Chapter 11: A Video of Babel Tower
‘Is it a silly clip or a trailer? Or, is it a promotion video of a game in 2077?’ thought Bai Yan. Whatever it was, he cared nothing about it and swiped it away and logged on to Babel Tower again to continue his game.
The screen popped up again.
“Damn it!” Bai Yan let out a deep sigh and swiped the pop-up ads one more time. “Give it up, man! I won’t watch this ad today, even if you put a running fan to Nightsaber’s nipples.”
Bai Yan avoided using his name unconsciously. Well, it would be better to put the little paper “him” at risk.
He then tried to log on again, and the ad popped out again.
Bai Yan took a deep breath. ‘Calm down! Don’t get mad, don’t get mad.’
Then, he tried the fourth time. And as expected, the fancy ad came up again. It seemed like someone was forcing Bai Yan’s hand by making the ad pop up.
‘Calm down! Don’t get mad, don’t get mad … Oh, fuck off!’
“OK, I'll watch it,” yelled Bai Yan at his phone. Then he calmed down and added, “Just have to waste a little time.”
His first glimpse was terrified people running for cover from a giant black monster in the middle of a street in the daytime. When he looked closer, he found a girl with a white mask and in a black coat, carrying a huge black sword which looked like a cross. Oh, she was confronting the giant monster.
Bai Yan was not impressed by this video. ‘Everything is in chaos,’ he thought. ‘The masked girl should be the focus, but now she shares the same weight with every single other person in the scene.’
It was true that the video was terrible. It was even difficult to spot the masked girl, who was supposed to be the main character, among the rushing people.
When the monster started to attack people with its tentacles, the masked girl dashed to it and cut its tentacles with her huge sword. Her move was splendid, while the special effects were not only fancy but effective, stopping the monster from further action.
Blood splashed from the tentacles that she chopped off and looked so lifelike.
The frame, however, did not focus on the girl. It did not look like a promotion video of a film or a game but a record of a real scene by a layman. At least, Bai Yan thought so.
The monster fell, finally emitting black fog that covered the casualties and the girl. The camera work was terrible, but the fight and the special effects were so real and splendid.
‘The filming crew is good,’ he thought. And they deserve a good director.
Then he shot an unconscious glance at the uploader. At this very moment, his heart jolted. The next moment, he froze, mouth opened a crack.
It was uploaded by an account named Babel Tower. The location was Central Avenue. A girl in a black coat with a big sword, a giant monster, and Babel Tower … All these seemingly familiar things combined together were telling him something, and he seemed to know what it was.
“Impossible.” He started to sweat and unconsciously denied it. The next second, he realized that he couldn’t deny it. It was not coincidental that these factors appeared together in a random video. He needed more information about it. He bit his lips and swiped the screen to see the comments under the video.
Hejizi: Wow! It’s so real! It’s like something happened in real life.
Qimixuanjun: Really awesome! I think it’s something real, but it’s not, right?
Saltedfishleap: No, it’s just a promotion video of a film. The director has made an official denial on TV just now.
Preoccupiedbyfantacies: Use your head. It couldn’t be true. If it is, it would’ve already been deleted, right?
Qimixuanjun: OK, but it’s just so real to me …
The comments were stuffed with discussions about its authenticity. Most people thought it was not real, even though it looked so. The reason was that it would have been removed if it was.
‘But there might be some kind of force that made it impossible to be deleted.’ Bai Yan shook his head as soon as this idea popped up in his mind.
“Calm down,” he said to himself. “I’ve just given myself so much self-talk that I felt like I saw this scene before.”
He then tapped into the account of Babel Tower to check the other videos this uploader launched.
There was only a handful of them. In the first one, the girl in black fights with a monster with numerous tentacles on the street on a rainy night. In the second one, the girl in black runs into a church and kills the members of the cult one after another. The scene was violent but weirdly peaceful.
Watching the videos one by one, Bai Yan lost his peace of mind gradually. He could no longer persuade himself that all those factors had just been combined together randomly.
Discussions about authenticity also appeared in the comments under these videos. There were even speculations that Babel Tower was an account supported by someone very influential because he could even upload such violent videos freely.
“Yes, it’s real,” murmured Bai Yan. “The monsters and the members of the Cult appeared in the real world because of me.” But after a moment of thought, he disagreed, “Wait! Maybe they were just there in the real world, no matter whether I played the game or not. Maybe I have saved many people by defeating those monsters and the Cult in the game.”
He then tapped into the game again. “95 days away from the first Doomsday Crisis,” read the countdown in the corner of the screen.
“What? Are you kidding me?” exclaimed Bai Yan. “Thirteen years after I traveled to the world, now you’re telling me that the reason I’m here is to save this world?”
He felt it was very absurd. He had spent the first year here searching for a game mode. However, he’d got nothing. During the first few years, he had had the hope that he could live an unextraordinary life. But now, he no longer dreamed about that. He had accepted that he had just been transported to another boring, ordinary world. But in this world, could one affect reality by playing video games?
“Did I save the people after I defeated the monster by cultivating and summoning Nightsaber?” said Bai Yan to himself. “What if I didn’t make a perfect playthrough on the second round but just play it casually?”
Many people would have died, obviously. He didn’t know any of them, but such an assumption upset him.
“Why would I have been chosen to save this world?” exclaimed he again. “Can’t I just play some easy modes where I can win every game effortlessly?”
Suddenly, he found that thousands of lives were on his shoulder. That pissed him off. He had never wanted to be a savior, but he did not want others to die because of him either.
He sighed. He still remembered clearly all the bad endings of the Doomsday Crises at the first time he played the game.
Now he realized that he could not lose. Once he lost in the main story of Doomsday Crisis, this world was over and he would also die.
“Hoo!” After complaining, Bai Yan let out a deep breath and got excited.
He had been getting more and more into video games. There were many reasons for it. One of them was that he had no family and knew very few people in this world. Such a world was very dull to him.
He asked himself many times whether he would have chosen to come to this world if he could choose one more time. The answer was no. Because his thirteen years here after he had lost his family and friends were meaningless.
However, from this moment on, this world became different.
Bai Yan looked through the window at those students and said, “Good news is there is a very interesting and meaningful game for me.”
It was still the same game, but Babel Tower could affect the reality now. This excited him and made him think this boring world no longer sucked.
“What I’m gonna do is to have a perfect playthrough!” He tapped the operator list and chose the only core operator – Nightsaber. “You’re the only one I can summon, Nightsaber.”
He then started to think about how to make good use of his operator.
