Chapter 210 - 85: The Dream Server Hypothesis

Chapter 210: Chapter 85: The Dream Server Hypothesis

He was back.

Yu Xian let out a long, heavy breath. He didn’t sit up right away. Instead, he subconsciously reached for his phone on the coffee table.

He pressed the power button. The screen lit up, and he squinted.

2:37 PM.

They had started preparing for the test around 2:20 PM.

It took him a little longer to fall asleep, probably a few minutes even with the audio-induced hypnosis. Add to that the ten-minute countdown that ran in the dream...

The timelines roughly matched up.

Yu Xian sat up from the sofa. The refreshed, clear-headed feeling after such a high-quality nap reminded him of the ten-minute breaks between classes in high school. A short nap then felt even more restorative than sleeping for hours in bed.

He also understood now why so many people were addicted to the "Bus." The physical sensation it gave was indeed nothing like a hallucinogen; it felt more like a health supplement.

Wen Xiao woke up as well. She sat up, rubbing her eyes, her soft, short hair clinging to her cheek. She hugged a pillow and sat cross-legged on the sofa.

Yu Xian mentally summarized the conclusions from the second test:

The test had verified three crucial hypotheses at once.

First, merging the online function with the TDI blueprint was completely viable.

This proved that their "splicing" approach was correct—"online" and "blueprint" could coexist.

Second, the "failed mirror reflection" Logical Anchor Point was very effective.

The moment he touched the mirror in the dream, the jarring sensation of it violating the physical laws of reality made him instantly and clearly aware that he was in a dream.

Third, the Time Compression technology had worked. Ten minutes in the dream was ten minutes in reality.

The desperate situation from the original TDI, where days felt like years and one could be trapped for ten days and nights, would no longer happen. At the same time, the problem of source memory confusion was partially resolved. With the time weight now one-to-one, no matter how realistic the dream, the brain wouldn’t easily confuse it with decades of real-life memories.

"The three hypotheses we discussed were all validated. The experiment was a great success," Yu Xian said, syncing up with Senior Sister Yiyi about the information from the dream.

Yang Yiyi nodded as well, letting out a sigh of relief.

"Being able to use cognitive intervention to counter physiological mechanisms is an excellent breakthrough."

Yu Xian sat on the sofa, his mind still replaying the scene he had witnessed in the dream.

The experiment had achieved a milestone success, which was certainly something to be happy about.

But he couldn’t shake the feeling that some important detail had been missed or overlooked.

He replayed everything from beginning to end, over and over.

There wasn’t much in the dream. The starry sky. The mirror. The chair. The girl.

But...

Yu Xian’s pupils constricted. He looked at Wen Xiao, who was animatedly discussing the dream scene with Senior Sister Yiyi, and suddenly asked:

"Wen Xiao, the mirror you saw in the dream—what was its frame like, exactly? How did you define it in the script?"

Wen Xiao paused, stopping her enthusiastic discussion. She looked up and recalled,

"When I was designing it, I don’t think I specified much about the frame. Let me think... In the dream, I saw a simple wooden material, kind of like walnut, with some minimalist patterns on it..."

Yu Xian frowned and pressed on,

"What about the chair in front of the mirror? How did you define that?"

"I was in a rush last night, so I didn’t set its model or material either..." Wen Xiao said, sticking her tongue out a little sheepishly.

"What did the one you saw in the dream look like? Describe it in detail," Yu Xian interrupted.

Wen Xiao bit her lip, thought for a moment, and described it:

"Let’s see... the chair was also wooden, dark brown. The backrest had three vertical slats, with some carved vines on them. The material was probably similar to the mirror frame... I didn’t look too closely..."

As Yu Xian listened to Wen Xiao’s description, his brow furrowed even tighter.

Walnut material, dark brown, carved vines, three vertical slats...

It was completely, utterly, and exactly the same as what he had seen in the dream.

"What’s wrong?" Yang Yiyi asked, noticing Yu Xian’s strange expression, her own brow slightly furrowed.

Yu Xian looked at Wen Xiao and said in a low voice,

"Do you remember our previous discussion, our guess about how these audio files construct such realistic scenes in a dream?"

"Of course. We said it was like a ’blueprint,’" Wen Xiao recalled.

"The audio only contains ’prompts.’ The materials needed to construct the dream, the ’art assets,’ are all drawn from the dreamer’s own ’memory bank.’"

"Right." Yu Xian nodded, a strange sense of absurdity welling up inside him.

"If we follow that prompt-based logic, then the settings you wrote in the audio script, as you just said, should only have been simple descriptions like ’a huge mirror’ or ’a chair,’ right?"

Wen Xiao nodded.

"Then here’s the problem. If the brain ’renders’ the scene itself based on the prompts..." Yu Xian pointed to himself, then to Wen Xiao.

"...then why were the mirror and chair rendered in my mind identical to the ones you saw in your dream—the same frame style, material, texture, and color?"

Yang Yiyi froze for a second, understanding what Yu Xian meant. She asked hesitantly,

"Are you saying... the chair and mirror in your dream were completely... identical to the ones in Wen Xiao’s?"

Seeing Yu Xian nod in confirmation, she instantly turned to Wen Xiao.

"Xiaoxiao, what about during our first test... all those things in the dream...?"