Maybe Song Zang was satisfied with his life now and would never long for anything more.
But Yin Chen had learned a phrase that described Song Zang’s condition perfectly.
He had no roots in this world.
He drifted like duckweed. On nights when no one noticed, perhaps he would occasionally bloom in an instant like an illusory night-blooming cereus, its moon-bright white-jade petals breathtakingly beautiful, only to close again just as quickly.
Then he would quietly curl up beneath the shelter of leaves and branches, hiding his radiance so thoroughly that anyone who had witnessed that startling sight might wonder whether it had only been a fleeting dream.
Song Zang was good. He was exceptional too. Yin Chen was not the only one who thought so.
Even measured solely by the standards of ordinary human society, he was exceptionally accomplished.
He had skipped grades again and again from the time he started school, and had even relied on prize money from mathematics competitions to make up for his shortage of living expenses.
He entered university ranked first in his major, maintained a perfect GPA, still had time to take side jobs, and always took first place in scholarship selections without anyone being able to dispute it.
Even his professor from those years still could not let Song Zang go, regretting that he had not gone further in academia and shamelessly wanting to drag him back to pursue a doctorate.
Yet throughout more than twenty years of his life, even without the Infinite Game or any supernatural danger, Song Zang had lived with extraordinary low-key restraint.
Whenever other people’s attention landed on the parts of him that shone, he would instinctively retreat, and retreat again, habitually hiding everything good about himself.
It was not only because he lacked a sense of security. It was also because… there was no one worth showing off for. Song Zang could find no direction in which to strive, and no reason to make himself shine.
More importantly, Song Zang had always yearned for a mother’s love. He had never deliberately demanded it, but clearly he had never truly let it go.
At the very least, he deserved to know why he had been abandoned back then.
So Yin Chen, carrying a measure of resentment, began seriously looking for Song Zang’s parents.
He truly was dissatisfied with Song Zang’s parents.
Yin Chen could hardly be blamed for grumbling in private. What decent person gave birth to a child, abandoned a baby not even two months old at the entrance of an orphanage, and, before abandoning him, gave him such an inauspicious name?
Because his name was steeped in “yin energy,” Song Zang had suffered no end of trouble in the beta-test instances crawling with demons and ghosts.
He had nearly died several times, nearly been delivered to a Ghost King’s bed, and nearly been cursed with high-level paralysis the moment an instance began.
Song Zang himself might have almost forgotten those old brushes with death, but Yin Chen held grudges by nature. He would remember them very clearly on Song Zang’s behalf.
Of course, despite his resentment, Yin Chen was still very curious. What kind of humans could possibly have produced someone as unusual as Song Zang?
Keeping it from Song Zang, Yin Chen quietly began his investigation with the orphanage at its center.
Song Zang’s household registration was in Sen City, and he had spent more than ten years at the Sen City Orphanage.
So Yin Chen dug up pregnancy files and obstetric surgical records from hospitals all across Sen City, the city’s annual newborn data, and even neighbors who had lived around the orphanage more than twenty years ago, along with the owners and employees of nearby shops.
He did not act alone. He secretly asked Chi Yan, who had far better connections, to help as well. Chi Yan made a subtle expression that plainly said she was shipping them, refused to take a cent from Yin Chen, and agreed immediately.
With the young lady of Luo City’s powerful assistance, investigating a person in human society turned out to be far easier than Yin Chen had imagined.
Yet by the end of the investigation, the matter somehow grew stranger and stranger.
Among the dusty obstetrics files at Sen City Fifth Hospital, there really was one woman who appeared to be Song Zang’s mother. Both the date her file was established and her expected delivery date matched.
At first, the woman had come in frequently for prenatal checkups and bought large quantities of folic acid and pregnancy-support products, clearly cherishing the fetus deeply. A man sometimes accompanied her, though he was very busy and constantly taking phone calls.
But after the fifth month of pregnancy, she never set foot in the hospital again.
Her name was Song Lan Jing. Compared with the highly repetitive Fang, Li, and Juan names common in that era, hers was especially memorable.
The obstetrician, now retired, could no longer remember the name of the man who accompanied her, yet still remembered Song Lan Jing.
At the very least, that showed she too had been a child born in accordance with her parents’ hopes.
Song Lan Jing was extraordinarily beautiful. Even from her ID photo, it was obvious she had the kind of face people remembered after a single glance.
But she was not very good at dressing herself, and after becoming pregnant, comfort mattered even more. A puffy bread-style down jacket, fuzzy Minnie Mouse sleeve covers, a dark-brown scarf, and a headscarf that wrapped up all her black hair for convenience…
Like any ordinary person from an ordinary family, she had tried hard to make herself look unremarkable.
Yet even so, passersby could immediately notice her delicate features and the air that set her apart from the crowd. A supermodel could wear a floral-padded coat and still make it look like expensive haute couture.
After comparing all the witnesses’ recollections, Yin Chen became increasingly thoughtful.
As expected, Song Zang’s mother could not possibly be an ordinary person.
In Sen City back when it was still relatively undeveloped, her presence had left an impression in quite a few people’s memories.
But after Song Lan Jing left her child at the orphanage entrance, she simply vanished into thin air, as though she had never left a trace in this world.
Yin Chen could not find her, and neither could Chi Yan. Song Lan Jing’s name still quietly existed in the household-registration system. Since no one had ever reported her missing, she could only be considered unofficially missing.
Chi Yan offered several reasonable possibilities: she had been trafficked, gone abroad, fallen into debt, assumed another identity to hide from enemies, or died unexpectedly or from illness in some small town where information systems were poor, with her death simply omitted from official registration…
Any of those was possible. But Yin Chen’s thinking went a step deeper.
Song Zang was a naturally gifted player. Luck had played a role in his surviving the Infinite Game for so long, but far more important was his extraordinary 【compatibility】 in every respect.
Not just anyone could inexplicably dominate a game world, and not just anyone qualified to be selected by the beta-test version. Song Zang did.
He was exceptionally suited to being a player.
His innate high resistance kept him from falling too deeply into the abyss called “madness.” The danger warnings that appeared again and again were like psychic instincts engraved into his genes and bloodline, allowing Song Zang to avoid otherwise certain death.
If that was the case, then Song Zang’s parents had to possess something unusual as well. It was worth digging deeper.
Once Yin Chen had a direction, he immediately began a second stage of investigation.
While Song Zang took the dogs out for their vaccinations, Yin Chen secretly returned to the Dark World, spent a considerable amount of power rooted in his true body, and performed a different kind of bloodline tracing on a higher-dimensional level.
The result was absurd. Even Yin Chen found it difficult to believe.
Song Zang’s father had died twenty-two years ago. His mother was alive, but she was living five hundred years in the future.
Five hundred years in the future???
Yin Chen had not encountered anything this ridiculous in a long time. His spirits lifted at once, and he immediately followed that faint thread of a clue into the river of time.
An indescribably enormous entity floated through a substance-less void. The rims of thousands upon thousands of densely packed eyes merged together, forming a long, narrow, pitch-black double pupil that gazed toward the future.
Song Lan Jing, once young and beautiful, was now a middle-aged woman with a gentle bearing. She wore a simple cotton-linen dress, several loops of six-path-wood prayer beads around her pale wrist, and sat with lowered eyes sipping tea.
Six-path wood was also called dragon-subduing wood. Yin Chen carefully examined the only ornament on her body and could faintly discern wisps of genuine mystical power within the prayer beads.
Very soon, as though sensing Yin Chen’s distant gaze, Song Lan Jing set down her cup, lifted her eyes with a faint smile, and looked directly at Yin Chen without dodging in the slightest.
The instant their gazes met, a strange golden light flashed across the wooden prayer beads, then quickly withdrew, leaving them looking like perfectly ordinary wooden beads again.
In those dark eyes so similar to Song Zang’s, there was a trace of surprise, followed almost immediately by a softened look of realization.
“You came the wrong way.”
Song Lan Jing smiled and spoke gently.
Then she raised her teacup again, lowered her eyes, and took a small sip, plainly having no intention of continuing the conversation.
Yin Chen suffered a minor injury and, unusually, did not retaliate.
He had no idea how he was supposed to interact with his own “mother-in-law.”
The bloodline-tracing ability was about to fade. Before that faint sense of rejection could fully rise, Yin Chen marked Song Lan Jing’s location with a coordinate.
With his remaining time, he seized as much information as possible from that distant spacetime, then turned and left without looking back.
Song Zang’s mother really was five hundred years in the future.
She possessed “supernatural” abilities that exceeded the limits of present-day Earth.
She resembled a player, but she absolutely was not one.
From a rough analysis of the information he had seized, Yin Chen could reach one conclusion without the slightest doubt.
The emergence of the Infinite Game world was inseparably connected to humanity.
It was even very possible that it had been created by humans of the future.
The game system had extremely distinctive characteristics that aligned with the programming habits of humans on Earth, though they were far more complex and advanced than any existing computer language.
The mission mechanisms of the instance worlds likewise aligned only with the play preferences of humans from Earth.
If intelligent beings from other worlds entered the game, at first they would only find it strange and incomprehensible.
Even the Collective had initially struggled to breach the wormhole barrier because it could not understand the mechanism, and for a brief time the system had caught it completely off guard.
This was a uniquely human invention, born from human intelligence.
But Yin Chen did not recklessly invade the future timeline. He touched his injured true body and calmly returned to Earth.
He was no longer like before, when he had not cared about his own safety in the slightest and had acted with complete abandon.
Only by keeping his body healthy could he feed Song Zang the richest and freshest flesh, bit by bit.
Speaking of which, although Yin Chen’s thoughts of “assimilation” had never gone away, the person who cooked at home most of the time was Song Zang. Yin Chen had secretly learned how to cook long ago, but knew only the few dishes Song Zang liked, while Song Zang insisted on stealing the job from him.
When it came to housework, Song Zang was unexpectedly far more enthusiastic than Yin Chen.
Having lived alone for so many years, Song Zang was familiar with every large and small detail of daily life: property management, utilities, furniture, appliances… He kept everything perfectly organized, and their home was always arranged exactly the way the two of them liked it.
Yin Chen considered this an extraordinarily powerful kind of inner strength. He would always cling close and follow along to help, while carefully noticing everything Song Zang did.
Their two-story house had quite a few windows, and the sunroom on the terrace, overgrown with green vines, was also made of glass and got dirty most easily. Yet whenever Yin Chen looked, it always seemed clean and bright.
The curtains had been torn several times when the two dogs fought. Song Zang spoiled them terribly and had actually learned some cross-stitch specifically for repairs, buying soft, pale cloth in different colors to patch the holes.
He embroidered a heap of little flowers and grasses, round chibi cats, fluffy puppies, and piglets… It made everything feel exceptionally cozy.
Yin Chen had once suggested sewing a giant version of Song Zang’s face onto one of them. Song Zang, unusually expressionless, told him he was insane.
Damn it.
Even the sofa the dogs used for parkour never seemed to be conquered by dog hair and always carried the fresh scent of lemon fragrance.
More and more framed photos of the two of them appeared in the living room. The entryway shoe cabinet was covered with photo-booth stickers of them making outrageous faces, along with close-ups of the dogs glossy and sleek after their baths. The bedroom quilts and clean clothes were steeped in the warm scent of sunlight.
Song Zang was seriously building a life. He poured all his attention into it and frequently studied recipes, trying to discover things Yin Chen would enjoy eating too. For that purpose alone, he bought several different kinds of pots, bowls, and baking tools.
One particular moment had left a deep impression on Yin Chen.
Once, they teamed up for an instance. The side mission was to kill every xenomorph parasitizing the human world.
With no other players present, Song Zang killed to his heart’s content, scarlet droplets of blood staining his smooth, pale, beautiful face while his excited smile looked almost sinister.
Yin Chen did not think much of it. Song Zang looked perfectly normal to him, and very alluring. But the morning after clearing the instance, Yin Chen had just returned from walking the dogs when the rich aroma filling the whole house hit him.
Song Zang had woken early. In the kitchen, he carefully opened the oven, picked up the scorching tray with his bare hands, spun around, and proudly announced with a smile that he had learned how to make oven-baked honey-glazed char siu.
Sometimes Yin Chen really liked him a little too much.
At that moment, he wanted Song Zang to put him in the oven, turn him into fresh food with an enticing glaze and thick sauce, then devour him with an expression of pure enjoyment.
Mm. It was difficult to put into words.
So Yin Chen darkly peeled flesh and mucus from his true body and, under cover of night, repeatedly placed large quantities into the jars of maple syrup and honey.
Song Zang had known all along. He simply indulged him and pretended not to see.
…
But this time, after returning from the river of time, Yin Chen’s shallow disguise did not work at all.
Song Zang, who usually pretended to be blind to everything, suddenly became extraordinarily perceptive.
Yin Chen was just about to bring up Song Lan Jing when Song Zang immediately pointed out that something was wrong.
Misstep. Song Zang had noticed long ago.
Thanks to Yin Chen’s tireless “feeding,” the two of them would frequently and unpredictably experience a 【shared-sensation phenomenon】.
That insignificant little injury happened to be something Song Zang could feel.
“Baby, go put on a cat tail and cheer me up. Then I won’t be angry with you.”
Song Zang sat on the sofa with his arms folded, his voice gentle, shallow dimples appearing and disappearing beside his lips.
Yin Chen fell silent.
Song Zang was genuinely frightening when he was angry.
Better placate him first.