Genius Playground

Chapter 313: Chapter 4: A New Future

“Holy shit!”

Jiang Ran jumped back in fright. He had never encountered anything so bizarre!

‘Did my eyes deceive me?’

He rubbed his eyes and opened them again, only to find the old woman had vanished.

‘What’s going on…’

‘Did… did I see that wrong?’

He scrambled off the bus and bumped into a woman.

“Sorry,” he apologized quickly.

“It’s alri—”

Suddenly, the woman before him seemed to turn to stone, or as if someone had hit a pause button. She froze solid right in front of Jiang Ran.

It wasn’t a daze! It was a lifeless pause! As if her entire being had become a photograph, a flat 2D image!

“Are… are you okay?”

Jiang Ran moved to the woman’s side.

In that instant, his scalp tingled and goosebumps erupted all over his body!

He watched as the woman’s face smeared into a motion trail right before his eyes! The farther Jiang Ran moved from her, the longer the trail from her face became! It was just like a lagging, glitching movie screen!

“AHHH!!!”

Jiang Ran leaped away in terror.

Bizarre!

This was too bizarre!

‘What the hell is happening!’

The moment his feet hit the ground, the brilliant daylight instantly turned to night, then back to day, then night again… It flickered as if someone were frantically flipping a light switch! On, off, on, off! The entire world was switching between day and night!

A chill that he couldn’t stop ran down Jiang Ran’s spine.

He could no longer feel any warmth; his entire body was filled with nothing but cold!

But…

It seemed he was the only one who noticed these anomalies. Everyone else was still going about their business as usual.

At the front door of the bus, an elderly woman was lifting her foot to board.

She was halfway onto the bus, but in the next second, she glitched back to the front of the door and lifted her foot again… Halfway on, glitched back, lifted her foot… Halfway on, glitched back, lifted her foot.

An unspeakably strange phenomenon played out at high speed before Jiang Ran. The elderly woman was like someone with a bad internet connection, unable to get on the bus no matter what, stuck repeating the same action in a loop!

Jiang Ran’s heart rate spiked. He looked left and right, discovering that the entire world, as far as he could see, was glitching and flickering.

The green trees along the road suddenly turned red, blue, white, purple, and then vanished completely;

A running child stuttered like a poorly edited film, appearing on one side of the road one moment and then flashing back to their starting point the next;

Cars that had been flying in an orderly fashion suddenly passed through buildings without any collision, twitching at the point of contact like two overlapping pieces of paper;

In front of a coffee shop, a couple was kissing. The coffee in their hands blinked into milk tea, then into cola, then shampoo, then disinfectant! Even more terrifying… their kissing faces were smeared together like a pixelated mosaic!

‘What… what is happening?’

‘What’s wrong with the world!’

Jiang Ran whipped his head around, only to see an afterimage of himself stretching all the way from the bus to where he now stood!

Like time-lapse footage from a slow-motion camera, countless versions of Jiang Ran overlapped, forming a winding, centipede-like curve!

He spun back around in horror…

A terrified, stunned Jiang Ran stared back at him.

It was him from the previous second; the afterimage he had left behind.

In an instant, the entire world went dark.

Jiang Ran couldn’t feel his breath, his heartbeat, or anything at all. He couldn’t feel his own existence. He couldn’t even think.

「In a flash.」

The world became bright again.

He quickly took a deep breath and turned around—

“Sir, would you like to try our new orange juice?”

A pretty waitress in a maid outfit walked over, smiling faintly as she added:

“And it’s free!”