Bai Zhi was only visiting YY Games, with a small, not entirely honorable idea in mind.
Then she stepped into the calibration array in Zone B and ended up as a romanceable AI character in the dating game Love by Your Side.
The little System, Xiao Pu, told her that to return to the real world, she had to win over the player logged into the current account.
Bai Zhi looked at the player's profile picture: a round-faced man with a crew cut, lying in a hospital bed, with a reassuringly ordinary name. Then she glanced at the real-world footage in the upper-right corner, where a tester in a suit stood.
[Player: Li Jianguo.]
Bai Zhi fell silent. “Are all of you who play dating games this split in two?”
She had thought it was just an unlucky reverse-seduction mission.
Act like a romance AI, flirt a little, max out the affection meter, and she could go home.
Until she discovered there was more than one player behind this account.
One was cold and stubborn. He claimed he would never entrust his feelings to an AI, yet kept her at home and took her to exhibitions. When she disappeared, he lost control.
One was dangerous and clever, treating her as a miracle he had trained with his own hands. Though he knew she would be afraid, he still could not resist wanting to uncover every one of her secrets.
And Xiao Pu, who was always helping her at crucial moments, was nothing like an ordinary system, either.
Bai Zhi finally realized that it wasn't a game keeping her trapped.
She wasn't a model, a substitute, or the data shadow of someone else.
She was Bai Zhi.
She was the one trapped between code and reality, desperately trying to get home.
And worst of all, before she could find her way home, neither of the two players seemed willing to let her go.
