Four Split Personalities

December 31, 2048

Motan dragged his weary body home to watch several men move a huge rectangular cardboard box into his living room, where they busily worked for half an hour.

During this process, he just sat quietly on his not-so-spacious sofa, watching the employees of ’Innocence’, the company whose flag they carried, diligently at work.

Their task was to assemble the company’s first psycho-simulative product - a special game cabin for ’World of Innocence’.

Upon completion of the assembly, Motan politely send off the sweating workers, then turned around and takes a seat on the expensive, spacious, and hard-earned device. He absentmindedly tapped on the shiny black shell of the cabin, then wore an unreadable grin.

Clearly, Motan was not a normal man. In fact, he was far from normal...

Multiple Personality disorder was a rare condition in any era, with no effective treatment. Its legendary symptoms have been used as gimmicks and selling points in countless films, novels and other works of art. They tend to sell well as long as they aren’t too shoddy.

By now you must understand that 21-year-old Motan is such a multiple personality patient. The reason why he can still prepare to play the latest virtual network game on the market at home, rather than whispering to mirrors in a mental hospital, is mainly due to two factors.

First: The diagnosis was his own judgement, made when he was thirteen through extensive research and self-reflection.

Second: He was very clever. Despite having such a unique and difficult to control disease, Motan was able to conceal it well enough that no one noticed anything strange about him. The extent of his intelligence can be inferred from the previous point.

On an additional note, the information that Motan studied was not basic knowledge that you can easily search for on a smartphone, but was exclusive data held by major medical institutions both domestic and abroad. For a more comprehensive understanding of various cases, he had even breached the police database multiple times.

And yet, he has never been arrested.

Well, it’s a long story...

Rather than introducing him at length here, I prefer to explore his situation slowly in the following story. So let’s get back to the story...

[Do you want to try living differently? Here you can have the most authentic self!]

Motan repeated the game cabin cover’s slogan and chuckled cynically: "Why did I, an impecunious and skeptical patient with mental illness, actually end up buying you?"

As he rose from his seat, he stretched a bit, mumbling to himself: "Let’s begin the experiment. If what the officials said wasn’t exaggerated, we’ll find out as soon as we start..."

With that, he opened the game cabin but didn’t immediately crawl inside. Instead, he closed his eyes and began to breathe deeply.

After a while, Motan’s demeanor transformed into gentleness and tranquility, a stark contrast from his previous rebellious aura. It was a drastic change that would make anyone realise... this guy had split.

Indeed, Motan’s personality had indeed changed, but this personality was a bit special. It could be considered a desperate attempt at self-therapy after giving up on professional treatment. It became his dominant personality that he would use for most occasions.

He then laid down inside the game cabin and set the sleep and wake times. He changed the AI voice to a gentle and soothing female tone, and closed his eyes.

...

[Your mental connection has been detected, synchronizing personal information...]

[World of Innocence is open to you, character creation process will begin shortly...]

After a brief period of light sleep, Motan found himself standing on a platform adorned with numerous patterns, surrounded by void. Countless colorful, resplendent patterns flashed in the void. Within a short observation period, he found many familiar constellations, plants, human silhouettes, as well as unprecedented geometric diagrams, phantom beasts, and so on...

"Hmm, it’s very realistic," he murmured, evaluating the space and his physical feelings, "It said ’the character creation process will begin shortly’, not ’please create character’, so it’s really as I expected..."

As he finished speaking, nine differently colored spots suddenly emerged from the void. Accompanied by a resonating howl, they grew larger. By the time Motan reacted, towering monumental doors had materialized around him.

"Er?" Motan, who had not heard any system prompts, paused. As he looked around, he mused: "Am I supposed to choose one to go through myself? If that’s the case, how is this any different from choosing actively?"

The reason he asked this was because he saw four vastly evident characters etched on each door, each emitting unique auras of their own...