“We have to go out today.” After breakfast, Kou Tong picked Manman up and quietly said to her, “Can you come with me? I’ll buy you chocolate.” 

Manman didn’t hesitate for a second before nodding. 

Huang Jinchen said, “I’m going, too.” 

Manman said, “Hmph!” 

Kou Tong thought about it, weighing it up. Probably thinking that the little loli was more important, he firmly refused her hated creepy uncle. Smiling, he said, “Manman says no. You can look after the house, guard against rats.” 

Huang Jinchen said, “…It’s not like I’m tetramine.” 

Kou Tong was entirely unmoved. 

Huang Jinchen was still thinking about the Seed Project that Kou Tong had mentioned the night before. These two words had nearly kept him up all night. When he got up first thing in the morning, they were still going around and around in his head, about to exhaust his patience. He seemed to be experiencing this kind of urgent mood for practically the first time. He was regretful. If he had known he would feel this way, he would have forced Kou Tong to keep talking last night; for whose benefit was he pretending to be calm? 

So he clutched his hair and bent down, bringing his line of sight level with Manman’s. “Beautiful little lady…” 

Manman looked at him hatefully. Huang Jinchen cried inwardly, thinking, All I did was refuse to hug her, what kind of child needs to be hugged at seven or eight? Hasn’t she finished kindergarten? 

So he put on a vulgar smile like the Big Bad Wolf abducting Little Red Riding Hood, rubbed his hands together, and fawningly said, “Look, you’re already eight, an eight-year-old is a big kid who needs to learn to be independent, how can you still need people to hug you? That’s wrong. Uncle is developing your independence. It’s for your own good!” 

This move might have deceived other little lolis, but it was absolutely no good for deceiving a genius little loli like Manman. 

She pouted and kept glaring at him without saying a word. 

Huang Jinchen thought, Shit, how annoying, why do people insist on having kids? 

Well, they could have kids if they wanted to! But when they were having them, couldn’t they be a little more careful? They should wear UV-protection clothing, go online less, stay away from unknown radiation! Otherwise, what were they going to do when they gave birth to a little freak like this?  

As if she had read something in his eyes, Manman suddenly burst into tears. She turned, tugged on Kou Tong’s clothes, and burrowed into his arms. Huang Jinchen, facing the condemning gazes of many observers who didn’t know the truth of the matter, instantly felt that he was under great pressure. 

Manman said, “I hate him! He’s a bad guy!” 

Kou Tong immediately nodded to express approval. “Yeah!” 

Huang Jinchen sorrowfully tilted his head back forty-five degrees to look at the ceiling and glumly said, “Even bad guys have self-respect. Do you two masters have to say it in front of my face?” 

Manman said, “We’re not taking him with us!” 

Kou Tong abandoned his former comrade-in-arms without any hesitation. He nodded firmly and said, “Yeah!” 

Huang Jinchen pathetically said, “Chief Kou…” 

Kou Tong pretended not to see him. But Manman raised her head from his embrace, a crack appearing in her small hands covering her eyes, showing a pair of eyes with not a trace of moisture. 

Shit, it’s been hardly any time at all, she’s just found a reliable backer she can throw tantrums for, and this little whelp who can only chew lollipops has already learned to fake crying! 

It was true that good things took three years to learn while bad things took three days. 

Huang Jinchen took a deep breath and decisively said, “I was wrong. How about we go to the supermarket today and buy anything you like? I’ll pay. Is that all right?” 

Manman turned her head and looked at him with her pure, innocent eyes. Two seconds later, she nodded and very profoundly said, “OK, deal. Keep the cops out of it. We’ll meet at the docks and swap the money for the goods!” 

Huang Jinchen: “…” 

Kou Tong: “…” 

“Who did you learn that from?” Kou Tong asked. 

“I saw it on TV,” Manman responded. 

In the war between the creepy uncle and the little loli, the creepy uncle was completely defeated. 

Soon, the two adults and one child were walking in the street. People in the street came and went hurriedly. Breakfast stands were doing brisk trade. White steam and the fragrance of food floated around. It seemed identical to “outside,” but it was still different. Huang Jinchen looked at the two people beside him and had a subtle feeling of disharmony that made him feel bewildered. 

He was going with another person to take a demanding little devil to the supermarket to buy snacks—when this thought appeared in his brain, Huang Jinchen, like a feeble-minded child who had just learned to form sentences, repeated it over and over to himself, seeming still unable to understand what meaning it held. 

And when he remembered that he was living with these people, that he had just gotten up from the same breakfast table as them, he felt even more incredulous. 

He was like a child trying candy for the first time, cautiously tasting the novel flavor, tongue numb from sucking but still unwilling to give up. 

Kou Tong was watching the people in the street. Along the way, he bought a map at a newsstand and put it in his pocket—this seemed to be their main assignment in leaving the house. 

Seven conscious subjects. If you counted him and Huang Jinchen, then added Lao Yao, He Xiaozhi, and Manman, it made five people in all. There were still two other conscious subjects. Where would they be? 

After a sleepless night, Kou Tong at last slightly understood the mechanism of this erroneous program. He had previously envisaged this as a place for automatic treatment—automatically supplying each person who entered with a character and a role; but as for how the character was to be inserted, and what role the character would play, Kou Tong hadn’t gotten that far. 

Now, owing to a programming error, it seemed that the half-completed program had automatically added a second half to itself—the conscious subjects who were inserted could fulfill their hearts’ desires. 

Like him seeing his long dead mother, Manman suddenly being able to communicate with others, and Lao Yao’s family—his source of stress—being gone. 

Though He Xiaozhi’s circumstances weren’t clear yet. But that was also easy to understand; according to the length of time it took to parse out each conscious subject, the speed of the program’s analysis would differ somewhat, so the time it would take them to encounter the needed “scene” would also be different. Manman was a child; his and Lao Yao’s consciousnesses had previously entered the Projector, so presumably the speed of analysis would be a little faster. 

But putting it like this, Huang Jinchen’s consciousness should also have been recorded by the instrument. What was his situation now? 

Kou Tong looked searchingly at Huang Jinchen. The two of them were following Manman around the supermarket. Manman was pushing a cart hardly shorter than she was, putting Huang Jinchen’s “buy anything you like” fully into effect: cookies, chocolate, all kinds of candy, all kinds of pie, ice cream, jelly, and a squinting teddy bear as tall as a person. 

Huang Jinchen’s expression looked a little pained. 

Suddenly, Manman, who had been joyously putting things in the cart, stopped in her tracks. The child’s inorganically pure eyes turned—there was a little rat in a corner. 

The rat’s expression was very humanoid, like a voyeur caught in the act, so startled it froze on the spot, its little eyes rolling around and around, paws quivering again and again. 

Next, it suddenly scurried under a shelf of products. Manman said, “It’s going to get…” 

Before she could say “away,” she saw a lollipop that had been in her cart go flying and hit the rat in the head like a bullet, making quite a lot of noise. Manman blinked and turned to look at Huang Jinchen, who had done all of this. 

Huang Jinchen’s gaze shifted from the dead rat. He said to the little loli, “Not bad, rat radar.” 

Manman considered, then said to the creepy uncle, “Not bad, rat killer.” 

The three of them returned from the supermarket practically in a rush, looking out for rats following them the whole way. After they came home, Kou Tong put Manman and her big bag of loot from the supermarket on the couch together. She turned the TV on for herself with familiar ease. 

Dr. Kou quietly said to Huang Jinchen, “Come with me.” 

The two of them went into the study. 

Huang Jinchen watched him hang up the map and raised his eyebrows—it wasn’t the map of any country or area he had ever seen. It was only a small continent with a little island next to it. The rest of the map hadn’t been drawn. Judging from the limited space, this was probably limitless ocean. 

Kou Tong opened his notes to a certain page with a hand-drawn map on it, astonishingly similar to the printed one hanging on the wall. 

“What is this?” Huang Jinchen asked. 

“A map, or…as far as the space’s generating program is concerned, a coordinate grid.” Kou Tong said. “There’s a very complex calculation method. I’m planning to provisionally use the personal computer in my study to simulate it. This way, we can get a better grasp on our surroundings.” 

He frowned. “I’m not very sure right now what it means that Manman said ‘intruders.’ Reasonably speaking, the Projector has the highest degree of compatibility. Everything in the space has been created according to the conscious subjects’ projections. The instrument itself won’t have any hostility towards any of the subjects. Unless it’s a virus, then probably…” 

“What?” 

“The person those rats are loyal to is one of those seven people.” 

Huang Jinchen didn’t especially understand. He silently watched Kou Tong lean over and scribble on a paper. In fact, he currently very much wanted to roughly interrupt Kou Tong and ask him the question that had been troubling him all this time. All he could do was control the rate of his breathing while leaning on the wall as if he didn’t exist, unmoving—this was one of the basic skills he had been trained in many years ago. 

Kou Tong also seemed to have forgotten he existed. His expression grave, he analyzed the map, occasionally stopping to perform calculations on the paper. 

Huang Jinchen’s gaze was directed at the map along with his. Suddenly, his eyes opened wide. His even breath caught, and his spine, half-leaning against the wall, straightened. Pointing at the shape of the map’s main road, he said, “That’s…” 

The map was very detailed. One on side, it had a traffic map of railroads and highways. On the other, it had a diagram of the natural features that looked very colorful. All of these had disrupted Huang Jinchen’s line of sight, so he hadn’t recognized the familiar outlines of that figure right away. 

It was a figure of a seed, and the little island next to it was its leaf. 

This figure had enshrouded his whole youth. This was…

“Yes, it’s the Seed.” Kou Tong paused, stood up off the ground, and looked at the map with an even more complicated expression than Huang Jinchen’s.