Meanwhile, Li Xian, who had been deemed "as good as dead," was lounging on the sofa like he owned the place, swinging his feet as he asked Ji Xie:
"Why did you cover my eyes just now?"
He had only tossed someone outside. It wasn't as if Li Xian couldn't watch.
Ji Xie answered as though it were obvious, "Shielding a child from blood and violence."
Li Xian ignored that answer. Although Ji Xie seemed much the same as before-still spouting nonsense and pestering him now and then-there seemed to be a subtle shift in his attitude.
Unsure whether he was imagining things, Li Xian looked up at Ji Xie beside him, and their eyes met.
Li Xian opened his mouth, but the words he had wanted to say suddenly got stuck.
Ji Xie raised an eyebrow in confusion and leaned toward him.
"...Can NPCs in an Instance be modeled on real people?"
Li Xian chose to ask the question he had originally intended after all.
Ji Xie didn't answer right away. Instead, he reached out and pressed a finger against the child's furrowed brow, smoothing the crease away.
"Why are you suddenly asking that?"
Unsure whether to tell Ji Xie about this, Li Xian pursed his lips in distress-which only made his face look rounder. When Ji Xie poked his cheek for the third time, Li Xian grabbed that persistently bothersome index finger, pushed it down, and said:
"In this Instance... every player has a parent as part of their assigned background. Their appearance, words, and behavior are almost identical to their actual parents in the real world."
After hearing this, Ji Xie considered it for a while before answering based on what he knew:
"The system has an enormous database, so pulling up real people's data to use