Fu Songcheng felt the instance scenes he’d just experienced begin rewinding before his eyes, scene by scene.
As if someone had pressed rewind—the images flickered and twisted.
Bai Mu’s peaceful life peeled away and receded like a sand painting; then the scene abruptly darkened, returning to the novice instance she loathed and feared; then came the oppressive, struggling high school years; and finally, the scene froze on her childhood.
Fu Songcheng walked from her outermost dream, step by step into Bai Mu’s life—and then, from the dream’s depths, fell back to reality together with Bai Mu.
All the images finally shattered with a violent dizziness.
Fu Songcheng snapped his eyes open.
His vision refocused, and he found he’d returned to room 7401.
A very faint rustle of fabric came from the bed.
Bai Mu slowly woke.
She lay flat, eyes open, staring straight at the ceiling. Her eyes were full of bewilderment, as if her soul had just finished a long trek and hadn’t yet fully reattached to her weary shell.
After about a dozen seconds, her pupils gradually regained their spirit.
She seemed not to remember how many dreams she’d just journeyed through; the memory of the dreams was quickly forgotten, leaving only an unnamed, hollow gap at the bottom of her heart.
She glanced over and saw Fu Songcheng standing by the bed.
Almost by instinct, she quickly adjusted her breathing rhythm, pressing down the bewilderment and retreat, her face settling into a calm, mature expression unbefitting her age.
Bai Mu tried to brace on the bed and sit up, but sucked in a sharp breath.
Hiss…
Bai Mu lowered her head, her gaze falling on the back of her hand.
There was a clear wound still seeping beads of blood—the wound Fu Songcheng had left to wake her from the shallowest layer of the dream.
“I cut it to wake you.”
Fu Songcheng followed her gaze, briefly explaining. “After you all entered the instance, everyone got trapped in dreams. The instance uses what players most resist or most crave in their subconscious to trap everyone inside until they die.”
Bai Mu clutched the back of her hand, not complaining about the wound at all, only quickly understanding the current situation. “So everyone else is still trapped in dreams right now?”
“Right.” Fu Songcheng nodded and turned straight toward the door. “Let’s go wake the other players.”
Bai Mu immediately rolled off the bed, deftly gathered her equipment, and followed closely behind Fu Songcheng.
The corridor’s lights remained dim; the carpet absorbed sound, making their footsteps seem especially muffled.
Walking, Fu Songcheng flipped through the registry, quickly determining the next target.
Bai Mu behind him repeatedly started to speak and stopped.
A girl in her early twenties—however mature and steady she pretended to be—still kept curiosity of that age in her bones.
She finally couldn’t hold back and spoke: “You told me that mentioning what the other cares about most can wake the dream… but you haven’t told me what you saw in my dream?”
Fu Songcheng’s fingers flipping the registry paused slightly.
“I saw you live out a happy, fulfilling life.”
Fu Songcheng answered flatly, his voice carrying no rise or fall of emotion.
Bai Mu was taken aback.
Her footsteps slowed half a beat.
She was clearly not very satisfied with this answer—even found it somewhat strange, hard to describe.
A happy, fulfilling life?
If it really was like that, then why, now that she’d woken, did the spot where her heart was feel so sour? After a long dream, her heart was filled with emptiness.
But watching Fu Songcheng’s straight back, she bit her lip, forcibly pressed the inexplicable sense of loss back down, lowered her head and stopped asking, focusing on the instance before her.
The two walked into the elevator one after the other.
This time, there was no strange card for Fu Songcheng to fill out.
Ding—
The tenth floor had arrived. The elevator doors slid slowly open to both sides.
The two stepped out and came before Zhao Yixing’s door.
Fu Songcheng stopped and turned to look at Bai Mu. “This time you come in with me. After that, we’ll act separately—split up to wake everyone, that’ll be faster.”
Bai Mu didn’t decline, nodding crisply. “Understood.”
Regarding Zhao Yixing, Dawn’s file had recorded him in detail.
Zhao Yixing was an honest man who’d lived a lifetime of rectitude.
In this era where machines ran rampant and smart manufacturing had long replaced the vast majority of manual labor, he was an intangible cultural heritage bamboo carving old master who still insisted on hand-carving.
A few years back, when times were bad, traditional handicrafts were thoroughly marginalized. He stubbornly guarded his pile of bamboo, at one point unable to even afford food, nearly starving to death in his own little workshop.
Later, when the cultural tourism department gradually began to value intangible heritage preservation, his life slowly improved.
Precisely because of this experience, Zhao Yixing felt gratitude toward the country and the officials.
So after being dragged into Death Party and learning that “Dawn” was an official-background organization, he’d unhesitatingly sought them out on his own, wanting to do his part for the officials.
And the skill he’d awakened was as stubborn as his personality.
[One-Track Mind]—a one-time skill.
[Bless a target. The target will permanently persist, not altered by any external force, any person’s will, or even the system’s own will.]
But precisely because it was “one-time” and “permanently persistent,” Dawn’s higher-ups had shown tremendous hesitation and conflict when dealing with this skill.
No one dared lightly let Zhao Yixing use it.
Recalling the file he’d read, Fu Songcheng pressed his hand on the doorknob and pushed the door open.
The two entered Zhao Yixing’s dream.
When Fu Songcheng opened his eyes again, he found they were standing in a dense bamboo forest.
A breeze blew past, bamboo leaves rustling, the air thick with the bitter-fresh scent of newly split bamboo.
Sunlight filtered mottled through the gaps in the bamboo leaves onto the ground; the whole world was so quiet it felt somewhat unreal.
Tap, tap, tap…
The sound of a wooden mallet striking a carving knife came, very regular, from deep in the bamboo forest.
Fu Songcheng and Bai Mu exchanged a glance and pushed through the bamboo leaves toward the sound.
In a clearing at the center of the bamboo forest sat none other than Zhao Yixing. He wore a washed-out old man’s shirt, reading glasses perched on his nose, his whole body bent like a bow, wholly focused on his bamboo carving.
He was completely unaware of the intruders.
All his attention, all his spirit and energy, was poured into the massive piece of bamboo before him.
Seeing this, Fu Songcheng spoke: “Mr. Zhao? Time for us to leave the instance.”
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