“God, Liumei, you sound like an old person.” Feng scrunched his forehead at the pulsating energy radiating across the sky on his phone. “Yes, it is the Floraverse, AR mode.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, look.” Feng angled his phone toward his aunt, energy still shooting up from behind the trees like a volcano. “AR is a layer on top of the real world. Augmented Reality.” As he turned his phone back and forth in front of Liumei it revealed different parts of the hidden landscape all around her. “Now look at this,” Feng said, swiping to another window to reveal his ’Versona, hard at work at Clan:LESS HQ. “This is the Spirit World. It’s not tied to any real-world locations. Total Virtual Reality. VR. Only real gamers get into this one.”

“So which one is the Floraverse?”

“Both. You start in AR and then progress to the Spirit World, but they’re both within the Floraverse. You take your skin and money and experience points from AR into the Spirit World.” Feng opened a chat window on his phone. He began typing a message to the other members of Clan:LESS but soon thought better of it, given what Liumei had just said about getting into trouble online. His clanmates were hardcore. His aunt wouldn’t understand.

“So which came first?”

“The AR came first.” Feng shifted. Suddenly his face lit up and he spoke more quickly. “To be honest, I don’t know how adults can stand life without an AR layer on top. It’s so boring without it.”

“You sound like an addict.”

Feng betrayed no hint that he knew what she meant.

“What’s the point of the game?” she asked.

Feng paused. “What’s the point of life?”

At this his aunt smirked. “To live to the fullest. To celebrate and work and meet wonderful people and love and laugh.”

Feng blinked slowly at Liumei before resuming his rapid speech. “Anyway, the AR world is like a filter to make yourself look better, or whatever, and make the world around you more fun. But VR is where the missions and clans and a never-ending universe of possibilities takes place.”

Feng tried to stop there, to remain silent, but he couldn’t. His passion for the subject overtook him. “The ’Verse started as open-source. Hackers built it ages ago after the governments took over social media. Way back, during the pandemics.”

“Hey! That wasn’t that long ago. The pandemics are the reason I studied medicine.”

Feng sighed. “Anyways, after all that super-ancient history”—he paused to let his gentle insult land—“hackers built an AR platform that no one could take over.”

“Everything got so fragmented back then.” Feng’s aunt shook her head. “I can see why they wanted a new platform. Pretty smart.”