The Uncanny Valley Traveling Guide - Ch 5

Melancholy Song (5)

Wen Zheliu sat up from the ground with difficulty, and laughed angrily: “You f*cking…”

The boy in front of him was stocky, white, and fat with a chubby face. He was wearing a red T-shirt and khaki trousers, with sweat soaking into his collar and back. He glared at Wen Zheliu angrily, still clutching the VR headset he had just pulled from Wen Zheliu’s head. At this time, there was a sound from the door downstairs, and the boy immediately laughed in schadenfreude: “Ha, my parents are back. Just wait for that beating! “

With that, he put down the thing in his hand and ran downstairs, his heavy body making the floor creak with noise: “Dad! Mom! Wen Zheliu secretly played in my game cabin again today. He’s a thief! “

Wen Zheliu had a splitting headache. He forced himself to get up and walked downstairs, whispering, “Uncle, aunt.”

The man standing on the bottom floor was also tall and fat, and the woman standing beside him had similar facial features to Wen Zheliu. The man’s expression was a little unsightly, but he still advised: “Tianxiong, didn’t I tell you that the game cabin was bought for you and your cousin to play together? Don’t always hog it for yourself all day long…“

When Liu Tianxiong heard this, he immediately screamed and made a scene: “I don’t care, it’s mine, mine alone! He eats my family’s food, sleeps in my house, and now he wants to steal my gaming cabin. I’m really sick of him. You have to beat him up! “

As he shouted, he pulled out the ornamental tree branch from the half-a person’s height vase at the entrance and shoved it into the man’s hand unrelentingly, “Break his leg!”

Liu Jianzhang smiled awkwardly. Wen Zheliu’s eyes completely darkened while staring at the metal branch in Liu Tianxiong’s hand.

He was not Liu Jianzhang and Wen Qian’s child.

When Wen Zheliu was eight years old, his parents died in a car accident, and his uncle and aunt, Liu Jianzhang and Wen Qian, adopted him. At that time, Liu Jianzhang and Wen Qian gave birth to their first son, Liu Tianxiong, only at middle age. Naturally, they spoiled him until he became an arrogant and unreasonable person, while finding Wen Zheliu unpleasant to the eyes. Although Wen Qian and Wen Zheliu’s father were siblings, because of their weak kinship, this woman had no qualms about taking all the money and property left by Wen Zheliu’s parents and happily bought a three-story villa in the new urban area, while treating her brother’s son as free labor. At home, Liu Tianxiong was allowed to wantonly bully the young Wen Zheliu.

Wen Zhe Liu endured it again and again, and finally, one day, he couldn’t bear it any longer. He picked up the glass shelf on the table that was used to hold the paper, and slapped Liu Tianxiong hard, cutting the corner of his eye. After the couple returned from the hospital with pale faces, Liu Jianzhang used a metal branch the thickness of a finger in the porch vase, grabbed Wen Zheliu by the neck, and beat him from the living room to the kitchen, causing him to have blood marks all over his body. That night, he developed a high fever and was taken to the hospital.

Due to his serious injury, the Vulnerable Group Protection Agency immediately conducted an investigation. They suspected that it was intentional domestic violence and wanted to file a lawsuit against the Liu couple with criminal charges. Liu Jianzhang and Wen Qian were afraid that if the matter was exposed, not only would they have to spit out what they stole from Wen Zheliu’s parents, but they might also have to face the disaster of imprisonment, so they took advantage of the fact that the ward was empty and led their son to kneel in front of Wen Zailiu’s hospital bed, crying and weeping. Unable to resist this situation, he still agreed to reconciliation.

Since then, Liu Jianzhang and Wen Qian have restrained a lot, and dare not do anything to Wen Zheliu openly. In addition to letting him eat cold meals, they made him sleep in the attic for nearly ten years, using his parents’ money in exchange. He was also suffering from Liu Tianxiong’s daily harassment.

When Wen Zheliu was fifteen years old and Liu Tianxiong was fourteen years old, Liu Tianxiong was short of money. Instead of asking his parents for it, he ran into Wen Zheliu’s room and rummaged through it, only to find something. There were a dozen or so illegally reprinted cheap electronic pictorials hidden under the pillow, with several different half-naked male stars, unabashedly showing off their strong manly bodies to the camera, and showing handsome or evil smiles from different angles.

Wen Zheliu was forced to come out of the closet just like that. In this free era when anyone with full civil capacity could legally marry a robot, he was forced to endure the contemptuous eyes of the Liu couple for a long time, and Liu Tianxiong kept throwing around malicious words such as “sodomite” and “pervert”.

The fragile and sensitive self-esteem as a teenager, as well as the humiliation of living off others, almost broke Wen Zheliu. Every night, he hid under the quilt and secretly wept in resentment. Fortunately, the family’s unfair discrimination wasn’t unknown to the outside world. Wen Zheliu’s teachers and classmates showed varying degrees of understanding and respect for him, so he gradually recovered, and began to look at his nominal family with a new mindset: he was a normal person, it was them who were abnormal.

Slowly, he grew up, but it wasn’t just his size and height that grew up. With forbearance and precocious eyes, he secretly observed the family that temporarily sheltered him. When Liu Tianxiong was clamoring for a new type of holographic gaming cabin, he took the initiative to stand up for the first time and expressed to the Liu couple that he was willing to spend his parents’ inheritance to “give his cousin a game bin” as a hint of his retreat. After the Liu couple pretended to laugh at him, Liu Tianxiong finally stopped speaking ill of him for a short time, because they said on the surface that this was “bought for Wen Zheliu and Tianxiong using a sump”, but the Liu family knew who the real user was.

This usage (of money) was used until Wen Zheliu turned 17, and was about to come of age.

Wen Qian saw that Wen Zheliu’s face wasn’t good, so she hurriedly mediated with a smile, snatched the metal branch, and inserted it into the vase again, “Hey, this child really likes to joke… Tianxiong, you can’t be so stingy. Why can’t your cousin use the game cabin? Don’t you usually play enough? “

Wen Zheliu looked gloomy, took a deep breath, and said, “He forced me to come offline for the third time just now. Does he want me to develop dementia? “

The Liu family was stunned for a moment, and Liu Tianxiong shouted, “You’re a f*cking thief! Your mother gave birth to you and didn’t care about raising you. It’s my family that raised you, and you dare to mess with my stuff! You’re a white-eyed wolf! “

Wen Zheliu clenched his fists tightly, trembling all over with anger. Seeing that he was about to have a seizure, Liu Jianzhang hurriedly pushed his son into the room beside him, intending to talk behind the closed door while Liu Tianxiong was still struggling. Wen Zheliu couldn’t take it anymore and yelled, “Your family raises me?! Your family sucks my blood! If you want to say that your family raised me, you should ask your parents to take out all of my parents’ inheritance first. I’m going to be an adult soon, and I’m not an idiot who didn’t know anything! Just wait, I won’t owe you any favors, and I won’t give you any of my parents’ money either! “

After he shouted all this, he turned around and ran upstairs. Wen Qian raised her voice and shouted from behind. He ignored it and ran into the attic, slamming the door heavily, shaking the beams of the room.

His head was still hurting, as if something was about to come out of it. Wen Zheliu sat on the ground and pinched his neck until he was almost out of breath before he let out a short coughing sound.

His whole body trembled, his chest heaved violently, his teeth were clenched tightly, and he used almost all his strength to finally force back the unfalling tears in his eyes.

There was a stinging pain in the palm of the hand.

Wen Zheliu turned his eyes with difficulty, and saw that he seemed to be holding something in his hand just now. Before, he was too angry and just grasped it firmly. He was shocked, and hurriedly let go of his hand, using the dim light outside to carefully study it.

It was a square silver medal hung with a black leather rope, and finely engraved with many neat and tiny characters.

Yes… It‘s Chin’s dog tag!

With the rapid development of science and technology, material transmission from the virtual world to the real world is by no means impossible. The Dog Tag was the first and only item that could freely travel between the virtual world and reality after completing the task of interaction between the two worlds ten years ago.

Looking at Chin’s dog tag, he was just like a drowning man who had grabbed the last straw—today’s shootout, the gunfire, the tacit understanding between the two of them, the final victory, and Chin’s smiling eyes… He finally saw a hope that he could pull himself out of his suffocating life. He jumped up in a hurry, turned on the small lamp in the attic, and carefully examined the sign under the light.

“Chin… Star Network License Registration Name… He Qin…”

Is Chin’s real name He Qin?

He repeated this name several times, but when he looked at it again, he suddenly found that this dog tag… seemed to be different from his own and White’s.

Wen Zheliu pulled out his own dog tag from his neck and compared it with Chin… He Qin’s. His own dog tag had nothing but basic information and an iris fingerprint verification code, but He Qin’s name was printed with a very beautiful embossed pattern, consisting of spreading iris and hydrangea, wrapped around the edge of the dog tag. At the back, there were even laser handwritten cursive characters, which didn’t look like an identity plate, but some kind of art.

“He Qin… He Qin…” As he read this name, he always felt like he had heard it somewhere. A flash appeared in Wen Zheliu’s mind. He remembered He Qin had said that he didn’t want to be recognized, which meant that he should be a public figure. Since he was a public figure, he could always be found on the Internet, right?

He got excited all of a sudden. He snorted and wiped his red eyes. Then he opened his personal terminal, and typed the word “He Qin” in the search bar suspended in the mid air, anxiously waiting for the web page to refresh.

The search results were numerous. He thought about it for a while and clicked on the website in the first column of the keywords. The first thing displayed was the sentence he was very familiar with, “The city of Nova, where dreams and the future are shaped by you.” Is this the official website of the N-Star company?

He was stunned, then tentatively clicked on He Qin’s entry above.

—Unauthorized access.

Wen Zheliu felt like he was being splashed with cold water. He bit his lip, and his eyes kept wandering between the webpage and the dog tag, looking for a way to get in. At this moment, he suddenly saw the login button diagonally above. After pondering for a moment, he boldly clicked it. A blue light immediately shot out from the light screen, showing a 3D bust of Saint Nun Theresa with vivid eyebrows and eyes in front of him.

“Hello, please scan your fingerprints.”

It works!

He was overjoyed, and hurriedly scanned the fingerprint verification code on the He Qin dog tag. The saint nun smiled for a moment, and then said in an ethereal voice: “Hello, given your special status, please scan your iris again within 15 seconds for verification.”

“Countdown to 15, 14, 13,…”

Wen Zheliu rubbed his fingers nervously, and hurriedly scanned it again with the iris verification code on the dog tag.

“Welcome back, Mr. He Qin.”

The holy nun who blocked his way was gone. He smiled happily, and quickly clicked on He Qin’s entry again.

The first thing that came out was a high-resolution photo.

He was stunned for a moment.

The man in the photo was tall and slender, wearing an expensive formal suit, as if he was attending a major press conference. His thick, dark sword eyebrows flew obliquely into his temples. His peach blossom eyes were both romantic and fickle, the bridge of his nose was high, the thin lips were dark red, he was hot with a bit of cynical suaveness… As if struck by lightning, Wen Zheliu stared at the person in the photo, stunned beyond words.

Just a short time ago, the owner of these eyes was smiling at him with arched eyebrows, like a stream of amorous spring water, but now……

He looked at the small characters at the bottom of the photo, and for the first time, he felt that the translucent web page with the eye protection mode was blinding.

“N-Star Group… Co., Ltd.” he mumbled, stumbling over his words, “Asia Pacific Regional Executive… He Qin.”

His icy fingers gently slid upward, reading the formulaic report at the bottom word by word,”… The only one of its kind in the world, N-Star Corporation has created a huge spiritual property that can rewrite history, change the times, and lead the future… and this youngest regional executive in history…”

He held his breath and looked at the words on the light screen,”… can inherit the legacy and guidance of his elders…”

He suddenly remembered where he had heard He Qin’s name.

On more than one occasion, when Wen Zheliu passed by the City Council District of ​​Nova City, the male and female players gathered there talked about him in an excited and longing tone; in the fast food restaurant where he worked on weekends, people mentioned Nova City and inevitably talked about its leaders, its team, and its most famous game world… They say that He Qin was the youngest regional executive in history, the third heir of N-Star, and the shares he held were only second to the current CEO and his uncle…

He froze with his mouth wide open, unable to say a word.