Weird Game: I brought an old version bug

Chapter 56 The Abnormality of the Night

Three days later, at 2:17 a.m.

Jiang Chen was awakened by a jolt.

He instinctively reached under the pillow.

The pages were heating up, but not with that familiar, gentle heat; instead, they were pulsating with rapid, burning heat, like an irregular heartbeat.

He sat up, picked up the book, and touched the inverted hourglass.

Shiyu's handwriting appeared on the paper, the strokes messy: "Are you awake?"

"You're awake. What's wrong?"

"Look out the window."

Jiang Chen threw back the covers, walked to the window, and drew back the curtains.

At two in the morning, the campus was as quiet as a still painting; the streetlights were dim, the tree shadows were motionless, and there wasn't even a breeze.

everything is normal.

He was about to reply when he caught something out of the corner of his eye.

In the distance, towards the city center, a black vortex is slowly emerging from the rooftop of an office building.

It was neither cloud nor fog, but a real, black opening suspended in mid-air, its edges glowing with a ghostly blue light, like an eye that was opening.

Jiang Chen's heart clenched.

He had seen this kind of thing before.

In the game, this is called a rule rift—a channel through which old version data seeps into the new version's world.

But in the real world, it shouldn't exist.

The pages heated up again, and Shiyu's handwriting became even more hurried: "Did you see that?"

"I saw it."

"I'm also reporting this to the police," Shi Yu wrote. "The system's monitoring shows that the last batch of residual data from the old version hasn't disappeared. They're seeping into the real world."

"penetration?"

"The coordinates are your city center. Jiang Chen, that batch of data wasn't wiped; it was sealed. We thought the seal was automatically lifted after the system core restarted, but the truth is—"

She paused for a few seconds, then a new line of text appeared:

"The seal has been lifted, but the data hasn't disappeared. It's just moved to a different location."

Jiang Chen stared at the line of text, his mind racing back to every word Shi Yu had said in Chapter 55.

The system has been restored, the data recovery committee has been established, and everything is getting back on track.

But Shigure didn't know.

He didn't know it himself.

The book page lit up again: "Jiang Chen, can you go take a look now?"

"You mean that office building?"

"Yes. The system's monitoring can only track the direction of the data flow, but it can't penetrate the physical structure of the real world. I need you to go and see for yourself to confirm what's going on over there."

Jiang Chen glanced out the window.

The black vortex was still there, and it seemed a little bigger than before.

"I'll go."

He put on his coat, stuffed the book pages into his pocket, and left the dormitory.

The campus corridor was deserted in the early morning. The motion-activated lights turned on one by one at his feet and then turned off one by one behind him.

He strode across the playground, climbed over the side gate out of the school, and ran along the empty streets toward the city center.

The wind was cold, and there wasn't a soul on the street.

He ran for about ten minutes, and the office building got closer and closer.

It is a 20-story commercial building. During the day, it houses the offices of several technology companies, but at night it is pitch black, like a huge, silent tombstone.

The black vortex, located above the building's rooftop, resembled an eye, overlooking the entire street.

Jiang Chen stopped at the entrance of the building.

The glass door was locked, and it was pitch black inside.

He tried pushing it—the door opened.

The lock is broken.

No, it's not broken—the metal part of the lock is covered with a thin layer of black substance, as if it has been corroded from the inside by something.

He reached out and touched it; it felt icy cold, like touching a block of ice.

"Jiang Chen, have you arrived?"

"We've arrived. The door lock at the building entrance is corroded, as if something came out of it."

"Be careful," Shigure wrote, "I'm not sure what form that data will take in the real world. Within the system, it's just code, but in the real world—"

"They could be anything."

Jiang Chen took a deep breath and pushed open the glass door.

The lobby inside was pitch black, with only a faint green light from the emergency lights, barely illuminating the outline of the reception desk.

There was a strange smell in the air, not burnt, not musty, but an indescribable, ozone-like metallic smell.

He turned on his phone's flashlight, and the beam swept across the hall.

On the front desk, several pages of documents were scattered, the writing on them blurred and illegible, as if they had been soaked in water.

The clock on the wall was stopped at 11:47, with the second hand motionless.

There were several black marks on the ground, as if something wet had been dragged from the doorway into the elevator.

Jiang Chen squatted down and shone a flashlight on the marks.

It was black, sticky, and dried.

He reached out his hand, wanting to touch it.

The pages suddenly became hot, so hot that he instinctively pulled his hand back.

Shiyu's handwriting appeared directly, the strokes so heavy they almost pierced the paper: "Don't touch it! That's not physical matter—it's remnants of an old version of data. You'll be marked if you touch it!"

"mark?"

"Like a tracking mark in a game. In the real world, it manifests as your body becoming a receiver of data streams. You will be found by those things."

Jiang Chen withdrew his hand and stood up.

"How do I investigate?"

"Use your rules to crack things up."

Jiang Chen was stunned for a moment.

"Have you forgotten? Your old version of the bug—you could sense cracks in the rules and see through chains of rules. This ability works just as well in the real world, because the real world itself is also a system of rules."

Jiang Chen closed his eyes, trying to evoke the feeling he had used in the game—the kind of perception that made the chain of rules appear before his eyes, like opening another layer of vision.

At first, there was nothing.

He could only feel his own heartbeat, hear his own breathing, and feel the warmth of the pages of the book in his pocket.

But a few seconds later...

A faint, semi-transparent blue line began to appear in his field of vision.

Like blood vessels, they extend from the floor of the hall, climb along the walls, pass through the ceiling, and disappear upstairs.

Each line seemed to pulsate slightly, as if it were alive.

Rule chain.

This can also be seen in the real world.

Jiang Chen opened his eyes and looked at the blue lines, which spread out in front of him like a map.

"I see," he said in a low voice, "the chain of rules also exists in the real world."

"Of course it exists," Shigure wrote. "Everything has rules. The rules in the real world are just more stable and more hidden, but they don't not exist. Your old version of the bug can see the essence of all the rules, whether they are in the game or in reality."

Jiang Chen walked forward along those blue lines.

They extend from the floor of the lobby to the elevator shaft, and then up the elevator shaft all the way to the roof.

It follows the same direction as those black marks.

"On the rooftop," he said, "the entire chain of rules points to that vortex on the rooftop."

"That's right," Shiyu wrote. "That data is seeping in from the rooftop. Are you going to the rooftop now?"

"Um."

"Be careful. In the real world, the loopholes in the rules don't give you hints like in a game. Every wrong step you take has real consequences."

Jiang Chen stepped into the elevator and pressed the button for the top floor.

The elevator doors closed slowly with a dull thud.

The elevator began to ascend.

The floor numbers jumped one by one: 2, 3, 4, 5.

The lights in the elevator started flashing.

6, 7, 8...

The lights went out.

The elevator came to a sudden stop, emitting a piercing metallic scraping sound.

Jiang Chen was thrown against the elevator wall by inertia, his shoulder hitting the metal panel, causing him to gasp in pain.

He steadied himself and reached for the emergency call button.

But the plastic panel on the button was cracked, and what was exposed inside was not an electrical wire, but a black, viscous substance that was slowly wriggling.

The book pages were hot: "What's wrong?"

"The elevator is stuck between the eighth and ninth floors."

"Can you open the door?"

Jiang Chen tried to pry open the elevator door with his hands—he managed to open a crack in the door, revealing a cement wall on the outside.

"No, it's stuck between two floors, and there's a wall on the outside."

A faint sound came from the ventilation opening at the top of the elevator.

It looked like something was crawling.

Jiang Chen looked up at the ventilation grille.

The fence was trembling slightly.

Then, a sound came from the vent.

It wasn't a human voice; it was a low, metallic hum, as if something was trying to speak in human language, but its vocal organs were wrong.

【OBS-07-Residual-Data-Package-】