I Am Your Natural Enemy

Chapter 461: Chapter 190: Buried in the Belly, Ashore (5k)

Wen Yan has no soul, so he won’t be devoured by the river’s soul-consuming rule in the Netherworld. That great river only targets creatures who can enter the Netherworld—it’s useless against Wen Yan.

And to top it off, Wen Yan is still a living person, and he even has the Calamity Protector Water Official Talisman, a heavenly Treasure Talisman, so he won’t drown either.

All these traits existed before the Netherworld even appeared.

Any code written afterward can only try to accommodate the pre-existing spaghetti mess. That makes sense, right?

Otherwise, it would need a total overhaul, starting from zero.

But unfortunately, Wen Yan is a living human. If you want to change things, you’d have to rewrite the whole real world along with it.

This absurdly huge mess is just sitting here; the Netherworld can’t shake it, so it just has to make sense.

Wen Yan not getting lost in the Netherworld is also something he acquired inside the Netherworld, which is perfectly reasonable.

The most important point: from the moment the Netherworld came into existence, Wen Yan was already inside the Netherworld.

As for the ”Domain” expansion, where simply being within its range means you’ll inevitably get pulled in—this was also a trait Wen Yan had before the Netherworld emerged. It all checks out.

To maintain this sense of reason, Wen Yan was given a hidden identity as an NPC.

So, he wasn’t some external invader; he’s part of this system.

That’s the key detail.

With that established, everything else becomes logically watertight.

Even the vacuum bags he used—they were already here in the Netherworld the moment it was booted up.

This is all way too reasonable.

Completely according to the rules.

When Wen Yan was able to accurately head for a location that had only been half-modeled and not yet rendered, a bug appeared in the Netherworld’s rules.

Because everything about Wen Yan makes sense. Only his current action doesn’t—or strictly speaking, even this isn’t all that unreasonable.

Wen Yan, by definition, has NPC status; he’s part of the Netherworld. At least for now, he’s still walking around inside it.

It’s just that it was expected that Wen Yan would eventually walk out of the Netherworld.

As Wen Yan keeps moving forward, in truth, there’s nothing ahead.

But that’s also what it means to leave the Netherworld.

A rule is a rule: until he truly steps out, then whatever Wen Yan does is valid.

The Netherworld now has two choices: deny Wen Yan’s logical existence at this moment—

Which is exactly the same as the Netherworld rules denying themselves.

Resulting in a total system collapse from a single bug.

Or, just keep accepting Wen Yan’s current legitimacy.

To an enormous system, as long as you don’t poke the bug, this is nothing more than a harmless little glitch.

No big deal.

No road ahead for Wen Yan? Then generate one for him.

If he wants to go out, then let Wen Yan, as an avatar of Netherworld rules, go out.

Taking all logic into account—if you want a living person to exit the Netherworld without breaking the whole thing, the only solution is to connect this exit to a place that both counts as outside and kind of still inside.

As long as the Netherworld doesn’t get physically linked to the world of the living, there’s zero impact on the system. Everything else goes on as normal.

The only remaining choice is the great river, which has already been influenced by the Netherworld and runs through both sides anyway.

The other side of that river is the very river inside the Nether Soul Realm.

This is actually the strongest tie between the Netherworld and the real world.

Just open a little doorway for this minor bug and let him through, problem solved. That’s all there is to it.

After all, it’s just this one little bug passing through. Doesn’t really affect the Netherworld as a whole.

Besides, once he’s in the river, he’s still technically in the Netherworld, so it changes nothing.

When he leaves that intermediate buffer zone, well, that’s a whole different story.

If he’s over there in the other river, it counts as having left the Netherworld, and anything he does is none of the Netherworld’s business.

Absolutely perfect.

...

The Doomsday Computer hard-crashed and blue-screened, and the reboot sequence kicked in right away.

Really, what system or game doesn’t have bugs?

Half the stuff in the world runs on bugs. No need to blow up the whole system over such a harmless little one.

After restarting, a progress bar appeared under the Cyber Netherworld icon on the Doomsday Computer.

In just a second, it filled up, and everything was back to normal.

All it left behind was a swarm of people at headquarters scrambling. Even a few minutes of network vacuum counts as a major incident.

Luckily, for now, nothing particularly negative has happened. The important departments mostly aren’t connected to external networks, and as for what’s hooked up to the internet—if it’s down, it’s down; no big deal.

On the Scorching Sun Department’s end, someone was quickly found to take the blame: someone dug up and cut a major regional optical cable, and—combined with a telecom temp’s emergency screw-up—caused a mass internet outage for a few minutes.

As for the more detailed excuses, we can make them up later.

Let’s solve the current issue first.

Meanwhile, Cai Qidong gets a call, asking him to pass a message to Wen Yan—did something happen in the Netherworld?

...

Under the dim water, Wen Yan gazes forward, where the water flow and riverbed look obviously unreal, like they’ve only been modeled and haven’t been fully rendered yet.

His eyes flicker. He slowly lifts his foot, taking a careful step forward, lightly touching down on the riverbed ahead.

As soon as his foot lands, a shimmer of light flashes by; the spot that looked unfinished a moment ago instantly turns into solid riverbed.

With each step Wen Yan takes, the glow spreads forward under his feet, following him step by step into the distance.

It’s as if he’s dragging the entire Netherworld along, stepping into the void.