Lu Mingfei closed his eyes and lay on the bed for a while.
The cracks in the ceiling hovered vaguely behind his eyelids, while the fluorescent light's buzz sounded like a distant mosquito. He tried to empty his mind and relax his body.
Then he suddenly slapped the mattress and sat bolt upright.
Since Lu Mingze had really reset the world, then he was going to go all out!
He took a deep breath and calmed himself.
"Senior Brother," he said, staring at his phone screen, "what does 'this gate cannot be opened from this side' mean?"
The phone screen glowed as He Xiaomeng's chibi avatar replied, "It means exactly what it says. You can't open it from this side."
Lu Mingfei frowned. "But can't I just climb over it? Why does it feel like I've hit an invisible wall?"
"Are situations like that rare in adventure games?" He Xiaomeng asked in return.
"But this isn't a game," Lu Mingfei said.
"Don't forget, this is Nibelungen." He Xiaomeng's voice grew more serious. "Nibelungen has its own set of rules. The Dragon King who creates a Nibelungen can impose specific rules upon certain objects—correspondingly, he must also obey those rules himself."
Lu Mingfei froze for a moment. He seemed to remember Kassel College's textbooks mentioning something similar.
"So what you mean, Senior Brother," he said slowly, piecing his words together, "is that Fenrir deliberately set this up—so it can be understood as a real game? Why would he do that?"
He Xiaomeng fell silent for a moment. The chibi avatar propped its chin on one hand, wearing an expression of "thinking."
"I can roughly guess," he said. "I heard Fenrir say before that he wanted to remodel Nibelungen and make this place more interesting. It seemed he'd been inspired by some