Chapter 511 “The Answer”

Chapter 511 “The Answer”

Zhou Ming returned to his bachelor apartment, where everything was still exactly the same as when he left.

When stepping on the familiar and slightly outdated floor, looking at the things in the room that had never changed, and listening to the fan buzzing sound coming from the computer mainframe that was always on beside his ears, his thoughts finally settled down a little.

A certain subtle and unspeakable feeling floating in his heart, Zhou Ming took a step across some of the clutter scattered on the floor and came to the tightly closed window, looking out at the constantly undulating white fog.

He stared at that fog for a long time, and then reached out his hand to push the window again – rightfully so, the window didn’t move at all.

The flour sprinkled on the windowsill and the few cans deliberately stacked up also remained as they had been at the beginning, as if conveying to himself without words an atmosphere of solitude and silence.

For a long time he stood thus silently before the window, maintaining his posture as if gazing out into the fog, with nothing going through his mind, and an unknown length of time passed before he suddenly blinked, as if a stone statue awakening, and turned his head to the side.

Not cleaned up beside the bed, the computer monitor on the desk is faintly glowing, “network not connected” prompt box is still popping up from time to time in the lower right corner, before leaving the record of notes on the notebook is still thrown in a corner of the table, the notebook has not been a long time to turn over.

Zhou Ming walked over and sat down in front of the desk, looking at the empty screen and fuming for a while, then reached out and yanked the keyboard and mouse that he had pushed to the corner earlier, clicked on the browser, and casually typed a line of text in the search box-

“The world beyond the fog, does it still exist?”

The browser, of course, gave no valid search page – the cursor on the screen flickered a few times after pressing enter, and then the error page popped up with a broken network connection and a remote server not responding.

This result was naturally expected, Zhou Ming knew from the start that he had already made various attempts to contact the outside world with this computer that had fallen into a bizarre state a long time ago, when the dense fog had just blocked off the room.

He did not expect anything different from before to appear on the screen this time.

He just wanted to type that out – without asking anyone or expecting any answer.

Listening to the monotonous fan humming sound coming from his ears, Zhou Ming exhaled and threw the keyboard and mouse back into the corner, then took the notebook, casually flipping it open to a blank page and leaning down to write carefully on it:

“To the world outside the thick fog, the people in the room greet you.

“In a short time, I will be arriving at a place on the ‘other side’ of the door, a city-state located in a frontier land, and I am going there to confirm a few things.

“But even without confirmation, I think I already know the answer, for countless things of the most unimaginable nature are tangibly happening in that bizarre world on the other side of the Gate, and my ‘instincts’ over there have always been very accurate.

“Based on this, I no longer expect to get a response from beyond the fog, or for someone to come through that fog and knock on my door or window, and I still can’t be sure what’s really happening in the world, but perhaps …… it’s not me who’s experiencing the changes, but you.

“In my quiet, narrow hut, everything is the same as it was before; I have a bed here, a sofa, a coffee table, a desk, and chairs, my closet next to the bed, and a very large shelf, which is still mostly empty ……

“I haven’t cleaned my room in a long time.

“There’s very little dust in here – I know that a good chunk of the dust in human dwellings comes from the debris of skin that humans shed themselves and the pollution caused by living and living, and I’ve been out of the house most of the time so most of the place is actually still pretty clean.

“But even without the dust, the room looks a bit cluttered now, because I’ve returned to the room several times before in such a hurry that I haven’t tidied up before leaving.

“It’s not good to always be in such a mess – if everything is as I think it is, I think …… I should leave this room clean and tidy.

“Also, maybe I shouldn’t say this, and maybe it’s pointless to say this anymore, but …… I hope all is well with all of you beyond the fog.

“Goodbye, now I’m going to go clean this room. “

Zhou Ming exhaled softly and threw the pen back into the quill, carefully reading over what he had just written again, then closed the notebook and placed it in a corner of the desk.

He then silently got up and began to carry out what he had planned in his notebook – cleaning and organizing this room.

Starting with the slightly cluttered bed, iterating the comforter and organizing the pillows and sheets, followed by the contents of the table, the coffee table, then the closet, the bookshelves, and the clutter on the couch and floor.

There wasn’t much dust, and there was no need to scrub the floor; he simply wiped away what little dust there was on the surfaces of all the furniture with a single piece of paper, and then tossed it into the waste basket.

At the very end, Zhou Ming came to the window.

He silently looked at the things on the window sill, and after standing there for a long time, he reached out and put the tools he had tried to use to open the window – including the hammer and wrench – into the toolbox on the side, and then put the cans and other miscellaneous items that had been stacked up on top of each other where they belonged. where they belonged. He then wet a paper towel, grasped it in his left hand, and pressed it against the window sill, a position he held for a full ten seconds before finally taking a deep breath and slowly wiping across the sill.

The flour that had been used to confirm whether or not someone had opened the window and entered the room was wiped clean by the moistened paper towel.

The room was now thoroughly clean and tidy.

Zhou Ming exhaled and calmly looked around the room, confirming the fruits of his labor, before picking up the bag of garbage that he had just packed up – the black plastic bag wasn’t very heavy, as it mostly contained some waste paper and empty cans, but when picking them up, he still felt that the bag was quite a bit weighty.

He carried the bag of things that needed to be discarded to the door of the bachelor pad and opened it.

As always, a dark and churning fog undulated and surged through the doorway, a fog that seemed to hide all the secrets of the world, but was too chaotic to be explored by reason.

Standing in front of the churning black fog, Zhou Ming hesitated for a moment, then raised his hand and threw the bag of garbage into the fog.

The moment the plastic bag was out of his hand, he felt a strong, strong urge to yank that bag back again, as if those waste papers and empty cans were the only treasures left in this world, and he was the only gambler left in this world, wanting to preserve every gram of substance in this room to the death – however, this impulse was ultimately suppressed by him, and he opened his hand , calmly watching the plastic bag fall into the other side of the door, disappearing in an instant into the churning mist.

He knew that those things would not “reach the other side of the door” – only he himself could reach that world as “Duncan”, and everything else would disappear into the churning mist as it passed through the door. Everything else would be lost in the churning mist as it passed through the gate.

Now the things that should be discarded have completely disappeared into the “world beyond the room”.

Zhou Ming wiped his hands and took a step forward, ready to leave this place – on the other side of the gate, Alice was still waiting for him to have dinner.

But just as he was about to step through the door, a faint sound caught his attention, the sound of a computer fan suddenly speeding up.

Zhou Ming stopped instantly, retracing his steps to look in the direction the sound came from.

On the computer screen that emitted a dim light, the interface that had previously displayed the Network Connection Interruption and Remote Server Not Responding prompts was flickering, and then those prompting texts suddenly disappeared, and immediately after that, the loading progress bar at the bottom of the page turned from red to green, and began to slowly move forward.

Zhou Ming felt his heart beating as if it had exploded in this instant, and a suffocating feeling filled his lungs, and in the next second he slammed the door of the room shut, and in a split second rushed to the front of his desk.

The loading progress bar at the bottom of the browser interface was still moving forward, the ghostly green color seemed to be slowly and firmly spreading fire, and on that originally blank page, the content that had been loaded out really appeared –

It was a picture.

Zhou Ming stared dead on at the picture that was gradually emerging.

The Moon.

It seemed to be a perspective taken directly from a certain location in space, what was presented on the picture was the Moon floating in the dark universe, its grayish-white appearance was covered with crater-forming grooves, as if many strange and light-dark patterns, even if he was not an expert in astronomy, Zhou Ming was incomparably familiar with this classic image.

He had also confirmed once again that what he had seen in Tirion’s office was indeed the Moon – the details were so precise that it could only have been drawn by someone who had seen the Moon with his own eyes and carefully copied it at close range.

Zhou Ming slowly sat down in his chair, leaning back, his expression frozen as he gazed at the image of the moon that occupied almost the entire screen, and only after a long time did his gaze move upwards to the line of text that he had just entered into the search box:
“The world beyond the fog, does it still exist?”

He was silent for a long time before he suddenly “woke up” from his stone-like state and quickly reached for the keyboard, typing new words into the search box:

“Is this an answer?”

“Who gave this answer?”

After quickly typing out these two questions, Zhou Ming stared at the computer screen in front of him.

However, there was no response from any “person”, and no new pattern or loading bar appeared on the screen, only the cursor rotating in place, like a silent and dull eye – outside of the low and slight fan rotation sound that gradually returned, he was once again left with only the sound of his own breathing and heartbeat beside his ears. The sound of his own breathing and heartbeat was all that remained.

A few moments later, the image of the moon on the screen was refreshed due to a loading failure, and the interface returned to a pale color with only one line of text remaining:
“Network connection interrupted or remote server not responding.”

(End of chapter)