Doomsday Wonderland

Chapter 1494: New Game Launch Conference

Just a second before the car was pushed into the 'tube' character, with its head down and about to fall, Lin Sanjiu lunged forward, throwing herself into the car. Her weight shifted the car, made up of a group of characters, making it teeter, and it finally slid down the strokes of the 'tube' character.

In those few seconds of descent, Lin Sanjiu felt like Alice, falling into Wonderland.

She could only stare out of the car window, unable to tear her gaze away nor wanting to. Countless characters swayed and splashed like golden waves in the sunlight, flashing past the window. Through the intricate strokes, she saw the world.

For a moment, she felt like she was kneeling on the ground, looking at red bricks on the sidewalk. Between the bricks, she saw the earth, continents floating on oceans, white clouds slowly passing over a deep blue sky. Deer stepping through morning fog, waterfalls echoing in silent valleys.

From the eyes of humans, it was no longer a human-centric perspective.

By the time Lin Sanjiu snapped back to reality, the flow of characters outside had vanished. The text-car, carrying both her and Yu Yuan, was falling straight down, dropping from the tube tunnel into an endless white below.

It was the same pure white she had seen when she heard the call of the grand prize.

In this vast nothingness, even the sensation of the car's fall seemed to cease; the car appeared to be falling rapidly and floating gently at the same time.

Lin Sanjiu, trembling, whispered, "We've arrived. I'm here..."

She had tried her best, but it took too long. What she had done for the grand prize was inadequate.

Yu Yuan leaned over to look out at the vast white expanse. After a while, he straightened up, his face as impassive as a snow-covered ground. "We should be well below the ten underground game levels, near the core of the earth."

That meant they were near the core of the game world. But where was the game organizer?

Without an answer, Lin Sanjiu could only sit still in the car, letting it take them further down. After the 'tube' character disappeared, they lost their point of reference. They might just be waiting in stillness.

Yu Yuan opened the car door, sticking one leg out.

Lin Sanjiu acted quickly, pushing his shoulder down onto the seat's textual structure. "What are you doing?"

"I want to see what's going on out there," Yu Yuan replied. "I've calculated the risks. I'm much safer than you."

The Veda were confident – and they didn't know fear.

"Let's wait a little longer," Lin Sanjiu said. "If something happens to you, I won't know how to help."

Coincidentally, before she could finish, both felt the car shake slightly, as if it had gently landed on some surface.

"Did we really keep descending?" Even Lin Sanjiu was a little surprised. She quickly turned around on the seat made of words, looking out of the windows to take in the scene outside. She opened the car door like Yu Yuan and looked downward. "What did we land on?"

Suddenly, she felt her entire being freeze.

"What did you see?" Yu Yuan asked, also leaning out of the door. The words that were about to come out of the Veda's mouth were immediately silenced. Of course, it wasn't shock that silenced him, but the unexpected onslaught of new information.

To be imprecise, the car had landed atop an office.

A character resembling the Chinese word '室' (room) stood faintly on a snow-white expanse. It wasn't just a standalone character but was formed from countless smaller characters, a 3D cluster of characters. At a glance, Lin Sanjiu recognized it—one of the offices on the 60th floor of an office building, and a small one at that. Everything was familiar, from the wooden door, gray-blue carpet, fluorescent lights, to the cubicles.

Of course, these elements didn't physically exist in their usual forms. When Lin Sanjiu looked at the cluster of characters, these images formed naturally in her mind. The position the car had landed in was such that its rear was stuck at the door of the office, but the characters of the car were above the '室'. Both spatial perceptions coexisted in her senses.

"Look up," Yu Yuan suggested emotionlessly.

Lin Sanjiu slowly lifted her head.

Outside the small office was a winding character cluster corridor ('廊'). From a high vantage point, the clusters forming offices looked like small mounds on snowy ground, stretching along corridors, connecting with other '廊' character clusters. As far as the eye could see, countless characters softly covered the snow-white expanse, standing silently, with only faint glimmers of light moving across them.

One blink, and it was a cluster of characters; another blink, and she saw the 60th floor of the building.

"Let's go, let's take a closer look," Yu Yuan said, already jumping out of the car.

Climbing down using the character '力' and '木', Lin Sanjiu gently landed on the snowy expanse. The characters, like giant sculptures, stood silently on either side of her. As she walked through them, the view of the 60th-floor office seemed to flow past her, moving like a painting behind the intricate strokes of the characters.

"I don't understand... If ordinary matter, like a table for instance, is composed of textual structures... then why are these characters here?" Lin Sanjiu felt like she was sleepwalking, her gaze darting everywhere. "What do these characters signify? Where is the grand prize?"

Yu Yuan, however, didn't share her sense of wonder.

"We might both have made a mistake in trying to understand this textual world through our understanding of the Veda," he said as he confidently walked through the clusters. "In the transition zone above, it did seem that way – for instance, the cars in the parking lot were composed of characters... but after all, that was just a transition zone."

His words drifted past her ears like mist. Lin Sanjiu followed him for a while before she said, "You have an idea?"

"Not yet," Yu Yuan said as the two of them walked. Before they knew it, they had arrived at a place equivalent to the elevator hall on the sixtieth floor. A group of words representing floor-to-ceiling windows was now shattered like actual glass, scattered and skewed on the pristine white ground, resembling long hair of a snow maiden, intertwined with shimmering points of light.

Lin Sanjiu gazed at it for a long time before regaining her composure. "My aircraft is not here."

Yu Yuan nodded and looked around. The elevator hall was precisely at the edge of this massive cluster of words. Beyond it was just a vast expanse of white land. He stared into the distance and suddenly said, "There are words over there."

Startled, Lin Sanjiu quickly followed his pace, heading towards the vast, desolate land in the distance.

Yu Yuan was right. There was indeed another cluster of words in the distance.

If the word cluster she just walked out of was merely constructing the physical environment of the sixtieth floor, the one she was now entering represented the game Mall Warfare itself.

"Catch the customer to profit," "There are five types of employees," "Rent for an hour is 30 yuan." These game rules that she once heard on the sixtieth floor now stood silently beside her in the form of towering word clusters. It felt as if she had stepped into a massive machinery of components and gears. These word clusters interlocked, seamlessly interconnected, logically flowing, and clearly meaningful. With just a glance, the respective parts of the game's rules naturally surfaced in her mind.

And it wasn't just the rules that posthuman players had experienced.

For instance, when Lin Sanjiu was upstairs, it was as if she was watching TV. Everything that appeared, all rules and things, were prearranged to appear before her. But as she walked among these gear-like words, she truly saw the entire backdrop of the TV – the different camera angles, the lighting, the props, and the director. She saw the entire operational rules and internal logic of the game.

"Where am I, really?" she murmured.

"In the Mall Warfare game," Yu Yuan answered, "or perhaps, inside the game's script."

Lin Sanjiu nodded blankly.

"No, you haven't grasped my point," Yu Yuan said, glancing at her. "We're literally inside the game script — and I don't mean that as a play on words."

"But I get it, this place is like a game script."

Even the Veda was stumped on how best to explain his point. He lowered his head, tapped his foot lightly, and said, "What I mean is, this is equivalent to paper."

Huh?

"These are words," Yu Yuan explained, pointing to the massive silent word cluster beside them. "Someone wrote these words on paper, forming the game you've experienced. Now, we're literally on the script that person wrote."

Lin Sanjiu stood still, and after two seconds, her fingertips began to tremble.

"So, when someone starts writing on paper, scripting the game," she whispered, "it's like a new game launch?"