The Most Popular Type of Dungeon

Actually.

Lu Xiu had initially wanted to enter Resident Evil 7, but after thinking it over, she deleted the "7."

There were no previous installments here, so writing it would have been meaningless.

As for the rating, after some hesitation, she entered C-rank. Nothing too high or too low.

The ticket price would be 200 Survival Points.

The genres were horror, stealth, and survival.

[Dungeon Name: Resident Evil]

[Self-Rating: C-rank]

[Ticket Price: 200 Survival Points]

[Genres: Horror/Stealth/Survival]

[Dungeon Theme: Ordinary Person's Courage—Players will take on the role of an ordinary person. When faced with the Baker Family's extreme terror, physical torment, and inhuman monsters, they must demonstrate psychological resilience and a will to survive beyond that of ordinary people. The reason the player is willing to enter this den of evil alone is simply to find his wife, who has been missing for three years.

This conviction is the source of the player's strength against fear.

It is also the courage of an ordinary person facing fear for love.]

Not long ago, when Lu Xiu had sat by the river pondering how she was supposed to survive, she had noticed the profession known as a dungeon architect.

At that moment, she had already decided what kind of dungeon she would create.

Although the original owner of this body had been shy and reclusive, she still had a certain understanding of this datafied world.

After all, she had not literally never gone outside.

The girl still clearly remembered what society had been like when this catastrophe began four years ago.

One word could describe it—extreme.

After all, the Survival Points everyone received when they were first datafied had been converted from their remaining lifespan.

A forty-year-old middle-aged person, even if they only had twenty years left to live, would still have over 7,000 Survival Points.

Not to mention young people.

Everyone had tens of thousands of Survival Points. The entire world had effectively undergone an epic-scale currency overissue, and more importantly, the system shop could buy practically anything.

That made many people believe that Survival Points, or rather lifespan, were renewable. As long as they kept clearing dungeons, they could keep living it up.

And so.

A huge number of high-risk challenges became popular, and society as a whole began becoming increasingly extreme.

Ordinary people began rushing into dungeons like mad, trying out countless user-created dungeons, spending their lifespans on items from the shop, or simply gambling on probability...

I've got over twenty thousand Survival Points. What am I afraid of?

Everyone thought that way. Many even saw it as their chance to turn their lives around. After all, the shop could buy anything, and everyone's chips seemed about the same.

But if resources were unlimited, would there be no gap between rich and poor?

Were everyone's chips really about the same?

...Not even close.

Dungeon clear rates, decision-making ability, appetite for risk, intelligence, courage, information gaps... all of it still created disparities. The strong only grew stronger, while the losers sank deeper and deeper until they died.

Before long, society had turned directly into an intensified form of Darwinism.

No one was an ordinary person anymore.

All humanity had been forced to become professional players.

Either grow, or be eliminated.

And the latter clearly made up far more people.

Perhaps that had been the god's purpose.

But it was truly awful... because the shop supplied goods without limit, the only things that were genuinely scarce were Survival Points themselves and personal ability.

The overall strength of the human race had risen rapidly.

But that, in turn, forced game difficulty to increase exponentially. Otherwise, dungeons would have been farmed into the ground.

During that time, how many "weak" people had silently died after exhausting their Survival Points?

No one had ever counted.

This extreme atmosphere lasted neither too long nor too briefly. Only after the death toll became unimaginable, and the authorities had recovered enough to act, did things slowly begin to change.

Fortunately, the nation's real-world production system had not been completely abandoned during the early days of extreme chaos.

There had always been clear-headed people.

As state authority was rebuilt, real-world production resumed. Factories, logistics, agriculture...

The weak were given a way to survive, and only then did society's atmosphere finally return, albeit reluctantly, to the right track.

Along with it, the players—or rather, the public—regained their rationality.

Most ordinary people finally no longer dared to blindly take on high-risk challenges.

The main reason was that after so many years, most people had nearly exhausted their Survival Points... Tickets for high-difficulty dungeons now cost thousands of Survival Points, while their clear rates remained extremely low. For most ordinary people, entering such dungeons was practically just throwing away Survival Points.

So now, very few reckless fools dared to enter high-difficulty dungeons directly.

The type of dungeon most popular among ordinary people now was one that could be tackled alone, cleared through endurance or evasion, and had the highest success rate: stealth-survival dungeons. The [Lone Ranger] dungeon was a typical example.

As Lu Xiu sat by the river and considered the two keywords, stealth and survival, the first thing that came to mind was Resident Evil 7.

The game praised for bringing the Resident Evil series back to the roots of survival horror.

The main reason she chose this game was that Lu Xiu lacked confidence. She had no idea what dungeons in this inexplicable world were actually like.

She did not want to keep barely getting by on advertisements. If she wanted to earn Survival Points quickly and draw attention, she could only choose a subject that provoked human emotions most effectively: horror games.

At the very least, she personally felt it would generate some discussion.

Although Resident Evil 7 had its share of regrets overall, the terror it delivered was genuinely comparable to the peak of the Resident Evil series. Its horror atmosphere was exceptionally well-crafted, and while playing hide-and-seek with powerful enemies, both body and mind remained tense almost the entire time.

Every scare could make a person's heart stop.

More importantly, it was a game born alongside the VR boom, and Lu Xiu had, by pure coincidence... played the VR version.

Lu Xiu believed that her experience playing the game in VR, the experience of truly being immersed in terror, should help her construct a sufficiently immersive dungeon.

That would increase her chances of receiving the dungeon architect's exclusive reward.

The secondary reason was this.

The game's protagonist—Ethan Winters.

Lu Xiu liked this character very much. Unlike the other superhuman protagonists of Resident Evil, this "ordinary person" had given her a certain emotional impact through his experiences in the seventh installment and his ending in the eighth.

He carried the desire to save his wife and daughter in his heart.

Though afraid, uneasy, and terrified, he still pressed forward without hesitation. In the end, his love for his family continued to shine brilliantly, even through the shadow of death.

The world was different now, but Lu Xiu believed emotional impact was universal.

And emotional impact was also a key point of dungeons.

Reality had been gamified for four years, and much experience had already been summarized. One of those conclusions concerned emotions.

Rumor had it that most players who obtained skills or items in dungeons... had experienced intense emotional highs and lows within them, or had been moved by the plot during the course of the dungeon.

Simply put, they had become immersed in it.

Therefore, high-ranking players generally believed that as long as a dungeon itself was good enough and one's sense of immersion was high enough, clearing it would usually yield some skills or items. At worst, there would be Attribute Point rewards.

The prompt in the theme field had been so solemn precisely because it supported that theory.

And Resident Evil 7... should have a sufficiently high sense of immersion.

At least, Lu Xiu thought it did.

What if it really could grant players who cleared the dungeon certain skills? Even if they were not particularly powerful, they should still help promote her dungeon.

After all, the term user-created dungeon came with its own debuff.

It truly needed a selling point.

Of course, she would only know the specifics after actually constructing the dungeon.

"I hope it won't be too troublesome. I don't have much time left."

Lu Xiu glanced at her Survival Points, her delicate brows knitting slightly, then clicked submit and sent the dungeon's basic information to the system.

The moment she submitted it, a new window popped up.

[Would you like to enter the construction space?]

[Yes]

Lu Xiu's figure vanished instantly.