After some thought, I decided I should at least reach two to the seventh power. Today, let us discuss a subject that has been brewing in my head for quite a while: the emotional aftershock a story leaves behind.

The immediate cause was the 3.1 story update for Wuthering Waves, which genuinely stunned me. Its excellent script carries traces of predecessors such as Interstellar and Steins;Gate, yet still tells a good story rooted in the world of Solaris. Although, for now, it ends badly. It takes the literature of regret tentatively explored in 2.5 and brings it to full maturity, successfully stabbing another large crowd of players, myself included.

That night, I had only just reached the music-club sequence when my roommate went to bed. Since I had no early class the next morning, I decided to finish the story before sleeping. I also thought I was nearly done. The furious sequence of developments that followed transformed the next few hours into a quantum superposition: eyes closed in bed, thoughts racing wildly; eyes open, frantically scrolling through fan creations on Bilibili. Naturally, my schoolwork the following day remained entirely unaffected. (

It is interesting that, for me at least, this feeling is not new. I loved stories and books from childhood, so many plots moved me enormously—or, put differently, inflicted enormous damage on my young heart. Back then, I had neither fan creations nor nearby friends who shared the interest and could help carry the sadness. Instead it became that lingering “aftershock,” leaving me to turn the story over in my mind for ages.

The most memorable instance—strangely enough—came after I watched a story-driven Minecraft music video by the YouTube animator Rainimator. I was deeply moved by the protagonist’s struggle within its sweeping narrative. I seem to have made peace with it later by weaving the story into tales I told my younger brother. Whether the tiny child, even younger than I was, understood any of it did not matter. I enjoyed telling it, and that was enough.

Novels such as Charlie IX and The Kingdom of Dragons and Cats also contain plenty of scenes that left little me tossing and turning at night. I mean that as praise—although in the former case, partly as criticism too. The Ghost Train remained a childhood nightmare for a very long time.

The same applies to several PG-13 films Dad took me to as a child because he had free tickets. China really could use a film-rating system. Moon River, which the cinema often played at the time, became naturally linked in my mind with scenes from those thrillers. Hmm… I vaguely remember Final Fantasy and Assassin’s Creed. Wait, why are they all named after games?

That association was gradually washed away when I later read the Memory Angel, Moon City, and Sun City trilogy, because Moon River was also the heroine’s favorite song. Teng Xiu Yin really does tell wonderful stories. Wait, what do you mean she is from Selangor, Malaysia?

Oh, right. The aftershock from finishing those three books was no small thing either. Despite possessing not a single artistic cell, I was suddenly inspired to spend ages copying the illustrations, hoping to preserve some impression that would probably make my future self cringe so hard he wanted to disappear into the earth. (There is today’s long sentence.) Fortunately, I succeeded.

Perhaps children simply enter the roles in books, stories, and films more easily. As I gradually grew older, moments like these became fewer and farther between.

I remember seeing a classmate playing some game during chemistry class. Were our chemistry lessons really that relaxed? Somehow puzzles and games appeared there constantly. I casually asked, “Has this game become popular recently?” and immediately received an emphatic recommendation for The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty.

Later, when it reached its historical lowest price, I proudly became the first among my classmates to invest in a legitimate copy. Yes, the friend playing it at the time had pirated it. Every morning I rose early and happily slacked off in the piano room, safely outside the security camera’s blind spot. I finished the story on the morning of the Mid-Autumn Festival holiday, September 16, 2024. I remember the date so precisely because, after reaching the true ending, I scoured the internet for fan creations and saved image after image. Apple Photos recorded it all like a chronicle of the ages. (

Without spoilers, all I can say is that I sincerely love the game from my own perspective. I often see people online complain that Hanser’s voice acting lacks emotional immersion. My answer is simply that everyone experiences it differently. I am sure some friends on my WeChat feed have far more authority on visual novels, so I will not parade my tiny axe before the experts. The purpose of this series is to record my own experience, after all.

Finally, let us return to the subject. After all those examples, I imagine the reader now has a rough outline of this abstract feeling. For me, the aftershock comes fundamentally from the unexpected.

As a child, I knew fewer narrative formulas. The first time I encountered a closed loop of cause and effect, I was inevitably overwhelmed; horror films worked the same way. The rise of the internet has turned countless concepts into recognizable symbols, indirectly encouraging more innovation. Whenever one genre attracts traffic, imitators naturally multiply beyond counting. A few may write beautifully, but they remain the minority. After enough repetition, we as viewers become desensitized. The clearest example may be the “transported to another world” genre.

Once these formulas are named and summarized, they also tell ambitious creators that “this road is closed,” forcing them to innovate further. Thus anti-tropes appear—and then become new tropes themselves.

For example, I am particularly vulnerable to the tear-jerking power of “everyone unites as one,” so I favor ensemble narratives. But after seeing enough of them, I can usually tell myself, “Ah, this must be where the emotional speech begins.”

Then I discover it is the Song of Guan Yu, and inner peace returns.

After all these words, I am really only sharing my own thoughts on the subject. I do not believe human creativity can be replaced by AI. Inevitably, many future works will still leave me with that emotional aftershock. When they do, I hope I can set these rational analyses aside for a while, recover the childhood curiosity that greeted everything as new, step into the story—and simply enjoy it.