Chapter 191: Dream’s Logical Anchor Point

(Note: For the events that occurred during the day on Saturday, November 24th, please see “Extra Chapter: The United Front to Urge Marriage.” The timeline here immediately follows that extra chapter.)

The mall was bustling with people on Saturday, and the heat was cranked up high.

The recently finished escape room, along with Yu Xian and Wen Xiao’s meticulously planned “United Front to Urge Marriage,” had, as expected, been seen through from the very beginning by the two sly old foxes, Yu Zhengze and Wen Yu.

But fortunately, even though their intentions had been exposed, the outcome wasn’t too bad.

Yu Zhengze and Wen Yu, walking ahead, strolled side-by-side, maintaining a polite but not-too-distant space as they chatted in low voices.

Occasionally, Wen Yu would let out a soft laugh, and Yu Zhengze would make the rare move of relaxing the tight corners of his mouth. They looked surprisingly harmonious together.

“Looks like… it wasn’t a total failure?” Yu Xian, trailing a few meters behind, muttered under his breath as he watched the pair ahead.

“Maybe because… two negatives make a positive.” Beside him, Wen Xiao buried her face in her coat, which covered her white JK-style shirt, leaving only her large eyes visible. Her voice came out muffled.

The four of them were riding the escalator up to the fourth-floor dining area, surrounded by noisy crowds and the enticing aroma of food.

Yu Xian’s mind was still on the matter of the Dream Net server, and he was also thinking about the “carrot” empowerment plan he had discussed with Shi Zuozhou last night.

But Wen Xiao, beside him, suddenly spoke up. She blurted out, apropos of nothing:

“Yu Xian… I think I know what’s going on with the ‘source memory confusion.'”

Yu Xian was taken aback. He clearly hadn’t expected Wen Xiao to suddenly switch the topic to the progress on the audio file during such a relaxed moment of shopping and heading for a meal.

He subconsciously glanced at his cousin and Wen Yu up ahead, then slowed his pace, his voice urgent:

“What do you mean?”

Wen Xiao didn’t look at him, asking in a low voice:

“Do you remember the logic behind source memory confusion?”

“I remember. The audio suppresses the MCH neurons’ function of forgetting dreams, forcibly stuffing the dream’s content into long-term memory. This causes the ‘weight’ of dream memories and the ‘weight’ of real memories to become imbalanced, so the brain can’t tell which is real,” Yu Xian said slowly, recalling the explanation Senior Sister Yiyi had given him.

“Right, that was our understanding before.” Wen Xiao extended a finger, lightly tracing lines on the escalator handrail.

“But… there was always something I couldn’t figure out.”

She turned to face Yu Xian.

“Think about it. A normal person, like us, has lived in the real world for over twenty years. The memories stored in our brains are massive, continuous, and vast—and they’re growing every day. But a dream, no matter how real, is just for one night. Even if the MCH neurons fail, and even if that memory is perfectly preserved, it should still be just a drop in the ocean compared to that enormous library of real memories.”

Wen Xiao looked up, her gaze meeting Yu Xian’s.

“Why would such a short memory carry so much weight that it could make the brain’s ‘proportions’ go out of balance and lead it to doubt reality?”

Yu Xian stopped in his tracks. ‘She has a point.’

If you compare memory to water, real memories are an ocean, while a dream memory is just a single glass of water.

If you pour a glass of water into the ocean, no matter how murky or special that water is, it shouldn’t be able to change the ocean’s color.

If it’s just a matter of ‘remembering,’ then at most it would be like remembering a movie or a trip. No matter how vivid the impression, a normal person would never mistake a movie for ‘reality.’

The depth of real memories is something a dream could never hope to match.

“Is it because…” Yu Xian mused.

“Because the stimulation in the dream is too intense?”

“Intensity is one aspect, but what’s more important is ‘duration.’ It wasn’t until last weekend, when I tried that MCH-suppressing audio myself…”

At this, Wen Xiao’s cheeks flushed slightly, and her voice became a little unnatural. She quickly concealed it and continued.

“It wasn’t until I experienced it firsthand that I suddenly understood a key variable we’d been overlooking.”

She took a deep breath, looked at Yu Xian, and seriously uttered one word:

“Time.”

“Time?”

“Yes. The flow of time in a dream is different from reality.” Wen Xiao held up a hand, gesturing in the air.

“In reality, you might only sleep for eight hours, or even less. But in that deeply guided dream, it might feel like several days have passed, or even… several years.”

BOOM.

It was as if something had just exploded in Yu Xian’s mind.

‘The flow of time.’

‘How could I have overlooked that?’

In that white room, he had felt like he’d spent ten whole days and nights, reciting the protocol ten thousand times. He’d experienced the entire process, from anger and despair to numbness and, finally, mechanical repetition.

That long, seemingly endless torment had felt so real.

But when he woke up, the wall clock showed that only three hours had passed.

“A Nanke dream,” Yu Xian muttered to himself.

“Just like Chunyu Fen, who only napped for an afternoon but lived an entire lifetime in his dream. When he woke up, he found he was still beside the great locust tree, and the sun hadn’t even set.”

“Exactly. The story of ‘A Golden Millet Dream’ is the same. Lu Sheng experienced marrying, having children, wealth, honor, and the chaos of war all in a dream. To him, the weight of that lifetime of memories was surely far heavier than the brief afternoon he experienced after waking up.” Wen Xiao looked at Yu Xian, a trace of alarm in her eyes.

“The TDI audio exploits the brain’s distorted perception of time during REM sleep. It stretches the dream’s duration countless times over. If a person spends ‘several days’ or even ‘several months’ in their dreams every night, then after just a few short weeks in reality…”