Chapter 40

“Gibberish, the protagonist has gone crazy.”

Gibberish considered this deeply.

“I can tell. How about you give him a kick to wake him up?”

Xie De thought this made a lot of sense. The gun pressed against Wei Yanchi’s head flipped in his hand, and with a thud, he knocked him one.

“Hiss.” Wei Yanchi clutched his head, looking over aggrievedly, “That hurts.”

“If it hurts, then it’s right.”

Xie De leaned against the wall and lifted his chin at him.

“Explain the situation.”

Wei Yanchi felt even more aggrieved, but still honestly explained the clues here.

“In the movie setting of Inception, dreams are divided into multiple levels. With each deeper level, the flow of time accelerates by about 20 times. For example, 10 hours in the first dream level is about a week in the second level, and about ten years in the third level. The deeper you go, the more deeply the consciousness sinks, and memories become confused.”

“And dying while going deeper into the deep dream levels, or dying during deep sleep induced by strong sedatives, will lead to entering ‘Limbo.’ It is composed of subconscious fragments. Anyone who enters it will lose their memory and be unable to distinguish between reality and dreams.”

“I guess that if we treat our entry into the movie plots as entering the second level of the dream, then the movie theater we are in now is actually the first level of the dream. So, since Mr. 39 came over from another movie, I am more inclined to explain it as returning from the second dream level to the first dream level.”

So complicated, staring blankly.

Xie De frowned.

“Are we in a dream right now?”

“Yes.” Wei Yanchi nodded, and considerately explained, “Actually, the method in cartoons of pinching yourself to tell if you’re dreaming is not reliable. Because in this kind of almost indistinguishable immersive dreaming, the brain will transmit pain sensations to the body, so dreaming can also hurt.”

Xie De fell silent. Silence was tonight’s scenario.

Wei Yanchi saw Xie De’s irritability and took the initiative to speak, his words carrying a bit of teasing.

“Actually, if it completely borrowed the settings from Inception, then we at least have one chance to die casually.”

This isn’t funny at all.

Xie De remained expressionless and took the initiative to ask.

“How do we distinguish whether it’s a dream or reality?”

“You can look for things you’ve never seen before, like the answer to a math problem you haven’t seen, or go to a city you’ve never been to before. A person cannot imagine things they haven’t seen. If there is a blank in your memory, then it’s a dream.” Wei Yanchi naturally answered patiently.

Wei Yanchi continued, “In addition, we can now enter the next dream level by falling asleep. Mr. 39 is the first person I’ve seen on the first level. I guess Hu Wei and Yue Xiamo are still trapped in the second dream level. We can go over and bring them back.”

Xie De continued staring blankly. He felt that relying on himself, he definitely couldn’t clear this scenario. He was silent for a long while, then nodded.

Just as they were preparing to enter the next dream level, Yue Xiamo came out of the door of the adjacent screening room with a cold face. Seeing them already outside the door, there was no surprise in her eyes.

She dragged an iron whip hung with minced meat in her hand, which was formed from the accessories she usually wore. Blood and flesh were dripping from her hair. She looked even more disheveled than them, and also more macabre.

She casually wiped the blood and flesh off her head.

“I picked the G-rated movie, so I killed a bunch of lions, killing my way through. Now only Hu Wei hasn’t cleared the level?”

Wei Yanchi shrugged.

“Actually, none of us have cleared the level yet. However, it looks like we can be one person short for the second dream level we are about to enter.”

He once again explained his theory to Yue Xiamo.

After listening, Yue Xia raised another question, “Then since we entered the movies, those surviving newbies probably entered the movies too, right? Have you seen them?”

“Mm.” Xie De answered casually. He lit another cigarette and stood relatively far from them.

“There were two new players in Pearl; one died, one lived. But neither is anywhere to be seen now.”

Wei Yanchi thought deeply, then reached a conclusion.

“Maybe during the process of entering the first level from the second level, if someone passes out from too much fright, or dies in the second level, they might enter Limbo. These new players’ psychological fortitude is lacking, they might have already fallen into Limbo.”

If he puts it that way, Xie De remembered the short dream after the Pearl plot ended, where Qiu Shanyi fell to the ground in fright and didn’t get up. It was highly likely she had fainted from fright.