Chapter 203: Girls Only Need 3 Seconds to Build a Friendship

On Sunday morning, the sound of rain outside the window persisted, going PITTER-PATTER in a tired and monotonous rhythm.

Yu Xian woke up very early while the sky was still gloomy. Fumbling for his phone from under his pillow, he found a message from Wen Xiao lying in the notification bar, sent at 5:20 AM.

“Sorry, the waveform adjustment for the linked audio is a bit more complex than I thought. We might not be able to test it until this afternoon.”

It was followed by a sticker of a kitten with heavy dark circles under its eyes. Yu Xian replied with a “Received, make sure to rest,” and quietly got out of bed.

He gently pulled back Shi Zuozhou’s blackout curtain and saw the guy still snoring, fast asleep. They had stayed up chatting until the early hours of the morning yesterday; it seemed he was exhausted. Yu Xian didn’t wake him. After a quick wash, he packed his laptop into his bag and silently left the dorm.

There were more people in the library on a Sunday morning than expected. With the postgraduate entrance exams approaching, students were claiming seats in small groups, their desks piled high with review materials.

Yu Xian walked around for quite a while before luckily finding a corner seat by the window. From here, he could see the gray sky outside and the tops of the plane trees swaying under the beating rain. He opened his laptop, but instead of opening that obscure paper on “Discrete Personality” and “Topological Manifolds” as usual, he created a new document on his desktop.

As the cursor blinked on the blank page, the conversation he had with Wen Xiao last night on their way back to the North Campus involuntarily surfaced in his mind.

“That girl… what is she like?”

“She has short hair, loves to smile, and always likes to tease me. Sometimes…”

The sudden blankness in his brain back then, the fear of his memories starting to blur and fade at the edges, surged up again silently like a tide.

It had only been three weeks.

In just three weeks, certain details about Xia Li had already begun to lose their clarity. Was she wearing white or beige shoes that day? Did she show her teeth when she smiled? These once incredibly vivid images now felt as though he was looking through frosted glass when he tried to recall them, leaving only a vague outline.

Yu Xian’s hands trembled slightly. He was afraid. He was afraid that if one day even he forgot, the very last trace of Xia Li’s existence in this world would be completely erased.

The cursor blinked on the blank page, as if urging him, as if waiting. Yu Xian lowered his head, placed his hands on the keyboard, and typed out the title of the document:

*Reality Programming Association*.

Her name, her birthday, her favorite food, her appearance, the meals she had cooked, the pictures she had drawn… He recalled desperately, digging deep into his mind for any details he might have overlooked.

The keystrokes were rapid and continuous. Yu Xian wanted to pour every image, every conversation, every moment in his mind—even the most insignificant details—into this document. As he typed, his movements would occasionally pause.

That time they went hiking, did she make it to the top? Why did she cut her hair short that year?

Whenever he encountered such hazy details, Yu Xian’s heart would suddenly clench, like running into an impossible final question on an exam. He had to close his eyes and force himself back into that scene, rummaging through the ruins of his memories until the image became clear, until he finally remembered that detail.

The keycaps rose and fell, the document’s page count steadily increased, and time slowly slipped away.

It wasn’t until the surroundings suddenly lit up and a pale light shone on his face that Yu Xian abruptly snapped back to reality. He lifted his head, looking around in slight bewilderment. The library hall’s fluorescent lights had all been turned on at once.

In a daze, Yu Xian turned to look out the window, only to realize the sky had already grown pitch black. He picked up his phone to check the time. It was 1:00 PM on Sunday.

Looking out the window again, he saw that the sky was as dark as seven or eight o’clock in the evening. Heavy black clouds pressed down, overlapping in layers like dilapidated curtains on the verge of tearing apart. At some point, the rain outside had grown heavier again. The wind made the windows RATTLE. The morning’s pattering rain had now turned into a hysterical sheet of water. Rivulets crisscrossed the glass, blurring the world outside into a chaotic mess.

A muffled RUMBLE of thunder rolled in from deep within the distant clouds, seemingly making the desk tremble slightly.

A bit more anxiety crept into Yu Xian’s heart. The prophecy of the “Land Sinking into the Sea” seemed to be turning into reality bit by bit.

Only then did he notice a few unread messages on his phone. Some were from Wen Xiao, and others were from Senior Sister Yang Yiyi. Yu Xian put on his earphones and first listened to the voice messages from Wen Xiao.

“The linked test audio has been packaged, complete with ‘Time Compression’ and the ‘Mirror Anchor.’ But Yu Xian, to test the dreamscape, we need to enter deep sleep… I tested the single-player dreamscape before, and for that, you can set a specific sleep duration.

“However, I’m not too sure about the mechanics of a linked dreamscape. For example, do we need to wake up at the same time? Can we join or exit halfway through? To be safe, I think we should have a third person present. It’s best to have someone watching over us so they can wake us up if we haven’t woken up after ten minutes… What do you think about telling Yiyi about this and asking her for help?” Wen Xiao’s voice came through soft and gentle.

Yu Xian was about to swipe away, but then he remembered what she had said last time about him “leaving her on read.” He casually replied, “Let me think about it,” before opening Senior Sister Yang Yiyi’s messages.