“What the hell is th-this-this-this-this-this-this-this-this-this——”
The mutation happened at that exact sa instant.
Facing the clingy Rhine Cat, Sang Biao let out a frantic roar. His clothes flickered wildly between mosaic glitches and blocks of color, while his entire model jittered up and down, half his body sinking into the horizon plane.
That whole row of clingy Rhine Cats suddenly began copy-pasting themselves, instantly filling the entire space—until even the elevator was stuffed with fluffy cat heads, overlapping directly with Jiang Ran.
Jiang Ran wanted to shout sothing, only to realize he couldn’t make a sound.
He turned his head toward the mirror on the side of the elevator and found that the upper half of his body had vanished cleanly at the waist, while his lower legs inverted and snapped back upright—
upside down, then upright again.
Upside down, then upright again.
In an instant, the Rhine Cats’ clothes and skin disappeared.
Muscles, blood vessels, and bones were exposed before Jiang Ran’s eyes exactly like an anatomy chart.
Th-th-that, that wasn’t a mascot! Not a costu! Those were Rhine Cats made of real flesh and bone!
Shock and terror collided when his arm suddenly appeared out of nowhere, stretched across his field of vision.
On the electronic watch at his wrist, the display clearly read—September 17, 2045, 10:39:11 AM.
Ah.
The whole world went dark, everything reduced to nothingness.
A few seconds later.
“Holy shit!!!”
As consciousness and vision returned, Jiang Ran shouted it out loud.
That one “holy shit” had really been bottled up inside him: “What the hell was that!?”
He clutched his head with both hands, not daring to recall the details at all—
the skinned Rhine Cats, bloody and raw, still singing and dancing at the sa ti. What kind of nightmare was that!?
How could there possibly be an outdoor amusent park beneath Basent Level 42?
And—
what those Rhine Cats had said in their clingy voices had been even more absurd:
“Welco tooooo~~~~ Hangzhou Paradise!”
Co on.
That was Donghai City.
That was beneath Basent Level 42 of the Donghai City Museum of Human Civilization.
How could there possibly be a Hangzhou Paradise there!?
The reason Hangzhou Paradise was called Hangzhou Paradise was because it was built in Hangzhou, okay?
“And besides—”
Jiang Ran’s heart skipped. He swallowed.
Just recently, on the second day of the National Day holiday, he had gone to Hangzhou Paradise with Cheng ngxue, as played by Li Yini.
So he was absolutely certain:
“[Hangzhou Paradise doesn’t look like that at all—it’s completely different.]”
That place was an old amusent park, dated and slightly run-down, long past its pri. How could it possibly have a Ferris wheel that tall, or a roller coaster that exaggerated?
The Ferris wheel he had just seen outside the elevator on Basent Level 42 had been nearly as tall as the sun itself, not to ntion the roller coaster spiraling like a giant dragon—there was no way a matching ride existed anywhere in the world.
If Hangzhou Paradise really had attractions that outrageous, how could it ever be on the verge of bankruptcy? Even Disneyland and Universal Studios combined wouldn’t be able to compete with it.
So this was what made it strange.
“[That was obviously not Hangzhou Paradise, so why were those Rhine Cats saying welco to Hangzhou Paradise?]”
He sighed and rubbed his temples.
No, no, no—this was not the ti to obsess over details like that—
if even the Rhine Cats had turned into living flesh-and-blood beings, then compared to sothing that outrageous, what was the point of fixating on surface appearances?
“Sir?”
“Sir!”
“SIR!!”
The sweet, delicate voice beside him jolted Jiang Ran awake. He turned around.
The familiar maid-outfit waitress was looking at him with eyes full of concern.
“Are you alright, sir? Would you like a glass of juice to calm yourself down?”
Jiang Ran took a deep breath and looked around.
He was back again.
Another rollback, restart, and loop after 39 minutes and 11 seconds.
This was already the third ti tonight, and also the last.
“I’ll have one, thanks.”
The girl smiled faintly, poured Jiang Ran a full glass of orange juice, and handed it over—
Hi!
Hi!
Hi!
Before his right hand could even touch the paper cup, dizziness struck again. The world spun, his vision reeled, and right on schedule the worldline kicked him into the spaceti vortex, sending him plunging through darkness—
Two seconds later.
All the discomfort vanished.
Jiang Ran slowly opened his eyes.
A gentle night breeze, swaying willow branches, faint floral fragrance.
This was outside the Film Cara Club window. His 2045 ti limit had ended, and he had returned to 2025.
“I’m seriously done with this.”
Covering his eyes, Jiang Ran crouched down.
This whole night had been way too intense.
He felt like he’d been shoved into a washing machine drum, spun around and around, tossed this way and that. In a re two hours, his position had changed a full four tis!
The constantly shifting bizarre scenery had left him dizzy, and for a mont he didn’t dare accept that he had really returned to reality.
“Senior!”
Chi Xiaoguo braced both arms against the windowsill and looked outside.
“Senior? Are you okay?”
She had keenly sensed that sothing seed wrong with Jiang Ran.
Because—
during every previous old electronic cannon experint, although it had also ended in an instant, Senior Jiang Ran had never looked like this afterward.
In the past, even though every experint had likewise ended in failure, he had always acted calm and unconcerned.
But today—
why had he crouched down holding his head?
Could it be… heartbreak?
Had the repeated failures over such a long ti finally caused him to emotionally collapse?
At that mont, Chi Xiaoguo hated how short her legs were, that she couldn’t jump out the window like Senior and run over to comfort him.
“I’m fine, I’m fine.”
Outside the window, Jiang Ran stood up and waved at Chi Xiaoguo, letting out a light laugh.
“I’m really okay, don’t worry. Just a little dizzy.”
Chi Xiaoguo tilted her head as she looked at him.
“Alright.”
Since Senior said he was fine, she couldn’t really press the matter.
The only thing she could do was continue cooperating with his experints as best she could and support his longing for a ti machine.
“Then—Senior, tomorrow night, do you want to try staying outside instead?”
Jiang Ran thought for a few seconds.
“We’ll see tomorrow. It’s late, let’s head back to the dorms for tonight.”
“Okay!”
Chi Xiaoguo waved.
“Then, good night, Senior!”
She relaxed her arms, stepped back down onto the floor, then turned off the lights, locked the door, and left through the main entrance of the student activity building.
Jiang Ran let out a long breath through his nose.
He looked up at the full moon in the sky.
This trip into the future of 2045 had contained an overwhelming amount of information. He absolutely had to sort it out carefully.
“Better head back to the dorm first.”
He scratched his back, still genuinely rattled by the skinned anatomy-chart Rhine Cats, and quickly headed toward the graduate dormitory.
After returning to the dorm, Jiang Ran took a shower.
Then, in his pajamas, he ca over to the window.
He opened it, listening to the rustling leaves and the scattered croaks of frogs outside. Only then did he finally recover from the back-and-forth traversal through the future world and regain a sense of the reality of the present.
“This is way too bizarre!”
When soone reaches the absolute peak of speechlessness, they can’t help but laugh.
That was exactly Jiang Ran’s current state.
In the glass reflection, his smile looked helpless and bitter.
“I need to sort out my thoughts properly.”
He turned around, sat down in the chair, then picked up the English edition of Narrow Gate from the coffee table and idly turned it in his hands as he began recalling everything that had happened in 2045 tonight.
It was still the sa as usual.
He had gone through three loops of 39 minutes and 11 seconds, then stood blankly in front of the juice shop for another 2 minutes and 27 seconds before the worldline kicked him back to 2025.
Altogether, it added up to exactly two hours, perfectly seamless, without the slightest deviation.
Before the first rollback and restart, he had gone to the library to look up materials, which at least gave him a rough understanding of the origin and rules of the virtual world—
as well as Puppe’s once-grand ambition.
Before the second rollback and restart, he had talked at length with the juice girl about Puppe’s past, then gone to morial Square, where beneath the dark bronze statue he found the suicide note Puppe had left behind.
From that, he had deduced that Puppe’s depression and suicide in his later years were most likely connected to a malfunction in the virtual world—
naly, the unreasonable reset every 39 minutes and 11 seconds.
Before the third rollback and restart, that stretch had been the most surreal of all.
He had successfully gained Sang Biao’s trust, joined the theft squad, and prepared to steal Puppe’s treasure from the deepest level of the Museum of Human Civilization.
Only, this theft operation had gone both smoothly and not smoothly.
The smooth part was that they had indeed made it all the way down, completely unimpeded, to the deepest underground level: Basent Level 42.
The not smooth part was that the very instant the elevator doors opened on Basent Level 42, the theft squad instantly collapsed and fell apart.
Honestly, Jiang Ran himself had gone along with Sang Biao fully prepared to die. Even if the elevator doors had opened to reveal countless machine guns pointed straight at him, he wouldn’t have been surprised in the slightest. He would’ve stayed silent and faced death calmly.
And yet, fate had played an absurd joke on him.
Outside Basent Level 42—
it had presented him, like so magical dream, with an outdoor amusent park that completely defied logic.
And those living Rhine Cats—
not oversized mascots, not costus worn by staff, but real creatures of flesh and blood and bone, with breathing warmth and living bodies.
Even if this was a virtual digital world, wasn’t it still a little too insane to hide a scene that horrifying beneath the Museum of Human Civilization?
And besides.
What was the point of it?
“Not to ntion, those Rhine Cats said it was Hangzhou Paradise.”
The more Jiang Ran thought about that bizarre mismatch, the more absurd it felt.
Building a Hangzhou Paradise inside Donghai City’s borders—was that ant to embarrass Hangzhou or embarrass Donghai?
A provincial capital and a municipality directly under the central governnt—who wouldn’t care about saving face?
“Anyway, next ti I’ll be ntally prepared before going back down to Basent Level 42 of the museum. At least for now, I already know how to clear Sang Biao—just play the mother-emotion card with him.”
1
Jiang Ran lowered his head.
Absentmindedly flipping through that English edition of Narrow Gate.
Rhine Cat.
The eerie combination of Rhine Cats appearing in Hangzhou Paradise instantly made him think of one girl whose whole aesthetic matched both elents perfectly—
[Cheng ngxue].
Right.
She was a girl connected to both.
As a child, she had pestered Jiang Ran several tis, wanting them to go to Hangzhou Paradise together, but in the end they had never made it.
And at the sa ti, she was also an obsessive Rhine Cat fanatic. Ever since Rhine Cat first debuted at the end of 2022, Cheng ngxue had fallen straight into the Rhine Cat rabbit hole and never climbed back out.
“Hangzhou Paradise—Rhine Cat—Cheng ngxue—”
Jiang Ran murmured to himself.
“Resident 001—Basent Level 4—39 minutes 11 seconds—”
He propped up his head and looked at the fluorescent light overhead.
“What exactly is the connection between all these clues?”
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