He Felt Unfamiliar and Uncomfortable with This Situation
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Zhou Jiao steadied herself, scrolled back, and took another look. Sure enough, the previous comments were generated by bots. Scrolling down a few more pages, she finally saw normal comments.
[Holy shit, that scared me!]
[Bot-generated comments won’t make it to the trending list, bro.]
[What does this guy do? Why does he hate Biotech so much?]
[What do you mean, why does he hate Biotech??? Do you even need a reason to hate Biotech??? Isn’t the current unemployment rate sky-high because of Biotech??? Without Biotech, you could have worked in your position for ten years. Because of Biotech, you get optimized out before turning thirty, and that’s in a world where the global average lifespan is a hundred!]
[Calm down, maybe his whole family is unemployed.]
…
Scrolling further down, it was just netizens hurling insults at each other.
Due to the unprecedentedly high unemployment rate, employees were being dismissed every day due to mental breakdowns. The level of stress people faced was staggering, and arguments erupted online almost every moment.
Social media platforms encouraged people to engage in online disputes, both for traffic and for social stability—after all, wasn’t it better to vent hostility online than in reality?
Suddenly, Zhou Jiao’s gaze locked onto a particular comment:
[Are you an employee of Biotech?]
She frowned slightly and clicked on the profile picture of this comment, but a dialog box popped up—“This user is in anonymous mode.”
This was another method social media platforms used to encourage attacks—allowing users to be anonymous.
Under the effect of anonymity, people’s emotions tended to become extreme, their aggression significantly increased, and indifferent, radical, and black-and-white remarks became more frequent, making it incredibly easy for arguments to arise.
Ignoring the user’s anonymity for now, the owner of the account ‘When Will Biotech Go Bankrupt’ was indeed very likely a Biotech employee.
By carefully analyzing his remarks, a few key phrases could be extracted:
“Everyone around me is a bunch of monsters.”
“Why am I the only one who knows?”
“True face.”
“That person.”
“I’m terrified every day.”
“Everyone around me is a bunch of monsters”—This indicated that he frequently interacted with employees of Biotech.
“Why am I the only one who knows”—He was very likely a core member of the Biotech laboratory, having access to classified information that lower-level employees couldn’t reach.
“True face”—This was a term with a revealing nature, only appearing when there was a reversal in meaning. For example, “I always thought you were a good person, but I didn’t expect your true face to be so disgusting.”
Before this, the account owner might have always believed that the experiments he was involved in were beneficial to human development. However, during the experiments, he discovered a terrifying truth that overturned his worldview.
That was why he was so agitatedly questioning, “Why am I the only one who knows their true face?”
“That person”—He used “that person” instead of “that thing” or “they,” indicating that he clearly knew who was behind this plan.
“That person” was very likely the person in power at Biotech or an ambitious scientist.
“I’m terrified every day”—Combined with “everyone around me is a bunch of monsters,” this further confirmed that the account owner was indeed an employee of Biotech.
Even though Zhou Jiao had roughly deduced the identity of the account owner, her brows remained furrowed.
Because the account owner… was very likely already dead.
Zhou Jiao had no emotional attachment to the account owner, nor did she feel sympathy or regret. After all, his reckless act of summoning monsters had nearly cost her life.
But he was connected to Jiang Lian’s origins.
Losing the account owner as a lead… would make her plan to send Jiang Lian back home significantly more difficult.
Zhou Jiao’s mind raced. Too many questions, too few clues. A dull ache pulsed at her temples. She decided to put aside all doubts for now and find a place to sleep before dealing with it further.
Fortunately, Jiang Lian only seemed difficult to deal with; in reality, he was easy to fool.
She asked him if he could stay in a cheap motel. He stared at her for a moment and said, “I can build a nest.”
Zhou Jiao: “…There’s no need for you to do that personally. A cheap motel will do.”
A cheap motel was the only option. Her credit chip had been frozen, and in this era, only cheap motels still accepted cash and collateral—yes, the federal government had long since banned cash transactions.
Zhou Jiao pawned her miniature handgun to rent a double room—after all, with Jiang Lian by her side, having the gun or not made no difference.
Exhausted and starving, after an entire night of tension, Zhou Jiao collapsed onto the bed and fell asleep within two seconds, barely paying attention to what Jiang Lian was doing.
Her sleep was restless.
It felt like she was sinking slowly into the deep sea, the light growing dim, pressure surging in from all sides, crushing her limbs bit by bit.
She struggled to breathe, cold sweat seeping down her back in terror, feeling as if she could be flattened by the immense water pressure at any moment.
Under the suffocating pressure, she dreamed of her long-dead parents.
Unlike most people in Yucheng, her early life was peaceful and ordinary—she had hardly ever witnessed gang conflicts. Wasn’t that what peace and normalcy were?
This city was chaotic and mad. Corporations stood like giant mechanical spiders in the city center, spinning webs of crime outward.
Every day, people wept until they passed out in coffin apartments. Every day, someone overdosed on stimulants and died suddenly. Every day, someone flaunted their “high-tech” implants too openly and was kidnapped to underground clinics.
Fifty years ago, when those sci-fi writers gazed at the stars, was this really the future they longed for?
Zhou Jiao didn’t know. She didn’t even know why her parents had died.
Their deaths came without warning, like a piano piece abruptly stopping in the middle of a performance—they died in an explosion.
A completely unexpected explosion.
That day, they went to work. While taking the subway, their train car suddenly exploded without any prior signs.
The subway company’s official explanation was that a suicide bomber had activated a terrorist group’s self-detonation program in the carriage.
For over twenty years, Zhou Jiao rarely doubted the company’s words or read conspiracy theories online. After all, she had been educated by the company her entire life, and most of the people around her were company employees.
She wasn’t loyal to the company, but she had never considered overthrowing its rule.
Jiang Lian’s appearance forced her to see the company’s darkness with her own eyes.
He was dangerous, terrifying, and bizarre—yet he peeled away the clouds before her, revealing the truth.
Was it possible that her parents hadn’t died in a suicide bombing after all?
People suffered mental breakdowns from excessive chip use every day—who was to say that the “suicide bomber” wasn’t just another “chip lunatic”?
It felt as if an invisible, merciful hand was rewinding the footage for her frame by frame, allowing her to see the hidden truth—
A few seconds later, the subway’s roar echoed through the tunnel. In her dream, she stood inside that soon-to-explode carriage.
She saw her parents’ eyes gleaming silver as they processed company tasks through their chips. Across from them sat a dazed man.
The man was pale, his lips dry, and his greasy hair clumped together in strands, as if he had been living in the subway for a long time.
Since the subway operated 24 hours a day, such people weren’t rare. They were often recently laid-off employees who had just been evicted from company apartments, unable to find a suitable place to live but too proud to move into slums—so they simply lived in the subway.
Zhou Jiao had treated too many similar patients in the hospital. At a glance, she recognized that the man was experiencing stimulant withdrawal. He urgently needed a sedative to relax his overstimulated nervous system—otherwise, he would likely develop degenerative neurological diseases.
But the man’s hands were clearly empty. There was no sedative in sight.
The people around him didn’t notice anything unusual. Everyone was busy with their own affairs—after all, if they didn’t seize every second, how could they survive the ever-intensifying corporate competition?
Zhou Jiao was the only person in the entire carriage who approached him.
She saw the man burying his head deep down, his face so pale it had a faint bluish tint. His cracked lips opened and closed as he murmured continuously.
She didn’t know if this scene was something her subconscious mind had fabricated or if it had truly happened—but she was more inclined to believe it was real, as if some force beyond human comprehension was guiding her through the past.
Zhou Jiao lowered her head, trying to hear what the man was mumbling.
But his voice was too quiet, and the subway was too noisy. She could only catch bits and pieces:
“…I told you, it wasn’t me… Why did they fire me? Why did they cut off my meds… I can’t go on… I can’t go on, I can’t go on…”
“Meds” clearly referred to stimulants.
The man must have been a senior employee of the corporation, because only senior employees had personalized “medications” tailored to their physical conditions. The company even implanted them with special chips to monitor their heart rate, blood oxygen levels, and other vitals.
On the surface, this was done for their well-being. In reality, it was just another way to monitor them more effectively.
As time passed, the man’s expression became increasingly deranged, his voice turning hoarse and eerie. Then, all of a sudden, he sprang to his feet and bellowed at everyone in the carriage:
“I’m going to die! I’m going to die! I’m going to die! You all should die too—just die! All of you, just die!”