"Eating people?" Shang Jianyao exclaimed excitedly.

He used a tone as if saying a code, "The words are filled with eating people?"

The female figure glanced at him and asked, puzzled, "What are you talking about?"

Shang Jianyao said "Oh, oh" twice and asked seriously, "How do you know They are secretly eating people?"

Before the female figure could speak, the Fourth Research Institute's residential area suddenly became dark.

The sun in the high sky was covered by dark clouds that had floated over at some unknown time, and the surrounding air seemed to be welcoming an imminent storm, oppressive, dull, making it difficult to breathe, and feeling unusually uncomfortable.

The female figure visibly trembled a few times and said, "He, He suddenly became very weak, and then, everyone died, all died!"

Her voice revealed an unspeakable fear and a kind of hysteria.

Her answer also had some discrepancies with Shang Jianyao's question, as if stimulated by something, producing a dreamlike response that was related but not perfectly aligned.

Shang Jianyao asked with a curious face, "How did you discover that He suddenly became weak?

"Which Ruling God is He?"

The female figure looked around again, shivering, and replied, "He is, He is in that room deep in the laboratory.

"He has always been there!"

"Very similar to the Big Boss..." Shang Jianyao, who valued emotions, became worried.

He said earnestly, "Let's confirm one thing first, are you referring to the 'he' with the single-person radical, the 'she' with the female radical, the 'it' with the roof radical, or the 'He' representing a deity?"

The female figure looked at Shang Jianyao for a few seconds with the gaze of someone looking at an idiot, "After talking for so long, you still don't know we're talking about the Ruling Gods?"

"I see." Shang Jianyao suggested, "How about I play a song as background music? There's no atmosphere like this."

The female figure seemed to finally realize that this guy was very strange, but because this was a dream, she couldn't think too much and let it go.

"I don't want to make it like a horror movie." She rejected Shang Jianyao's suggestion.

Shang Jianyao stroked his chin and brought the topic back on track, "How can you be sure He is eating people? He just suddenly became weak."

"After everyone died, He became normal again! This has happened several times!" The female figure shivered, giving a feeling of being unable to withstand the returning cold.

Shang Jianyao clapped his hands and applauded, "You're amazing, you witnessed these things and still managed to survive!

"How did you do it? Teach me."

The female figure suddenly froze there, her lips moving, not knowing what she was recalling.

The entire dream suddenly became deep, and those lights that still existed instantly retreated, shrinking back into the distance, as if separated from this place by a whole world.

In the darkness, there was a faint pair of eyes slowly opening.

Although Shang Jianyao was bold and knowledgeable, at this moment, he felt as if he had been doused with a bucket of cold water, then dragged to the frozen wilderness for punishment.

As a result, his whole body was frozen, seemingly turned into an ice sculpture, and all the thoughts belonging to different personalities that had just arisen were shattered, making it difficult to form.

The female figure had the same feeling, and a flood of fear enough to engulf her soul welled up in her heart.

She couldn't bear it any longer, and her figure rapidly dimmed.

Accompanying this was the fragmentation of the dream.

The sky collapsed, the earth sank, and everything disappeared.

...

Tar'nan, Dream Inn, in the landlady's bedroom.

Aynor suddenly opened her eyes and screamed.

Then, she gasped heavily, recalling several fragments of the dream.

After a long while, she finally calmed down and muttered to herself, "Nothing happened... continue sleeping, continue sleeping."

In fact, she had always known that there was a big problem with her ability to survive back then and continue to live carefree in Tar'nan for so many years, but she was accustomed to escaping reality and never deeply thought about what was hidden in between.

Take things as they come, and muddle through one day at a time!

As the thoughts flashed through her mind, Aynor hugged the quilt tightly, lay down, closed her eyes with a posture of a dead pig not afraid of boiling water, and brewed sleepiness.

She wanted to make up for all the sleep she had missed before.

...

Wildgrass City, in the South Street rental house where the "Old Task Force" lived.

Shang Jianyao had just walked out of the room when he saw Jiang Baimian, Long Yuehong, and Bai Chen surrounding a square table, eating cornbread and buns with different fillings bought from downstairs, while Genava stood by the window, moving his mechanical body to prevent certain parts from rusting due to prolonged disuse.

"Any results?" Jiang Baimian asked first, then pointed to the table and said to Shang Jianyao, "There are red bean paste fillings, pork fillings, and vegetable fillings... Wildgrass City has indeed been more stable in the past two years, and the variety of breakfast has become much richer."

Shang Jianyao grabbed a pork-filled bun and took a bite, saying vaguely, "There are some results."

"Did you ask about what it's like to be raised by a Ruling God?" Long Yuehong immediately forgot that he was still holding a bun and was holding soy milk.

They now had sufficient funds and didn't need to pair cornbread with cold boiled water.

"No." Shang Jianyao was always honest, "But I asked about some other situations."

He told them what had happened in the dream in its entirety.

"Clearly everyone is dead, why did this happen several times?" After listening, Long Yuehong raised his question.

He didn't quite understand the room owner's statement in the dream and felt that it was very absurd and contradictory.

Can one person die several times?

Jiang Baimian thought and said, "You can't take everything said in a dream seriously.

"Although a person severely lacks self-control when dreaming and is unlikely to lie, various things in the dream can bring different emotional influences, thereby inducing specific answers, and those things are a mixture of various memories and fantasies, not absolutely equivalent to reality."

Seeing that Long Yuehong and Bai Chen were both a little confused, while Shang Jianyao had an expression of "So that's how it is, I completely understand," Jiang Baimian added an explanation, "Simply put, what '506' said in the dream may be a product of multiple things mixed together.

"For example, the Ruling God secretly 'eating people' did happen several times, but the first few times did not lead to the destruction of the Fourth Research Institute and the collective death of humans there, but only affected or involved a small number of people, or even only limited to the research subjects in the laboratory, and this was accidentally discovered by the room owner, leading to a series of subsequent events."

"I see..." Long Yuehong listened with some heaviness.

Genava's eyes flickered with red light and said, "Ruling Gods raise humans to replenish themselves and recover from weakness?"

"At least that's what it looks like from the room owner's current answer." Jiang Baimian didn't dare to say it too definitively.

Long Yuehong exhaled and said, "Then the company has never had a large number of employees die collectively."

What he meant was that Ruling Gods are different, and "Disaster" may not be raising humans, but is closer to using human wisdom to study biotechnology.

"There are no employees, but what about those volunteers who participated in various experiments?" Shang Jianyao responded coldly.

Long Yuehong was speechless for a moment.

The next second, Bai Chen quietly held his left hand.

Jiang Baimian thought for a moment and said to Shang Jianyao, "You should go to room '506' more often recently, ask about this matter from different perspectives, and dig out more details to facilitate us piecing it together and restoring it.

"Well, don't touch on the topic of how that person survived for the time being, it feels very dangerous."

"Yes, yes." Shang Jianyao chose to agree, "We almost died at the time, but fortunately, the room owner collapsed before us."

Jiang Baimian nodded, "You should rest well in the car later. The room owner seems to have given up resisting, so just proceed step by step, don't be too anxious.

"Alright, let's pack up and prepare to set off, going around the Blackmarsh Wilderness to the Icefield."

...

Somewhere in the Icefield, in a valley with a temperature different from the surrounding area.

Elder Rodon of Year-End City stood by the window, looking down at the busy scene of the residents, his brows deeply furrowed, never relaxing.

At this moment, in this situation, he always wanted to sing something, feeling that language was not as good as song.

He had had similar impulses too many times, and Rodon, as an experienced Awakened who had explored deep into the Mind Corridor, naturally knew what was going on.

This was a sequela left behind by his fainting in room "131" and undergoing "surgery," essentially a mental trauma that required a certain amount of time and corresponding treatment to heal.

But what Rodon was troubled by was not this matter. In his experience of exploring different rooms in the Mind Corridor, this was not the first time he had suffered such trauma, and he had long been prepared both mentally and materially.

What troubled him was that he might have to explore that strange and dangerous room "131" again, which seemed to involve the Ruling Gods.

Because, in the instant he fainted, he had a sense of familiarity.

This meant that the door to the New World he had been searching for so hard was likely to be deep within room "131."