Chapter 60 - 59: Hide-and-Seek
"This game is called hide-and-seek."
The Bubble Man said it would hide and have Liang Zhi try to catch it.
But that wasn’t the most important rule. When he caught it, he also had to say who it was. Otherwise, Liang Zhi would lose.
"Then what happens if I lose?"
"If you lose, you just start over. You keep trying to catch me until you win."
At the time, Liang Zhi had no idea what "starting over" truly meant.
He just thought the price demanded by the Bubble Man relic was far smaller than he’d imagined.
Besides, if he completed the game, he would get the answers he had always wanted. It seemed like a fantastic deal.
By then, the strange allure had clouded his judgment. His mind was consumed by a thirst for knowledge, desperate to find the whereabouts of the Primordial Cells.
So Liang Zhi agreed.
And that was the beginning of his suffering.
The Bubble Man even gave Liang Zhi a Druid’s Spine and told him to equip it right away.
"This is to keep track of how many times you lose. It’ll keep a record."
Although he didn’t understand the principle behind it, Liang Zhi knew what a Druid’s Spine was, so he wasn’t suspicious.
He’d never owned a relic before. To suddenly receive one for free made him ecstatic, and he didn’t sense anything amiss.
Under the sway of that unknown allure, he had lost his judgment.
After he equipped the Druid’s Spine, the Bubble Man shook his hand, sealing their agreement.
Liang Zhi would play the game with the Bubble Man, and in return, the Bubble Man would give him the answer.
The instant their hands touched, a watery film surged over his body.
Liang Zhi watched himself rapidly age.
"Now, I’m going to cover your eyes and run," the Bubble Man said to Liang Zhi.
Then, Liang Zhi lost consciousness.
A spine fell to the ground.
When he woke up, Liang Zhi had no memory of the Bubble Man or the game.
All he remembered was discovering a strange egg surrounded by a zone of accelerated time, and that he’d gone to great lengths to find a Druid’s Spine...
This was the version of events he had initially recounted.
His memories had been altered.
But his subconscious kept telling him: finding the strange egg meant finding the Primordial Cells.
His thoughts grew muddled. His pursuit of the Primordial Cells morphed into an obsession with the strange egg, and he became almost frantic in his desire to find it.
He returned to the place where he had first found the egg, but it was gone.
The obsession echoed in his mind, and finding the egg became his sole purpose.
Liang Zhi began to search tirelessly around the Big Tree Cave.
After all, he knew the Theseus Region like the back of his hand.
And so, it wasn’t long before he came to the Theseus Region and found the strange egg once more.
With the appearance of the Bubble Man, his memories came flooding back. Everything about the game returned to his mind as the fabricated memories faded away.
"I found you! What about my wish?" he asked, incredibly excited.
"You still haven’t said who I am," the Bubble Man replied calmly.
Hearing this, Liang Zhi froze. He realized he truly didn’t know the Bubble Man’s name.
So he guessed randomly, "Bubble." He still had no idea what was about to happen.
"You guessed wrong. This time, you lose."
What followed was the Bubble Man’s handshake. A spine fell to the ground, and the number of Druid’s Spines on the floor became two.
His memory was altered once more...
Liang Zhi reverted to being an ordinary Researcher, filled with obsession and running to the Theseus Region every day.
He knew the area well, so it only took a few days for him to find the strange egg once more.
His memories returned.
This time, he didn’t rush to shout out a name. Instead, he started a conversation with the Bubble Man.
"What’s your name?"
"I don’t have a name," the Bubble Man replied.
Liang Zhi instantly felt cheated. "Then why are you playing this game with me?" he said, infuriated. "How can I win if you don’t have a name?"
"Someone gave me one. Now I have one. But you have to guess it yourself," the Bubble Man added.
"Then what’s your name?"
"I don’t have a name."
"..."
Liang Zhi asked many times, but the Bubble Man always gave the same answer. Believing the Bubble Man was deliberately hiding its name, he had no choice but to investigate on his own.
"Are you called ’Aladdin’s Magic Lamp’?"
...
He lost again.
The number of spines grew to three...
In the days that followed, Liang Zhi was trapped in a cycle: search for the egg, find the egg, guess the wrong name, have his memory altered.
The Druid’s Spines beneath the strange egg slowly piled up, forming a nest.
Later, when Liang Zhi found the egg but before his memories returned, he would even marvel at the nest of Druid’s Spines, finding it wondrous.
Only after the Bubble Man appeared and his memories gradually returned would he stare at the field of Druid’s Spines, horrified.
’These were all past versions of me...’
So he began to stall, deliberately avoiding guessing the Bubble Man’s name. But stalling for too long also counted as a loss.
He could only try again and again.
After countless memory alterations, he began to understand the Bubble Man better. He discovered that the strange egg was its true form.
So every time he found the egg, he would study it.
At first, he would just tap and poke it. Eventually, he discovered that the Bubble Man wouldn’t say a thing even if he destroyed the egg.
The next time he saw it, the egg would be perfectly restored.
Though his memory was altered each time, something was always left behind in his subconscious.
He slowly started bringing various research instruments with him when searching for the egg. His subconscious told him they might be useful.
Sure enough, after one such exploration, he used a microscope to observe the liquid that flowed from the egg.
Liang Zhi discovered wriggling, Block-shaped cells within the egg’s liquid.
He felt he had finally discovered the egg’s true nature.
But after checking all available data, he found it was a type of cell that had never been discovered.
He spent too much time on his research and failed to guess the name in time, so a new round of the game began.
In the following rounds, he formed a bold hypothesis:
’Those Block-shaped cells... they must be the Primordial Cells!’
The Bubble Man had told him in a previous round that as long as his answer was close enough, it would count as a win. It wouldn’t make things difficult for him.
"You can use a descriptive name. As long as you can define what I am, you win," the Bubble Man prompted.
But at the time, Liang Zhi didn’t realize the Bubble Man was giving him a hint. He just started trying different ways of naming it.
After finding the egg again, his memories flooded back, and he eagerly shouted his guess: "You’re a lifeform made of Primordial Cells!"
Just as he confidently shouted what he thought the Bubble Man was, the Bubble Man once again announced the game was over.
"That’s very close, but you’ve lost again."
A spine once again fell to the ground.
Liang Zhi reverted to his altered state.
His subconscious kicked in again.
Because of his discovery of those little Blocks, the line between the strange egg and the Primordial Cells in his mind blurred even further, the confusion deepening.
It reached the point where he would often doubt himself, wondering why he was so certain that the liquid inside the egg was made of Primordial Cells.
But all these doubts would instantly vanish the moment he saw the egg.
Then a spine would fall, and the cycle would begin anew...