Lost Domain

"455, the protagonist's gone crazy."

455 gave it some serious thought. "I noticed. How about you kick him back to his senses?"

Xie De thought that made perfect sense. He flipped the gun pressed against Wei Yanchi's head in his hand and knocked him with a thunk.

"Ow." Wei Yanchi clutched his head and looked over, utterly aggrieved. "That hurt."

"Good. It was supposed to."

39 leaned against the wall and lifted his chin at him. "Tell us what's going on."

Wei Yanchi felt even more wronged, but he obediently explained the clues he had found here.

In the film Inception, dreams were divided into multiple levels. With each level deeper, time sped up by roughly twenty times. For example, ten hours in the first dream level would be about a week in the second and about ten years in the third. The deeper someone went, the more deeply their consciousness became immersed, and their memories would become confused.

Continuing deeper into the dream levels, or dying during the deep sleep induced by a powerful sedative, would send someone into the "Lost Domain." It was made up of fragments of the subconscious, and anyone who entered would lose their memories, unable to distinguish reality from dreams.

Wei Yanchi said, "My guess is that if we treat entering the movie's plot as entering the Second-Layer Dream, then the movie theater we're in now is actually the first level. So I'm more inclined to explain Mr. 39 coming over from another movie as him returning from the Second-Layer Dream to the first."

So complicated. Brain frozen.

39 frowned. "We're still dreaming?"

"Yes." Wei Yanchi nodded and helpfully explained, "Actually, the method cartoons use, pinching yourself to see if you're dreaming, isn't reliable. In an immersive dream that's almost impossible to distinguish from reality, the brain sends pain signals to the body. So dreams can hurt, too."

Xie De fell silent. Silence was tonight's Instance.

Noticing Xie De's irritation, Wei Yanchi volunteered with a hint of teasing, "Actually, if it borrowed all of Inception's rules, then we'd have at least one chance to die without worrying about it."

That's not funny at all.

Still expressionless, 39 asked him, "How do we tell dreams from reality?"

Wei Yanchi patiently answered, "You can look for something you've never seen before. The answer to a math problem you've never seen, for example, or visit a city you've never been to. People can't imagine things they've never seen. If there's a gap in your memory, then you're dreaming."

Wei Yanchi continued, "Also, we can enter the next dream level by falling asleep now. Mr. 39 is the first person I've seen on the first level. I suspect Beiwei and Yue Xiamo are still trapped in the Second-Layer Dream. We can go bring them back."

Xie De remained dazed. He felt certain he could never clear this Instance on his own. He stayed silent for a long moment, then nodded.

Just as they were about to enter the next dream level, Yue Xiamo emerged from the door of the screening room beside them, her expression cold. There was no surprise in her eyes when she saw them already outside.

She dragged an iron whip hung with scraps of flesh in one hand. It was formed from the accessories she wore on her hands, and blood and flesh dripped from her hair. She looked even more disheveled than they did, and far more sinister.

She casually stripped the blood and flesh from her hair. "I picked a G Rating movie, so I killed a whole bunch of lions and fought my way out. Beiwei's the only one who hasn't cleared it yet?"

Wei Yanchi shrugged. "Actually, none of us have cleared it yet. But it looks like there's one fewer Second-Layer Dream we need to enter now."

He explained his theory to Yue Xiamo again.

After listening, Yue Xiamo raised another question. "Then since we entered the movies, the newcomers who are still alive probably entered them too, right? Did you see any of them?"

"Yeah," 39 replied casually. He lit another cigarette, standing some distance away from them. "There were two new players in Pearl. One died, one survived. But now there's no sign of either."

Wei Yanchi considered this, then reached a conclusion. "It's possible that while moving from the second level to the first, fainting from an extreme fright could send you into the Lost Domain. Dying on the second level might do it too. Those new players aren't mentally resilient enough. They may already be trapped in the Lost Domain."

If that was the case, Xie De remembered that in the brief dream after Pearl's story ended, Qiu Shanyi had collapsed to the ground in terror and never gotten back up. She might very well have fainted from fright.