Chapter 2
Chapter 2: Taking on the Avatar Operator Role
The River of Oblivion stretched to the horizon. Blackwater lay slick as oil.
Cliffs rose on both banks, jagged teeth biting into the clouds. High above, a ruined suspension bridge swayed in the wind, and a tiny black dot crept across it—Song Wei Chen, squinting against the gale, too focused on keeping her footing to spare a glance for the abyss below.
On the surface of Blackwater, a soul-bearing boat drifted alone, hovering three feet above the current. At the bow stood a slender White Robe envoy, head tucked beneath a hood, face and gender hidden. One sleeve covered their hand as they held a bone lantern that glimmered with a pale, tooth-like sheen. They stared out at the endless black sea without moving.
Behind White Robe, a young woman curled at the stern, sobbing.
“My lord, my child is still young. At home, his concubine mother makes life hard. If I’m gone… he won’t survive.”
“My lord, please… give me three more days in the living world. Let me settle my son. After that, even if I’m doomed forever, I’ll follow you. Please.”
She dropped to her knees and knocked her forehead to the wood, desperate and feverish with hope.
A wind chime rang somewhere, its notes steady and bright.
The woman started to lift her head—then, out of thin air, a finger appeared and tapped twice.
Aside from the chime, everything froze.
On the other side of an iPad screen, a young woman in her early twenties yawned so wide her eyes watered. On-screen, the kneeling woman was suspended mid-kowtow, and the video site’s “Exclusive” label glared in the corner.
It was a drama.
The young woman lay crooked on her bed, eyelids heavy. She checked the time—14:30—and silenced the phone alarm blaring beside her. The chime cut off at once. She stretched until her back cracked.
“What is this? Did I turn on the iPad before I fell asleep?”
Song Wei Chen felt slow and hazy. She didn’t remember watching anything. She only remembered dreaming something long and vivid—so vivid it left a lingering sensation, light as a feather, in her body.
She closed her eyes, trying to chase the memory.
A tall silhouette. Broad shoulders. He was—
Her phone alarm went off again.
14:35.
Annoyance snapped the fragile thread. Song Wei Chen grabbed her phone and canceled all the five-minute interval alarms in one sweep.
She hadn’t even gotten a good look at the dream-guy’s face. What a loss.
She checked the wall clock, exhaled, and climbed off the sofa bed. The iPad sat in front of her, frozen on a paused frame. She closed it and wandered to the sink, rubbing at her messy long hair.
Her body clock ran opposite to most people’s. Others worked by day and slept by night.
She slept at dawn and worked after sunset—night after night, putting on a smile and keeping company with strangers through the long dark.
Don’t get the wrong idea.
She worked for an entertainment company called RealSoul, as an avatar operator.
RealSoul managed the country’s most popular virtual idols: singers, dancers, fashion and beauty creators, parenting channels, and emotional-companionship streams. Song Wei Chen belonged to the last type. Every night she went live at a fixed time, stepping into the company’s huge studio, strapping on motion-capture gear, and becoming the virtual idol “Shi Meng.”
An avatar operator—if you put it nicely—was the “soul” of a Vtuber. The person inside the “skin,” the pulse that made strangers feel seen.
If you put it bluntly, it was a shadow job. A real human lending warmth through an unreal body—fake wearing the shape of real, the real kept invisible.
Song Wei Chen didn’t mind.
She liked the work. It made her feel like an old-story puppeteer: giving voice and movement to a figure, threading a tale through the dark, offering people a gentle dream.
And maybe, in this world, dreams were stronger than reality.
She said as much in the makeup room, leaning toward the mirror while she worked eyeliner into place. Chen Liang, a famous parenting streamer, sat nearby to observe her live process.
Chen Liang watched her wrestle with false lashes—clumsy but stubborn—and frowned. “Wei Wei, you’re this pretty. Why are you an avatar operator?”
“Debut right now,” she added. “Leave us old aunties a way to live, okay?”
“Sister Liang,” Song Wei Chen said, smiling, “that mouth is too sweet. You’ll get cavities.”
She fixed the other lash with careful fingers.
Chen Liang was twenty-seven. She used to be an actress. In her words, she “waited until she was washed up and still couldn’t make it.” She couldn’t even land extra work playing someone’s mother. So she turned to livestreaming to sell products—“like the Tathagata,” as she joked.
Somehow, the woman who wanted a child but couldn’t have one became the top virtual streamer in the parenting lane, a sales monster.
The strangest part was how humble she stayed. She enjoyed watching other streamers in the company whenever she had time.
“Seriously…” Chen Liang studied Song Wei Chen for a moment, then spoke slowly. “I’ve watched your streams at least ten times, and I still don’t get it. Why do you always do such full, formal makeup? We’re all inside the suit. The fans can’t see us anyway.”
Song Wei Chen looked at her reflection. “Self-suggestion is a weird thing. I know fans can’t see the real me. Even if I streamed in pajamas, it’d be fine.”
She dabbed powder lightly, then met Chen Liang’s eyes through the mirror.
“But pajamas give me a closed suggestion—I’m messy, I’m hiding, I don’t want to face people. Full makeup gives me the opposite. Open. Present. Ready.”
She smiled faintly, as if at herself. “That suggestion hits me first. It changes how I think, how I speak, how I move. And then it passes through the AI face on-screen to the fans.”
“They can’t see our bodies, but they can feel our spirit. And that changes the dreams we make. It really does.”
Silence landed like a dropped curtain.
Chen Liang stared, thoughtful.
Song Wei Chen realized she’d started preaching and immediately regretted it. No one liked a junior colleague lecturing them.
She blinked hard and tried to soften it. “Sister Liang, I got dramatic… I mean, I got out of line.”
Chen Liang laughed. “No, no. People with brains are different. No wonder you’re popular. Your fan count rises faster than ours.”
She jabbed a finger at her. “Tomorrow I’m doing full makeup too.”
21:00.
Finger after finger tapped hearts on phone screens. In the live room, the popularity counter climbed.
On-screen, a cute anime girl with a mysterious edge toyed with a virtual moon. As it spun, she spoke.
“I’m Shi Meng. We meet again.”
“I am the embodiment of the Dream Tapir spirit. I feed on dreams. I eat nightmares so sweet dreams can become even sweeter.”
“With me by your side tonight, what you will have is only sweet dreams.”
The voice belonged to Song Wei Chen.
She stood in the studio wearing full-body motion-capture gear. Her movements matched the avatar so closely that the line between them blurred. For a moment, it was hard to tell which one was more real.
She glanced at the teleprompter. “As usual, we’ll start with the fan dream-sharing segment. Let’s hear from a friend called ‘Chang Xiang Si.’”
Nobody knows I can see ghosts. Not even my fiancée who died seven years ago.
As usual, I brought flowers to her grave on the weekend.
Sure enough, she was still there, like she had been waiting.
I stood by the tombstone and rambled about work and life. When I got excited, I waved my arms around. If anyone saw me, they’d think I was sick.
But I knew she heard every word.
She died because of my drunk driving. Watching her still laugh at little things, the way she used to, I felt dizzy. She was still as beautiful as she was seven years ago, but my hair was already half white.
I stopped talking. She squatted across from me and watched while I fed paper money into the brazier. I brought a lot. It burned for a long time and still didn’t run out.
After a long silence, I said, “I won’t come anymore.”
She looked even more lost.
I took out a little red booklet. Inside was a photo of me and another woman—white shirts, a bright red backdrop.
I burned it for her. “This is my wife. We just got our certificate. You said men should be faithful, so I won’t come anymore. You should go find a good home too.”
Ashes flew. Wind cut. Fire snapped.
Ghosts can’t cry. She only covered her face and crouched low, her shoulders shaking.
In the end, she stood up and smiled at me, and she faded a little, turning transparent.
“Hey. It’s the end. At least curse me.”
She vanished.
My sweet dream woke for good.
Old people say if a ghost doesn’t reincarnate within seven years, it will never be reborn. It will fall forever into the ghost path.
You didn’t leave. Was it because I kept coming?
I’m sorry. The photo was generated by ChatGPT, and I paid someone to make a fake certificate.
Actually, I made one for the two of us too. I couldn’t bear to burn it for you. Let me keep it, just as something to remember you by.
Song Wei Chen was the kind of person who felt other people’s pain too easily. She couldn’t finish reading. Her throat burned with the effort of holding herself together, and for a moment she couldn’t speak.
The fans seemed to sense it through Shi Meng’s stillness. The chat exploded with “Shi Meng, don’t cry,” so fast it looked like a snowfall. It even trended.
[They can’t motion-capture tears,] she thought bitterly. [How do they know?]
She took a breath. “Sorry. I lost control.”
Then her voice steadied. “Shi Meng has two gifts: devouring nightmares, and crafting sweet dreams.”
“Chang Xiang Si, I don’t like your dream.”
“So Shi Meng will eat it.”
“And in return—may you and the one you love end up together. May your sweet dream never wake.”
“End up together, sweet dream never wake” flooded the screen again.
Someone typed, “Shi Meng deserves to be enshrined in the grand temple!”
A new wave of spam followed, joyful and loud.
The studio’s mood was bright. Everyone was riding the high.
No one noticed the eyes in the corner fixed on Song Wei Chen—eyes lit by jealousy, like fire smoldering under charcoal.
Those eyes belonged to Chen Liang.
The studio lighting was hot and harsh. Condensation beaded on Chen Liang’s plastic cup of iced coffee, slicking her fingers.
She set the cup down on a hollow wrought-iron shelf beside her with a sharp, irritated motion and flicked the water from her hand.
A few drops landed in the sockets of the power strip below.
The lights popped with a brief flare.
People jolted, confused. Even the avatar froze.
“Did it lag?”
“Did Shi Meng bug out?”
The viewer count dipped. The director’s steady voice came through Song Wei Chen’s earpiece, and the stream recovered.
Chen Liang curled her mouth into a thin smile and casually nudged her cup to a spot directly above the power strip, as if by accident, as if it didn’t matter.
Water continued to gather at the cup’s base.
Then she walked away, still calm, pulling out her phone and typing as she crossed to the other side of the studio.
In the chat, amid the flood, one message stood out:
Nan Ke: Shi Meng, you act so fake-sweet all the time, saying you can eat people’s nightmares. Will you get karma and fall into one, never able to crawl out?
The second the message appeared, the lights flickered again—once, twice—then steadied.
For no reason at all, Song Wei Chen felt that old sensation again: light, drifting, weightless.
“Voltage fluctuation,” the director said in her ear. “Don’t get distracted.”
Song Wei Chen forced her focus back.
“What someone goes through makes them who they become,” she said softly. “Nan Ke, I don’t know what you’ve been through.”
“But I think it must hurt—because you don’t even want to dream.”
Shi Meng looked down at herself, then back up. “Everyone knows Shi Meng is fake. And the Dream Tapir powers are fake.”
“But everything we feel here, and every wish made here—that part is real.”
The studio lights flickered again. The condensation under the iced coffee cup had grown heavy, and drops were starting to fall through the shelf toward the power strip.
From afar, Chen Liang glanced at the spot she’d left. Her smile widened. She even gave Song Wei Chen an encouraging look.
Drip.
A drop splashed onto the power strip.
Drip.
Another landed at the edge of a socket.
If nothing went wrong, something was about to.
“Do people who come here really believe Shi Meng will make them a sweet dream?” Song Wei Chen continued, voice gentle. “I don’t think so.”
“I think they want to say it out loud—so they have the courage to chase that dream, or fight that nightmare.”
She smiled, then put a little sharpness into her tone, playful on the surface. “But Nan Ke—this young lady is a little mad. If your words scare me into having nightmares tonight, I’m dragging you with me.”
“I—”
Drip.
Pop!
A spark burst. The whole studio dropped into darkness.
It was strange—without the lights, darkness gained weight, pressing down until it was hard to breathe.
Song Wei Chen stood in blackness so complete it felt solid. She tried to tell herself it was just a blackout, but something was wrong.
Where were the voices? Where was the shouting, the scrambling, the chaos?
Wind roared around her, as if she were standing somewhere impossibly high.
She took two careful steps. The ground—no, the bridge—swayed. Her body couldn’t find balance.
And then she heard it: the creak of old boards.
In an instant, she knew.
She was on a ruined suspension bridge again.
Bad luck—or something worse—put her foot on the weakest plank.
Wood cracked with a sickening snap.
The bridge broke.
And Song Wei Chen plunged into a bottomless abyss.