When Wan Xin asked this, Li Ku couldn't help but glance at him.

This guy...

He really did talk too much.

Talkative, unlucky, yet somehow still alive...

He was truly a talent.

The administrator didn't answer directly either. His eyes fixed on the compass without lifting his head.

But his other hand deliberately tucked away the Carefree Dao Stone, and his tone flatly offered a remark:

"Like I said before—those three spatial anchors on this Carefree Dao Stone weren't marked by me."

When he'd said this earlier, Wan Xin hadn't heard it.

But now that he had heard it, he could naturally pick up on the meaning behind the words—

"So the person who gave you the Carefree Dao Stone told you that you could only explore in the direction the compass points?"

"And this compass... was it also given to you by that same person?"

The administrator didn't reply, just swept him a cold glance.

That look wasn't exactly polite.

Wan Xin belatedly swallowed his throat.

The administrator directly ignored him, handed the compass to Li Ku, and said, "Here, you give it a try?"

Li Ku took the compass but frowned, "This thing... how do you use it?"

"You don't need to operate it. It's like a compass needle—it points the way on its own..."

The administrator's words trailed off mid-sentence, so much so that the last word never came out.

And what caused this reaction was naturally the change in the compass in Li Ku's hands.

As for the change, it wasn't much.

The direction the needle pointed remained the same as when the administrator had held the compass.

The direction hadn't changed.

But on the disc, slightly larger than a palm, Roman numerals from I all the way to XII appeared around the edges.

What had originally looked like an ordinary compass now seemed like an old-fashioned clock!

And the direction the clock pointed wasn't the apartment's most special zero o'clock, but IX, which was nine o'clock.

Wan Xin counted from I, II, III before figuring it out: "This IX stands for nine o'clock."

"So, we can only explore in this nine o'clock direction? Is that right?"

He clearly hadn't grasped the administrator's shock yet.

The administrator didn't say a word, but Yang Wenchao immediately spotted the clue:

"Did this compass never show a time mark when you held it? Only just now, in Li Ku's hands, did it show a time?"

The moment this came out, Wan Xin was stunned, looking at the administrator.

The administrator's expression was complicated, but he quickly nodded in admission: "That's right. In my hands, it was just an ordinary compass—it never showed a time surface."

Yang Wenchao and Li Ku both fell into thought.

Li Ku asked the administrator again for confirmation: "Do you have any leads on this time? Also, every time you explore this place, does the compass point in the same direction?"

The administrator was about to answer, then suddenly froze.

Yang Wenchao guessed something and said bluntly, "You always thought before that you followed the same direction each time with the compass."

"But you just realized—you can't even judge whether the direction the compass points is the same every time."

"Because the compass has no easy distinguishing marks, and this endless stretch of grave mounds doesn't seem easy to differentiate directions either."

This claim was likely close to the truth.

But it stung the administrator's pride somewhat.

"No matter how endless it is, I wouldn't fail to distinguish the direction I explore each time."

Saying this, the administrator clearly wanted to salvage some face.

But Yang Wenchao swept his gaze across every direction again, then said with a heavy tone, "Are you sure you can distinguish direction?"

This remark initially sounded like simple doubt.

But the administrator quickly caught a hint of seriousness in Yang Wenchao's eyes.

He too immediately scrutinized every direction carefully.

When he'd come here before, he'd also tried to distinguish directions.

But never as carefully as this time.

In the end, his face turned grim, and he admitted honestly, "Alright, I admit it—on my own, I really can't distinguish direction using the grave mounds."

"These grave mounds, they seem chaotic... but no matter which angle you look from, the arrangement pattern is the same."

"There's simply no way to tell direction through the layout of the grave mounds."

This statement naturally caught everyone's attention.

Wan Xin, Li Hongbin, and the others also tried observing this endless stretch of grave mounds from various angles.

As for Jiang Ye...

While paying attention to their conversation, he attempted several more times to use Ji Zixuan's clone red-eye perspective.

But the result was the same as when he'd used the cat's eye to probe in his portable apartment.

Every time, his vision went black, then a sharp stab of pain shot through his brain.

But these few observations confirmed for him—

The blackness in his vision was indeed because his red-eye perspective was seeing black!

So, from this red-eye perspective, was this space black?

He was thinking to himself—could he train his spirit attribute by using the red eye a few more times?

Then he heard Yang Wenchao ask the administrator directly, "Is that all there is?"

The administrator was taken aback: "What do you mean?"

Yang Wenchao didn't answer but instead looked at Li Ku: "And you? Any findings?"

No one knew what Li Ku's crack-eye perspective saw.

But after a moment of silence, he indeed gave a response that satisfied Yang Wenchao:

"I noticed that when we unconsciously look from different angles, all the grave mounds seem to be randomly distributed."

"But when we deliberately try to remember the positions of the grave mounds to distinguish direction, we find that the mounds seen from every angle are identical."

"This alone is far too abnormal!"

"Philosophers say there are no two identical leaves in the world."

"So logically, there shouldn't be two identical trees either!"

"Suppose the grave mounds here are leaves, and countless mounds form trees."

"Then it's like seeing the same tree from any angle."

"This situation is completely unreasonable!"

"So..."

"Either the environment itself has some kind of strange trick."

"Or it's our eyes—or the part of our brain that processes visual information—that has something wrong."

As he spoke, he analyzed while thinking.

Meanwhile, his gaze stayed fixed on the compass in his hand.

Wan Xin followed his line of thought and immediately said, "So everything here... is it an illusion?"

"Then could this compass be the means to break the illusion?"

When Yang Wenchao heard this, he instinctively frowned but didn't refute.

But the administrator directly dismissed the idea:

"It's unlikely to be an illusion. I've dug into grave mounds in every direction around here. Although many are empty, some do contain items."

"For example, the bone ash box I showed you, and the portable apartment card—both came from those mounds."

Li Ku was startled: "But why aren't there any traces of digging? Could it be..."

A terrifying thought rose in his mind, but he didn't say it outright.

The administrator fell silent for a moment, likely guessing Li Ku's thought, and directly nodded: "That's right."

"The mounds I've dug get refreshed every time I re-enter."

"In other words, they revert to their untouched state."

"However, the items inside don't respawn."

"The mounds I've already dug items from become empty."

"So I suspect that the other empty mounds I've dug might have been looted by someone else before me."

This claim was inevitably thought-provoking.

The players present each had their own thoughts, but none voiced them openly.

Only Wan Xin, carefree as always, blurted out:

"Refreshing the map... doesn't that sound just like a game setting?"

The moment these casual words left his mouth, Wan Xin sensed the atmosphere shift.

Startled, he couldn't help but blurt out again:

"Could this place really be a game world?!"

Even as he said it, he was still in shock.

But Li Hongbin and Gong Cheng—who had used recording orbs to explore the underground palace and seen the "white paper" and "stick figure" through Guan Gong Eyes—widened their eyes instantly.

Li Hongbin glanced at the administrator, then at Gong Cheng, and muttered under his breath:

"Could it be... that the white light world beneath the underground palace stairs is essentially a game world?"

"Then could that white light be data we can't see or touch?"

"And even... what they call the taboo..."

When it came to the unspeakable taboo, a flash of fear crossed Li Hongbin's eyes, and he quickly shut up, not daring to say more.

Afraid of being directly erased with one careless word.

The "taboo" he referred to was still the Light faction.

But it was just that now he thought—could what players understood as "Light" actually be a piece of data in the game world holding the highest authority?

Li Ku had never known what they meant by "taboo."

Only now, hearing Li Hongbin's words, did he suddenly understand—

So the so-called taboo was game data?

Was it the game's protection mechanism, preventing players from discussing it, so the concept of game data became the so-called "taboo"? 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

Clearly, Li Ku never considered the Light faction and directly equated the taboo with "game data."

And because of this understanding, he didn't dare discuss the topic openly, fearing he'd trigger the "taboo" and get erased...

Just as he was thinking this, he heard Yang Wenchao gazing at the grave mounds and speculating:

"From the perspective that items can be dug from the mounds, they do seem real;"

"But from the special phenomenon of observing the mounds with the naked eye, and the characteristic that they refresh automatically upon each re-entry, they also seem like illusions that don't truly exist..."

"So... is there a possibility that both conditions exist simultaneously?"

"That is, these grave mounds are in a unique state of combining reality and illusion?"

Reality and illusion combined?

The others were still following Yang Wenchao's train of thought.

Li Ku, however, was thinking of that unspeakable "taboo"...

If, as he thought, the so-called "taboo" was data capable of erasing anything...

Then could the world they lived in also be, like Yang Wenchao's analysis of the grave mounds, a product of combined reality and illusion?

Part of it belonged to the "game world."

And another part belonged to reality?

Just like the so-called "game invasion," which could be understood as games transforming into reality, or as real people entering games...

Then there could equally be a third possibility—

That games and reality had merged, jointly creating a world of combined reality and illusion?

Like... like what?

Li Ku found it strange.

His train of thought was perfectly smooth; he was about to land on a very natural metaphor.

But it felt inexplicably blocked, as if something had stuck, preventing him from recalling the metaphor he was about to use.

This odd sensation made him extremely uncomfortable.

As if that so-called "taboo" had imprisoned his thoughts!

If Jiang Ye knew what Li Ku was thinking, he could immediately answer the metaphor that was stuck in his mind.

Because Jiang Ye, who already knew what the "taboo" was, directly thought of a metaphor related to "combined reality and illusion."

It was... light.

The metaphor stuck in Li Ku's mind was light's wave-particle duality!

Waves as illusion, particles as reality.

And light possesses both characteristics simultaneously.

Related to this was also the terrifying double-slit interference experiment.

It was said that the introduction of an observer could influence the experimental results.

Combined with Jiang Ye having seen the white paper and stick figure...

This was almost like—

Without an observer intervening, light is a wave, the world is an illusion;

Once an observer intervenes, light is a particle, the world is real!

So that white paper expanded its boundaries as the "stick figure" observer explored it!

So this seemingly endless expanse of grave mounds...

Was what they could see with the naked eye the real part?

And what they couldn't see with the naked eye was the illusory part?

No!

The characteristics actually shown by the grave mounds didn't perfectly match this.

The pattern here was more like...

What the naked eye saw as "grave mounds" was illusory, while what the naked eye couldn't directly see, the "inside of the mounds," was real!

This was equivalent to—observation equals illusion, non-observation equals reality!

This was completely opposite to Jiang Ye's earlier inference!

No!

That's not right!

The two situations aren't completely opposite at all!

The "observation" in the two cases wasn't even comparable!

The observation of players' naked eyes and the observation of Guan Gong Eyes were on completely different levels!

That's also wrong!

Wait—was the limitation on players truly only about their naked eyes?

No!

The "physical body" that contained the players' naked eyes...

Seemed to be the key to the problem!

Just as Li Ku had said earlier...

The information received by the eyes is essentially processed by the brain.

Because of the mechanical eyeballs and red eyeballs, both Jiang Ye and most players instinctively associated the word "observation" with the naked eye.

But what truly processed the information from the naked eye was the brain!

So, if players were truly limited...

Then what was truly limited wasn't just the naked eye, but also the brain!

And very likely, the entire physical body was limited!

With this thought, the differing results of the two kinds of "observation" could have a new interpretation!

Because their physical bodies were themselves "false" products!

So the "observation" results of the naked eye in this grave mound area were completely opposite to the "observation" results of Guan Gong Eyes!

Then could it be understood that... Guan Gong Eyes were a "real" product?

Unfortunately, Jiang Ye had amnesia...

Otherwise, at this moment, he might also deduce that—his Pure Black Clone, and the pure black Nomadic Merchant, the pure black crow, even the pure black auditorium reliefs...

Those things he could hardly see through with his naked eye were all "real" products!

Their essence wasn't pure black...

It was just that the "false" naked eye, produced from a "false" source, perceived them as black!