Chapter 100

Wen Yu sighed and said, “Ains, how’s it going on your side?”

Ains was leaning against a tree root at that moment, with specks of fireflies drifting before her eyes. Those light spots flew upward all the way, while she stayed in place: “I can’t fly up.” The tree was like a balloon that had carried her flying sideways here; it only went up a few meters before stopping. Not only that, she felt the air growing heavier and heavier.

Until she discovered in horror that the tree root she sat on had developed cracks, which began to spread. She immediately made the tree fly lower. When she flew almost level with the lotus leaves, the cracks stopped growing.

The game rules had first stopped them from going forward; now they stopped them from going up.

“Are you sure it’s upward?” Horne was starting to doubt it now, but even as he voiced the doubt, he felt he couldn’t answer it himself. Who could be sure which way they were supposed to go in here? They could only keep trying, but every attempt met with obstacles.

The group gathered again at the very bottom, falling silent.

Hels sat on a cloud, propping his head as he quietly watched Horne. He didn’t join their conversation until Horne turned his gaze and their eyes met.

Horne approached and touched his forehead—it was burning hot. He already had a high fever.

Anxiety, along with the frustration of being unable to leave, all the emotions surged up, turning into tightly furrowed brows.

Hels reached out, wanting to smooth the wrinkles between his brows. His hand stopped halfway and dropped back down.

But Horne’s brows furrowed even deeper. He half-squatted and touched Hels’s face with the back of his hand. Cold and heat fused in an instant, the temperature transferring over continuously. Horne took a deep breath, grasped Hels’s hand, and lifted it to his own face.

For those few seconds when only the wind spoke, Horne held his hand and lightly tapped out a few words.

—Denial.

—Me.

—Agree.

Horne just felt that even though there was no one else in sight, this place actually had five people. With so many around, he didn’t know how to speak up.

Three seconds after Hels received the message, he stared blankly at Horne and suddenly burst out laughing.

The other three: “?”

Horne stood up expressionlessly, his voice ice-cold: “Quick battle, quick decision.”

Though Hels believed he wasn’t sick to that extent yet, Horne insisted on carrying him up so he could rest. With the weight pressing on his back, Horne gritted his teeth and reached again for the steps made of floating clouds.

It was the expected pattern: the lower steps were as hard as stone, growing softer the higher up they went, until the last ones tore at a touch. But this time it was slightly different—Horne discovered he couldn’t even reach the previous height. It wasn’t because of the person on his back; the clouds’ softening pattern seemed to have shifted downward.

Horne asked the others, and they said they weren’t experiencing it. They still couldn’t go higher from where they’d been before.

“So annoying.” Ains looked at the tree root that had started cracking again and quickly made the tree slide down a bit. “I might be too heavy.”

“Too heavy?” Horne murmured the three words, and suddenly his breath hitched.

He seemed to have figured out the mechanism for climbing up. At the same moment, Wen Yu reacted too. She took out the pendants she had just collected from her waist and murmured, “So that’s it.”

Unsure if the number of pendants mattered, Horne first tried discarding just one.

He picked one almost at random: “status.”

With a “plop,” the pendant dropped into the clouds, drawing in a few wisps of white before being instantly swallowed by the endless sea of clouds below.

In that instant, Horne closed his eyes as a fierce vision slammed into his heart.

He saw everyone refusing to believe him, countless fingers pointing at him. Finally, the military tribunal announced his suspension—he was no longer that Military District colonel.

The scenes shifted, but only for a few short seconds. Horne let out a breath of relief. He didn’t care about these things; it was just that each scene change left him a bit dizzy.

When he opened his eyes again, their surroundings had changed dramatically—they were gone from where they had come up.

The five hundred meters they had walked pixelated and dissolved block by block. The few meters they had climbed were also melting away, turning into pure blackness. They now dangled like dust motes in midair; if they fell, it would be into a bottomless abyss.

This also meant that from the moment they discarded the first pendant, there was no turning back on this path.

“Ever stranger rules,” Wen Yu murmured.

Horne reached out for the next step.

He didn’t care anymore. “Reputation,” “wealth”—one pendant after another dropped downward, while the cloud he grasped grew firm bit by bit again. With every step, the darkness swallowed another.

“Slower.” Hels’s voice was soft, right by his ear, his exhaled breath carrying a scorching heat.

“Shut up.” Horne shot back without hesitation. He couldn’t slow down; he couldn’t stay here any longer.

After discarding three pendants, Horne advanced a good distance upward quickly, but as the distance grew, the clouds softened once more.

He looked down—blackness. Above was still clouds and wind, unchanged.

He had to keep discarding.

Dignity, freedom, peace, kindness, parents, lover, friends.

Horne’s hand hovered in midair. When he reached for “dignity,” his arm trembled slightly, and Hels noticed.

“It’s just an illusion,” Hels reminded him.

“I know.”

“Dignity” fell. He stood in Loch City’s military prison, wrists bound in handcuffs. They stripped him of all his clothes, leaving him completely naked, then shoved him onto the main street. The entire city watched him, lining both sides of the road in silence as he kept his head down, walking from the prison all the way to the city gate. His feet trod the cold, hard concrete, stones and glass piercing his soles. Everyone stared at him, scrutinizing his exposed body.

Someone spat at him. Someone rushed out with scissors, originally aiming to stab into his body, but soldiers stopped them. The scissors grazed his shoulder, snipping off flesh and hair together.

“Why did you press that button?”

“If it wasn’t you, then who? Did the government wrong you? Is someone out to get you?”

“You deserve to die.”

Horne closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and climbed higher with a surge of his limbs.

“Kindness” fell. Expressionless, Horne swung his hand like a knife, killing the person begging him for help at the city gate. He mocked the beggars by the roadside, berated the soldiers who made mistakes, and trampled the paintings at a street stall.

His breathing grew rapid, but he climbed higher.

Friends, parents, lover, freedom, peace.

Horne stopped in place, his throat working.

“Shh, it’s okay, it’s okay.” Hels’s voice was soft. He knew what Horne was seeing; he could feel the trembling in the hand supporting him.

He took out “parents” but didn’t throw it, just clutched it.

He took deep breaths, over and over. He knew it was an illusion, but knowing was all he could do.

“How about you all? What’s it like for you?” Horne asked. After the words left him, only endless wind answered, along with swirling clouds and his tiny figure.

He couldn’t hear You Wenjie or Wen Yu’s replies. After a long while, Ains’s voice came from very high up: “Brother, I can almost see the top.”

She had discarded them quickly, out of everyone’s sight. She kept her eyes wide open the whole time, throwing the pendants downward like a madwoman—one after another. After each, she covered her face and cried silently, then continued until the last one.

Horne looked up. The sun was far away; that layer of golden light hadn’t changed, shining grandly above the clouds and piercing his pupils, gilding his ice-blue eyes with brightness.

“Parents” slipped away. In that moment, Yaro collapsed in the kitchen, an alien’s blade protruding from her chest. Her blood curved and twisted, mixed with the scent of laundry powder on her clothes, soaking from the kitchen all the way into the wooden floorboards’ cracks, winding to the front door. His father was nailed to the door with several small knives—wrists pinned to each side of the frame, forehead fixed to the crossbar, as if an invisible crucifix stood behind him.

General Al still had his eyes open, half his hair white and drooping, deep wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. He looked at Horne without a word, but his gaze was full of disappointment.

Horne rushed back to the kitchen and held his mother’s cold body. She just gazed quietly at him, then let out a deep sigh and closed her eyes.

“How could a general’s family produce something like you.”

When Horne snapped awake, a sound escaped his mouth uncontrollably. The next second, he bit his teeth and swallowed it down.

The wind still howled, growing fiercer the higher they went, filling his nostrils and disrupting his breathing.

So tired. He had never been this tired.

“Horne.” Hels called softly. “Put me down.”

Once Horne calmed his thoughts and forced composure, he said, “No need.” He could keep going. It was just illusions; he could still advance.

The next second, Hels did something unexpected. He took out all the pendants on him and scattered them downward without hesitation. He closed his eyes, frowning faintly for just an instant before opening them again. Then he grabbed Horne’s arm, leaped lightly down, and landed steadily on the cloud wisps beside Horne. The landing shook slightly at first but quickly stabilized.

Horne was somewhat surprised.

“You…”

Hels gave him a weak smile, reached out, and opened his palm. The last “lover” pendant was still in his hand.

“Based on what just happened, to reach the top, we probably have to discard all the pendants.” Hels withdrew his hand and looked up too. The wind spun endlessly, beautiful yet dangerous. “The process of discarding them might be painful, but it’s just a matter of time. No one would really stop here because of these illusory scenes, so…”

He paused, easing a wave of dizziness: “This is just a completely irrelevant rule. Since Ais lured us here, he shouldn’t have imagined he could trap us with something like this—unless he overestimated how much humans value their core desires, thinking everyone is constrained by moral dilemmas.”

At that point, Hels felt something off. He smiled faintly, the smile quite feeble: “We few won’t be fooled, but as for other humans, I don’t know. Humans do struggle to face their desires head-on. If they keep the pendants, they can stay immersed in those scenes forever, making escape even harder.”

In other words, if leaving here was just a matter of time for them, then there might be even greater difficulties above. Ais must have been completely confident.

Going up wasn’t the end, and discarding the pendants wasn’t either.

“So, feeling clear-headed now?” Hels asked softly.

It was like a basin of cold water poured over him from head to toe. Horne straightened up and looked at the last four in his hand.

Friends, lover, freedom, peace.