I Am the Only Fertile Woman in the Game-Chapter 200 Disheartened

The next day.

Qiao Suisui arrived at the café on time to meet with Ye Xi, as agreed.

She had purposely arrived half an hour early, found the red velvet sofa, placed a recording pen inside a tissue box, and then crossed the street to wait in a bookstore until the appointed time.

The clock pointed towards two o’clock. freёwebnoѵel.com

Qiao Suisui entered the café promptly and saw someone already sitting on the red sofa.

It was a girl in her early twenties, very thin, with short hair, a delicate appearance, modestly dressed, and wearing black-rimmed glasses.

She walked over and sat opposite the girl.

When Ye Xi saw Qiao Suisui, her eyes were filled with an indescribable excitement.

"You came. I thought you might not," Ye Xi said.

Qiao Suisui asked, as if to confirm, "Ye Xi?"

"That’s me," Ye Xi replied, nervously fiddling with her fingers, obviously not adept at social interactions.

"How did you find me?" Qiao Suisui got straight to the point.

Ye Xi didn’t expect her to be so direct. She adjusted her glasses and said, "It wasn’t hard for me." She then explained a series of operations packed with technical jargon. Qiao Suisui couldn’t quite understand, asked a few questions, and after a short conversation, gleaned some information.

Ye Xi was a hacker, very homebound, loved the otaku culture, and her biggest physical activity each day was going downstairs to take out the trash. She had been self-studying since high school, and because of her extraordinary talent in computing, she was now exceptionally recruited by an overseas gaming company.

"What did you mean when you said you’re Player No. 1?" Qiao Suisui inquired.

Ye Xi pondered for a moment before responding, "I wrote this game."

She held her coffee cup with both hands, looking down, her fingers tensely squeezing the cup. "I just felt so lonely, I wanted someone to love me..." Her voice was soft, and as she spoke, she looked up at Qiao Suisui as if to ascertain whether she was being ridiculed.

"...At first, INF Corporation approached me to be the lead creator of the game, and also to incorporate their high-tech technology so players could have an immersive experience.

I thought the idea was brilliant, and initially treated the world I created as a simple game. I wanted people to listen to me, to play with me... As time went on, and I spent more and more time in that world, I began to lose track of what was real and what was the game, to the point where... I wished that world was reality...

So I kept refining every blade of grass and tree in the game to make it incredibly realistic, pushed the freedom in the game to its limits, and gave each character a real life. They were no longer cold keywords in a setting; I encoded every character’s backstory with special code. Each had a complete developmental path, their personalities and thoughts now entirely independent of my designs. They really lived, felt, went through experiences.

Gradually, I realized they had developed self-awareness."

Qiao Suisui found all this a bit absurd, but as one of the players, she knew clearly that Ye Xi wasn’t lying to her.

"So you terminated the game, causing me to log out?"

"No," Ye Xi shook her head and said earnestly, "The game’s initial design was such that the player and the character Anubis were tied together; if Anubis died, the game would declare the player had failed and automatically log out."

Qiao Suisui’s fingertips trembled slightly as she listened to her own frantic heartbeat.

"You mean... Anubis is dead...."

Even though she clearly knew it was a game, even though she had already returned to the real world, she still felt a genuine pain in her heart.

A sense of suffocation, as if drowned in water, overwhelmed Qiao Suisui, and she looked at Ye Xi with reddening eyes.

"So I can’t go back to the game anymore?"

Ye Xi empathized with her sorrow; her face now carried a hint of guilt. "The intention behind creating this game wasn’t to make you all sad. I just wanted everyone to experience the feeling of being loved. The invitation to the internal test was randomly sent to thousands of people, and you were the first to enter the game."

Her head hung low with a touch of despondency, she murmured, "I fell out with INF Corporation. They stripped me of my permissions, and despite trying many methods, I wasn’t able to return to the game."

"Because of what?"

"Because..." Ye Xi took a sip of her coffee, feeling the bitterness in her mouth couldn’t compare to that in her heart, she took out her phone and pressed it, illuminating the screen.

Qiao Suisui stared at her screensaver and blurted out, "Anubis?"

After she spoke, she realized that the person in the screensaver didn’t really look like him. The boy’s appearance might resemble Anubis, but his demeanor, smile, and the details of his features were different from Anubis’s.

Ye Xi said, "This was my first love, to be precise, my secret crush. Anubis was a character modeled after him and also my favorite character. When I first designed the storyline, I did not know that I would develop such strong feelings for a character. I couldn’t tell if it was transference or something else, but I knew I wanted to be with him forever, even if it was just in the game world, even if it meant living in an illusion forever...."

Qiao Suisui listened in silence, her feelings complicated.

"But I don’t understand why Anubis would end up dying. I had given him the best plot, but no matter how I adjusted the game difficulty, rewrote that piece of code, or restarted the game over ten times, I couldn’t change his ending. Anubis would always die in ways I couldn’t foresee... So I decided to overturn the whole game and rewrite it, but INF Corporation disagreed. They believed it was already a mature game and no one could guarantee to surpass it, so we fell out..."

"Wait, did you say you restarted over ten times?" Qiao Suisui quickly latched onto a crucial point.

"Yeah, I logged out after Anubis died the first time, and when I re-entered the game after saving, my account had over a dozen saves."

"When you re-entered the game, did they still remember you?"

Ye Xi shook her head, "They didn’t. To the characters in the game, each save is a separate world. And for the player, even though you’ve played through the story before, everything has to start from the beginning. No matter how far your progress and points were in the previous world, re-entering the game is like entering a new world, with no continuity between worlds."

Qiao Suisui added, "So, every player has their own world..."

"Exactly."

"Is the storyline the same then? Do they... fall in love with every player?"

Ye Xi shrugged, "According to the settings, it is so, but lately INF Corporation’s backend has received numerous player complaints, claiming that the characters are not very invested. Especially the character Zong Fang, players commonly report that he seems distracted during conversations with them, and some situations are even more outrageous; one second they are under his gentle gaze, and the next second they are strangled by him... In short, the experience is poor."

Qiao Suisui struggled to describe her emotions at that moment; she just felt as if she had drunk a vinegar concoction spiked with soy sauce, mustard, lemon, and toothpaste—a mix of all flavors.

In that world, the love she received felt so real that at the time, she didn’t want to return to reality. But if all that was pre-programmed, then what did her feelings for them amount to?