Chapter 66: Explosive Last Train

Shortly after "Bai Liu" gets off the bus, Bai Liu's body materialises from a translucent data virtualisation and he squeezes his palm thoughtfully, he can now touch the passengers around him.

I don't know if the virtualisation of his existence is due to the fact that two Bai Liu's are in the same time and space, or if the fact that Bai Liu is not getting off the train and is about to die has caused his body to virtualise, but none of this matters.

The next stop was Antique City, and he was still on the train, which was about to explode in three minutes at the most.

"Bai Liu--!" Mu Sicheng's voice came from the crowded other carriage as he struggled to squeeze in next to Bai Liu, his face hard as hell, "How can we find the broken lens when there are so many people here? We're almost at the station! This last train is going to explode before we get there!"

"And I just tried, I wanted to get off at that platform." Mu Sicheng's tone was strained, "but I couldn't get off, it was like I was stopped by something on this train."

Instead of closing the conversation with Mu Sicheng, Bai Liu said to him, "This is the reality, because the real [you] is not on this train, so you can't do the action of [getting off], and [the real me] has just gotten off, so there is no way for me to get off again on a train that [I] have already gotten off. I can't get off again on a train that [I] have already gotten off of, the causality is not valid, it would cause the game logic to go haywire."

"What reality?!" Mu Sicheng said alertly, " Bai Liu this is not reality, this is in a game! You're not down, are you? Are you hallucinating? What's this nonsense about getting out of the car?"

"That's not what I meant." Bai Liu nudged Mu Sicheng's shoulder with his finger, then pointed to the underground route map on the carriage, "Look at this route map, the last stop on Antique City is LuJiaZui, not the reservoir, and pay attention, this underground route is not circular either, it's a linear underground route, this is the underground map in our real world. "

Mu Sicheng followed Bai Liu's hand and noticed this too, he frowned, "But we can't go back to reality, we are indeed in a game."

Bai Liu continued, seemingly enlightened, "When I say this is [reality], I don't mean we're back in real reality, this is [reality] as opposed to the train full of charred corpses we were in before, that place isn't really a game world, that place is just a constant loop mirror world. "

"And this train we're standing on now." Bai Liu nudged his toes under his feet, his eyes leveling, "is the real game relative to reality, or you could say the parallel time and space resulting from the possibilities derived from a reality that has already happened, the prototype for this game is [the Mirror City bombing], and generally the reference prototype for our games is that we have done well enough by highly reverting the events in the game, and this game, it has the ability to do much more than recreate events."

"It recreates the event scenario." Bai Liu looks to Mu Sicheng, "It takes us back to that point in time when the explosion occurred, and then at that point it's up to us, the players, to manipulate it, and it plays out the possible scenarios based on our manipulation, which leads to different consequences."

For example, Bai Liu's first reaction to the train was to find himself and Lu Yizhan. When Bai Liu entered the Mirror World, the 380 shattered lenses automatically entered his system backpack.

Bai Liu is virtual, but the mirror is real, and Bai Liu's proximity allows the residual heat on this mirror to warm the tired " Bai Liu ", thus causing him to get really sleepy and keeping him from following Lu Yizhan off the train, as Bai Liu remembers.

But Mu Sicheng wasn't concerned with any of that, he just needed to know that Bai Liu knew that this place was still in the game, and with three minutes to go before the train exploded Mu Sicheng was so desperate that he was focused on getting through the level and grabbing the key information from Bai Liu's words.

"A world of mirrors in a constant loop?" Mu Sicheng asks eagerly but rhetorically, "What does constantly cycling mean?"

"Don't you think there's a big logical flaw in our previous mission to collect broken lenses?" Bai Liu said lazily, "We were to collect broken lenses on a last train that was about to explode, right?"

Mu Sicheng nodded, "Yes."

"But -" Bai Liu lifted his eyes and looked at Mu Sicheng with a smirk, "- if this last train hadn't exploded, where did the broken lenses from the explosion come from? hadn't exploded, where did all those broken lenses from the explosion come from?"

"Unless it has exploded, we have the shattered lenses to collect after the explosion."

Mu Sicheng stalled completely for a second or two before coming back to his senses, muttering in a trance, "It's a constantly cycling last train that explodes over and over again ...... There's no use us collecting good shattered lenses in there, and when we're done collecting we'll probably trap ourselves completely in That constant cycle of exploding last trains, so those passengers are thinking of ways to stop us, grass - they're saving us silly players."

"Yes, I noticed before I got to the underground station that the lifts in the station were running in the opposite direction, and then the order of the passengers was also reversed, and even our mission was somehow "reversed"." Bai Liu explains clearly, "Our task was to collect the broken lenses, but in fact the broken lenses had already been collected by [the passengers], and what we did instead was to scatter and grab the collected broken lenses again, and it looked like we were doing the villain's job, and the passengers were right, which I guess is one of the properties of mirrors -- [reversing the nature of the object itself]."

"So I think the main quest in the mirror and the real main quest in this reality we're in should be reversed." Bai Liu's eyes were calm and lazy, his hand picking at the coin on his chest with a single movement, "In this reality we are in, the train hasn't exploded yet, that means the mirror is not broken at all, and the task in the mirror is to collect and piece together the mirror, so the reverse would be-- "

Mu Sicheng realised something with a jolt: "We have to break the mirror!"

Bai Liu hooked his lips in a smile and snapped his fingers, "Bingo."

[System Alert: Congratulations to Player Bai Liu and Player Mu Sicheng for triggering the ultimate main quest - Break the Sinister Ghost Mirror and end the ever-looping Mirror Burst Last Train]

[System Alert: Bai Liu has 380 broken lenses on his body. Please find the real mirror quickly and break it to clear the level]

Mu Sicheng let out a long, fearful breath as he looked at Bai Liu, unable to resist a tsk, "You guys, even with all this brain fog?"

Three minute countdown to explosion, one point of life, and this guy is actually in the mood to think about real world real world missions, isn't he burnt?!

"But where's the mirror?" Bai Liu is not anxious, but Mu Sicheng is, "There are six carriages on this train, and with two minutes to go, there's no way we can find every single one."

"No need to look." Bai Liu leaned unhurriedly against the door as he pointed, "I've been on this train before, and before I got off I remembered that the pair of thieves were in this section, so I came straight over, and sure enough they were in this section, noooo, standing in the centre."

Mu Sicheng's eyes moved over to see two small and large thieving passengers standing in the crowd, pushing a huge suitcase in their hands, just big enough to put down a mirror, which should be in there, and a few people in suits standing next to them, probably museum staff, Mu Sicheng immediately realized that they were the thieving brothers. Bai Liu, a bit bemused: "Why didn't you go over there when you saw it already? Why are you standing here?"

Bai Liu spread his hands and laughed, "It's not waiting for you to steal the mirror, big thief, how do I have the skills to snatch something from another pair of thieves, which of course you have to do."

Mu Sicheng was stunned for a moment, then slowly curled his lips and snorted, "You're saving yourself a lot of trouble."

With those words, Mu Sicheng's eyes changed to a cold, frozen look as he adjusted the position of his headphones, donned his hood hat down over his eyes, and threw his right hand diagonally backwards into a sharp, drawn together monkey's paw as his form ghostly swung past the surrounding passengers.

Bai Liu didn't even see what Mu Sicheng had done before he heard the thieving brothers scream, "The mirror is gone - ! There are thieves!!!"

The crowd in the carriage stirred, Bai Liu turned his head and felt himself being lifted from the back of his collar. "

Mu Sicheng flashed his knife expressionlessly and said the word "get out", and immediately the crowd shrieked and panicked as they moved out of the way and ran to the other carriages.

"Cool, Mu Sicheng, you're really not bad at doing bad things." Looking at the instantly empty carriage, Bai Liu praised sincerely.

Mu Sicheng raises an eyebrow: "Each to his own."

Bai Liu crouched down and opened the case. Inside was the mirror, and it was intact. The moment Bai Liu put it up, he heard the system's piercing warning.

[System Warning: The moment the mirror is broken, God-level npc will break the mirror and all players in front of the mirror will be attacked indiscriminately, please be careful of the broken mirror!

The smile on Mu Sicheng's lips soon dissipated, and the only sound in the empty carriage was the sound of the wind being poured into the train, and the small whimpers of passengers who were scared and crying by Mu Sicheng coming from the other carriage.

The sweet, feminine radio voice duly rang out.

"Coming to the end of the line -"