Chapter 128: All Fake
Song Yuqing’s consciousness drifted in a stark, featureless void. Stripped of her physical form, she had no way to control her trajectory and could only let the empty expanse pull her aimlessly back and forth.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!!!”
She heard Nanjiao’s panicked voice echoing from somewhere close yet impossibly far away.
“Gaha! Gaha!”
She tracked the raw terror bleeding from Gaha and Little Meat Bun.
“I’m right here!” Song Yuqing shouted. More precisely, she forcefully projected her thoughts outward like radio waves, casting them into the infinite void in all directions.
She knew with absolute certainty that her physical cries could not be heard in this realm. An oppressive silence blanketed her surroundings, as if everything was being systematically smothered by the blank canvas of this space.
One by one, Nanjiao, Little Meat Bun, and Gaha spoke up, their thoughts responding to her mental beacon.
Song Yuqing couldn’t visually parse anything from the void. She couldn’t even see in the traditional sense; her perception wasn’t driven by her eyes, but by a raw, hyper-attuned network of senses.
Suddenly, countless microscopic digital pixels began to materialize before her consciousness. The particles shifted and combined with absolute fluid freedom, rapidly rewriting the imagery.
And then, she saw it.
She witnessed exactly how the baseline reality she inhabited had been constructed, step by step. Infinite strings of code systematically compiled into cities, followed by the artificial generation of flora and fauna, and finally, the deployment of human populations.
Song Yuqing tracked the chronological trajectory of her world’s evolution, watching the data streams fluctuate—sometimes accelerating into a blur, sometimes slowing to a crawl, but always iterating.
Every micro-universe possessed its own distinct parameters. One timeline was locked in perpetual night; another could only develop within the depths of a submerged aquatic civilization; yet another existed in perfect symbiosis between elite human espers and advanced technology. Because she could recognize these baseline signatures, Song Yuqing knew without a doubt that the matrix actively rendering before her senses was the exact world she belonged to.
What does this imply? Was it possible that her home world, the dark timeline they had just left, and every single one of those eccentric parallel realities were nothing more than pre-written algorithms?
Horrified by the sheer weight of the thought, Song Yuqing forced herself to clamp down on the theory. She desperately didn’t want to dig for empirical evidence that might validate such a terrifying conclusion.
She wasn’t the only one trapped in the simulation; Nanjiao, Little Meat Bun, and Gaha were also bearing witness to this staggering display of universal genesis.
Before the apocalypse hit, tech companies had frequently utilized advanced rendering software to generate hyper-realistic simulation videos online, making it nearly impossible to separate reality from illusion. She tried to convince herself that what she was observing was simply a massive piece of visual media.
“Is… is all of this just fake?” Nanjiao muttered, desperately wanting to believe the sequence was nothing more than a localized optical illusion or a joke.
Is it fake? Song Yuqing found herself completely unable to dismiss the horror. From the very first night she had blundered through the doors of God’s Supermarket, the breadcrumbs pointing to this foundational truth had been lurking in plain sight.
A profound, unnatural calm settled over her consciousness. She systematically reviewed every catastrophic event that had unfolded since the initial meteorite shower, and the pieces of the puzzle began to violently lock into place.
It was mathematically plausible. What if they were nothing more than brains in a vat?
To put it another way, they weren’t actually interacting with a tactile, material universe; they were experiencing a fully synthesized virtual state.
Song Yuqing remembered their excursion to the pristine beach, recalling how Teacher Fu had explicitly stated he was the architect who created Master Fu. She also remembered the night Master Fu had first delivered Little Meat Bun to her storefront, casually mentioning that a system bug had occurred while he was patching a parallel timeline.
While her mind raced through the data, the digital city on display continued to evolve at a breakneck pace.
The meteor showers descended, the mutant virus fractured the populace, zombies aggressively swarmed the bastions, humans were brutally hunted down and consumed, the undead hordes subsequently starved to death, and the entire civilization dissolved into ash like a fading dream bubble.
Yet, in the blink of an eye, the simulation cycled. New cities rose from the code, and populations of humans structurally identical to the previous generation busied themselves repeating the exact same historical milestones—only for the timeline to inevitably collapse back into ash.
Immediately following the purge, the sequence rebooted again. The same citizens populated the streets, the same meteorite storm fractured the atmosphere, the same mutant legions swarmed the defenses, and the same tragic espers failed to salvage the planet, all culminating in the exact same apocalyptic conclusion.
She lost count of how many hundreds of thousands of times the cycle had iterated. But finally, a structural anomaly fractured the loop.
The anomaly was God’s Supermarket.
The moment the store injected itself into the post-apocalyptic timeline, the velocity of the world’s destruction visibly slowed. In her previous existential loops, Song Yuqing hadn’t noticed the supermarket’s manifestation, likely because it had remained too small to register. But in this active iteration, it stood prominently amidst the desolate wasteland, immediately visible to her senses. She finally realized that every global purge was simply a clean restart, and the parameters were shifting.
Ever since the introduction of God’s Supermarket, the operational stalemate between humanity and the undead had grown increasingly protracted with each subsequent round. It was a net positive; it granted human civilization the leverage to survive a fraction longer. While the absolute end of the world still appeared statistically inevitable, the overall arc was charting a positive trend.
The infinite strings of code continued to flash across her consciousness before freezing on a final, real-time render:
God’s Supermarket standing proud amidst the smoking ruins, completely surrounded by rings of refugee tents.
“It looks exactly like a virtual game interface…” Song Yuqing’s thought-voice finally broke the silence. “Is that… is that where we are currently anchored?”
“What the hell is this thing? Where are our bodies?!” Nanjiao yelled.
“Maybe…” Song Yuqing could only grasp at probabilities. “Maybe this is a real-time diagnostic interpretation of our universe?”
A historical review of their systemic iterations.
“Gaha…” Gaha grunted, her consciousness thoroughly disoriented by the data.
Following a long, heavy silence, Nanjiao’s thoughts resonated with a profound, suffocating weight. “The world we live in has been systematically annihilated and reconstructed over and over again… exactly like the log files we just watched.”
If their calculations were correct, the complete destruction of their planet wasn’t an anomaly; it was a statistical certainty.
But if that was the baseline truth, what exactly was their universe? Why could their reality be casually rebooted like a commercial video game whenever the campaign failed?
“Why are we being forced to look at this?” Nanjiao’s mind fractured with raw terror. Were these digitized environments merely a fictional art piece, or were they bearing witness to the literal playback of reality?
Song Yuqing was trapped in a fierce internal conflict. A desperate part of her soul hoped these anomalies were merely standard physics native to an eccentric parallel timeline, but her cold, unyielding logic kept whispering the truth: Everything you know is fake.
Ever since the day the world collapsed, her fundamental understanding of cognition had been continuously overturned, but this realization cut the deepest.
“Is this some tier of advanced prophetic foresight, like the visions inside the Future Cinema?” Nanjiao guessed, grasping at straws.
“No. What we are observing isn’t a map of the future,” Song Yuqing stated, her thoughts sending a literal shiver through their collective consciousness. “We are looking at the absolute history of our past iterations.”
“Gaha… Gaha, Gaha!” Gaha rippled with acute panic.
“We need to find a way to deploy back to the storefront and confront Master Fu,” Song Yuqing suggested. Though, if she were being perfectly honest, she had absolutely no idea how to execute a spatial extraction when none of them possessed a physical body.
Little Meat Bun let out a low mental rumble of agreement. Yes. Master Fu will definitively hold the answers to this.
“I have a technical question,” Nanjiao noted, his analytical mind probing the layout. “Our team initiated the jump into the parallel timeline directly from your private pocket dimension, and then we were violently dragged into this inexplicable server space from that alternate reality… Is it mathematically possible that the core secrets of the system are actually hardcoded straight inside your spatial inventory?”
Song Yuqing had no answer to give him. Could her pocket dimension truly house the source code?
Every single time she had requested a spatial capacity upgrade, she had relied entirely on Master Fu’s administrative clearance. While their supervisor consistently projected the persona of a careless, lazy bureaucrat, it was becoming blindingly obvious that he was guarding an immense database of restricted information.
She still couldn’t decipher why Master Fu had systematically selected her out of a billion survivors to serve as his primary manager. Had it truly been a matter of pure coincidence—a random variable because she happened to blunder through his doors on that fateful night?
Yet, as they floated within the blank server space, neither Song Yuqing, Little Meat Bun, Gaha, nor Nanjiao realized just how remarkably close their frantic theories had come to unlocking the absolute truth behind their existence.
