After becoming celebrities, Bai Youwei, Shen Mo, Ada, and Nick each had their own personal assistants and apartments.

Day to day, they had nothing they needed to do—only follow the talent agency’s requirements: accept interviews, or film various advertisements.

Here, the most common form of entertainment was watching livestreams. One yuan was equivalent to 100 points; sending 10,000 points worth of gifts amounted to only 100 yuan.

Beyond that, this world had a vast wealth gap, rigid class stratification, injustice, inequality, and all manner of extremist ideologies running rampant. It was not a beautiful world.

Just as Bai Youwei was growing bored of it all, she woke up one day to find her plush rabbit had returned—sitting right there on her pillow.

She knew, then, that this world was “fake” as well.

In truth, she had long since stopped fixating on real versus fake.

Real and fake were always relative. In the absence of a valid point of comparison, every puppet world was essentially no different from any other.

Bai Youwei and Shen Mo prepared to leave.

——*Ahem, she had been arrogant before. The truth was, she couldn’t open the door between worlds just any time she liked. She needed to obtain permission from the rabbit first.*

Now that the rabbit had returned, Bai Youwei’s heart settled.

Before leaving, she converted all her assets into points and donated every last one of them to Yi Zichu.

Yi Zichu had already become a somewhat well-known food blogger in the livestream world, living peaceful days at a welfare home while leading a group of children. He was gradually becoming capable of standing on his own.

That was good.

Leaving didn’t necessarily mean living better than staying.

Nick, for his part, adapted extraordinarily well to the celebrity life. He kept taking advertisement deals, appearing on one show after another—calling it “saving up for retirement”—because he understood clearly that celebrities like them had a popularity shelf life of at most one year.

By next year, the audience would be cheering for a new team.

As for Ada, the moment his memories returned, he went straight to the sanatorium where his fiancée was staying.

He never got to see her.

More than six months ago, his fiancée had been discharged and had gotten together with her attending physician.

Ada couldn’t quite describe what he felt—perhaps a little sad, but to call it heartbreak didn’t seem quite right either.

Maybe time had washed certain things away.

In the more than a year he’d been gone, his fiancée had spent a prolonged period under the care and attention of another man. It was only natural that her feelings had changed. After all, when he had taken the blame for someone else back then, he hadn’t told her—hadn’t asked her to wait for him…

The truth was, he had done it deliberately. He hadn’t thought he’d make it back alive.

Ada felt rather awful.

He used to think every day about escaping the livestream world. Now that he’d escaped, he felt… as if he had no goal left.

He wanted something to do.

He still remembered Natasha’s dying wish, so he spent a few days tracking down the address of Yuri’s daughter and went to pay her a visit.

The residential building was old and dilapidated. The staircase banister was covered in rust. Shouts and arguments could be heard every now and then from neighboring apartments. Occasionally, young men and women covered in tattoos would emerge from the building. The corridors were piled with all manner of rubbish…

It was hard to imagine a young girl living in a place like this.

Ada climbed the staircase and stopped in front of the door number written on the address. He hesitated for a moment, then pressed the doorbell—

He heard the soft shuffle of slippers moving inside the apartment.

Getting closer.

Stopping just inside the door. A click. The door swung open.

Before him stood a fresh-faced young woman: deep brown curly hair, bright and clear eyes, a slender neck above a black spaghetti-strap top, and below that, low-waisted fitted jeans with a sliver of a narrow waist exposed in between—pale enough to dazzle.

Ada was briefly stunned. If she were Yuri’s wife, she couldn’t possibly be this young.

He asked: “Is this Darya’s home?”

“That’s me,” the girl answered.

Ada: “……”

This was a bit different from what he had imagined…

“Is there something you need?” The girl frowned, her impatience plainly visible.

Ada thought for a moment, then explained the whole situation to her—the beginning, middle, and end.

“I see…” the girl said, her tone flat. There wasn’t a trace of excitement at learning news of her biological father.

“He divorced my mom when I was five, so I don’t have much of an impression of him—I just know that such a person exists,” she said calmly. “Maybe that’s why he only remembered me as I was at five. Truth is, he didn’t love me as much as he liked to imagine. Otherwise, in all those years, he wouldn’t have gone without coming to find me or my mom. But a person always needs something to hold on to when they’re dying—makes them look a little more human, I suppose.”

Her words were cold, and cutting. Ada didn’t know what to say.

After a pause, he asked: “Your mother—is she doing all right?”

“Dead,” the girl replied indifferently. “Three years ago, someone swindled her out of her savings. In a moment of despair, she jumped off a building.”

Ada fell silent again.

Then the girl asked him: “Hey, do you have money?”

Ada looked at her, puzzled.

The girl averted her gaze, looking somewhat uncomfortable. She pursed her lips and said: “I don’t have the rent money anymore. Baden, that bastard, keeps pressuring me to pay, and if I don’t, he’s going to drag me off to film—”

She bit her lower lip and continued: “I don’t want to film that kind of thing. Since you’re a friend of my father’s, then you… could you lend me some money?”

Ada said nothing, just looked at her silently.

The girl waited for a moment. Her cheeks flushed hot with embarrassment.

“Forget it then,” she muttered angrily, turning to go back inside—both mortified and a bit indignant. The door swung shut—

With a thud, it was blocked.

Ada had wedged his elbow in the gap and said, with quiet sincerity: “Come stay at my place.”

The girl blinked, startled, and stared at him.

A feeling rose in her heart—a premonition that her life was about to change because of this encounter.

After all, this world always had so many stories.

More than could ever be written.

……

Bai Youwei and Shen Mo walked hand in hand. All around them stretched an apparently endless expanse of glowing squares—each one connecting to a different world.

“Do you ever have regrets?” she asked the man beside her in a small voice.

Shen Mo raised an eyebrow slightly and looked down at her. “Why would I have regrets?”

“Because… we don’t know what the next world will be like.” Bai Youwei had one arm hugging the rabbit, her other hand gripping his tightly.

Her gaze swept back and forth across those squares. Finally she gave up, and said with vexed resignation: “Fine, I’ll admit it—I’m the one with regrets… I keep feeling like there are endless pitfalls ahead just waiting for us to fall into.”

Shen Mo gave a low laugh.

“Don’t laugh!” Bai Youwei pouted and pulled at his hand, negotiating: “Should we just go back?”

“Go back?”

“Mm, back to the original world. See how everyone is doing.”

She squinted her eyes and suddenly smiled. “Like, for example… your dad, my mom—without the two of us interfering, do you think they might have gotten together?”

“And Teacher Cheng too—and Xiaoxin, Tan Xiao…”

“I deliberately created an opportunity for Lu Yuwen. I wonder if he managed to seize it…”

Bai Youwei finally made up her mind:

“Let’s go back and see.”

Shen Mo held her hand steadily throughout, and said one word, gently:

“Okay.”

……

*Feels like I’m padding it out a bit—ugh, I can’t help it, I just wanted a natural transition~ The next story is Lu Yuwen and Su Man’s.*

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