Chapter 196 - 78: "I Lost Someone

Chapter 196: Chapter 78: "I Lost Someone

"That must be... really painful," she said softly. Her tone was earnest and focused, devoid of any doubt, filled only with an empathetic sorrow. "She’s clearly the most important person, yet you’re the only one guarding that memory. You can’t even find someone to share that warmth with... That feeling must be lonelier than getting lost on this rainy night."

Yu Xian froze.

He had told this to many people—his cousin, Shi Zuozhou, and even Dr. Wen Yu knew about it. But this was the first time someone had listened to this absurd story and, instead of questioning its authenticity, directly touched the deepest loneliness in his heart.

"You don’t think... this is all just my delusion?" Yu Xian felt his throat go a bit dry.

"I don’t think so." Wen Xiao gently shook her head. Although she usually appeared frail and delicate, her tone at this moment was exceptionally firm. "I can’t see her, but I can see your eyes. When you bring this up, your eyes are so genuine. That sadness... is also very genuine."

She paused, turning her head to look at him, and asked softly, "That girl... what was she like?"

"She..." Yu Xian opened his mouth. "She has short hair, about this long."

Yu Xian raised his hand, gesturing near his chin to indicate the length. "She always loved teasing me. Sometimes..."

As he spoke, his pace suddenly slowed down, and his brows furrowed slightly.

An inexplicable sense of panic suddenly washed over him.

Because he realized that the memory he wanted to recount was actually... actually becoming a bit blurry.

He wondered how this could be happening.

Yu Xian’s heart clenched violently. It had only been three weeks...

How could he possibly forget those little details, those past moments?

Cold sweat beaded on his forehead. He didn’t know what had gone wrong, but he could distinctly feel that if this continued, perhaps tomorrow, or the day after, he might truly and completely forget Xia Li.

"Yu Xian, what’s wrong?" Beside him, Wen Xiao reached out worriedly. "If you don’t want to talk about it, you don’t have to."

"I’m... I’m fine."

Yu Xian closed his eyes, frantically searching through his mind. He forced himself to fight against the emptiness brought on by the forgetting. Like a drowning man, he wanted to use all his strength to grasp onto those most profound fragments, to trace her silhouette with everything he had.

Yu Xian’s voice trembled slightly, and he spoke very quickly, as if racing against time. "She isn’t very tall, only reaching about my shoulder. She... she really loves cooking. Even though her food used to taste awful, and she’d always force me to eat it, it only got a little better later on..."

He rattled off a lot in one breath. It wasn’t until those details became clear again, until that figure was once more vivid in his mind, that the heart-palpitating fear finally began to fade.

But he still felt a lingering dread.

He could remember it this time, but what about the next?

Wen Xiao listened quietly. Watching him desperately try to hold onto something, seeing the deep agony in his eyes, she murmured, "That’s so nice..."

Her voice was laced with indescribable emotions—akin to envy, yet also like an imperceptible sense of loss. "It sounds like... she must be a very lovely girl."

"Whether she’s lovely or not is hard to say..." Yu Xian let out a long breath, a very faint smile tugging at the corners of his lips. "But she is indeed a very vibrant person."

...

The light rain that had persisted for days seemed to fall heavier tonight. Beneath two overlapping umbrellas, they slowly made their way back to Building 3, North Campus, trudging through the rainy night.

It was already late into the night, and the apartment building’s corridors were dead silent. Wen Xiao returned to her dorm to fetch her laptop, while Yu Xian turned on the warm yellow wall lamp in the lounge.

Wen Xiao sat obediently opposite him, her small face focused as she waited for Yu Xian to finish his train of thought.

"Combining our discussion from this afternoon, there are now two key phases," Yu Xian said, cutting straight to the chase after a moment of contemplation. "First, we must verify the boundaries of the ’Dream Net,’ which is the ’Spindle Wave Connection’ technology."

He rubbed the space between his eyebrows wearily. "Although we saw records of two test subjects entering the same dream in Professor Mo’s experiment logs, that was in a laboratory setting. Who knows how many precision instruments were assisting them? Right now, all we have in our hands is an audio clip."

He held up three fingers. "We need to figure out three crucial parameters. Number one: Can this audio clip really allow the two of us to successfully ’connect’ using just a phone playback, without any external equipment? Number two: What is the ’bandwidth’ of this connection? Meaning, what’s the maximum number of people it can support online simultaneously? Is it one-on-one, or many-to-many? And number three, which is what you brought up: the distance limit."

Wen Xiao typed rapidly on her keyboard, documenting the questions Yu Xian had laid out.

"If, as you previously guessed, this is a ’peer-to-peer’ resonance of biomagnetic fields, then the distance is definitely highly restricted. The connection might sever not far after leaving this room," Yu Xian said, his expression grave. "But if it’s a ’server-client’ broadcast model, then theoretically, the distance should be limitless. This parameter directly determines our next step—the second key phase—the design plan for the ’script’."

Wen Xiao nodded thoughtfully. "I understand. These key parameters will affect the gameplay design of the ’game’... If it’s a local area network model, we can only create small-room team games like the ’Escape Room’ or ’Werewolf’ we played today. But if it’s a wide area network model..."

"Then that would be a massively multiplayer online game—an MMORPG. It would be ’World of Warcraft’, a true virtual world," Yu Xian chimed in. "If that’s the case, the chips in our hands become much heavier. We could even establish a genuine ’Rabbit Hole’ within the dream. Shi Zuozhou plays a lot of games. Once we nail down the parameters, we can call him over to discuss the game’s design."

"In that case... the first step is to test out those three key parameters, right?" Wen Xiao asked, seeking his input.

"Correct. We first need to create a dream script specifically for ’testing’." Yu Xian pointed to her laptop. "This script doesn’t need to be too complex, nor does it need any plot. It only requires the two safety cores we discussed this afternoon: ’Time Control’ and a ’Logical Anchor Point’, to prevent us from falling into ’Source Memory Confusion’."

"Okay. I’ve actually tried out ’Time Control’ before," Wen Xiao agreed, her fingers moving rapidly over the keys. "What about the Logical Anchor Point? What should we set it to? For instance... counterintuitive physics rules?"

"Counterintuitive physics rules..." Yu Xian frowned slightly and admitted, "I’m not sure if that would effectively serve as an ’anchor’. After all, if that works, then all other bizarre dreams should also be correctly identified as ’fictional’ by the brain."

Waking up his phone screen, he added, "We probably need to ask a professional. I’ll give Senior Sister Yiyi a call."

"Ah?" Wen Xiao’s fingers stopped typing. She looked up, pursing her small lips. "But it’s so late... Won’t it disturb her rest?"

Yu Xian shook his head and dialed the voice call. It rang only twice before being answered.

"Hello, Yu Xian?" Yang Yiyi’s voice came through the receiver, carrying a hint of concern. "Still up this late? Everything alright?"

Beside him, Wen Xiao immediately perked her ears up. She moved from the opposite sofa to sit right next to him, leaning closer, her two small hands tightly clasped together.

"Everything’s fine, Senior Sister. I didn’t interrupt your rest, did I?" Yu Xian glanced at Wen Xiao next to him and spoke into the phone. "I’m currently with my friend who studies computer science. We were just discussing the issue of ’Source Memory Confusion’. She proposed a conceptual solution that might counter the confusion, and we’d love to hear your thoughts."