Chapter 97: Chasing Death in the Old Campus, Able to Traverse Dreams...
Vehicles were coming and going on the main road of the campus, but none of them stopped at the teaching buildings, unlike teachers' cars, and headed towards the cafeteria at the end.
In Xue Chao's recollection, the school cafeteria focused on cost-effectiveness, with one or two places worth trying repeatedly, but the rest were just so-so, and didn't attract the attention of these luxury cars, whether understated or ostentatious.
It seems like it's either a cafeteria or a bar.
Where is the hospital?
There were three teaching buildings on the university campus, and fortunately they were all next to each other. He looked them over and found that none of them had a hospital inside.
Is there a plot point where it's unnecessary to build another building for the hospital?
If we focus the plot on "Xue Chao", then the most likely places for his hospital room, besides the student council office, are the art studio.
But there was none in the studio either. Xue Chao thought again and realized that he couldn't just rely on "Xue Chao"; he also needed to combine it with the clue of "butterfly"... Xue Chao had won an award in a biology competition.
There is a biology laboratory in the second teaching building.
When he opened the laboratory door, all he saw was a sea of white, like a funeral parlor. At first glance, he couldn't tell if it was a hospital room. Eighty percent of the room was filled with white butterfly bones, obscuring the bed. Bones were stacked on top of each other, like a nest. There was only a narrow slit around the perimeter. There were many windows, all without glass, wide open.
A low cabinet lined the base of the wall, holding biology-related magazines, books, and research. The walls were covered with butterfly specimens. Xue Chao walked along the gaps and looked at each one. Each butterfly had a mark under it, such as a circle, a cross, or a triangle, the meaning of which he didn't know. Some butterflies not only had marks but also a sentence, probably the reason for their rejection. For example, the transparent-winged glass butterfly had "Too transparent" written under it, and the huge bird-winged butterfly had "Too big" written under it.
What is Xue Chao choosing?
He knew the answer: in the very center of the wall was a small blank space with only a simple checkmark, and the specimen's name was "Helena Morpho (Morpho the Goddess of Light)".
In the cabinet directly below, Xue Chao found the book "The Time Machine". The book did not have any gift mark yet. When he opened it, the center of the page had been hollowed out to reveal the shape of a butterfly.
The butterfly was originally hidden inside the book.
On the left side of the cutout page, written in red pen are the words "love of flowers (x)", "pursuit of stench", and "like of rotting plants and animals and mud". On the right side are the words "recognized as the most beautiful butterfly in the world" and "one of the fastest flying butterflies".
At the bottom, it says "Death" and "Dream".
Chasing death can traverse dreams... So the essence of the "memoir" is a dream, the content of which is past memories, but the morpho butterfly brings the dead souls back to the dream?
There's also the phrase "mutual repulsion" that doesn't lead to any conclusion; it's written rather hesitantly, and a question mark is drawn at the end.
Behind him, there was a rustling sound and a faint smell of blood. Xue Chao turned around and heard the sound of bones rattling coming from the center of the butterfly bone nest.
Xue Chao pried open the nest little by little from the outside. The further he went in, the louder the sound became, and the more flesh and blood clung to the bones. Unlike the clean white bones on the outermost side, when he reached the innermost side, he could no longer see any bones. There was only a fresh corpse from the base of the neck to the lower part of the chest. Something was gnawing at the flesh and blood inside, causing the back to bulge and throb, and the butterfly bones appeared and disappeared.
He intended to wait until it finished eating, but the thing suddenly stopped, then quickly gnawed through the flesh and blood, crawled out from under the bones, spread its dreamy, dark blue wings, and soared into the sky at an extremely fast speed. He had to thank Xue Chao for clearing a path for it, and it disappeared in the blink of an eye.
"So as long as you catch the butterfly, you can leave the instance." Pu Fengchun entered, picked up the book, and after reading its contents, said, "A butterfly that can fly over death and dreams...?"
The skin around her shoulder blades hadn't fully healed yet. Sheng Hong had sewed the skin from her head down to her collarbone onto her body to prevent it from being exposed at the neck. After her soul almost became confused, her head, being an anomaly, became distinct inside and out. However, the rest of her skin had already grown together, so Xue Chao had to tear it off all at once. After she woke up, she drank a blood-restoring medicine and ran down the stairs on the other side to confuse Sheng Hong.
The front has healed, but the skin at the back, around the shoulder blades, is growing the slowest. She tilted her head: "Is this the only one?"
"It seems so at the moment," Xue Chao said lazily. "Keep it up."
This script is too strange. The final task has been announced, and with three cameras set up, it has already exceeded 70 popularity points. There is no risk of betting, and the host doesn't need to do the task. He doesn't have to worry about it.
But Pu Fengchun thought he was being a bit optimistic: "Aren't you afraid that 'your' death will also be part of the plot?"
If Xue Chao's death was caused by a certain character, then the player playing that character was "ordered" to kill him.
“Even without a plotline to back it up, you still killed me quite a few times.” Xue Chao rolled his eyes and pulled a death notice from the book cover. “Look at the date. It’s two years earlier than the causal deaths of ‘you’ one after another, and it’s before all the missing person notices. That is, during ‘your’ high school timeline, before the organ incident, ‘I’ in college had already died. I died of illness.”
Pu Fengchun looked at him like he was a ghost: "Then what are you doing now..."
Xue Chao raised his chin in the direction the butterfly flew away: "That thing was raised by 'me,' carrying a soul that flew over death and returned to the dream world constructed in the past. 'I' am also a dead man, just like you—why don't you go after it?"
“I can’t keep up with that speed either, so I can only outsmart him.” Pu Fengchun paused for a moment, then suddenly said, “Jiang Ming is dead. I wonder who will be the next one to be ‘killed by plot’.”
The final mission began. Jiang Ming's camera was only on for a short while, as if to say hello, before the sharing was turned off. After a while, the camera screen went black, indicating that the player had died.
But Jiang Ming isn't a normal player. Xue Chao: "A scourge lives on for a thousand years; he's not dead."
He was too calm, so calm that he was too certain. Pu Fengchun still hesitated: "I saw another player pull out his sunflower head."
“That’s even more impossible. In the final episode, you’re all main characters, all heads, so where would you get sunflowers…” He suddenly paused, meeting Pu Fengchun’s gaze.
“You probably thought of it too, right? The other head might be the real body.” Pu Fengchun pointed to his own head. “The memories have been embellished by the protagonist, so only the protagonist and you, as the thread connecting them, are the real heads. And this last shared memory is hard to beautify by any one person’s impression, but everyone has a consensus that they didn’t know they would die, so they all beautified this head together.”
Therefore, only by following the storyline and completing the death process will the head revert to its true form.
The opposite head is the real issue.
Xue Chao agreed with this view, but that unlucky thing was definitely not dead. However, he continued along with Pu Fengchun's words: "So you need to catch the morpho butterfly that can fly across the dream before the plot point of 'death'... So let's take action. Don't you already know its characteristics? And you happen to know where 'death' has occurred. It will definitely go there to follow the stench."
Pu Fengchun thought the same thing: "Let's go back to the bar."
At the end of the main road is the cafeteria, but at the end of the campus is the viewing hill behind the cafeteria. As soon as you get close to the cafeteria, you can see the bar's exaggerated fluorescent decorations slowly emerging, like hidden ink exposed to ultraviolet light, with bodyguards at the entrance.
Player deaths are unlikely to be all condensed into a single day; rather, they are placed in this eternal night, where the sun may rise at any moment, simply to showcase key plot points.
From a game perspective, players have only experienced less than an hour, but Jiang Ming has already gone through two plot points that require a significant time span: "hiding evidence and sending letters" and "being killed."
Interspersed in the plot is a mailbox that Pu Fengchun has already received but doesn't know where it is. She guesses that she probably won't be able to find the mailbox for a while because in the storyline, her mother discovered their letters and forbade them from corresponding. She didn't see the last letter, so in order to protect the normal progress of the plot, she won't be allowed to find it.
Just because she didn't see it doesn't mean the bar thinks she doesn't know. If the bar finds out that Jiang Ming sent the letter to her, they definitely won't let her off the hook.
She used the same logic to scheme against Xue Chao, and now her character has also fallen into this fatal trap that cannot be proven. Is this a small retribution?
They had no choice but to hide, so they took a detour and went up the mountain first.
Reaching the side of the mountain, Pu Fengchun noticed faint bloodstains on the steps. In the darkness, they looked like a few specks of mud, seemingly fresh and still slowly flowing. She glanced up at the hill and whispered to Xue Chao, "...The mass grave?"
The hospital morgue is still vivid in my mind. Xue Chao: "They probably preferred cremation."
But as they climbed the steps, they found a sunflower with its roots still attached to the grass on the hillside. Several petals had been plucked off, a seed was missing, and the leaves were crumpled and wrinkled.
There were footprints around, and judging from their size, they belonged to a girl. The player who found the sunflower head was Fang Tailai. She took the sunflower to study it, but she was probably discovered by the people at the bar and hid it in the hill. She also threw away the sunflower.
From the hillside, turn to the other side, and you can see the third floor of the cafeteria.
Pu Fengchun observed the distance between the two, while Xue Chao also began to study the sunflower. He had seen it up close more than once, touched it, hit it, pulled it off, and even kissed it. He was so familiar with it that after flipping through it once, he was certain that it was indeed Jiang Ming's aberration.
How did that thing escape? Did it pull out its head again, like a cicada shedding its shell?
By the way, as the protagonist of the first unit, Yi Tou hadn't even grown out yet when Jiang Ming took action at the beginning and forcibly replaced Xia Caizhe. But was Xia Caizhe really dead at that time?
Who exactly is this "protagonist of the first unit" who has now died?
“The butterfly is over there.” Pu Fengchun pointed to an open window on the third floor, which seemed to be the back kitchen of a bar, but there were several blood-soaked garbage cans piled up. A morpho butterfly was on the side of the cans, nibbling at the outstretched arms, its dreamlike beautiful wings fluttering gently.
Pu Fengchun, not receiving a response from Xue Chao, assumed he was still studying Jiang Ming's head: "What have you figured out?"
But then he noticed Xue Chao was watching the morpho butterfly. He snapped out of his reverie and shook the damaged sunflower in his hand: "I'm just regretting that I ran out of my plant root props, otherwise I could have just swung across." He preferred this straightforward method.
Pu Fengchun was enlightened: "I can do it."
Xue Chao was slightly taken aback, but quickly realized: "Superpowers?"
Pu Fengchun nodded: "My special ability is 'growth,' which is rather useless, but this just happens to be something I can do."
How are goals defined?
"Currently, it's only effective on plants because it promotes rapid growth and has a long cooling period, so I don't use it much."
Xue Chao thought of something else: "Your white rose earrings?" He remembered that they were real flowers.
Pu Fengchun joked, "Although it's not very useful, it serves as a safety net, giving me a little more courage?"
"Everyone has their own expertise, this is just right." Xue Chao once again marveled at the incredible matchmaking of this instance, and handed the sunflower to her, "Please."
Pu Fengchun grasped the sunflower's rootstock, roughly aligned it with the direction of the butterfly, and used his supernatural ability.
[Superpower "██" in use]
Instead of growing, a red flash suddenly appeared at her fingertips, and a laser beam shot out like an arrow, piercing through the trash can.
The butterfly took flight in fright, then landed carelessly in the flesh and blood of another trash can.
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