After the two girls left the institute, they went their separate ways, each heading home.
Once she got home, she posted an update on her social media account about the nightmare she had that day.
"That was terrifying. I never thought sleeping in the game 'World' could lead to something so horrible."
Before long, someone commented below, "Milk, what did you dream about?"
"I fell asleep in the game and dreamed I fell into a blue ocean. I kept dying over and over. Do you have any idea how awful that felt? I hate the company behind 'World'!"
"Couldn't you log out?"
"I wanted to, but they didn't even provide a logout button. I've already reported it to the local institute. They'll investigate this game company thoroughly and give me a reasonable explanation," White Milk replied in the comments.
Soon, friends who knew her were all leaving comments to comfort Miss Bai.
Some players also sent White Milk private messages, hoping to learn exactly what had happened.
After all, being unable to log out of a virtual game sounded far too fantastical to be real. No company in the real world could bypass AI oversight.
White Milk received private messages from several friends and some players. She was already rather angry, with frustration bottled up inside her, and she would not feel better until she vented it.
She took the opportunity to pour out her frustration to those curious friends and online acquaintances, recounting the terrifying events in the dream again and again.
As she told the story, she also bad-mouthed the company behind "World," suspecting that it had already started down a path against humanity. She urged everyone not to play the game and warned them to be extra careful.
Some people grew curious after hearing her story and went to play "World." It was a newly released game, and not many people played it yet.
Orange Star's virtual game market was already firmly entrenched, making it difficult for new games to gain a foothold. After all, established games had accumulated decades of content through continual updates. New games could not match that decades-long gap in content, and the older games had enormous worlds.
Others did not believe her and thought Miss Bai had deliberately made up a story for attention.
Some of her friends and relatives believed her and decided not to touch "World."
But some also thought she had played so many games that she had lost her mind. How could there possibly be no logout button?
White Milk's post only circulated among her friends, and few people knew about it. "World" suffered no impact and continued running as steadily as ever.
Meanwhile, a researcher from the Intelligent Machinery Institute entered "World," preparing to test the two girls' claims from earlier that day about encountering terrifying dreams while sleeping in the game.
Researcher Li Shen opened his eyes at the starting point in the beginner village.
He neither did the beginner quests nor went to sleep. Instead, he first ran to the outskirts of the beginner village to watch a group of players fighting the Kobolds.
The people at his institute had noticed the battle outside the beginner village long ago. The Kobolds had actually been fighting the players for an entire day and night.
The game company's staff were now being dragged out for another round of criticism. Why were ordinary monsters from a mountain village near a beginner village so powerful? Their combat strength was almost on par with level twenty or thirty enemies.
Worse still, the two Kobolds responsible for healing seemed to have no need to regenerate mana. They kept healing their companions as a group, leaving the players unable to defeat them despite the prolonged assault.
By now, the Kobolds were growing weary. Even after fighting for so long, they still had not wiped out the adventurers, and they wanted to retreat to the Kobold Mountain Village.
But the players refused to let them leave. They did not care even if they lost levels, using sheer numbers to keep the Kobolds pinned down.
The Kobolds had powerful healing abilities, and their levels were far above those of the beginner village. Still, the players believed that once the top teams leveled up, they would eventually wipe out these Kobolds who did not know their place.
"There's definitely something wrong with these Kobolds," researcher Li Shen said after watching from a distance.
The game company's staff tried to modify the Kobolds' physical stats through the backend, because they had inexplicably been strengthened and possessed power they should not have had.
But the company's engineers reported that after they altered the Kobolds' data, the backend values had returned to normal, yet the Kobolds in the game world remained just as ridiculously powerful, showing no sign of having been weakened.
The institute therefore began focusing on the Kobolds, monitoring their running code in real time. Yet the engineers could find no abnormal code, as though what was happening inside the game belonged to a different game from the one running on the server.
That was not Li Shen's concern. His task now was to test whether sleeping in "World" triggered a terrifying Reincarnation Dream. If there was no logout button, that would be a very serious matter indeed.
He returned to the little house provided in the beginner village, lay down on the bed, and clicked the deep sleep button.
Deep sleep scheduled for three hours
A line of text appeared, then slowly faded away.
As the text disappeared, the researcher closed his eyes. His consciousness grew hazy, and he seemed to hear the sound of ocean waves.
Strange. Where was that sound of seawater coming from?
An odd thought flashed through Li Shen's mind. He opened his eyes and saw an azure ocean stretching endlessly into the distance.
The waves rose and fell, surging fiercely. The slightest lapse in attention brought a huge wave crashing over him.
Blue seawater. Deep sleep.
Li Shen snapped fully awake. This was very likely the Reincarnation Dream Miss Bai had described.
Seawater slammed into the researcher's face, and the current swept him beneath the surface.
But he did not panic. He actively swam upward, guiding his body back to the surface to breathe.
Unlike the two female players, he could swim and had swum in oceans in other games. This little difficulty was nothing to him.
"Logout button, logout button. System, system, where did the system go?" Li Shen tried to summon the system panel as he floated.
But the gaming pod's system seemed unable to detect Li Shen's brain waves. The system interface never appeared, leaving him with no way to log out.
At that moment, Li Shen felt that things were taking a bad turn.
He had entered deep sleep in a virtual game, yet there was no logout interface. That meant he would have to keep drifting at sea until the machine woke him automatically.
Just then, a large shark swam toward him beneath the water.
"Ah!"
For the first time, the researcher experienced the agony of being swallowed alive.
Inhuman agony consumed his entire body. The pain was extraordinarily intense, exceeding the upper limit of the virtual game's sensory settings.
Deep beneath the sea, an enormous whale opened its eyes and slowly swam toward the surface, ready to catch the stranded player.