Annan managed to figure out that Celecia’s wish was related to Vladmir.
However, the players had no idea about these “behind-the-scenes” stories.
It was not their fault.
Annan deliberately didn’t tell them about it.
Annan wanted to get information from Celecia about the Ice-shredders and the Winter Insurgent. Therefore, he didn’t tip the players off to avoid making her suspicious or putting her on guard prematurely.
Given the players’ tendencies, if they knew about this secret, they would surely try to bring it up in the conversation.
Annan was certain that if he shared this secret with the players, it would undoubtedly be leaked. Moreover, he probably wouldn’t gain any benefits from it.
If Annan capitalized on this information gap, he could gain new intel — this was the lead the Tragedy Writer gave to him.
After all, Annan didn’t expect the Venerated Skeleton would rush over without warning, then perform a 360-degree spin in the air and free fall to death, plunging the players into this Otherworldly Level nightmare.
Without this knowledge, the players would find it difficult to grasp the mechanics of this nightmare.
From this perspective, the players shouldn’t be blamed for not realizing the underlying elements of this nightmare.
“After all, they originally had some information they were reluctant to share and were missing a crucial piece of the puzzle… So it was only natural they would feel confused.”
Annan tapped his fingers on the armrest and murmured.
In other words, the initial identities of all those who entered this nightmare were related to their innermost desires.
It was not the desire to “get” something, but the desire to “want to be” something.
At the same time, the fear deep in everyone’s heart restricted them.
Whenever the players—or rather, all purifiers who entered this nightmare—exhibit any form of ‘cheating’ behavior, they face a ‘gradual distortion’ as punishment.
As soon as their actions deviated from their own ‘identity’, their minds started to twist gradually at night. It began with hallucinations, both visual and auditory, and then progressively led to complete distortion and madness… which was to fall into a dream within a dream.
The more intense, clear, and challenging the fear in their hearts was, the less resistant they were to that state of ‘madness’.
Why were Longjing Tea and Delicious Wind Goose more resistant?
Because they had all overcome… or experienced this fear.
The child hadn’t overcome this fear up to that point. However, Dove’s situation was different. Although she hadn’t conquered her inner fear, in the two previous walkthroughs, she had joined the team pretty late. That time, she was the first one to be discovered.
She had gone mad later in the past, simply because she hadn’t strayed from her role as a ‘jungle hunter’.”
Obviously, a wild jungle hunter should not speak human words, let alone appear leisurely in a coffee shop.
In other words…the more Dove talked and conversed with other people, the closer she became to madness. The reason why the Child went crazy every time was because he didn’t know how to role-play a rich man at all.
Longjing Tea took the longest to go mad because his current ‘persona’ was that of a police officer who knew magic. And most of what he did didn’t stray too far from his duties as a cop—whether it was investigating suspicious individuals or fighting with thugs.
No matter how many people could survive to the end, only one could inherit the memory.
If multiple people survived to the end, the inheritance of memories was random.
That was forcing the one in charge of memories to betray and kill their companion.
Hence, if the solution was deducted based on only what they individually knew, the problem would become serious.
“Suppose everyone has a ‘fear of the impending future’ as well as a ‘perfect life in the present’, and they live each day peacefully and joyfully amidst this contradiction, without any memories…”
Then, when people grasped that “they would go crazy if they didn’t role-play”, how many people would choose “Why not just continue playing the role”?
It was impossible to find [something that would not be forgotten] in one walkthrough. There must be someone who retained the memories from the previous round, and then in the second round, they gathered teammates and sought out clues.”
He must risk going crazy and use less than eight hours to gather and convince his companions to investigate the truth… and kill everyone to ensure that he would survive to the end and inherit this memory.
But in the end, when his teammates had realized that the leader, who had previously asked for their trust, had started attacking them… how could they have believed that the leader hadn’t gone mad but had planned to kill them and ‘save the game’?”
Until someone like Delicious Wind Goose made a change, and because of the emergence of a new mechanism, they were killed. All the memories they retained and the information they had gathered were completely forgotten.
Everything would start all over again.
Torture after torture…
That resulted in the cycle of eternal reincarnation.
Everything was just at the beginning stage for the players.
From this point of view, this plain and quiet other world was undoubtedly filled with danger. It did not contain any malicious intent, it only hoped that the purifier could give up struggling, integrate into the nightmare, and live a peaceful life.
However, it became much more dangerous than Sporeggar Mill.
There was no doubt about it. It was a tied knot.
All Purifiers who stumbled into this nightmare were like pinballs in a pinball machine… They had to encounter countless extremely lucky and small-probability events in countless changes before they could escape from it.
Not to mention completely purifying it.
And, here…
Annan also realized that there was another trap that could torture people to death.
In regular nightmares, they could afford to die because only their consciousness entered the dream.
In the Otherworldly Level nightmare, they had physically entered the dream world.
Fortunately, this nightmare had a reincarnation mechanism, so everyone had a chance to be resurrected in the next life.
Then, there was another problem.
If after countless coincidences, a certain player finally inherited the memories of multiple lives and solved all the puzzles.
——At this moment, his companions went crazy or died.
Should he leave directly?
If he broke this eternal cycle of reincarnation, then could the companions who died in this life be resurrected?
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