Brainoid

Just returning to Beijing District means that he has played in other districts before.

"Then which district were you in before?" Qiu Shuang asked with a smile, pretending to strike up a conversation.

It is normal for a beautiful blonde girl to be approached by a handsome guy. However, Echiyo said expressionlessly: "Don't worry, I'm a man."

"I know." Qiu Shou put away his smile and said with some helplessness, "I just want to know where you come from. I finally got to the top of the list, but you surpassed me in less than a day."

"I'm really sorry. I'm just raising points to earn some money." Echishi bowed forward slightly, barely apologizing.

"It's not necessary. It's not your fault that my skills are not as good as yours." Qiu Shuo said with a smile, "But where did you practice this? You can earn points so fast."

Echishi glanced at her again, and then said: "In the St. Petersburg area..."

"Are you playing with Красный_снег (red snow)?" Qiu Shuang asked in surprise.

Red Snow is like the winter MOD of the Old City, and its overall structure is similar to the Old City. However, the red snow ground is covered with snow all year round (the snow will be refreshed at zero o'clock every day). Players can pick up Soviet Army coats to keep out the cold in the rooms of the building, and the zombies in the city are all wearing blood-stained clothing. military uniform. This project was called "Красный_снег" because the black and purple blood splashed out when killing zombies would dye the snow red.

As the first entertainment project in St. Petersburg, Hongxue has a good reputation among Chinese players. When it was first promoted, it also took advantage of the Battle of Stalingrad and promoted it as the Resident Evil version of the Battle of Stalingrad. However, in fact, the difficulty of Red Snow is basically the same as that of Old City, and players will not fight very fiercely.

"I had fun." Echiyo replied, but his next sentence was truly shocking, "I died there."

"What...means this?" Qiu Shuang asked with a frown.

"That's right, I died while fighting zombies there." Echiyo replied calmly.

"Uh... so this is a BUG in the St. Petersburg area?" Qiu Shu tried to explain in a more understandable way, "The player's identity should not die in the brain-like body, and the damage to the virtual body should be restored after seven days..."

However, what made Qi Min feel cold was that Hui Qianshi said calmly: "No, I mean I am dead in reality."

——

Echiyo is a "Dead Soul (Мёртвые_души)" - a special product of the St. Petersburg District of the brain-like body.

This term originally came from Gogol's novel of the same name, which refers to a dead serf who can still be sold for a price on paper. The dead souls in the brain are a bit similar to this. They are all people who died in a real sense, but they are still online in the brain and continue to pay online fees to the brain company.

These dead souls were once normal living people, making money in the real world and spending it on brain-like bodies. They may have come from all over the world "before their death" (Russians and Chinese are the majority among them). But some are due to overindulgence in brainoids, and some may be due to other diseases. When these people's consciousness is in brainoids, their real-world bodies suddenly suffer from acute myocardial ischemia or similar emergencies. At that time, no one noticed their abnormality, and they did not receive reasonable rescue. Therefore, their physical bodies in reality died suddenly, and their consciousness was forever trapped in the brain-like body, becoming a person who only existed in the virtual world. Dead souls, also known as Мёртвые_души (dead souls).

For normal players, if they run out of money, they can log off from the brainoid body and return to the real world. But for dead souls, once the amount in their accounts is exhausted, they will be automatically offline. However, the real world no longer has a brain that can accommodate their consciousness, so it is equivalent to death - just later than the physical body in reality. Just a little bit dead.

The physically dead players who appeared at the beginning probably didn't know that they were dead in the real world, and they exited normally as before, and then they were really dead. Later, there were some incidents where brainoids went online and died in real life. Generally, others came online to remind them not to go offline, so that they could maintain the state of "dead souls".

For those dead souls with relatively healthy social relationships, their living relatives and friends will continue to pay their online fees, so they can still hang on to their lives in the form of consciousness. For those dead souls who are alone in reality, it is likely that no one will find out that he/she is dead, so they can only find ways to find money to pay the online fee in the virtual world.

The actual popularity of brain-like bodies has actually been less than three years, and those who unfortunately become dead souls are often severe Internet addicts. In the past, these people may have been the brain-like version of the "Master Sanhe", who spent three days in the brain-like body for every day's money they earned; or they may have been in the abandoned houses on the bottom of the building where even the neighbors didn't know that this person existed. The small house of less than ten square meters has been online for more than 20 hours. Once they die suddenly, not only are they difficult to detect, but there are also very few people who will take the initiative to renew their subscriptions. Moreover, in the real world, such people are already unable to engage in normal and stable jobs or maintain healthy interpersonal relationships due to psychological or ability problems, so naturally they will be no good in a brain-like body. Before the advent of the era of brain-computer interaction, such people lived in seclusion in a corner beyond the reach of the public, and would not attract attention even if they died, and the situation has not really changed now.

But there are still people who will do something for these dead souls that are ignored in reality. There is a public welfare organization in the St. Petersburg area that normal players will not know about, called the "Red Snow Rescue Station", which is composed of some red snow enthusiasts. Hongxue, like Old City, is the only place where points can be exchanged for real currency (except for RMB in Old City and rubles in Hongxue, the relative exchange rate is the same as the real exchange rate), so the volunteers at Hongxue Rescue Station are playing Earn points while playing games, and then convert the points into money to donate to the "unwanted" dead souls in St. Petersburg.

Just like Old City's points are not valuable, Hongxue's points are not valuable either. The income of the Hongxue Rescue Station is not much, and it relies entirely on the "power generation with love" from well-meaning players, so it will only pay the life-saving money to those dead souls, and will not give them an extra penny other than that. But almost everything in the brain-like body costs money - even passing through a wormhole requires a fee (of course, the wormhole crossing from China to Russia is particularly expensive). The dead soul can only live on in St. Petersburg, unable to do anything but simply live.

But Echiyo seems to be different from such a sad dead soul. At least he has the full ability to communicate with people.

He told Qiu Shou that he was born in the old city of Beijing "before his death", and his grandparents were employees of state-owned enterprises. He bought two houses in time for the privatization of housing, and now he can make a living by collecting rent alone. It's just that his parents were both bastards and died at a young age, leaving him a useless house without a job, collecting rent once a year, and then playing in a brain-like body for a year.

In order to prevent others from disturbing her, Echishi always used her brain-like body in the basement where there was no mobile phone signal. When he died in the real world, his consciousness was fighting zombies in the red snow of St. Petersburg. It is said that he felt that his body was dead, so he never went offline again. But to Qi Min's ears, he was just fooling around and trying to kill himself.