The world was forcibly reformatted, and the urban jungle Qing Mo knew became a truly lethal instance.
As a practitioner of traditional medicinal botany, his survival no longer depends on academic papers, but on his profound understanding of the medicinal properties of all things. In a post-apocalyptic maze choked with poison gas, while every other player flees the Purifier Chumi and its ravenous hunger, only Qing Mo knows that the monster is a living being that needs the one and only antidote. It is also the source of the mutations within all the New Humans, mutations the players have never noticed in themselves.
He calmly mixes potions, navigating the eerie world and its rules, all to save up tokens to exchange with the System and search for his missing family. Then, in a dreamlike yet cruel circus instance, he sees the two mothers he has missed day and night. They smile as they help him destroy the instance's core, but vanish like streams of data as the victory announcement sounds.
At that moment, Qing Mo understands that the true cruelty of this game lies not in death, but in gently crushing all your hopes and memories.
“System,” he says, wiping the bloodstains from a potion bottle as he looks toward the next instance about to open. “You want to turn me into a player, but I insist on using your rules... to become a virus.”
