No,” Teacher Fu refused flatly.
“But sir, I have to submit my resignation today too… You’re going to be left entirely on your own out here.”
“I am perfectly capable of maintaining the grid by myself.”
“Teacher Fu, what about your wife…?”
“That is strictly my concern.”
“But you know as well as I do that the doomsday simulation sequence was hardcoded to run for a maximum of six months!” the student argued, his voice rising in frustration. “Why are you constantly trying to force external plug-ins into the core architecture? Is this specific program really worth sacrificing your life for?”
“Yes,” Teacher Fu replied, his posture unyielding, his tone brooking absolutely no room for debate.
“Fine!” the young man sighed heavily. He offered a respectful bow to his mentor, turned on his heel, and marched away.
Song Yuqing carefully analyzed Teacher Fu’s features from her vantage point. To a normal human observer, the professor’s face would have appeared perfectly blank and stoic. But from her shrunken perspective, his face was magnified thousands of times over. She could easily track the minute contractions of every muscle fiber and the underlying grief bleeding through the lines of his skin.
Suddenly, Teacher Fu snapped his gaze directly toward her position. The tiny silhouettes of Song Yuqing and the giant panda were perfectly mirrored inside his massive eyeballs.
Startled by the sudden eye contact, both travelers took a sharp, instinctive step back, Little Meat Bun instantly raising his paws to shield his manager.
But a second later, Teacher Fu simply turned around and strolled into the laboratory building without a single trace of emotion, acting as if he hadn’t registered their presence at all.
Song Yuqing and the panda traded a wide-eyed glance, their instincts instantly validating the encounter. There’s no doubt about it—he absolutely saw us!
The pair quietly trailed him, sprinting through the glass loops wrapped around his office space. Maddeningly, the professor never locked eyes with them again. They existed merely as tiny ghosts trapped inside a glass pipeline, entirely incapable of exerting a single shred of physical influence over this massive world.
It was impossible to deduce exactly what Teacher Fu was calculating. At times, his giant fingers would rapidly type out a complex line of data, only for him to hold down the backspace key and completely delete the code right before hitting enter. At other times, he would sit perfectly frozen for hours, staring intensely at the rendering of God’s Supermarket flickering on his monitor.
And occasionally, he would slip on a pair of massive headphones, holding his forehead in his hands as silent tears welled in his eyes.
Little Meat Bun cast a deeply questioning look at Song Yuqing, but she could only offer a helpless shake of her head. She had no idea where they were anchored, nor could she parse the nature of the project.
While the professor sat motionless under the weight of his headphones, Song Yuqing grabbed the panda’s paw, guiding him to scurry toward the section of pipe wrapped nearest to the audio cups.
A faint, distorted acoustic frequency bled through the padding. Song Yuqing and Little Meat Bun focused their hearing, and both instantly recognized the vocal signature leaking out of the speakers.
It was the exact voice of their Master Fu.
“The integrity is fully restored, my boy,” Teacher Fu murmured, a profoundly tragic smile breaking across his face as he spoke to the empty room. “I will preserve your dreams, your consciousness, and your voice inside this database for eternity.”
He let out a long, weary sigh, leaning his weight back into the office chair as he slowly closed his eyes. “It took me two full days to patch the subroutines this time… It only took half a day last week. Before long, I’m afraid these system failures are going to outpace my ability to fix them… I’m simply getting too old.”
Song Yuqing’s brow furrowed in sudden panic. Wait, did he just lose consciousness? Is he dying?
She frantically scrambled forward alongside Little Meat Bun, pressing themselves against the glass nearest to his face to check if he was still breathing.
Fortunately, a steady stream of air was still moving through his nostrils. The man was alive.
But the revelations left Song Yuqing and the panda completely disoriented, their minds spinning in utter confusion.
“You’ve stared long enough. Go back to your station,” Teacher Fu spoke out loud, his eyes remaining firmly shut.
Had he chosen to open them, he would have been treated to the bizarre sight of two mosquito-sized humans frantically probing his nose.
“Huh?!”
Song Yuqing and Little Meat Bun froze in absolute shock. The realization hit them like a lightning strike—the giant was addressing them directly! Startled to their very cores, they gripped each other’s arms, their bodies shaking uncontrollably in the transparent pipe.
The creator of their world was resting right before their eyes, and he had tracked their movements from the very start.
