Ning Wang was a veteran player of the Infinite Horror Game. For players like him, the game had long since ceased to be truly dangerous.
Most veterans roamed through the instances, treating them like playgrounds. Some took the opportunity to search for bugs in the scenarios, attempting to steal power that belonged to the game itself.
Ning Wang was that kind of player.
Most high-level players had vaguely grasped the truth behind the Infinite Horror Game—it seemed like you could leave, but in reality, escape was impossible.
Unless you grew strong enough to contend with the game's system itself.
And to rival the system, ordinary methods were basically useless. The only way was to steal power from the game's instances.
But bugs weren't easy to find, and the instances imposed heavy restrictions on players. Most of the time, their efforts came to nothing.
To increase the odds of finding bugs, Ning Wang split himself into countless fragments, casting them into various instances.
Whenever a fragment discovered a bug, he would personally go to that instance and steal its power.
As for those fragments—even if they died, it didn't matter. He would retrieve them himself.
This method proved effective, and Ning Wang quickly amassed a great deal of power.
At this rate, breaking free from the system's control was just a matter of time.
But what Ning Wang hadn't expected was that his fragments would run into trouble.
Some of his fragments seemed to have entered some kind of heat—their minds filled with nothing but romance and desire. They even disobeyed his orders to look for bugs, instead skulking around in secret to follow some young boy.
Like... perverts.
Though Ning Wang really didn't want to describe his own fragments that way, it was the truth.
Ning Wang refused to acknowledge that those fragments were him. He figured something must have gone wrong during the splitting process. He simply erased the abnormal memories and cast them aside.
But it wasn't an isolated case. It kept happening, one after another, and the fragments in his memories grew more and more twisted.
Each time, Ning Wang gave them a cursory glance before wiping the memories clean. He had no interest in others' mating urges or romantic pursuits—he didn't need a lover.
Until Ning Wang met someone.
That boy was stunningly beautiful—just as beautiful as the boys his fragments had been chasing, so lovely that no words in the world could do him justice.
Ning Wang looked up at the boy, who was gazing at the sky from beneath an airplane, and instinctively pressed a hand to his wildly pounding heart. At last, he understood why his fragments had been acting so strangely.
It seemed he, too, had gone into heat.
The moment he laid eyes on that boy, his mind was flooded with romance and longing. He wanted the boy.
He wanted him so badly his blood surged through his veins. He wanted him so badly he felt like he was going mad.
Like a moth aimlessly fluttering through a dark forest, finally encountering a blazing flame—with no thought left in its mind except to draw closer.
With just one look, Ning Wang recognized that the boy was the very one who had caused his fragments to act so abnormally—and also the one who had been put on the wanted list for causing chaos in the game's main city.
He found an excuse to get close to the boy.
He knew the boy was clever—how could anyone who had escaped from Su Zhen and Lu Rufeng be anything but clever?
Right from the start, he made the boy discard everything on him. The boy was frail, and without the help of tools and auxiliary items, he would naturally pose little threat.
Yet no matter how carefully Ning Wang guarded against him, he still ended up outwitted by the boy.
The moment he realized he'd been tricked, Ning Wang's heartbeat was so loud he could hear it himself, and his entire body grew feverishly hot—with excitement.
Because the boy, looking down at him with indifferent, downcast eyes, was simply breathtaking. So beautiful that it was impossible to look away. So beautiful that Ning Wang couldn't control himself.
The boy coldly left him stranded in a pile of zombies and walked away without hesitation—but that was fine. He would find him again.
And when he did, he would never give him another chance to leave.
He would be his.
But plans never kept up with changes. Before he could even find the boy, he was blown up in a lab—outsmarted once again.
He had entered the instance as a fragment, so he naturally couldn't withstand an explosion of that magnitude. He died on the spot.
This was merely one of his fragments, so death wouldn't affect him much. Besides, he still had a death-replacement item on him, which forced him to log out of the instance after dying.
The first thing Ning Wang did after leaving the instance was issue a maximum-reward bounty. Then he went to stake out players who had just cleared instances, planning to wait for the boy directly.
But the boy was far too cunning. He left no traces behind—not a single clue.
Ning Wang suspected he had entered the next instance immediately.
Instead of following him into an instance, Ning Wang sought out other players he knew. He wanted to retrieve those memories.
Those memories of the boy.
Yet erasing memories was easy; getting them back was harder than reaching the heavens. He tried countless methods but couldn't recover them.
He had no choice but to give up on recovering the memories and focus on finding the boy first.
Too many people coveted the boy. Almost everyone was obsessed to the point of madness. The boy seemed to know exactly how to keep their group of lunatics in balance—and how to use them to check each other.
Even if Ning Wang did find him, it was only ever a brief reunion.
Ning Wang had thought he had plenty of chances. With so many fragments, he would surely find the boy faster than anyone else.
Given enough time, he was certain he could become someone important to the boy.
But time waited for no one. It wasn't just the players who had gone mad for the boy—even the instance bosses had fallen under his spell.
To keep the boy by their side, the instance bosses even chose to merge with other instance bosses, all for the sake of resisting the Infinite Horror Game system.
They had no chance of winning.
Even knowing they had no chance of winning, Ning Wang had no intention of giving up—and he wasn't alone in that. None of them could let go.
Before meeting the boy, they could drift aimlessly through the instances, numb and directionless. But after crossing paths with him, they could never return to who they once were.
The boy had already become an indispensable part of their lives.
Just as Ning Wang was about to set out to find the boy again, Su Zhen approached him with a proposal—fusion.
Ning Wang hesitated for no more than a minute before agreeing. If the past could not be reclaimed, then he would create a future—a future that included the boy.
He could still make new memories. Memories shared with the boy.
This time, he would not forget again.
