"What is the question?" The psychology professor assumed a listening posture.

"Why can the third game create a fake environment?" Xu Huo slowly said, "Since the Water Rubik’s Cube is not controlled by humans, it shouldn’t have such strong adaptability to immediately create everything related to my past."

"To be honest, it’s too realistic."

It’s really like the past reappearing.

"I even suspect whether this device has truly traveled through time to peek into my past years, which is why such a real place exists."

"Of course, this is just one possibility."

"However, since it can peek into the past, no matter how it does it, it should be able to access the period when Xu Zhi died."

"Why not push time forward a bit? Is it afraid of causing a rebound?"

"Or is it trying to trap me in this utterly meaningless time?"

As he questioned one after another, the space of the hospital began to collapse, the psychology professor’s terror, and the patients’ cries outside slowly faded away until only a tile beneath Xu Huo’s feet remained.

The surroundings returned to a gray tone, as if he were in an extremely silent space where all sounds came from within.

When Xu Huo stood up, the chair behind him disappeared as well.

Then, three options appeared before him:

"In your opinion, what is the most important among the past, present, and future? You can rank them."

Xu Huo placed "past" first, then "present," followed by "future."

After making his choice, the text refreshed in front of him:

"As a failure in the time-travel experience, we’re sorry to inform you that you did not win the third game and lost the future."

Xu Huo sneered, punched the text in front of him, but in the next second, he was thrown back to his original position by a tremendous force.

Before him were still several floating cubes, but the ones that had disappeared into his body did not return to their places.

Xu Huo didn’t know how he won the second game, nor why he inexplicably lost the third, "a failure of the time-travel experience"? What does failure mean? Was it exposing the false reality created by the game? Or was it not making more effort?

But he lost the game, precisely since the moment he exposed the game’s illusion, so he had every reason to believe that the "loss" and "win" of the third game were entirely reversed...

However, soon he forgot not only the memories in the game but even the anger of being fooled gradually disappeared. Seizing the last moment, he wrote in his notebook, "The cost of losing the ’future’..."

"The cost of losing the future?" A few seconds later, Xu Huo frowned at the words on the paper and began checking his body.

No injuries, memories were fairly complete, no lost props, both "Three Seconds of a Lifetime" and "Heart of the Child" were there, losing the ’future,’ with ’past’ and ’present’ paid for with memories, what is ’future’?

Then thinking about the third game involving space-time powers, he immediately tried to mobilize the spatial rays, but soon a sense of obstruction appeared. It wasn’t due to chaotic spatial powers increasing control difficulty, but rather whenever he slightly mobilized the spatial power, a barrier-like encircling field appeared around him, preventing him from smoothly controlling the spatial power.

Neither attempts to create a spatial barrier nor a spatial body succeeded!

His spatial power was locked!

This realization made Xu Huo’s heart sink. He stared at the remaining few cubes in front of him, his gaze flickering. He had touched a cube to enter the third game, and since it was the medium, could he still enter the third game through it?

But after standing for a while, he gave up and turned to open the door.

Outside was a fully metallic corridor. After the heavy door swung open, there were several more sealing doors opposite, but these doors still hadn’t locked out the Water Rubik’s Cube’s powers.

Following the corridor’s instructions to the ground, then along the ground’s connecting lines, he found a room not far away. The room was filled with various-sized terminals, but no one was sitting on the chair in front of the terminals. A few food packaging bags were scattered nearby, but from the faded text and surrounding dust, this room seemed to have been left untouched for a long time.

Xu Huo approached the still operating terminal, seeing the continually flickering interface.

It contained many messages from the account "Ding Dong Bleeding," but the replies from the city center had stopped half a year ago.

Xu Huo sat down, operating the system to retrieve all the saved chat records from the terminal.

From what Old Cai and others said, the programmer repaired the system to contacting them, as well as the descriptions of the city center, the content matched, but a slight discrepancy was that the sketch of the deconstructed Water Rubik’s Cube wasn’t sent within these two days but about six months ago. After fixing the system, this sole surviving programmer packaged all the information he knew and gave it to them, also mentioning the scarcity of his food and water.

Old Cai and others lied about one thing. Judging from the programmer’s questioning and venting towards those players, it wasn’t curious but ignorant staff who activated the Water Rubik’s Cube; rather, it was a decision from the upper echelons of the Player Organization because they believed having a large number of Space-Time Evolvers, speculating that the situation might be related to the mysteriously appearing Water Rubik’s Cube, wanting to gain more benefits, they risked activating the Water Rubik’s Cube.

The final result was, of course, countless casualties, and it dragged down innocent colleagues and Bu Liu City in the process.

Some players were lucky or ran fast enough not to be trapped in the city center, but most ordinary staff were left behind, with the majority dying in the initial chaos attacked by temporal powers. The rest, using emergency supplies of food and water, managed to repair the original municipal government system, reconnecting with Bu Liu City players.

These staff requested Old Cai and others to contact the District Government, but naturally, nothing came of it. After multiple failed communications, Old Cai and others proposed a rescue plan, using an instance to let outside players fill the third game, hoping to find suitable people and methods to enter the city center again.

The status of the Water Rubik’s Cube was originally the programmer’s trump card, but six months ago he gave the last trump card to Old Cai and others, cutting off contact since then.

Old Cai and others, however, never gave up contact, shifting from infuriated attempts to calm tests of chance.

The earlier confrontation with Xu Huo was nothing but an act.

On the shelf were still unopened packs of compressed biscuits. Xu Huo opened one, took a bite, and slowly chewed. He elevated his rank through the terminal’s internal system, then found the list of wanted criminals diverted by Old Cai and others, and signed his name in the blank space after the death penalty review.