Editing .Hack//ZERO ME:1070 (section)

==ME:1070==

I once saw a documentary on TV about a child with a disease called paresthesia.

Since the disease numbed a person’s senses, I thought that must mean they could endure any kind of pain or suffering, no matter how severe. But because children with this illness wouldn’t even notice their own injuries, as living beings, they were actually much weaker than normal people.

Their wounds healed much slower because they don’t feel the pain and sometimes leave the injury untreated. And sometimes, by the time they do notice, it would already be too late.

It was a strange, slow, but deadly disease.

But in a room covered in urethane and Styrofoam, one of these children was playing happily. He was running around throwing a ball while his fingers and forehead were covered in bandages.

The smile on his face was genuine, but I couldn’t tell if that was because of his lack of pain or in spite of it.

I’m sure I must have been smiling as I watched him on the documentary, too, though I doubt anyone would have been able to tell.

Once more, I dove down into '''The World'''. No, it was more like I was falling into it.

To a world that was neither fun nor pleasant.

But this time, I didn’t experience the headaches that usually plague me here.

Instead, everything seemed indistinct around me. The feeling in my fingertips and the scenery in front of me all felt very far away from me now.

I walked into Mac Anu with a vague sense of unease in my heart.

The babbling of the canal was the same as always, but there were more people than usual. As I stood on the cobblestones, PCs passed me by one after the other.

They each wore a different outfit and held different weapons. They had different faces, hairstyles, and were all dyed a variety of colors.

I suddenly realized that there were far more than just the twenty options from character creation. Even if they looked similar, there were as many designs as there were players.

Dozen or even hundreds of players controlled the crowd that was moving in the background.

People in their rooms or Internet Cafés, wearing FMDs and holding controllers.

I felt a sting of bitterness rise in my throat. I realized that each of the PCs were connected to their players through a cable – like babies to an umbilical cord.

Every PC had at least one living person attached to it.

And each of those people had a face, a name, and could feel pain.

I smelled a phantom odor.

The smell of freshly sliced meat, of white kettle corn, and of eggs floating in a pot. Those scents all hit me along with the steam of the city. It was the smell of things baking, frying, and boiling.

I turned my back on the city and ran to the Chaos Gate.

I needed to be alone.

I needed a place where I could hide.

A place where no one could find me. To the deepest depths of the net. ''<To Hidden Forbidden Holy Ground>''.

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