Yan Wei initially thought Yan Mingguang was deceiving him.
Most instances within the Tower were dominated by ghosts and monsters. The NPCs inside could be humans, ghosts, or even some indescribable creatures. It was common for ghosts to blend in among the players. Anyone who appeared suspicious or had an out-of-place aura, Yan Wei would keep a mental note of.
The instance had only just begun a day ago, and everything was still uncertain. Yan Wei didn’t act rashly.
He watched as the man turned and slowly walked away down the dimly lit corridor. The faint light from the nearby lamp cast a long, receding shadow of the man.
His aloofness was something Yan Wei couldn’t ignore.
If this were a ghost disguising itself in the instance, it was far too eccentric.
Yan Wei thus kept a close eye on him.
This floor’s instance was a death-rules instance where players’ data and abilities were sealed. All players were housed together, and they had to deduce the death rules to survive until the Stairway appeared. Over the next few days in the instance, most players became familiar with each other. Yan Wei, suspecting that the silver-haired man might be a disguised ghost, paid extra attention to him, often intentionally or unintentionally sticking close to observe him.
On the third day of the instance, a player sharing a room with Yan Wei accidentally triggered a death rule. Yan Wei lost his roommate and moved into the man’s room that night—since he was the only one alone, but the instance required rooms to have an even number of occupants.
He could only take a gamble, secretly observing the man’s every move.
Unexpectedly, the man didn’t give off any dangerous vibes; instead, he seemed more reliable than the other skilled players in the instance. Though he often said one thing and did another, he was always kind to Yan Wei.
Even during the deadly dangers of the night, the man didn’t hesitate to drag Yan Wei along to escape.
Yan Wei didn’t have the Undying State that day. After running with the man, the ghost behind them disappeared. They hid in a small storage room in the building, so close that they could hear each other’s breaths clearly.
“You save people in this kind of instance?” Yan Wei panted, finding it somewhat amusing. “This isn’t like those people who recklessly seek death during the day, where you can just stop them to save them. You always meddle and help people during the day, and now you’re dragging me along to escape at night. Bored?”
The man didn’t speak.
He lowered his gaze to the floor, still holding Yan Wei’s hand as if he had forgotten to let go. His expression was calm, showing no emotion.
During the day, this man would stand aside, and no one dared to approach him except Yan Wei. But now, he was holding Yan Wei in the cramped storage room, the warmth of his skin vividly alive.
This man couldn’t possibly be a ghost.
Though he seemed distant, he was overly kind.
—A trustworthy and worthy companion.
Yan Wei reached out and patted the man’s shoulder in the confined space.
He said, “Now, can you tell me who you are? If our organizations haven’t been enemies, we might be able to help each other in this instance.”
The man shook his head. “I don’t belong to any organization.”
Yan Wei asked, “Then what’s your name?”
This time, the man looked at him.
“Call me whatever.”
“?” Yan Wei found it amusing. “You don’t care?”
“Mn.”
The man paused, uncharacteristically adding a few more words. “I don’t care about names, and I don’t remember mine. Call me whatever you want.”
“You really don’t have a name?”
“Is a name necessary?”
Yan Wei was momentarily speechless. This wasn’t a question a normal person would ask, but he couldn’t deny it either. In the Tower World, life and death were trivial, and names truly didn’t matter.
He joked, “Really? If you don’t have one, I’ll just give you one.”
“Okay.”
So agreeable.
Yan Wei thought. Fortunately, the man looked like a living Yama King, and the other players didn’t dare approach him, allowing Yan Wei to take advantage.
He seemed to ponder for a moment. The exact emotions at the time, Yan Wei couldn’t quite remember. Even now, with his memories restored, the memories from over thirty floors ago were distant. He could only recall fragments, not every detail.
In any case, he thought seriously for a moment.
“Do you know how you’ve made me feel these past two days?” he said.
The cramped storage room was pitch dark, with only a faint light from the corridor seeping through the door, outlining the man’s silhouette. They were so close that they could feel each other’s breaths, warmth, and the proximity of their bodies. This situation went beyond the distance Yan Wei usually kept with others, breaking his guard.
“What?” the man cooperatively asked.
“Well… you help anyone, whether you know them or not, like a place where there’s always light,” he said. “Bright as day.”
“How about taking my surname, Yan?”
The Black Ring vibrated twice.
Yan Wei tapped his finger, and the Information Panel popped up. He stared at the name of the person who sent the message for a full minute, then sighed leisurely.
It was a message from Lin Zhen, who had just exited the instance—asking where he was currently staying.
He had just sent the location information when there was a knock at the door. Lin Zhen had just received the message, and Lin Qing was still in the instance, so it couldn’t be either of them.
In the area completely close to the endless monument at the center, each player was assigned an apartment so large that the surrounding rooms were empty, and each player lived far apart. Even though there were direct trains in the Tower World, it took several transfers and a lot of time to get from the innermost to the outermost areas.
However, high-level players generally didn’t go outside.
At their level, except for challenging the highest-floor instances, they hardly paid attention to anything else. Even the Gambling Tower, unless it was for a super high-floor instance, couldn’t pique the interest of super high-level players.
In Yan Wei’s memory, the central area was usually deserted.
The last time he climbed the Tower, apart from meeting Lin Qing and Yan Mingguang, he only encountered other players inside instances. He knew several high-level players from other organizations, some even friends or enemies he had fought alongside in instances. A few who had seen him might still be around, but now, the ones who definitely knew he lived here…
There should only be two left.
The others had all died in the final instance.
Yan Wei sighed silently.
He withdrew his gaze, turned, walked through the spacious living room, and arrived at the door. He didn’t look through the peephole or ask who it was; he simply opened the door directly.
Yan Mingguang stood at the entrance.
Perhaps because the Puppet Castle instance had ended with a fierce battle, the scene filled with a nauseating stench of blood, or perhaps because Yan Mingguang’s clothes had been torn by the puppets, it was clear he had changed before coming.
Yan Mingguang was dressed casually in jeans, his long legs straight and firm. Yan Wei glanced up; the man was wearing a plain black T-shirt, one hand in his pocket, leaning slightly against the wall by the door. He still wore those silver-rimmed glasses, the coldness in his dark eyes mostly hidden.
Yan Wei paused, his hand on the doorknob.
Even though it was his second time climbing the Tower, he had always been with Yan Mingguang. But now, with the missing memories restored, Yan Wei thought of the dangers in their final instance.
The Tower, wanting them dead, had created another Yan Mingguang in that instance—so real that Yan Wei couldn’t tell the difference, even almost losing his life at the start because he mistook the real one.
As the instance grew more dangerous, Yan Wei was too preoccupied to notice, and the other high-level players died one by one, until finally… only the two of them were left.
Before entering the instance, Yan Wei had already anticipated the difficulties. Unlike the other players, his goal was to obtain Pandora’s Box, wish for an end to everything, and let the Tower destroy itself under Pandora’s Box’s mechanism, so that instances in the Tower World would no longer appear.
This obviously enraged the possible consciousness derived from the Tower.
So both he and Yan Mingguang had prepared a backup plan.
In the end, they had technically succeeded, but Yan Wei’s memories stopped there, and the next thing he knew, he was in the long corridor hotel instance of the first floor—now it seemed that the Tower, to prevent him from exchanging Pandora’s Box, had found an excuse to format him and Yan Mingguang at the time. But they had already prepared, and now both had their memories restored and retrieved the sealed data.
Yan Wei looked directly at Yan Mingguang, not moving.
Yan Mingguang seemed to raise his hand slightly, but the movement was minimal, and he eventually let it down.
After a while, Yan Wei quickly blinked, smiled, and stepped aside, saying, “Come in.”
Yan Mingguang stepped in.
As the man passed by him, he suddenly paused. Yan Wei only felt Yan Mingguang suddenly close in, his vision blurred, and the man’s kiss had already landed.
But it didn’t go deep. The warmth lingered on his lips for just a moment. Yan Mingguang’s grip on his arm was so tight that Yan Wei felt a slight pain, but the kiss was brief.
Just like their current state, always close at hand, yet it felt like a reunion after a long separation.
Then, Yan Mingguang released him, paused, and walked into the room.
Yan Wei chuckled softly, closed the door, and said, “Last time, when we gathered in my room after exiting the instance, you were the last to arrive because you came from the very center, right?”
Before entering the Puppet Castle instance, Yan Wei had organized a gathering, inviting Lin Zhen and others. Yan Mingguang was the last to arrive. Though Yan Wei had noticed at the time, he didn’t ask. Now he realized it was because Yan Mingguang had already restored his memories and data earlier, assigned to the high-level players’ residence in the Tower World, so it took him longer to get there.
Yan Mingguang nodded.
Yan Wei skillfully took a bottle of red wine from the fridge, opened it leisurely, and poured while saying, “It’s the second climb now. It’s a pity I didn’t react in time when we were formatted, or I would’ve dragged you to correct the name information.”
Yan Mingguang turned to look at him, the corner of his mouth, usually without much curve, slightly lifting as he slowly said, “Same.”
“It’s just the same in pronunciation, but I still regret it. When I named you, I didn’t clearly tell you how to write the character ‘Yan.'”
Though he said this, Yan Wei only wanted to tease Yan Mingguang and use this topic he often brought up before to start their “reunion” conversation. Saying he remembered everything felt a bit too sentimental, but saying nothing felt lacking.
He held the wine glass, sitting across from Yan Mingguang at the bar.
Before he could speak, there was another knock at the door.
Lin Qing was still in the instance, and Yan Mingguang was sitting across from him, so the only person it could be was Lin Zhen.
But this time, Yan Wei didn’t get up to open the door as decisively as he had when Yan Mingguang arrived. His hand holding the glass trembled slightly, and he lowered his gaze, sitting silently for a moment, not moving.
He didn’t know how to face Lin Zhen.
“Some things have to be faced,” Yan Mingguang said. “He should have realized something in this instance.”
“But I don’t know how to say it.”
Yan Wei raised the glass, took a gentle sip, the rich aroma of the wine filling his nose, tempting him to take another. But he slowly put down the goblet, hesitating, “Some things, even knowing the logic and reason, can’t be faced objectively.”
“I don’t know how to tell him that he really is just an accessory.”
An accessory composed of all the negative traits and emotions he had split from Lin Qing using the Moon Wheel.
