Chapter 1 Joining the Resistance

Feng Bujue didn't stay in that simple cell for too long. Soon, a butch woman with a buzz cut and a lightning bolt-shaped scar on her head came to the cell door, glanced inside, and said,

"Hey! You, you… and you, come out." Lightning Head casually selected three people and motioned for them to come out of the cell.

Given that she and the guards watching the cell all had guns, the inmates naturally had no choice but to obey.

Thus, Feng Bujue and two other prisoners from the search party walked out of the cell in silence.

[Main Quest Triggered]

The system voice sounded the moment he stepped out of the cell door.

Feng Bujue looked at the quest bar, which read: [Join the Resistance].

"Move it, ladies." Looking at the slow-moving prisoners, Lightning Head urged them with the term "ladies," revealing an impatient expression.

"Where are you taking us?" The prisoner walking in front of Feng Bujue straightened his back and asked in a neither servile nor overbearing manner as he approached Lightning Head.

He didn't receive a direct verbal response but was instead struck in the abdomen with the butt of a gun by Lightning Head.

"Ugh…" The blow was obviously not light, and the man immediately bent over, groaning in pain.

"You don't have the right to ask questions, understand?" Lightning Head said two seconds later. "Now, move your ass and walk over there."

Her response was very effective. Although the prisoner who had been hit looked depressed, he had no choice but to continue walking forward to avoid suffering more.

Under her escort, the three passed through an electronic door with a scanning device. On the other side of the door, a resistance soldier was already waiting.

In short, two minutes later, the three quickly passed through several narrow, modified mine tunnels and were eventually pushed into three separate rooms.

"Hmm… an interrogation room…" After entering the room, Feng Bujue saw a table and two stools. The lighting equipment in the room was on both sides of the ceiling, and there was a hemispherical metal device directly above the table, which looked like a wide-angle surveillance camera.

"These guys are pretty carefree…" Jue-ge came to the chair, sat down, and muttered, "Isn't it a bit too trusting not to handcuff the prisoners? If you encounter a die-hard who's willing to risk everything and thinks that killing one is no loss and killing two is a profit, wouldn't the interrogator be in danger?"

Just as he was thinking about this, the door to the room opened.

A man in his thirties with a full beard walked in holding a tablet computer that looked like it was made of scrap metal.

"Hello." The man glanced at Jue-ge slightly after entering the room and then turned around and closed the door. "What's your name?"

He asked the question while walking to the table and sitting down opposite Feng Bujue.

"Feng Bujue," Jue-ge answered the other party's question very simply.

Because the system had previously indicated that his image and language would be processed, he could give his name without worry.

"Oh?" However, the next second, the man raised his eyebrows and revealed a rather surprised expression.

"What's wrong?" Feng Bujue asked in return. "Is there something strange about my name?"

"No… the name isn't strange." The man smiled. "Heh… it's just… generally speaking, prisoners don't give their names so easily."

"Are you saying that I should report a meaningless military number with a blank expression in order to leave you with a tough guy impression?" Feng Bujue replied.

"Haha… you have a good sense of humor, Feng Bujue," the man replied. "It's just… you gave your name so easily…" He paused. "You understand… it's a bit unbelievable."

"Heh…" Feng Bujue also smiled. "Whether it's true or false, it's better than a military number, isn't it?"

"Hmm…" The man stared into Jue-ge's eyes for a few seconds with an experienced look. "Alright, Feng Bujue, I'm Sade. You can call me Sade or Lieutenant."

"What? You're not a full-time interrogator?" Feng Bujue immediately began to probe.

"Hahaha…" Sade laughed. "Buddy… there's no such thing as 'full-time' here. Even the commander sometimes has to do a lot of work that's usually done by lower-level technicians."

"I understand," Feng Bujue nodded.

"So, what did you do 'full-time' before joining the search party, Mr. Feng Bujue?" Sade said, raising his hands and making quotation marks.

"I don't know," Feng Bujue replied.

"Heh… sorry, I don't think I heard you clearly. What did you say?" Sade's expression became a little subtle.

"I don't know. That part of my memory is gone," Feng Bujue replied.

"Gone?" Sade chuckled. "Ha! Are you saying you have amnesia?"

"Alas… if it were just amnesia, that would be easy," Feng Bujue sighed and put on an expression as if he had a story to tell.

"Then tell me… what's the specific situation?" Sade took the bait.

"I…" Feng Bujue's expression straightened, and he replied, "...lost all my memories from before today. Apart from my name, my mind is now filled with facts about Bita rewriting history, and… a lot of information about 'the timeline where video games exist.'"

Sade naturally wouldn't accept this statement at face value. Over the years, Bita had sent robots or human spies to try to infiltrate the resistance army more than once, and the way they got in… either by pretending to believe in the Zhi Yue Zhe (Knowledge Leapers) theory or by simply posing as Zhi Yue Zhe.

"Oh… you mean you're a newly awakened Zhi Yue Zhe?" Sade asked calmly.

"I don't know what 'awakened' means," Feng Bujue's answer was also very shrewd. "I'm just telling you what happened to me."

"Heh…" Sade smiled. "Feng Bujue, I'm also a Zhi Yue Zhe who only awakened after I was twenty years old. Do you know what happened when I awakened?"

"I don't know," Jue-ge replied calmly.

"When 'knowledge fragments from another timeline' poured into my brain, my nose bled like a burst dam," Sade said. "And that was just the beginning… for the next eight or nine hours, I felt like my brain and spine were soaked in magma. I still remember that burning pain. During that time, I couldn't even get out of bed to go to the bathroom…"

"Alright, I understand what you mean," Feng Bujue said. "You're saying that if I awakened today, I should have been sent to the hospital for emergency treatment and wouldn't have been captured by you, right?"

"Hehe… very good, it seems you understand," Sade said. "So… buddy, are you ready to tell the truth now?"

"I'm telling the truth," Feng Bujue said. "I don't know why I didn't experience the symptoms you mentioned when I obtained the knowledge, but I did obtain it."

"Hoo…" Sade let out a long sigh. "Good~ good~" He showed an unpleasant expression. "Since you insist on saying that, then you shouldn't mind if I ask you a few simple questions about the other timeline, right?"

"Ask away." He might not be confident in other areas, but Jue-ge was extremely confident that he could answer any questions about video games fluently.

"Hmph…" Sade snorted coldly upon hearing this.

At this point, Sade had basically concluded that Feng Bujue was lying. However, he didn't think that Jue-ge was a spy.

Perhaps the general public wasn't clear about it, but the Bita army undoubtedly had a lot of information about the Zhi Yue Zhe. Information like "the physiological pain response is relatively mild only when minors under the age of sixteen awaken" was definitely something that people coming to be spies would know.

Therefore, someone who said something with such obvious flaws was definitely not a spy but most likely a cunning veteran trying to muddle through.

"Please…" Since Sade was sure that Jue-ge wasn't a Zhi Yue Zhe, he didn't ask the "simple" questions that he claimed he would ask. Instead, he asked about something that was always controversial even in the other timeline, wanting to deliberately make things difficult for the other party. "...Who is the father of modern video games?"

After he finished speaking, Feng Bujue fell silent.

After ten seconds, seeing that he had no intention of speaking at all, Sade said in a sarcastic tone, "What's wrong? Did you lose your memory again?"

"No, I'm just curious whether you understand or accept it after I give the answer," Feng Bujue continued. "The question of who is the 'father of modern video games' has always been controversial. Some say it should be Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, who developed the world's first commercial coin-operated game machine… the so-called arcade game; he also developed *Pong* and founded Atari.

"Some also believe it should be Ralph H. Baer, because he developed the first home console that could be connected to a television, the Magnavox Odyssey. Although that thing could only create a few light spots of different sizes on the television and needed to be used with a bunch of stickers and things similar to board game accessories to run, it was indeed the 'first video game console in history.'

"Pushing further back, as early as 1962, in a small laboratory at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Steve Russell had already developed *Spacewar!* on a PDP-1 (the world's first computer with a visual display). Even Nolan Bushnell himself admitted that he stood on Russell's shoulders to achieve his later success.

"In addition, some people think that Miyamoto Shigeru (I feel like only this person doesn't need much introduction) is the real creator of the video game industry. After all, Atari had that incident in '83… which, in a sense, knocked down the dynasty that it had built.

"There are also people who think that John Carmack (the father of first-person shooting games, best known for Doom) should be the one to bear this title, but I think that's a bit far-fetched.

"In short, in my personal opinion, the title or honor of 'father of modern video games' should not belong to one person. All of the people mentioned above together achieved the birth and development of video games; they each played an important and irreplaceable role in every link from concept to technology to innovation and commercialization… Even if many people think… some earlier technologies 'can't be called games at all,' there would be no later progress without the foundation laid by those pioneers.

"Therefore, when you asked me this question, I didn't answer you without thinking. Instead, I was thinking… what would your reaction be after I finished answering."

At this moment, Sade's expression was naturally very interesting.

In fact, Sade's expression had already begun to change when Feng Bujue was talking about the second paragraph, and as Jue-ge said more and more, to the point where the content had exceeded Sade's own knowledge, the latter even became a little panicked.

"You…" After a full ten seconds, Sade spoke again. "...You sit here for a while, I'll be back in a bit…"

After stuttering out these words, Sade stood up and ran to the door, shouting outwards, "Guard, open the door!"

Seconds later, the door opened, Sade turned his head, gave Jue-ge a complicated look, and then fled the room as if he were running away.

"Hmm…" After the interrogation room door was closed again, Feng Bujue said leisurely, "Looks like he went to report to his superiors…"

His guess was correct. As soon as Sade left the interrogation room, he rushed straight to the base's command center and reported to the base's head with a state of panic as if "he'd forgotten to turn off the gas at home."

This process didn't last too long, because the interrogation room was equipped with a camera. Sade only needed to pull up the recording of the conversation just now and show it to his superior, and he wouldn't need to explain too much.

Thus, about fifteen minutes later, that "Lightning Head" led two soldiers and opened the door to Jue-ge's interrogation room again, escorting him out…

In this scenario, Feng Bujue's abilities were not restricted, which meant that… if he wanted to resist with force, he could destroy this base. However, for the sake of the main quest, Jue-ge still cooperated very well with being hooded and, with shoves along the way, walked to the base's command center.

When the hood was removed, a woman who looked like she was only in her twenties appeared in front of Feng Bujue, wearing clothes that were not much different from those of ordinary soldiers (anyway, it was the North Star Divine Fist mook outfit).

"Hello, I'm Colonel Conrad." The colonel greeted Feng Bujue briefly and powerfully.

Feng Bujue didn't respond to her immediately but instead looked around at the surroundings.

At this moment, Jue-ge was standing in a place similar to an office. Behind him stood a total of four guards. In addition to Lightning Head, who had helped him take off his hood, the other three were very vigilantly pointing a strangely shaped device at him.

"Hello, my name is…" Two seconds later, Feng Bujue was just about to respond to the colonel.

But the colonel interrupted him and said a string of somewhat inexplicable words: "df, An, Qhgh, poL…"