Chapter 200: Disappointed
The next day.

As agreed, Qiao Susu came to the coffee shop to meet Ye Xi.

She arrived half an hour early, found the red velvet sofa, put a recorder in the tissue box, and walked to the bookstore across the street, waiting for the agreed time.

The clock points to two o'clock.

Qiao Susu entered the cafe on time and saw someone already sitting on the red sofa.

She was a girl who looked to be in her early twenties, very thin, with short hair, pretty features, simple dress, and wearing black-framed glasses.

She walked over and sat opposite.

When Ye Xi saw Qiao Susu, there was indescribable excitement in his eyes.

"You're here. I thought you weren't coming."

Qiao Suisui asked as if to confirm: "Ye Xi?"

"It's me." Ye Xi pinched her fingers nervously, and it was obvious that she was not very good at dealing with people.

"How did you find me?" Qiao Susu asked straight to the point.

Ye Xi didn't expect her to be so direct. She adjusted her glasses with her hand and said, "This is not difficult for me." Then she explained a long list of operating procedures mixed with professional terms. Qiao Susu didn't quite understand and asked some questions. The two chatted for a while, and Qiao Susu learned some information.

Ye Xi is a hacker who usually stays at home and loves to hang out in the second dimension. The biggest amount of exercise she does in a day is going downstairs to take out the trash. She has been self-studying since middle school, and because of her extraordinary talent in the field of computers, she has now been admitted as an exception by a foreign game company.

"What do you mean when you say you are player number 1?" asked Qiao Susu.

Ye Xi pondered for a while before saying, "I wrote this game."

She held the coffee cup in both hands, lowered her head, and unconsciously exerted a little force on her fingers. "I just feel too lonely and want someone to love me." Her voice was very low, and she looked up at Qiao Suisui, as if to confirm whether she was laughing at her.

“.In the beginning, INF Company approached me and asked me to be the main creator of the game and to integrate their company’s high-tech technology so that players can be immersed in the game.

I think this is a great idea. At first, I just regarded the world I created as a game. I hoped someone would listen to me and play with me. But as I spent more and more time in that world, I found myself unable to distinguish between reality and the game. I even hoped that the world was reality.
So I kept repairing every plant and tree in the game, making it extremely realistic, maximizing the degree of freedom, and giving each character the most real life. They are not cold keyword settings, I have made special codes for the background stories of each character, each of them has a complete growth trajectory, their personalities and thoughts have completely broken away from my settings, they have really experienced, lived, and felt.

Gradually, I found that they were giving birth to themselves.”

Qiao Susu felt that all this was a bit ridiculous, but as one of the players, she knew clearly that Ye Xi did not lie to her.

"So you terminated the game and asked me to log out?"

"No." Ye Xi shook his head, looked at her seriously and said, "The original setting of the game is that the player and the protagonist Anubis are bound together for life and death. If Anubis dies, the game will determine that the player has failed and will automatically log out."

Qiao Susu's fingertips trembled, and she listened to her own panicked heartbeat.

"You mean Anubis is dead?" Even though she knew it was a game and even though she had returned to the real world, she still felt heartbroken.

The suffocating feeling of being submerged in water swept over Qiao Susu. She looked at Ye Xi with red eyes.

"So I can never go back into the game?"

Ye Xi felt the same way as her, and now he looked a little apologetic. "My original intention in making this game was not to make you sad. I just wanted everyone to experience the feeling of being loved. At that time, the internal beta test invitations were randomly sent to thousands of people, and you were the first one to enter the game."

She hung her head in frustration and muttered, "I had a falling out with INF, and they took away my privileges. I tried many ways, but couldn't get back into the game."

"Because of what?"

"Because." Ye Xi took a sip of coffee and felt that the bitterness in her mouth was not as bitter as the bitterness in her heart. She took out her mobile phone from her bag, pressed a button, and the screen lit up.

Qiao Suisui stared at her screen saver in shock and blurted out, "Anubis?"

After saying that, she felt that the person on the screensaver was not quite like Anubis. The boy might look similar to Anubis, but his expression, smile, and facial features were all different from Anubis.

Ye Xi said: "This is my first love, or to be more precise, my secret crush. Anubis is a character based on him, and he is also my favorite character. When I first designed the storyline, I didn't know that I would have such strong feelings for a character. I couldn't tell whether it was empathy or something else, but I knew I wanted to be with him forever, even in the game world, even if I lived in fantasy for the rest of my life."

Qiao Susu had mixed feelings and listened to her quietly.

"But I don't know why Anubis ended up dead. I clearly gave him the best arrangement, but no matter I changed the difficulty of the game, rewrote that section of the code, or restarted the game more than ten times, I couldn't change his ending. Anubis always died in ways I couldn't imagine. So I planned to overturn the entire game and rewrite it, but INF disagreed. They thought it was already a mature enough game and no one could guarantee that it could be surpassed, so we fell out."

"Wait, you said you reopened it more than ten times?" Qiao Susu quickly grasped the point.

"Yeah, I logged out the first time Anubis died, saved the game, and then re-entered the game. I have more than ten save files on my account."

"So when you re-enter the game, do they still remember you?"

Ye Xi shook his head, "I don't remember. For the characters in the game, each save file is an independent world. For the players, even though you have already played the story once, everything has to start over. No matter how much progress and points you made in the previous world, re-entering the game is equivalent to re-entering a new world, and the worlds are not connected to each other."

Qiao Suisui continued: "So every player has his own world."

"Yes."

"Is the plot the same? Will they fall in love with every player as well?"

Ye Xi shrugged. "That's the setting, but INF has received a lot of complaints from players recently, saying that the characters are not engaging enough. Especially the character of Zongfang, players generally said that when they were talking to Zongfang, he would be distracted. Some players even said that he would be so outrageous that he would look at them tenderly one second and strangle them to death the next. In short, the experience was not good."

It was difficult for Qiao Susu to describe her mood at the moment. She just felt like she had drunk a glass of vinegar with soy sauce, mustard, lemon and toothpaste, with a mixture of various feelings.

In that world, the love she received was so real that she didn't want to return to reality at all. And if all this was set, then what was her feeling for them?

(End of this chapter)