Chapter 126: The World of Night (Part 3)
“These are just scale models,” Song Yuqing said gently. “I’m an adult now, sweetie. I don’t really play with toy houses anymore.”
“But big sister, these are real houses! People actually live in them!”
Song Yuqing, who had been trying to figure out how to pry the secrets of this world out of the child, froze. She blinked, wondering if she had misheard.
“Wait… these house models are habitable?”
How? she thought. Are the tenants supposed to drink some sort of shrinking potion to fit inside?
The little girl shook her head firmly. “They’re not models. They’re real houses.”
The absolute earnestness on the child’s face made Song Yuqing genuinely question her own understanding of the world.
“Our house is exactly like this,” the little girl explained. “It looked tiny when we first bought it, but once you place it on the ground and press the switch, it unfolds and grows huge!”
“Really?”
The little girl pouted, a flash of irritation crossing her face. “Really! Do you honestly not know that, or are you just teasing me?”
When Song Yuqing didn’t immediately answer, the little girl assumed she was still being dismissed. She couldn’t comprehend how a grown adult could be completely oblivious to something so basic.
“If you don’t believe me, just buy one and we can go pop it open outside.”
Song Yuqing’s eyebrows shot up. “I truly didn’t know. Thank you for explaining it to me! I actually really need to buy some housing. Would you mind helping me pick some out? Oh, and do these structures come with defensive features?”
“Of course they do!” The little girl proudly puffed out her chest, looking for all the world like she had engineered the blueprints herself.
“Are they impervious to acid rain?”
“Yep!”
“Can they keep out zombies?”
“Zombies?” The little girl tilted her head, looking entirely baffled.
Right, Song Yuqing noted. It seems a zombie outbreak never triggered in this timeline.
“I mean, do they protect against bad guys who might try to break in and rob you?”
“Oh, absolutely!” the child nodded vigorously. “Every single one of these houses comes with its own integrated security system!”
Song Yuqing secretly rejoiced. This was perfect—more than enough to ensure her primary mission in this world would be a massive success. She could select hundreds of these compact structures and ferry them back to her baseline reality to give her neighbors proper shelter.
Delighted to be helpful again, the little girl enthusiastically pointed out the best models according to her own tastes. Naturally, her recommendations consisted entirely of vibrant, brightly colored villas. Song Yuqing carefully pulled the miniature estates off the shelves one by one, piling them into her shopping cart.
In addition to the villas, she selected a wide variety of apartment complexes. With the refugee population at God’s Supermarket expanding by the day, single-family luxury homes alone wouldn’t cut it.
The villas were slightly more expensive, costing 1.5 points a piece, while the standard apartment buildings were a steal at just 0.6 points.
Feeling incredibly wealthy, Song Yuqing loaded three hundred apartment buildings and fifty villas into her cart.
“Wow, you’re buying that many?” The little girl’s eyes went wide as she stared at the mountain of tiny real estate towering inside the metal basket.
“Yes,” Song Yuqing smiled. “I’m taking them back so my friends and I can live together.”
“Gee, big sister, you sure have a lot of friends.”
Song Yuqing gently patted the girl’s head. “Would you mind showing me around the other sections?”
The experience felt profoundly surreal. It was as if her own childhood self was personally giving her a guided tour through God’s Supermarket.
As they wandered the aisles, Song Yuqing quietly probed for more data regarding this world of eternal night. Despite her young age, the little girl proved remarkably perceptive. From her casual chatter, Song Yuqing gathered that this dimension had simply always functioned this way. The sky systematically broadcasting everyone’s deepest privacy wasn’t viewed as a dystopian horror here; it was accepted as a completely natural phenomenon, no different than flowers blooming in the spring.
The child claimed that no one in her society had ever questioned the sky’s existence. Song Yuqing kept her skepticism to herself. Someone, at some point, must have tried to fight back. A sky like that was a psychological weapon, engineered to slowly break even the most resilient human mind.
She pictured the cold, profoundly indifferent pedestrians she had crossed paths with on her way to the store. Their absolute detachment was almost certainly a psychological defense mechanism against the omniscient sky curtain.
This little girl was a rare, untouched exception.
The two of them chatted easily as they browsed the remaining layout, quickly arriving at the front checkout lanes. Having secured exactly what she came for, Song Yuqing had lost interest in the rest of the inventory. Even if she wanted to browse, her budget was finite, and she still had no idea what kind of supplies Nanjiao and the others were hoarding in their own carts. If their collective total exceeded her credit line, she would just have to put back a few of the apartment models.
A young couple stood behind the counter, their backs turned to the registers as they diligently audited the supermarket’s inventory. Song Yuqing felt a sudden, familiar wave of nerves. Are these cashiers going to give me the same icy, robotic treatment as the people on the street?
“Mom! Dad!” the little girl chirped, skipping happily toward the counter to greet them.
Song Yuqing froze dead in her tracks.
Wait. The owners of God’s Supermarket in this timeline… are her parents?
The moment the young couple turned around to greet the child, the air left Song Yuqing’s lungs. Her mind flashed back to her very first multiversal jump, remembering how crossing paths with her alternate self had violently caused that entire dimension to fracture and collapse.
The little girl’s mother looked flawlessly, completely identical to her.
But the young couple wasn’t her own parents. The woman was herself… and the man beside her was a total stranger.
Song Yuqing stared intensely at the alternate version of herself, catching a flicker of mutual surprise mirroring in the woman’s eyes. It was just a brief, passing flash of shock—nothing more.
“Wow, look at that! You two could be twins!” the little girl’s father exclaimed, a warm, bright smile breaking across his handsome face. As the proprietors of God’s Supermarket, they appeared to be among the few citizens in this bleak city capable of genuine laughter.
Song Yuqing studied his features. She had never seen this man in her original world.
“It makes sense,” the alternate Song Yuqing noted with a relaxed smile. “At the end of the day, it all comes down to the programming.”
Song Yuqing felt as though her head was about to explode. What on earth did she mean by that?
“Programming?”
The woman didn’t offer a direct answer, simply waving her over to the register. “Are you looking to purchase these housing units? Since you’re buying in bulk, I’ll happily apply a twenty percent discount to the total. Bring the cart on over, and I’ll get you checked out.”
Moving like a zombie, Song Yuqing numbly pushed her cart to the counter, watching the alternate version of herself systematically scan the tiny structures one by one.
“What exactly do you mean by programming?” Song Yuqing pressed, her voice tight. “Are you saying we share the same source code?”
The husband, who was efficiently bagging the items to assist his wife, chimed in casually. “Did your family never disclose the parameters to you? The genesis of all matter, all timelines, and all life forms is explicitly programmed by Master Fu.”
Boom.
Song Yuqing’s heart skipped a beat, and she genuinely forgot how to breathe.
Noticing the manager’s face turn dangerously pale, the woman quickly jabbed her husband in the ribs with her elbow, silently signaling him to shut his mouth. There were certain systemic realities that a person simply wasn’t built to handle.
The little girl reached out, gently tugging Song Yuqing’s hand. “Big sister, are you okay?”
Staring down into the child’s sweet, concerned face, Song Yuqing’s throat tightened, the words catching in her chest. Everything that this family viewed as an ordinary, baseline truth of existence was a terrifying, worldview-shattering horror to her.
She forced herself to process the data logically, trying to rationalize that this world of night was merely a simulated micro-reality created by Master Fu—a twisted, grand scale game of The Sims.
But a darker, more terrifying thought knocked against the back of her mind, and she deliberately forced herself to stop calculating the variables. If this timeline was manufactured… what about her home world? Was her entire reality programmed by Teacher Fu?
Holding tight to the little girl’s small fingers, a sudden, agonizing ache bloomed in Song Yuqing’s chest. If the citizens of this dark timeline were nothing more than scripts generated by Master Fu’s code, it meant every choice, every relationship, and every tragedy they experienced was nothing more than a pre-written algorithm.
From the very moment of their inception, their destinies had already been decided.
