Chapter 14: The World to Come (Part One)

Lu Xing sat down in the chair, and before long, breakfast was brought by his mother.

In the future world, or rather, within this virtual world, breakfast consisted of something akin to a salad—vegetables mixed with a sweet sauce, accompanied by a glass of milk.

Lu Xing could not discern the flavor of the salad; it tasted faint and bland. The milk, however, was markedly different from what he remembered in the real world. Simply put, it lacked any milky taste and was purely sweet.

The family of three ate breakfast in silence.

On the surface, the android parents appeared no different from ordinary humans—they spoke, smiled, and showed concern for their daughter, their tones warm and familiar.

Yet Lu Xing chose to trust Jiang Xuannü.

After finishing breakfast, Lu Xing set down his utensils. The android parents looked at him again, their eyes carrying a certain questioning expression.

He decided to say something: “I’m full and heading to school!”

His heart pounded wildly as he spoke. This world was riddled with taboos, and he never knew when he might unwittingly break one.

“Go then, be careful on the way,” his mother said with concern once more.

Lu Xing nodded, picked up his backpack, and headed out—though inside, there were no books at all. Just like his meal, he neither felt full nor hungry.

The virtual world seemed to be engaging in a pointless charade, maintaining a façade of human society while forbidding humans from truly behaving like humans.

Under his mother’s smiling gaze and his father’s stern watch, Lu Xing stepped outside into a dreamlike small town street.

Every corner of this place was immaculate—roads clean and spotless, flowers vibrant and beautiful, greenery lush, filled with the fragrance of blooming blossoms and the songs of birds.

People on the street were neatly dressed, walking at a calm, measured pace, their expressions peaceful and serene.

The only oddity was the absence of cars, electric bikes, bicycles, or any animals such as cattle, sheep, cats, or dogs.

When Lu Xing came here last time, he had mistakenly thought he had entered a fairy tale world. He wandered around near his home but was met with strange looks from passersby.

Fortunately, he wasn’t punished.

Now, knowing this was a virtual world, Lu Xing quickly found a way to distinguish virtual from reality:

Standing on the lawn outside his house, he bent down, plucked a flower, and crushed it hard in his palm. The petals broke into seven or eight fragments and fell from his hand.

“Warning: Do not damage public property!” an intelligent hairpin issued a caution.

Lu Xing, a computer science student, saw nothing but an error, not a warning.

About a minute later, the petals and stem disappeared together, and the hole in the ground was covered with soil.

Lu Xing poked the soil with his finger and then looked at his hand—no dirt particles clung to it, revealing the virtual world lacked particle effects.

“Daughter.”

Without him noticing, his android mother had stepped behind him, calling gently with a smile, “What are you doing?”

Lu Xing’s heart skipped a beat. How had they appeared without any sound?

Had the flower destruction triggered the alert?

“Have you not called the car yet? You’re going to be late.”

His stern father also emerged, walking past Lu Xing to the mailbox by the door and pressing a button on it.

Mother smiled, “Go wait for the school bus.”

“Thank you, B22. Thank you, B23,” Lu Xing said awkwardly, addressing his parents by their assigned numbers.

His father turned to him with a serious gaze, an invisible pressure making Lu Xing stiffen as if they were not androids but malevolent spirits in human form, watching and waiting for him to break the rules.

Mother smiled gently, “You don’t have to call us by our numbers. Human names are fine—just call us Father and Mother.”

Lu Xing remained silent.

The future world was vastly different from the 21st century. Jiang Xuannü couldn’t possibly explain everything; most of the rules he had to discover on his own.

He desperately needed to interact with more people, whether androids or hidden humans, to learn how they spoke and thus be able to respond to his android parents.

Fortunately, the vehicle arrived quickly.

A school bus materialized at the doorstep, already with seven or eight classmates aboard—around Jiang Xuannü’s age, all of average build, dressed plainly. Lu Xing’s hairpin was a rare accessory in the virtual world.

He even thought Jiang Xuannü should have made him a wristband instead—less conspicuous than a hairpin.

“Daughter, get on the bus to school,” his mother said softly again.

Lu Xing nodded and stepped onto the open bus.

Once aboard, the bus doors closed immediately. His mother waved goodbye from the garden at the doorstep, and his father stood nearby, watching.

The bus did not start moving.

It remained stationary for a full thirty seconds. His mother waved for the entire half minute. Then the bus disappeared, entering a dazzlingly strange tunnel, and in an instant, arrived in front of another classmate’s home.

Was this how consciousness transfer worked in the virtual world?

Luckily, it wasn’t data transmission, or the classmates might have been fragmented.

The students on the bus all wore expressionless faces. Among them, Lu Xing blended in with Jiang Xuannü’s petite figure; when silent, his demeanor matched theirs perfectly.

At 7:28, the school bus arrived at the school.

From the window, Lu Xing saw the school gate was quiet—no parents waiting to see off their children, no booths selling snacks.

The school had no name, only a numeric designation displayed on the gate.

Classmates lined up to disembark, then vanished as soon as they passed through the gate.

Watching this, Lu Xing hurriedly asked the intelligent hairpin, learning that he could use his class number to locate and transfer directly into the classroom.

It seemed the school was like a local network, allowing free movement.

At 7:29, Lu Xing sat in his seat and, like the others, opened his backpack to find books mysteriously refreshed inside—apparently the lessons for the day.

One minute later, morning study began, and a teacher came to patrol.

The students inserted their fingers into their foreheads, extracting a glowing memory chip, which they plugged into a computer port on their desks.

Lu Xing was astonished.

In theory, people in the virtual world were data and didn’t need to remove memory chips. But as mentioned, this world indulged in absurd behaviors, so Lu Xing complied.

“Fellow compatriot, the master has two chips in his head. This is confidential. Remember to take the first one,” the intelligent hairpin reminded him timely.

Lu Xing nodded slightly. Jiang Xuannü had mentioned in the guidelines that from birth, a memory chip secretly implanted by the human resistance was inside her head; her name was derived from information stored there.

In other words, the human resistance began cultivating members from infancy. This explained why Jiang Xuannü had only recently had her first contact with the organization.

In the future world, whether human or android, including resistance members, auxiliary chips were compulsory.

Not for any nefarious reason, but because auxiliary chips served as a second brain.

People here were born with extraordinary memory, able to connect to the network without devices, possessing computing-level processing power.

Morning study was essentially traversing the knowledge within the auxiliary chip, enabling the person to absorb as much as possible.

Lu Xing now was like a primary school child handed an advanced calculus book—his eyes could see the words, but he couldn’t absorb them. It wasn’t ignorance; it was the data streaming too fast for his brain to process.

Better to watch the classmates.

At that moment—

“B73!”