“Who the hell are you?”
Ning Heyue took a horrified step backward while staring fixedly at the murderer who had slaughtered everyone in Jilang Manor.
The girl remained silent for a moment before raising her hand and removing the calico cat mask from her face, revealing the youthful features of someone barely in her teens.
Under the moonlight, her skin glowed with a faint, cool sheen. She had a straight nose with a delicate tip, and her eyelashes cast a fine row of tiny shadows beneath her eyes.
Her blood-red eyes gazed steadily at Ning Heyue. They were slightly swollen and reddened around the edges, as though she had just been crying.
“…Tang Queying?”
Ning Heyue cried out her name in astonishment.
Her face was more familiar to Ning Heyue than almost anyone else’s, second only to his own.
After all, over the past ten years, he’d seen that face countless times on the character selection screen whenever he logged into the game, on the display pages of the costume shop, and beside the statistics panel on the results screen after clearing dungeons.
She was his main character from the original Swordbound Jianghu!
The sheer absurdity of the situation instantly overwhelmed him, leaving no room for fear or confusion.
The person who had massacred Jilang Manor and left all these corpses scattered across the ground was his own game character.
This was even more fucking unbelievable than waking up to discover he’d transmigrated into another world…
When Tang Queying heard Ning Heyue call out her name, the sorrow on her face turned to surprise.
“Didn’t you drink the Soul-Ensnaring Elixir…? How can you still remember me…?”
“No, wait! What the hell are you doing here???”
To be fair, Ning Heyue could understand how NPCs, whose lives, personalities, relationships, and grudges had all been carefully written in advance, could have lives of their own in this game world.
But what he couldn’t understand was how a character like Tang Queying, created by a player, could actually exist in this world and act independently.
How many players did the original Swordbound Jianghu have? As an MMO that had been running for ten years, its monthly active player count had consistently exceeded sixty million at its peak, and the number of game characters was in the hundreds of millions.
The entire population of the Tang Dynasty at this point was only around thirty-five million, right?? Could the Great Tang even support that many people??
Tang Queying studied Ning Heyue’s face. When she realized he didn’t seem particularly happy to see her, the corners of her mouth, which had just begun to rise, stiffened.
“It seems… our reunion has made you unhappy?”
“Unhappy?”
Ning Heyue froze for a moment, then turned back and frowned as he studied the girl before him, saying nothing.
He couldn’t afford to let his guard down just because she appeared to be his game character.
After all, Ning Heyue had never regarded his character as an independent individual. He had no idea what her personality was like, much less how she felt about him, the owner of her account.
Tang Queying lowered her gaze and spoke softly. “Don’t worry. I won’t bother you for too long. But… could you at least tell me what I did back then that made you so unhappy with me? Why did you leave me without saying a single word?”
Leave?
Heaven and earth could bear witness to his innocence! It wasn’t like he’d sold his account! Hadn’t he kept playing right up until the servers shut down, staying with her until the very last day of the first game’s existence?
Naturally, Ning Heyue had no intention of accepting that accusation. But before answering, he decided to test the waters.
“Let me confirm something first… if I give you the wrong answer, are you going to kill me?”
Tang Queying’s mouth fell slightly open in surprise. “Kill you? Me?? You think I would—”
As though she’d heard something utterly incomprehensible, she took a moment to process his words. Then a pained expression appeared on her face.
Tang Queying hung her calico cat mask from her waist, then drew a bone-white dagger from beside it. Moonlight fell upon its icy blade, reflecting a cold, pale gleam.
Ning Heyue flinched and took a step backward. Before he could react, something blurred before his eyes, and he felt a sudden, forceful tug on his right hand.
By the time he realized what was happening, Tang Queying had already placed the dagger in his hand. Gripping his wrist, she guided the tip of the blade against her own throat.
“Do you feel reassured now?”
Tang Queying released Ning Heyue with a bitter smile, clasped both hands behind her back, and tilted her head up slightly, leaving her pale neck exposed beneath the blade.
“Just answer me. After that, whether you kill me or simply walk away is entirely up to you.”
Her sudden willingness to offer up her own life had completely caught Ning Heyue off guard.
Lowering the dagger, Ning Heyue rubbed his forehead. After a long silence, he finally asked, “Answer me something first. How did you find out my name? Technically, today’s the first time we’ve ever spoken face-to-face, right?”
“Mhm.”
Tang Queying lowered her gaze and slowly replied, “Mhmm. Before this, weren’t you always living inside my head?”
“Inside your head?”
“That’s right. Ever since I was born, I’ve been able to hear your voice. You’d tell me who to kill, who to save, when to walk, when to sit, where to go, and what to do… Whenever you stopped giving me instructions, I’d fall into a dream. And there, through a square window, I could see what you looked like. Naturally, that’s how I learned your name and came to recognize your face.”
So that was how game characters perceived their relationship with players?
Tang Queying let out a soft laugh, but the light in her eyes gradually faded.
“I spent seventeen years like that. I thought those days, which had always seemed so natural to me, would continue forever…”
“But then, one day, your voice suddenly disappeared. You stopped appearing in my dreams, too. It felt… as though someone had carved a piece out of my mind…”
“From that day onward, finding you became the only thing left in my life. I searched for you for so, so long. If I couldn’t find you here, I’d search in my dreams. If I couldn’t find you in my dreams, I’d wake up and keep searching… Like a foolish monkey trying to scoop the moon out of a river.”
“Where have you been all these years…?”
“Why did you abandon me…?”
As she spoke, Tang Queying sniffled and pressed both hands against her chest.
“I… I know…”
“If a pair of shoes no longer fits, you simply throw them away.”
“If your clothes become torn and worn, and they no longer keep you warm, it’s only natural to replace them with something new.”
“That’s just how the world works. No one would ever blame you for it.”
“But after everything we’ve been through together, after all those years we spent together, shouldn’t you at least have told me why before leaving? I’m not a pair of shoes, after all… And I’m not a piece of clothing, either…”
Ning Heyue stared at her, utterly speechless.
This was heavy.
Way, way too heavy.
The game character he’d spent ten years playing was actually such an emotionally intense young girl?
“Uh…”
Ning Heyue looked at Tang Queying, who seemed on the verge of tears, then glanced around at the corpses of all the people she’d killed.
He drew a sharp breath.
“So, you brought me into this world just to find out why I abandoned you?”
Tang Queying timidly shook her head. “If I had that kind of power, I would never have let you end up in a place like this.”
“Then why did you just happen to show up at Jilang Manor? Did someone tell you I’d be here tonight?”
“No. I came here looking for Zhou Yi. I only discovered you were here by coincidence…”
Looking for Zhou Yi?
Ning Heyue recalled how Zhou Yi’s face had looked almost identical to his own. He clicked his tongue and looked down at Tang Queying.
“He really does look a lot like me. Did you mistake him for me?”
Tang Queying shook her head again. She reached into the pouch at her waist, pulled out a folded sheet of paper, and presented it to Ning Heyue with both hands.
Ning Heyue took it and unfolded it. It was a portrait.
Despite being drawn with only a few simple strokes, the face depicted on the paper was almost identical to his own.
“That’s a pretty good likeness. Did you draw it?”
Tang Queying explained, “I spent a very long time asleep, searching for you in my dreams. When I woke up half a year ago, I discovered that this portrait was already circulating throughout the jianghu. I knew you weren’t from this world, so I began following the trail and investigating. But what I discovered was…”
Her voice trailed off. She raised her head, her blood-red eyes gazing into Ning Heyue’s face.
“There are actually many people in this world who look exactly like you.”
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