This Game Is Too Real
Chapter 95: Diary, Clues, and Origins

Chapter 95: Chapter 95: Diary, Clues, and Origins

"I’m done."

Rubbing his eyes, which were too tired to stay open, Chu Guang put down the journal and the notes in which he’d excerpted key pieces of information, and he tossed aside the pen he was holding.

Although he had not found the answers he was looking for, the stories inside still provided him with quite a few interesting clues.

At first, he thought the journal was about a group of survivors who lost their humanity and eventually transformed into Looters.

In the end, it turned out to be just a plain modern version of The Farmer and the Snake.

There are three main characters mentioned in the journal.

The owner of the journal was named Li Xiu, an ordinary sports journalist—let’s call him Little Li.

Another was a woman named Sun Lai—let’s call her Little Sun.

And the third person was Little Sun’s husband, who served as a security guard in the shelter.

Since the journal didn’t mention the name of this guard, let’s just call him "Sufferer."

After reading the whole journal, Chu Guang felt that this brother who lived inside the yellow page journal was truly miserable.

The beginning of the journal was described in a bland manner, with Little Li, who had survived the disaster, using his memories to simply recount what he saw and heard during the outbreak of the nuclear war.

At that time, there was a regional basketball game going on at the sports arena in the north suburb of Qingquan City, and the match was in its tense and critical final stages.

That’s when the broadcast suddenly blared the warning of a nuclear strike.

"...Almost no one realized what was happening, even my assistant thought the sound effects were arranged by the organizers to liven up the atmosphere. But I panicked, running almost instinctively, dashing into the basement, where I found the Sleep Cabin placed there. The moment both my feet stepped in, I hesitated. What if this was all an ill-conceived joke? In just a month’s time, my audience would forget me completely, and I would be left with nothing... But I eventually shut the door and turned on the cabin’s launch safety."

"The temperature around me started dropping, and my consciousness slowly faded away. When I opened my eyes again, pushed the door open, the mechanical clock on the door presented the fact to me that the nuclear war had indeed happened—I had been asleep for more than three years, and now everything outside had changed. I’d gambled correctly, but I didn’t feel lucky at all... I’d rather be the one who was wrong, that everything was just a poor joke— at least I would be able to get a hefty compensation from the organizers. Or perhaps it would be better to have ended everything three years ago; dying in Utopia is not a bad thing. Being alive is the real torture."

In the next section, Little Li described the scenes he witnessed on the streets from his point of view.

Shattered streets, riddled concrete buildings, and dead bodies left on the streets to be pecked at by crows—all was like hell.

It was despair to the point of suffocation!

It was August, yet snow began to fall from the gray, sunless and warmth-less sky.

Wandering aimlessly on the streets.

Finally, just before he was about to collapse, he found a group of pitiful survivors in a nearby abandoned tire factory.

In those days when humanity had not yet faded, the survivors at the tire factory saved him, and there he met a woman named Sun Lai.

This woman was a nurse, with a child not yet seven years old; she had been separated from her husband at the time of the nuclear explosion and had been searching for him for years.

Li Xiu sympathized with her plight and offered to help her.

At this point in the journal, there was a yellowed photo pasted in—it was their joint photo; although the woman’s face was marked with the traces of harsh weather, one could tell she was still quite lovely.

Chu Guang didn’t care about their emotional development or the complex ethical entanglements that ensued, so he quickly skipped at least 30 pages of psychological activities and detailed descriptions—until he finally saw the clue that truly interested him.

Little Li and Little Sun assembled a primitive but reliable radio using scavenged parts and successfully received a broadcast from the shelter.

And the man in the broadcast was Sun Lai’s husband—the sufferer who served as a guard in the refuge shelter.

For three years, the broadcast had not stopped for a single day, always starting punctually at noon and continuing until three in the afternoon.

The content of the broadcast consistently sought his lost wife and children every day for three years.

Realizing that her husband had never given up searching for her, Little Sun, already somewhat shaken, lay in Little Li’s arms and burst into tears.

Chu Guang could sense that the owner of this diary didn’t seem very happy, even omitting her husband’s name from the diary and briefly referring to him as "that man."

However, the events that followed gradually began to get interesting.

As a shelter guard, the sufferer was locked in the refuge shelter before the nuclear war broke out.

Upon learning that his wife and children were still alive, he immediately found a way to contact his friends who worked at the police station before the disaster, guiding them to bring supplies and go to the aid of those poor souls living in the tire factory.

These resources proved invaluable.

Moreover, leveraging the near-infinite knowledge stored in the shelter, he accessed usable data from the electronic library and actively helped the survivors at the tire factory gather useful items, establishing their own shelter to fend off the harsh cold and hunger.

It was like remote assistance.

Little Li and Little Sun were very cooperative, yet they concealed one fact: they didn’t tell the survivors about the refuge shelter.

People are selfish.

If those survivors knew there was an accessible shelter hidden nearby, it was hard to say whether they would continue to live courageously, united, and helping one another like they were now. They might even have bad thoughts, force the people helping them to reveal the location of the shelter, or even do something more outrageous.

The credit and prestige were temporarily attributed to Little Li’s name while the existence of the shelter remained a secret; he seemed like an all-capable genius, winning everyone’s admiration.

That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

But leading a group of survivors was no easy task.

Especially since the collected resources would eventually run out, and this endless winter showed no hope of ending.

The diary owner’s thoughts were clear from the start; he knew that only by entering the shelter could they find everlasting peace.

Thus, he began to try persuading Little Sun, implanting ideas in her mind, telling her that only the refuge shelter was the sole path to safety.

This was not only for her sake but also for the sake of her children.

No matter the reasons, it was clear that Little Sun was convinced; no one wanted to stay in hell and suffer when compared to the comfort of a shelter.

Moreover, her husband was inside the shelter, so it was not entirely impossible for her to enter.

However, neither of them knew that once the doors of the shelter were shut, they would not be so easily opened again; the belief that they could enter was wishful thinking.

Though the sufferer was also anxious to see his wife and child, only the Manager had the authority over the shelter’s doors.

As a mere guard, he could not even dream of opening the doors, let alone qualify to see the Manager.

And that wasn’t all.

In principle, as soon as the shelter’s doors were closed, they would immediately enter radio silence, forbidding anyone from sending out any messages to the outside world. If discovered, they would be subject to severe punishment.

The reason he could send signals to the outside world and receive information from it was largely because the refuge shelter he was in was somewhat special.

This shelter concealed a low-power signal tower on the surface, and listening to nearby signals was something he had to do every day.

Yes, he took advantage of his position.

For whatever reason, this was not an honorable thing to do.

He hadn’t figured out how to confess, and he was even less sure how to plead with the esteemed Manager to let him off the hook.

The worst outcome was that after he confessed everything truthfully, he would be sentenced to life imprisonment as a traitor by the Manager, frozen forever in a sleep cabin, and subject to the judgment of the law once order was restored.

By then, he would lose contact with his wife and children forever.

All of this was Chu Guang’s speculation based on the contents of the journal.

After all, the journal did not record the owner’s psychological state but simply mentioned the clues about "radio silence" and "unable to open the door."

Later, out of guilt for his wife and children, the sufferer used the radio to guide them to some hidden supply points that wouldn’t normally be marked on regular shelter maps.

There were plenty of supplies there, including food, medicine, clean drinking water, and even riot control police weapons.

These supplies allowed the survivors from the tire factory to enjoy a period of affluence and even help a group of survivors who wandered from the nearby city.

Consequently, the owner of this journal naturally became a savior in these people’s eyes and a hero to others’ wives and kids.

However, this affluent period did not last very long.

From the latter part of the diary, it’s clear that as the supplies were exhausted, the friction and conflicts between people gradually intensified.

At first, men and women, young and old, were able to enjoy two cans of meat and unlimited supplies of self-heating rice each day and even had ice-cold beer to drink.

Then, the survivor community began to prohibit alcohol; meat was reserved only for the young and strong men who went out exploring, hunting, scavenging, and for pregnant women. The porridge became thinner, and sometimes they even had to mix some bark into it.

Eventually, all the hoarded supplies were depleted, and the days grew colder.

Everything was getting worse, with no sign of improvement, even the most optimistic person couldn’t see a glimmer of hope.

Some said the winter would last a long time.

Others claimed it was a rumor, there was no such thing as a nuclear winter.

Then, a voice retorted, maybe it’s not just nuclear weapons? After all, the news had said they had already mastered something even more deterrent than nuclear weapons.

But, if it truly existed, was everything before their eyes fake?

They had never even seen the most primitive nuclear bombs— their knowledge all came from chewed-over information and couldn’t differentiate what was real from what were speculations and conjectures.

Doubt and complaints spread among the survivors; some chose to leave, while those who stayed gradually turned against each other.

Perhaps...

From the start, they shouldn’t have taken in those wandering survivors.

But who wasn’t a wanderer?

Or rather, from which accepted person should they have started counting?

When the conflicts accumulated to an irreconcilable extent, they eventually turned into a fierce conflict. The cause might have been as trivial as a moldy piece of bread or even a bone; none of that mattered anymore.

The melee finally quieted with Little Li’s gunfire, but from that moment, his dreams of being a savior were utterly shattered.

Sun Lai’s kids died in that conflict, and she herself went completely mad. One snowy night, she vanished and was never seen again.

And Little Li was steeped in regret and pain, the journal’s content gradually turned to another extreme. The initial crisp clarity was replaced by sloppy and perfunctory words.

Sometimes, he wrote a few lines every few days; sometimes, he simply forgot to update for an entire month.

And the last page bore the date of the fourth year of the Wasteland Era.

[...I am still searching for that shelter, the only hope, though I know the hope is slim. The world is beyond saving now.]

That was the last line he wrote.

Until his life’s end, he searched for that unattainable Utopia.

"This journal could be displayed in a museum... if one day museums and history reappear on this planet; someone has to know what happened here."

"Forget it, I’ll take some time another day to update the ’Blood Hand Clan’ entry on the official website’s setting collection."

"The servers of a Different World are always more reliable than the museums of the Wasteland."

Although the diary explained the origins of the Blood Hand Clan, it did not mention Little Li’s own fate.

But that doesn’t matter.

The bloodstain imprinted on the cover, in a sense, told everything; it was likely left by him.

Chu Guang had heard from Hain that two years ago, the leader of the Blood Hand Clan wasn’t called "Bear" but was a man known as "Eagle," his body hanging near the tire factory, suspended from a streetlamp.

And before "Eagle," there was "Snake," who had his eyes gouged out.

Who it was before then, nobody knew; perhaps they had other names.

The legend goes that all of the Blood Hand Clan’s past leaders met with violent ends, almost all of them murdered by their successors — or more accurately, the ruthless Darwin’s law.

This journal, imprinted with the Blood Handprint, seemed as if it was under a malicious curse, treated by the Looters as a spiritual totem, along with that bloody and violent culture, handed down generation after generation to the present day.

Now, inherited by "Bear," it seemed justice’s Iron Hammer finally shattered this vicious cycle.

With a soft sigh, Chu Guang closed the journal in hand.

"Xiao Qi, I’m going to sleep; turn off the Light for me, and remember not to forget to wake Xia Yan."

"As for me, 1 p.m.... Forget it, let me sleep until I wake up naturally."

"I’ll deal with those spoils of war after I wake up. If any player asks you, just say... the equipment has not been identified yet."

Everyone knows that unidentified equipment can’t be equipped; it’s common sense in MMORPGs, very reasonable.

And Xiao Qi’s voice was always so attentive.

"Okay, Master."

"Go to sleep ba."

The light in the room gradually softened and finally succumbed to darkness.

It would be a pleasant dream.