Surviving the Game as a Zombie - Chapter 107

“What happened! Operator! Where’s the feed?!” someone protested in the comments.

Then, the screen filled with “Operator, show yourself!” scrolling past, reflected in Xiao Zhao’s pupils.

Xiao Zhao pulled at her hair. It wasn’t that she wasn’t answering; she wanted to know what happened too!

The feed had gone haywire the moment the door lock was destroyed.

The stream could no longer capture Tang Yu’s point of view.

It was as if the camera had suddenly detached from Tang Yu, switching to a spectator view. The perspective was pulled high up into a top-down angle, barely showing the tops of Tang Yu’s and Song Lengzhu’s heads and more than half of the office.

As for the door and the so-called restroom, they were cut out of the frame.

The livestream audience could only see a zombie fly out of the door and get sliced in half by Tang Yu. Immediately after, three shadows formed in a corner and rushed to an area outside the viewers’ sight.

In the end, even Tang Yu disappeared from view!

The stream was still running, but the player it was following had vanished. This was unprecedented.

The audience, who had just been excitedly discussing Tang Yu and Song Lengzhu’s relationship and the sticky note, now directed all their anger at the operator.

Cut off my content, take my life!

Following the operator’s manual, Xiao Zhao ran a diagnostic on the equipment but found nothing out of the ordinary.

She immediately realized she couldn’t handle this on her own. With a desperate cry, she went to her boss at the next workstation for help.

“I’m screwed, I’m screwed! I think the stream glitched out,” Xiao Zhao said, shaking her boss’s chair, her face etched with anxiety.

Her boss rose unhurriedly, holding his teacup. “Don’t panic. Did you check the filter log?”

“I did! There’s no record!” Xiao Zhao shouted. “My Tang Jie isn’t taking a bath, getting undressed, or doing anything inappropriate. Why would the AI censor this part?”

“Keep your voice down,” her boss said. “Did you check the error log?”

“I did! There’s no record whatsoever! You have to come see for yourself!” Xiao Zhao began to wonder whether she should snatch his teacup or just drag him over. How could this veteran, responsible for training new staff, be so unreliable?

Her boss’s expression finally grew serious. He set down his teacup and asked, still hoping, “Didn’t the proxy AI give any alerts?”

“Nothing!” Xiao Zhao finally resorted to physical action. She grabbed her boss’s arm and forcibly dragged him from his workstation. “The proxy AI has been showing green lights all the way. Not a single hint of red!”

Xiao Zhao dragged her boss to the digital screen, which was just then showing the moment Song Lengzhu frantically called out Tang Yu’s name.

“It’s over,” her boss said. “I’ve never seen a stream suddenly switch its main perspective.”

“…”

Her boss composed himself and summoned a holographic keyboard, his fingers flying across it. As a senior employee, he had higher clearance and could easily access the livestream’s backend to check sections unavailable to Xiao Zhao.

Just as Xiao Zhao said, everything with the stream was normal. The proxy AI hadn’t triggered any alarms, which meant neither the game nor the streaming equipment was malfunctioning.

Her boss frowned and inspected the stream page’s source code. A dense wall of text popped up on a secondary screen. He moved the cursor, scrolling through it quickly. No highlights, no error messages—nothing.

Sighing, he straightened up. “Well… since there are no errors, then… we’ll just leave it alone.”

“Huh?”

“Look, you’ve done everything you’re supposed to. You’ve gone through the operator’s manual, and the problem isn’t your fault, so don’t take the blame for it.” Her boss looked serene, as if he’d reached a state of enlightenment. “Remember this bit of workplace philosophy: if it’s not your problem, stay out of it. I’m off. See ya.”

Her boss strolled out of Xiao Zhao’s cubicle and then vanished in a flash.

“Huh? What?!” Staring at the screen full of comments, Xiao Zhao let out a wail.

A moment later, Xiao Zhao posted an announcement at the top of the stream.

“Unknown error. Feed temporarily unavailable. Please try refreshing.”

After typing out the generic message, she moved her hands away and sent a message to her boss on the secondary screen. “Boss, do I need to report this to a higher-up?”

“You can file a report and include it with the daily summaries. Just do your part, and you’ll be fine.”

Sly old fox, Xiao Zhao cursed inwardly. Her superiors never read the daily reports anyway. What was the point of filing one?

“If a superior asks about it, there’ll be a record of the report they can look up,” her boss said.

“Oh, so that’s workplace philosophy.”

“Trust me. If you stick your nose where it doesn’t belong, you’ll be the one who ends up in trouble.”

Xiao Zhao mulled over her senior’s advice. “Alright, I’ll trust you this one time.”

The announcement about the stream malfunction was up. After a moment’s thought, Xiao Zhao decided to just loop a clip from earlier in the stream to replace the blank feed.

The current feed was empty; even Song Lengzhu had moved out of frame.

Oh well, might as well show them something they’ve already seen. They seemed to enjoy discussing it before, anyway.

“What the hell, am I stuck in a loop? Why are Xiao Tang and Captain Song climbing the stairs again?!”

“We’ve seen this part before, haven’t we? Or am I just imagining things?”

“We’ve definitely seen this. I guess the operator wasn’t lying. The stream really is bugged.”

“What kind of glitch is this? Why does it keep replaying their PDA? My poor heart!”

“Quick, look! Song Jie said it again, that she doesn’t dislike our Xiao Tang. This ship is so sweet, I could just die.”

“I only noticed on the second watch, but Song Jie’s voice gets softer and softer as she speaks. Could it be for real?”

“Now that you mention it, that’s totally possible! I’m going to go print them a marriage license right now.”

A few scattered comments diluted the screen’s hostility. Soon, more people joined the discussion. Since the stream was bugged anyway, there was no harm in a review session.

Xiao Zhao finished her daily report and sent it to her supervisor. The send log showed a long line of red dots—her supervisor hadn’t even glanced at any of her previous daily reports.

Xiao Zhao screenshotted the send log. Playing it safe, she also screenshotted her conversation with her boss. It was best if she never needed them, but if the worst happened, she wasn’t going to be the one left holding the bag.

As the replayed video reached the part where Tang Yu found the sticky note, Xiao Zhao watched the comments intently, ready to censor messages at a moment’s notice.

The first time this scene played, she’d had to deal with plenty of discussions that triggered the keyword filter. Now, it was time to get busy again.

Sure enough, someone reposted the earlier theory: “Posting this again. Xiao Tang must have found a major bug before. That damned Star Research wants to erase her, but they can’t use overt methods, so they have to resort to pulling strings behind the scenes.”

“Why would Star Research kill her? Is she someone important? It seems like a lot of trouble.”

“Or maybe it’s not Star Research who wants her dead, but the people in charge of Star Research?”

All three of the above comments containing the words “Star Research” and “kill” landed in the filtered queue, one right after the other.

Whether intentionally or not, Xiao Zhao slowed the filtering AI’s response time by a second or two—an adjustment well within normal parameters that wouldn’t attract any colleague’s attention.

She knew full well that the viewers would probably continue the discussion on other platforms. Xiao Zhao didn’t care, as long as it wasn’t happening in her stream.

This too was workplace philosophy.

The comments and speculation continued to roll in.

“The restroom is a key location, but the stream crashed right at that point. The restroom must be some kind of nerve center for the game, something that can’t be exposed or damaged.”

“But its location has already been revealed, hasn’t it? It’s on the fourth floor of the library. Everyone watching the stream saw it.”

“That’s exposed to the audience, but the player still doesn’t know.”

“That’s true.”

“Or maybe this Anchor Point is a save point. Even if they tell players there are no saves, the servers still need space to store and load data. With such a massive amount of information, it’s impossible not to have designated points for storage and deletion.”

“Or could it be a seam where massive map chunks connect? You know how that can happen, right? When the connection between two map areas has issues, it causes models to clip and creates tears in the environment—what we call bugs.”

“But that’s more common in older games, isn’t it? Modern tech allows for seamless open-world maps. Star Research’s engine is supposed to be the most advanced; it shouldn’t be making such a basic error.”

“That’s true. Ugh, this is so hard to figure out.”

“The Xiao Tang from six months ago left us quite a puzzle.”

“It’s not a puzzle for us, it’s a puzzle for her.”

Xiao Zhao watched for a moment before pulling up the live feed from the original timeline on her secondary screen, its contents visible only to her.

The feed was still empty, showing only the vacant office. Even the sounds of Tang Yu and Song Lengzhu had vanished completely.