In his daze, Qin Yuxuan seemed to catch sight of Su Bai. The feeling struck him as strange.
Su Bai was the first Player Qin Yuxuan had paid particular attention to after entering this game. Back then, he had found it hard to look away from the very first glimpse of Su Bai, as though a fresh splash of soft color had suddenly appeared in the gloomy Nightmare World.
Before becoming a Player in the Nightmare World, Qin Yuxuan had been nothing more than a student repeating his final year of high school, driven to the brink of collapse by parents who oppressed him until he wanted to erase himself from existence. On his way home from tutoring class, if the tracker he wore showed even a slight deviation from his route, he had to report everything he had done to his parents.
During those bleak days, when even his dreams held nothing but classrooms and practice problems, Qin Yuxuan had once had dreams of his own. He endured that darkest stretch of his life by imagining the happiness awaiting him after he got into university, or even after he graduated. As he sat spacing out and daydreaming in tutoring class, he would imagine leaving that home that offered nothing but scolding and coldness. He imagined shedding his gloomy image in a new environment, making new friends, perhaps even falling in love with someone he liked, and then starting a family of his own.
He imagined how he would spend time with the person he loved, and even how he would decorate his home in the warmest possible style, utterly unlike the home he had grown up in. Sometimes, he even imagined how gently and kindly he would treat his future children, letting them grow up surrounded by warmth into