Interlude: Speculation, White Line, and the News

"For players without mental resistance, dying suddenly in this scenario was perfectly normal. They spawned at the Old Taoist Temple, where they could easily run into the Cultists hunting Xuan Yan. You could practically call it a scripted death."

As Xia Lun thought, he wrote up his analysis in Chinese.

"I forced my way through that scripted death with brute strength and mental resistance. Other players would probably die outright, like the werewolf that attacks you at the start of Bloodborne, which I played in my previous life."

"But dying in a scripted event was actually a good thing. The second scenario took place in endlessly nested dreams, so death would only drop a player into a deeper layer. It would even spare them from the Man in the Flesh's avatar lurking in the Darkroom."

"In other words, players had virtually unlimited room for trial and error in this scenario, as long as they didn't do something stupid like eat an obviously suspicious Yin Longevity Pill, or draw the Man in the Flesh's serious attention and then get caught and mind-controlled."

His pen paused. Then Xia Lun wrote down a conclusion.

"Normal players could absolutely clear this scenario. The early stage was basically a simple puzzle game where you traded deaths for information."

"Even without meeting someone like Xuan Yan, who already knew everything and could reveal the truth about the world outright, a player could die a few more times and descend into deeper dreams. They could piece together the truth that they were trapped in nested dreams from the townspeople or dissenters among the Mind Fasting Sect's Cultists."

"And since people like Little Green could retain their memories completely across different dream layers, piecing together the truth was even easier."

Xia Lun paused, then kept writing.

"In short,