Workplace pressure couldn’t wake her; life crises couldn’t wake her. What trapped her in the dream was avoidance of the instance. Fu Songcheng recalled first meeting Bai Mu—she’d seemed to carry a maturity and steadiness beyond her years. So her heart was resisting the instance too.
No wonder her ability was [Safe Haven]—able to send people back to the real world.
Fu Songcheng felt a sense of understanding. He stared at Bai Mu’s face and tentatively spat out a few words.
“Death Party?”
In her dream, Bai Mu let out an extremely impatient “tsk,” her brows knitting deeper.
Effective.
Fu Songcheng immediately upped the ante, rattling off game vocabulary like reciting a menu to wake Bai Mu.
“You’re in an instance right now.”
“Dawn wants you to get up and work.”
“System notification: instance mission failed. Elimination protocol about to execute—” Fu Songcheng even mimicked the system’s tone to announce the status.
With every word Fu Songcheng spoke, the expression on Bai Mu’s face grew more pained.
Her head shook uneasily on the pillow, her hands clutching the corner of the blanket for dear life, as if enduring some unbearable torment.
When she heard the word “eliminate,” Bai Mu snapped her eyes open. She looked at Fu Songcheng standing by the bed, her gaze falling into confusion.
“This is an instance?”
Almost the same instant she asked aloud.
Crack—!
The dream let out a shattering sound crisper and louder than all the previous ones.
This shattering was extremely thorough. The entire room instantly turned to dust, and the surroundings fell into brief darkness.
When his vision returned, Fu Songcheng found he hadn’t entered the next strange dream, facing a sleeping Bai Mu.
He was standing in an old train carriage.
The lights in the carriage flickered on and off, emitting a buzzing electrical sound.
Fu Songcheng couldn’t feel his own body—he was like a transparent bystander, unable to touch anything or make a sound.
He looked down the carriage.
Under the last row of seats at the end of the carriage, Bai Mu was curled up there.
She looked somewhat panicked, her clothes covered in stains and blood. She clamped her mouth dead, not letting herself make a sound, tears mixing with grime to carve streaks down her face.
Her whole body was trembling violently.
That was when she’d just entered an instance and first saw a player die before her eyes.
Following Bai Mu’s terrified gaze, Fu Songcheng saw, in the aisle, a twisted NPC covered in black scales patrolling.
The NPC’s claws were sharp as knives; every scrape across the seats brought a grating metallic screech.
The NPC stopped before the seat where Bai Mu was hiding.
It smelled the breath of a living person and slowly bent down.
A terrifying face covered in fangs appeared before Bai Mu.
The NPC let out an excited roar, its sharp claws slashing viciously at Bai Mu’s throat.
Just as the claws were about to cut Bai Mu’s neck—
Bai Mu’s figure suddenly flickered in place, then vanished into thin air.
The claws struck empty air, shredding the seat.
The scene flipped violently the instant Bai Mu disappeared.
Harsh sunlight replaced the carriage’s dim lights.
The scene before Fu Songcheng switched instantly.
He saw a completely different Bai Mu.
She’d brought Fu Songcheng back to the real world.
Here, she hadn’t entered any death game.
She’d endured the painful high school years, smoothly entered an ordinary university, and spent four happy, carefree years. After graduating, she hadn’t stayed in the big city to compete—she’d returned to her small county town.
She’d found a leisurely public-sector job. The salary wasn’t high—only a few thousand a month—but she had no mortgage pressure, no overtime worries.
Most importantly, her family was all by her side.
The scene flashed quickly, finally settling at the dining table.
The table was covered with a sumptuous spread of home cooking: braised pork, steamed fish, tomato and egg stir-fry…
Steaming hot.
Bai Mu, in comfortable loungewear, sat by the table eating with her parents.
“Mu Mu, eat more meat. Have you been tired at work lately?” Her mother nudged food into her bowl while nagging.
“Not tired. What could happen at the office? Drinking tea and reading the paper all day.” Bai Mu smiled and took a bite of rice.
Her father sipped his liquor beside her, watching her with a smile. “Not tired is good. Peace and safety beats everything…”
Bai Mu’s face was brimming with a heartfelt, cloudless smile.
She was happy.
Unlike the forced maturity in the instance, here she was innocent and joyful—ordinary and unremarkable, but utterly happy.
Fu Songcheng stood quietly to the side, watching Bai Mu and her family chatting and laughing at the table, taking in this girl’s should-be life in an instant.
If not for this damned instance game, if not for being pulled into this world full of death and despair, many players’ lives would probably have continued on, ordinary and happy, just like this.
They’d complain about low wages, complain about overtime, quarrel with friends over trifles. But they wouldn’t have to worry every day whether they’d die at the next corner, wouldn’t have to watch the people around them get torn apart by monsters.
The Bai Mu sitting at the table suddenly stopped her chopsticks.
She turned her head, her gaze passing straight through the void, landing precisely on Fu Songcheng.
She could suddenly see him.
Bai Mu looked at Fu Songcheng, the smile on her face not fading. She pointed at the empty chair beside her and, in a very natural tone, said, “Mr. Fu, sit down too. My mom’s braised pork is really good.”
A flicker of surprise crossed Fu Songcheng’s heart.
She could see him.
And she called him “Mr. Fu.”
That meant this Bai Mu was actually lucid. She knew this was a dream, she knew she was in an instance, she knew the parents before her and this warm life were all just phantoms.
Yet she was still wallowing in it, unwilling to wake.
Fu Songcheng looked at the empty chair, then at Bai Mu’s expectant eyes.
He shook his head and waved a refusal.
“I won’t.” Fu Songcheng’s voice was calm, breaking the last filter of this perfect illusion. “You should go too.”
The smile on Bai Mu’s face froze instantly.
Her hand holding the chopsticks trembled slightly.
She looked at the dishes on the table, then at the kindly smiling parents before her.
Her eyes reddened bit by bit.
“Mm.”
After a long while, she answered in a low voice.
She didn’t look at Fu Songcheng again, but turned her head, picked up a piece of braised pork from her bowl, put it in her mouth, and chewed hard.
Tears slid down her cheeks, falling into the rice bowl.
She finished her last meal with the family in the dream.
“Dad, Mom, I’m full. I… I have to go to work.”
As her words fell.
The warm restaurant, the kind parents, the dishes on the table—all began to scatter like a sand painting blown by the wind.
His vision was pulled back to that dim green-skin train.
Bai Mu’s figure reappeared beside that shredded seat.
The NPC’s claws had already swung past; it looked in confusion at the empty corner and let out an angry roar.
And the very second Bai Mu reappeared.
The carriage’s broadcast suddenly crackled to life.
[Ding! New player Bai Mu, survival time has reached ten minutes.]
[Mission complete.]
[Instance cleared.]
A white light enveloped Bai Mu.
Just like that—by sheer coincidence, one might even say inexplicably—she cleared her first novice instance, surviving the final survival time the system required.
As the white light brightened, Fu Songcheng heard a mechanical system notification echoing in the void.
[Detected player’s intense will.]
[Skill awakened: Safe Haven.]
Bai Mu’s greatest wish was that during the ten minutes her novice instance let her temporarily flee back to the real world, she could have a meal with her parents. Not go home and face, alone, an empty household, an empty world.
After joining Dawn, she’d had the [Interstellar Broadcast] player help her contact her parents, but they were never found.
She wasn’t the type to flee—in the high school dream, before Fu Songcheng even spoke, she’d have struggled awake on her own. But in the deepest dream, the one of real life, she wanted to indulge herself a little.
To take one more bite of her mother’s braised pork.
Leave a Reply