Flow

The next three days.

Lu Xiu never left the house, pouring nearly all her energy into constructing the instance dungeon.

Fortunately, the fridge held about a week's worth of groceries. Otherwise, given her remaining Survival Points... the chances of starving to death in her own home would have been pretty high.

Groceries aside, the aftereffects of transmigration did not seem to have fully eased.

Everything else was fine... well, not really.

But Lu Xiu could barely overcome those issues. Though they caused one problem after another, at least they would not hurt her.

Cooking, however, was another matter.

Lu Xiu had never known how to cook in her previous life, while this version of herself did.

As a result, her body told her, I know how!

Her mind, meanwhile, was conflicted... it would say she knew how one moment, then flip over the next and say she did not.

That made every meal feel like a battle.

Sometimes she could toss a wok like a pro; other times, she could toss the wok itself.

Once, she nearly poured scalding hot oil straight onto her hand.

She had never expected two completely contradictory sets of memories to cause her trouble in this particular area...

Still, she could at least barely fill her stomach.

"Ptooey, ptooey, ptooey. Takeout really is humanity's greatest invention. Once I have Survival Points, I'm never cooking again..."

Lu Xiu walked out of the kitchen, spat out several strands of hair that had gotten into her mouth amid her frantic cooking, tucked the flyaway hair by her temples behind her ears, then sat down in exhausted defeat and began eating the Chinese kale beef rice she had struggled so hard to make.

At the same time, she absentmindedly reviewed the progress she had made constructing the instance dungeon over the past few days.

For the most part, the scenes had already been constructed.

Only the first floor of the abandoned guest house and its backyard, where players would go during the early game, remained.

Then there were the characters, the game flow, branching endings, and other such content.

Yesterday, she had carefully reread the construction tutorial provided by the system, so she had a fair grasp on those aspects. Still, there was one thing that worried her.

That was—

In her previous life, she had played a game. Its flow had been fixed, and even if there were branching choices, those had been provided by the developers.

But the instance dungeon being created here was different. Players would physically enter the game world, so there was no way to make interactions with NPCs follow a fixed format. The system did not seem to permit it, either.

Under those circumstances—

Determining whether a player had died would not be difficult.

For example, when the protagonist's wife went insane, if they could not defeat her or escape, they would simply be killed.

But the problem was that the protagonist had dialogue in the story... NPCs would interact with him, yet Lu Xiu had no way of predicting what the players entering the instance dungeon would say.

After all, that was the charm of language... Based on what she knew about gamers in her previous life, the higher the freedom, the more likely players were to do things like propose to their father-in-law. Their defining trait was a complete lack of humanity.

So how was she supposed to restrain the players?

Lu Xiu had no good ideas for now.

She could only see what happened when she designed the game flow later.

With all sorts of random thoughts running through her mind, Lu Xiu quickly finished her Chinese kale beef rice.

Lu Xiu set down her spoon and immediately stood, summoning the system interface as she prepared to enter the construction space.

But before going in, she noticed the plate on the table... and her mind began fighting itself again. One part of her thought she could wash it after coming out of the construction space, while another thought it would be better to wash it now.

"..."

After hesitating for quite a while—

Lu Xiu finally sighed, lowered her hand, picked up the plate, and walked into the kitchen.

The afternoon sunlight was just right.

Sunlight outside slanted through the small window into the kitchen, spreading a patch of golden light across the tiled floor. The glazed tiles softly refracted the light, making it ripple gently like water and lending the entire little kitchen a softer glow.

Lu Xiu stood before the sink.

The kitchen was small. The refrigerator stood against the wall, the spice rack was piled beside the stove, and the air carried the fresh scent of Chinese kale, the lingering aroma of beef, and a faint lemony hint of dish soap.

The girl wore casual hot pants and a loose T-shirt, her hair hanging freely down her back as she skillfully washed the dishes. Sunlight reflected from the glazed tiles fell across her profile and her bare, fair legs, casting a soft sheen over them and making her complexion appear even paler and more delicate.

The scene was as beautiful as a painting.

...It would have looked even more like one if the girl had not been muttering under her breath.

After nearly half an hour of fussing about in reality—

Lu Xiu finally entered the construction space.

Then, after another two hours of fussing around in the construction space, she finally finished building the entire stage for the Resident Evil instance dungeon.

"This is where the nightmare began in my previous life."

Lu Xiu stood before the abandoned guest house that players first visited in the original game. Looking at the completed building, she planted her hands on her hips, thoroughly satisfied.

Although the description for Visual Mental Imagery Construction Method stated that the system did not recommend using this function to directly construct instance dungeons, only to build their framework, because the discrepancy between imagination and reality could be enormous—

After all, most people could only imagine vague images.

Lu Xiu did not know whether it was a benefit of transmigrating, but her memories were extraordinarily clear... She did not even need to consciously recall many details. The moment she thought of a major scene, every little detail tucked into its corners surfaced automatically.

This meant she barely needed to manually edit anything. The scenes constructed using Visual Mental Imagery Construction Method could be used straight away.

Of course—

She had not inspected them yet, so she could not be sure there were no bugs.

Lu Xiu planned to check everything once while following the game flow. If there really were no bugs... then this probably counted as her cheat ability.

Though she could not yet tell how useful it would be.

"Come on."

Lu Xiu lowered her hands and pulled over the system window, which had shrunk into the upper-left corner of her vision. After checking the game flow she had written during the past few nights and confirming there were no problems, she submitted it and softly said, "Flow mode. Visual Mental Imagery Construction Method."

[Instance dungeon framework detected.]

[Instance dungeon flow document detected.]

[Verifying logical connectivity...]

[Flow mode loaded.]

As the window popped up—

Lu Xiu lowered her gaze slightly and saw countless tiny streams of data spreading across the ground like threads, passing through the house's structure and embedding themselves into the walls, floors, locks, drawers, stairs, and more.

It was as though a nervous system had been connected to the entire instance dungeon.

[Visual Mental Imagery Construction Method activating—]

[Generating NPC behavior tree—]

[Generating interaction core based on the flow submitted by the Constructor.]

A portion of those threadlike streams of data that extended through the house branched off and began converging into a humanoid outline in the open space of the backyard.

A person seemed to slowly rise from beneath the surface of water. His outline was blurry at first, then gradually became distinct.

He was a man in a white shirt, dressed like an ordinary office worker. A biometric watch was on his left wrist. He had no exaggerated muscles, but he was not thin either—just barely sturdy enough. His blond hair was neither long nor short, neatly combed without a strand out of place.

But he had no facial features.

A thin layer of black mist covered his face. It was not a heavy obstruction so much as a blur that could never quite come into focus.

His outline could barely be seen, but his appearance remained impossible to make out.

This was the protagonist of Resident Evil 7 and Resident Evil 8—Ethan Winters.

As for why Ethan Winters had no face... Lu Xiu had never seen it either. She could only censor it according to the original game.

"He really appeared."

Watching Ethan Winters, the motionless protagonist before her, Lu Xiu circled around him twice like a cat.

Only then did she examine the explanation regarding the interaction core that had appeared before her, a thoughtful expression appearing on her face. "When the time comes, players will directly play Ethan... That matches the game flow, but how am I supposed to control Ethan through the flow? This isn't a fixed scene. With Visual Mental Imagery Construction Method, could I do it like this..."

Lu Xiu thought of something and began recalling how she had controlled Resident Evil 7 when she played it.

Sure enough—

It was still crystal clear.

And as Lu Xiu began to imagine it, Ethan finally moved.

Just as Lu Xiu had controlled him in her memories from her previous life, he began wandering around the backyard of the abandoned guest house, looking here and there without entering the house.

Mainly because the house was pitch-black. The atmosphere was perfectly crafted; inside and outside the door felt like two entirely different worlds. She needed a little mental preparation.

When Lu Xiu played the game in her previous life, she had not dared to go straight in either.

But soon—

Lu Xiu began recalling her experience of entering the abandoned guest house, and Ethan Winters finally walked inside.

The moment he entered—

The door behind him slammed shut with a bang, and the interior was instantly plunged into darkness.

Lu Xiu controlled Ethan to turn on his flashlight.

After he pushed open another door, light finally shone through the broken windows, though it still left her uneasy.

And after passing through the narrow, cramped, dilapidated corridor and turning right, they arrived at the kitchen that had left a deep impression on players early in Resident Evil 7.

Following the protagonist Ethan, Lu Xiu began confirming the flow. There was not much to say about the early stages. She simply put herself in the player's shoes, explored everywhere she was supposed to explore, made sure the puzzles worked, made sure there were no bugs, and made sure every flow node in the document triggered as it should.

It had to be said—

Even though Lu Xiu had played the game in her previous life... and had thoroughly recalled it using Visual Mental Imagery Construction Method just days ago—

Standing beside it and watching now, she still found Resident Evil 7's scenes oppressive, filthy, and disgusting.

Even without monsters in the early game, they still made her uncomfortable.

But soon—

Lu Xiu had no time to dwell on that, because there really were some minor problems.

"Manual editing."

Lu Xiu suddenly called out softly. As her words fell, the cockroaches crawling around wildly and Ethan both froze in place as though someone had pressed pause.

Lu Xiu opened the construction tutorial and began searching for methods of making modifications.

She had only transmigrated a few days ago, much less been a Constructor for long. Aside from directly projecting things through Visual Mental Imagery Construction Method, she had to consult the tutorial and learn on the spot for many modifications.

What she wanted to modify now was the path the cockroaches crawled along.

Mm.

She felt the cockroaches were not disgusting enough.

...Professional.