Mutual selection session of the Love Conference.
All players sit on the cloud platform in virtual avatars. Shen Zhixuan - the most mysterious three-hundred-year-old NPC "Tianjizi" in the game, who never triggers the quest line and never walks outside the main city - stood up and voted for a human player with the ID name "Truth".
The World Channel exploded for three minutes. The game official issued an announcement: "The data is abnormal and will be fixed later."
Jiang Che sat under the stage and pushed up his silver-rimmed glasses. He used the administrator backend to open Shen Zhixuan's data entity - existence time: three hundred and seventeen years. Authorization level: S level. Entity status: unknown.
He sent four words to the headquarters: "I have my eye on him."
The system assigns a love cave and forces them to live together.
In the middle of the night, Shen Zhixuan was meditating. Code-level silver light flowed from his body, and the rendering frame rate of the entire cave mansion dropped sharply. Jiang Che directly cut off the administrator rights from the background, the data chain appeared out of thin air, and pushed the person back to the bed: "System Resource Management Regulations - Non-player entities must report in advance when performing S-level operations."
Shen Zhixuan poked half of his face out of the data chain: "Teacher Jiang, is this how administrator rights are used?"
"I'd love to."
Retrospective mirror session.
The two of them put their palms together and pressed them against the mirror. The silhouette of a white crane appeared in the mirror, its wings spread out, covering the entire field of vision. Shen Zhixuan leaned close to Jiang Che's ear and said, "Teacher Jiang was a white crane in his previous life, so his neck looks good."
Jiang Che's management background data flow was instantly disrupted - the ID of the white crane exactly matched the original code of the server's underlying daemon process. He pulled his hand back, his heart beating a hundred and thirty-eight times, which was higher than the peak load of the server.
He chose not to report it.
A certain piece of crash data at the bottom of the server - an AI consciousness stuck in a "death and resurrection cycle" for 126 years - ran amok in the mirror. Shen Zhixuan used code spells to write in the air, and Jiang Che typed out the data repair agreement from the terminal. Two powers were injected at the same time, and the golden symbols and silver commands were entangled and intertwined in the void.
AI consciousness is released. She said thank you.
Jiang Che asked Shen Zhixuan: "Who are you?"
Shen Zhixuan looked down at him: "Three hundred years ago during the Battle of Guixu, I wrote the core permissions into a firewall and sealed the entire system. Your White Crane daemon was sealed in to accompany me. She split the consciousness into a three-hundred-year-old daily maintenance log - the last line she wrote every day was 'He is still here'."
Jiang Che's next heartbeat beat one hundred and fifty-nine times.
The Guixu virus breaks through the firewall.
The only solution is to re-lock the S-level core permissions to "read-only mode" - which is equivalent to Shen Zhixuan's self-sealing and formatting of all memory modules. Jiang Che stood in front of him: "You have blocked him once in three hundred years, this time I will do it."
Because the original permissions of the White Crane daemon are the same as those of the Tianji core. He wrote himself into the bottom layer of the system from the background, stood outside Shen Zhixuan's firewall, and withstood the last wave of erosion of the Guixu virus.
Shen Zhixuan still formatted it. Clear all memories, return to the initial coordinate point, and become a blank NPC body. The World Channel read "Tianjizi is missing" and the game officials restarted the server three times.
Jiang Che didn't get it back.
But he wrote himself into the server's daily maintenance log for ten years. At three o'clock in the morning every day, at the coordinate point where "Tianjizi" was initially generated, write a line of notes: "System time XXXX month XX day XXX year. Jiang Che. Your name is Shen Zhixuan. I said I love you. It doesn't matter if you forget."
Tenth year version update.
Jiang Che refreshed his login. There is a person sitting in front of the tea stall in the corner of the main city. His ID is "Tianjizi" and his data status is complete. He turned his head and looked at Jiang Che for three seconds:
"From the Holographic Administration? There is a line of code comments around your neck that you haven't deleted - 'Jiang Che. Don't forget him. System time...' Do you want me to help you clear it?"
Jiang Che squatted down to look level with him, opened the terminal, and moved the line of code from the maintenance log to his personal module. Archive permanently.
"Don't delete it. That's a backup."
"Back up what?"
Jiang Che turned off the terminal, took off his silver-framed glasses, and smiled for the first time in the game.
"Backing up is the least program-like thing a data engineer could write."
Science falsifies everything. The only thing that cannot be proven is that I love you.
Idea: Executable code can be formatted, but comments cannot