What lay before them was undoubtedly a punishment instance.
If they still failed to complete the main quest in a punishment instance, the difficulty would no longer keep decreasing. The next instance would be Hell difficulty.
No normal Dreamer would do something so thankless and exhausting.
But there was another abnormality here: White Hair's talent, which forcibly raised him by one rank, had transformed after the final battle. It had become capable of forcibly expanding his upper limit by one rank.
After the final battle ended, his Dream Lock had already reached the fifth layer. Then he forcibly expanded his upper limit by another rank. Since the power of his talent was not limitless, he could only come infinitely close to becoming a Transcendent—but against instances at their current level, that was already a dimensionality-reduction strike. They just had to charge in and be done with it.
In truth, they knew that using this half-assed method made it unlikely they would be matched with an instance containing a resurrection point. But there was always a sliver of a chance.
More importantly, their plan was to use this *** to force the Space into fixing its previous bug. Like when a bug appeared and the developers refused to patch it, so the players went on a rampage to force their hand.
And if they activated the Transcendence Quest, the Space would restart. Everything that had ever happened would be reset, and the backup data of their companions would be destroyed as well.
In short, this had now evolved into a tug-of-war. It all came down to who gave out first, realized their mistake, and corrected it.
The Dream Space was indeed immensely powerful, but it was not infinitely powerful. Otherwise, it would not restart after every cycle.
Restarting was itself like