Chapter 70 – The Dialectic Game (8): Recursion

Qi Si did a rough count: eight corpses in total, each dead in a different way yet all looking more or less the same, every one of them wearing the same style of white shirt he had on.

The bodies lay silently in front of him, intact yet lifeless, like exquisite dolls arranged with care inside a display cabinet.

Qi Si admired the scene for a moment, then smiled and shook his head. “The setting contradicts itself—have you finally run out of story to tell?”

“If these corpses are all Clones that came before me, how is it that after a full three years there’s no decomposition whatsoever? Your preservation tech is a little too good.”

That was only the most glaring flaw; plenty more riddled the picture.

First, the researchers’ attitudes defied common sense.

In any society, ‘wolves’ and ‘sheep’ stay in dynamic balance: if some idle about, others push forward. It’s impossible for everyone to be stamped from the same mold, sharing identical thought patterns and behavior.

Besides, an institute rotates staff; people flow in, get reassigned, or are laid off. The odds that every shift lands a slacker are minuscule.

And even if the whole world grew bored with work, cloning is headline-worthy black tech—surely someone would show a spark of curiosity?

Second, the institute was too quiet—so quiet it felt fake.

Since entering the instance, Qi Si had heard no idle chatter beyond what was strictly necessary.

The entire place floated like a Peach-Blossom Spring cut off from reality, showing no trace of social or environmental change; the researchers themselves seemed mannequins with only job titles, no private lives.

Lastly, Jin Yusheng’s attitude was far too rational.

To save communication cost he recapped the past three years in one go; after Qi Si’s verbal provocation he accepted the claims with barely a doubt, then unhesitatingly took the out Qi Si offered.

Everything flowed so smoothly that, at first glance, Qi Si appeared to have read his mind—yet on closer inspection it looked exactly like a trap.

Measuring human relations by profit was Qi Si’s own habit; people like him were always a minority… “As expected, I’m still inside an instance.”

A mask-like smile hung on Qi Si’s face, but his eyes were ice-cold.

Though adept at toying with human hearts, he had never understood feelings: trust, goodwill, sacrifice, friendship—qualities lauded by others—were, to him, just items on a balance sheet.

That arrogance, too, was a flaw the Eerie Game exploited, letting him keep swaggering along until, not long ago, he finally sensed something off.

“A childish Q&A game, a contest model stripped of every interfering factor, plotlines that fit my plans to the letter—clearly a paper exercise designed to funnel me toward one answer. Yet mental laziness kept me from growing suspicious.”

“This instance tries too hard to be reasonable: each time I find something odd, someone sidles up with a convenient explanation. But reality is absurd; where are all these perfect coincidences?”

Qi Si replayed every moment since entering the instance, mocking himself from start to finish while filing the lessons away in his mental archive.

He had always claimed his luck was terrible, yet in this instance, had he not happened to act at night and spot the bloody handprint, he might never have noticed the anomaly—he could have stayed blind right to the end.

Viewed that way, his luck wasn’t as awful as he’d thought.

The system interface still hadn’t appeared, but Qi Si guessed the main quest was probably to walk this dim corridor to its end.

Only a day had passed; many areas remained unsearched. He couldn’t fathom how a high-tech institute could connect to such a mystic hallway.

—He needed more clues.

“Clearing it like this will give me a lousy completion rate. I should still have time to comb the place and push that number up, right?”

Qi Si calculated that if he muddled through again, the Evil God was unlikely to be as generous as in the Carnivore instance and manually bump up his rating.

A grade below S was torture for a perfectionist.

To spare himself future agony, Qi Si took several decisive steps back, leaving the mist-shrouded corridor.

He headed toward the Director’s Office, casually prying open locks along the way and ransacking each room.

Every room mirrored the Observation Room: snow-white walls without a speck of dust, an empty hospital bed parked in the center.

Each ward was so clean it looked as if a thief had already swept through—he couldn’t find even a scrap of metal.

The would-be plunderer came up empty. Listlessly, Qi Si stopped outside the Director’s Office and skillfully picked the lock.

No one was around; he flicked on the light and, beneath its harsh glare, yanked open the desk drawer.

—Nothing inside.

Even Qi Si stared blankly for a full ten seconds at the sight.

He badly wanted to ask the designer: “Do you even know how to make a game? Where are the clues? How can there be no clues in the drawer?”

By this point, Qi Si had pretty much figured it out.

The Research Institute scene was probably only the first floor of this instance; no matter how hard he searched, nothing new would turn up—any further clues would have to come from a fresh map.

He doubled back to the corridor piled with corpses and plunged once more into the mist.

This time he slowed his pace, bending over each body in turn to turn up a sleeve.

On every sleeve, scrawled in red, was a huge “9”—identical to the one on his own cuff.

Qi Si walked the entire length, checking the sleeves of the sprawled corpses; the endless parade of nines was blinding.

Every single body was Subject No. 9!

A low, hoarse voice sounded overhead:

“By now you must have figured everything out.”

“Countless different choices lead to countless endings, yet across every world-line your decisions are always much the same.”

“In a myriad parallel timelines you may stray from the original path, but the same affliction always funnels you to this single node.”

“You entered the Eerie Game and became trapped, replaying the ending of death over and over.”

The negative words carried a pessimistic tone, like a curse or prophecy about the final outcome.

Qi Si felt a faint unease, but far stronger was his curiosity toward sudden developments and his thrill at the unexpected.

He grinned, flashing white teeth. “So everything you fed me earlier was fake—making me think I was the special one, pushing me along your script right up to now.”

“In truth I’m just a negligible link in an endless loop, a cross-section of parallel space-time—no different from the eight predecessors before me—”

“We are all ‘me’; we are all Qi Si.”

Qi Si now understood: the theme of this instance probably wasn’t cloning at all, not some battle between original and copies.

The original-plus-Clones setup was merely the backdrop; the real core mechanic was that No. 9 Clone after No. 9 Clone cycled endlessly through infinite spacetime, marching one after another into a corridor whose end no one knew.

They didn’t know whether they would reach the terminus or die on the way, but lying in the Research Institute waiting for death was too dull—they were happy to sample different ways to die.

And as long as even one of them walked out of the corridor, the life known as “Qi Si” would continue, able to flip the whole world a middle finger—how fantastically interesting!

“Will you keep moving forward?”

“You have one last choice: leave the Eerie Game?”

“Leave now and you will gain a new life, far removed from horror and strangeness.”

The voice above coaxed gently, its cadence eerily familiar.

Qi Si tilted his head, smile radiant. “There’s actually room for regret? Too bad—I don’t feel like regretting.”

He stepped forward, striding over the corpses of his “selves,” the smile on his face slowly fading.

“Leave the Eerie Game, wait quietly for death once the illness worsens—or, if I’m lucky, survive as a creature of pure instinct who can’t even feed or clean itself? Sounds dreadful.”

“Waiting for a known ending is absolutely painful and boring. I’d rather die inside the game; at least I’ll get a dose of excitement, fun, and anticipation before the end.”

“You said that at this node, every me across parallel timelines makes the same choice… then this time I, too, will trust my own judgment.”

He casually pointed ahead, gaze sweeping over the bodies. “Look, it’s a recursive relation—the path ‘I’ covered before death keeps getting longer.”

“Doesn’t that mean that if this path continues, some version of me in some timeline is bound to reach the end?”

There was no reply.

Qi Si stepped over the last corpse, bent slowly, and slid two slender fingers into its pocket, fishing out a key.

He pocketed the key and suddenly looked up.

Within the thick fog, a bronze door etched with eerie patterns now loomed before him.

Seeing the lock that obviously matched the key in his hand, Qi Si’s eyes curved in a smile. “Great—looks like the me of this timeline is lucky enough to reach the finish line.”

He stood quietly by the door for a moment, savoring everything that had happened in the instance, then with mingled satisfaction and reluctance slid the key into the lock and turned it—click.

The door swung open, black mist billowing inside, wispy coils swirling so thickly that what lay beyond was impossible to discern.

Qi Si knew he couldn’t relax until the very last second.

He stopped half a step short and kicked the corpse at his feet into the opening.

The body hit the floor with a heavy thud, raising a cloud of dust—nothing else happened.

No ambush, no danger; the calm felt almost uncanny.

Qi Si glanced at the seven remaining corpses behind him and rubbed his chin. Should he toss a few more in for good measure?

Before he could lift the second body, a voice drifted from within: “Stop wasting time—come in.”

—It was his own voice!