Chapter 22: Chapter 22 You’re the Test Subject Now_1
Translator: 549690339
Night.
After eating the sauce meat cooked by his father, Fang Cheng did acupuncture and cupping for his parents, and took their pulse to make sure there were no issues, before he finally lay down in bed and soon fell asleep.
However, after he fell asleep, a glowing human figure identical to Fang Cheng walked out of his body and floated in midair.
Different from the Fang Cheng on the bed, the figure wore a Daoist robe with a square scarf on its head, appearing clean and detached from the mortal world, like an exiled immortal.
Fang Cheng organized his form and said to himself, “It’s been a long time since I used my Primordial Spirit to travel. I feel a bit unaccustomed.”
The Primordial Spirit has no physical form, being composed only of countless Divine Senses. Although its power of destruction is not as great as that of the physical body, it is more sensitive to the psyche and dreams of others.
To the Primordial Spirit, the walls around were almost non-existent, allowing Fang Cheng’s Primordial Spirit to move freely through these places.
He flew directly to the next room, where he saw his parents deep in sleep.
Both were sleeping soundly in bed, but bubbles were emerging above their heads, clearly representing their current dreams.
In Mrs. Fang’s dream, Mr. Fang and she were playacting aboard the Titanic, spreading their arms on the deck and shouting, “I am the king of the world.”
It actually looked quite romantic.
In Mr. Fang’s dream, however, the scene was completely different.
The daytime events had turned upside down: Mr. Fang was resting on the sofa, while Fang Cheng and Mrs. Fang were diligently serving him tea and water.
After watching for a while, Fang Cheng felt their dreams were of no value and casually connected the two dreams together before flying out.
Hovering outside in the night sky, Fang Cheng began to overlook the entire world.
The Primordial Spirit can enter dreams, and in a state made up entirely of Divine Senses, dreams have become a small world that one can freely traverse.
Everyone dreams when they fall asleep, the difference being that some dreams vanish without a trace upon awakening, while others leave fragments of words behind to be savored.
Furthermore, dreams are also a perception and a precursor to the surrounding environment. The body can sense danger unconsciously and display it in dreams, which is what is known as a precognitive dream.
In the millennia past, ancestors would also descend into the dreams of their favored descendants to warn or instruct them, which is what is called an ancestral dream.
But now, the once-active myriad of heavenly gods and immortals had vanished without a trace, and the lonely spirits and wild ghosts also had fled completely.
What on earth had happened during these thousand years?
After inspecting dream after dream, Fang Cheng finally stopped in a room.
In the room, a centenarian lay in bed, clutching his chest and groaning continuously.
His dream was as dark as ink, with many terrifying things swirling within, tormenting him with certain things from the past.
Fang Cheng scanned the old man’s dream with his Divine Sense and nodded, finding that his fears stemmed from some folk customs of his hometown.
When he first encountered these customs, he probably didn’t feel their terror.
But upon retrospect and recollection, a deeply unsettling feeling arose.
Over time, past memories became blurred and entangled with fragmented and false recollections, ultimately forming the root of his nightmare.
Extending his hand, Fang Cheng turned his finger into a sword and directly slashed through the old man’s nightmare, pocketing the dark nightmare afterward.
The massive dream was like a black cloud, but once pocketed, it shrank to the size of a sesame seed.
Dreams are intangible, able to expand or shrink; that is what makes them fascinating.
After Fang Cheng left with the nightmare, the old man’s expression finally settled into peacefulness.
Years of nightmares dissipated, replaced by sweet memories that brought a relieved smile to his wrinkled face.
Before long, the even sound of snoring began, leading him into a tranquil sleep.
Having claimed his first spoil of war, Fang Cheng continued on, slicing through one dark dream after another, storing them in his pockets.
By cutting down the nightmares of various elders across the country, it wasn’t long before Fang Cheng harvested a large collection of dreams related to folklore.
He wished to promote traditional culture, so he had to search within his own country, as it was impossible to find a suitable world to transform elsewhere.
After collecting tens of thousands of nightmares, Fang Cheng began the task of filtering them.
He crushed some overly absurd nightmares directly, slightly modified the more suitable ones, and then kept them.
Once he had enough samples, he processed them again, then connected these dreams to birth a vast Dream World.
By infusing the Dream World with Mana, Fang Cheng was pleased to see it operating orderly.
Within this world, there were a multitude of NPCs.
Although these NPCs were conjured by others’ imaginations, they still possessed their own logic and could produce some basic responses.
However, since the world was an amalgam of multiple dreams, there were bound to be conflicts in some details. Nevertheless, the dreams had their own error-correcting logic, so there shouldn’t be any major issues.
Players in this extensive Dream World could interact with various NPCs to learn their stories and thereby discover traditional folk knowledge and the underlying cultural significance.
One could imagine that after players gained a vast understanding of folklore through such immersive experiences, they would surely be touched by the nation’s traditional culture and enjoy learning new knowledge.
Hence, the theme of this game should be “Education”.
Hopefully, there would be no disasters this time.
With his Primordial Spirit returned to its place, Fang Cheng used an Immortal Spell to encapsulate the game, then contemplated the packed 5MB file.
In the previous game, people complained it was too small yet its effects too spectacular, making it seem problematic.
He didn’t mind suspicions about himself; after all, as an Immortal, such trivial doubts were inconsequential.
But if others discerned something was amiss, realizing he was no ordinary person, their motives for playing his games would surely be impure, ultimately affecting his path to enlightenment.
Reluctantly, he had to enclose some of the dreams in his own program and randomly added several large but essentially useless files to the installation package to finally reach a size of six hundred MB.
Looking at the bloated game files, Fang Cheng felt it should now be problem-free.
The next step was to find someone to test the results and see how well it worked.
Xiao Douzi and Xu Qingling were resting, and a good boss’s basic principle is to play dead during rest times—unless they’re actually dead, don’t disturb the employees.
Mr. Fang and Mrs. Fang were not interested in games, and having them play would yield no insights.
After much consideration, Fang Cheng finally thought of a suitable guinea pig.
He logged into Bilibili, searched for the person’s Bilibili account, and saw the signature in their profile stating, “Wang Say Games, accepting rants about bizarre games.”
Since they had already expressed a willingness to rant about odd games, he figured he might as well let them test it.