Chapter 1043: Chapter 724: Dreams of the Past

Capital City

In the distance, the setting sun’s afterglow spills over, the twilight’s golden light filling the sky.

In this modern metropolis of towering skyscrapers, there is a dark room inside one of the tall buildings.

At the center of the room is a high-tech chamber with blue lights circling the silver-white body of the chamber, adorned with some interesting stickers.

Suddenly, the machine activates, the lid of the chamber slowly opens, and amidst a puff of white smoke, Hongchen opens his eyes.

"Damn those developers, secretly changing skills again, I never thought the Clown King could actually kill me."

The game had just started a festival dungeon these past few days.

In his spare time, he took a shot at it.

With his gear and skills, solo speed running should have been a piece of cake.

In the past, the only serious threat was the hidden boss Alyris, and the Clown King was mostly a source of entertainment, a consistent setup each year.

But this year things changed. Out of nowhere, a silver tree appeared and pierced him to death. What kind of bizarre skill is that?

"Whatever, I’ll just order some takeout."

Hongchen casually placed an order and picked up his personal terminal to check the game update announcements.

"Why isn’t it mentioned?"

Could it be that the developers secretly added a skill? That doesn’t seem reasonable.

Logically, if that were the case, the announcement would have vaguely hinted at it, not silently included a new skill without a word.

However, it was just an announcement. Hongchen glanced at it and then let it go. Once the takeout arrived and he finished eating, he went back into the gaming chamber.

After a while, the chamber door opened again.

Hongchen opened his eyes and crawled out, looking blankly at his gaming chamber, then checked his terminal. 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺

"Isn’t it supposed to be non-networked? I didn’t install any experimental plugins, so how did an online game end up with this kind of plot?

Aren’t they afraid of being banned?"

It turned out that after he entered the game and while still in the dungeon, Alyris, as the boss, embraced him and started talking about some nonsensical things, making him suspect he had entered the wrong game, mistakenly stumbling into a single-player experimental mode.

Hongchen sat silently beside the gaming chamber for a long while before standing up.

"I really miss it. I almost forgot how my home used to look. That damn Shadow may have actually done something good."

He was now fully awake.

There were too many unreasonable aspects in this experience.

He possessed a spiritual antibody, and in his spirit, there resided a lazy little fairy.

Several clearly unreasonable scenarios had directly awakened him from a certain state.

Although Shadow is an evil god, and one of the Four Gods, he’s not exactly top-tier in the evil god circle.

He’s in a middling tier, his power ultimately limited.

Shadow attempted to trap his spirit in the deepest reaches of the illusion, trying to extract his secrets.

However, the secrets Kana hid were extremely complex, and simulating a flawless scenario was far from easy.

To simulate it to this extent indicated Shadow’s formidable power.

If this had been near the beginning of his journey, or even five or six years after crossing over, this move from Shadow might have been inescapable.

Because at that time, his career in another world had not surpassed his experiences in this one; his level wasn’t high enough, nor was his understanding of the world deep enough.

Although he had integrated into it, he didn’t completely see himself as part of this world, holding more of a "let it be" mentality, and wanting to do something due to the bonds formed with the storyline characters.

But things are different now; when he was trapped in the spiritual illusion, problems arose with the intertwining of reality and dreams.

With his deepening understanding of the world, Kana had merged his in-game experiences with his real-life experiences.

This ability of the evil god had already touched the realm of rules, perfectly simulating his experiences in the modern metropolis, an absolutely top-level standard.

Indeed, it successfully trapped him within his deepest secret.

However, it created significant flaws due to the similarities within the game; intertwined, they revealed vast inconsistencies.

But alas, to him, these flaws were too obvious, appearing real yet exuding falsity.

"As I speculate, Shadow should now be following my trapped spiritual pathway, delving into my secrets, a process that takes time.

The more I indulge in it, the faster he digs; the clearer I become, the harder his excavation becomes."

Now the problem was how to escape this predicament?

Though he was now awake, he couldn’t break free.

To escape, he either had to wait for Shadow to release him or rely on external world pressure to "kick" him out.

However, that wasn’t the outcome he desired.

Kana went through so much trouble, precisely to deliver a heavy blow to Shadow on the native world.

Ever since painstakingly annihilating the Evil Rat, he never entertained the thought of taking down Shadow.

To an evil god, a significant wound means suffering an irreparable injury.

This meant causing part of Shadow’s power to be swallowed by the world, as no evil god, no matter how powerful, could surpass the world itself.

The world had previously devoured an outside evil god, gaining experience in dealing with native evil gods, so even if the difficulty increased, it wasn’t impossible.

It would be impossible for Shadow to kill or heavily wound him; his aim was to dig out his secrets.

Undoubtedly, Shadow was racing against time to dig.

Though the flow of time in the spiritual world couldn’t be compared to the outside world, time was still passing.

Once external pressures intensified and Shadow was forced to interrupt the excavation and kick him out, if no secrets were unearthed, all his efforts would go to waste.

However, the likelihood of Shadow not uncovering secrets was extremely low to him.

Therefore, once Shadow enveloped Kana and successfully invaded his spiritual world, it was, in a sense, already a success.

Thus, what he should do was to let Shadow actually find some "secrets" and make him firmly believe it.

Given his current spiritual defenses, once Shadow withdrew from the spiritual world, he would be able to awaken, and the trap set by the outside world would be successful.

"Though caught off-guard, thankfully the gap isn’t huge, still room to maneuver."

Kana murmured to himself as he flipped back into the gaming chamber.

After entering the game, he quickly browsed through it.

Indeed, the characters that intersected with his real life were increasingly irrational within the game.

The most outrageous one was the Kana character, where a silver tree killed his in-game self upon his first entry into the game.

In his second entry, the original Kana disappeared, and there were changes in Alyris.

Once fully aware, Alyris didn’t differ much from her real-life counterpart.

Raelia, too, reverted from the game’s Divine Apostle of the Blood God back to her normal state.

Currently, the game seemed more like a mix of the original game plot and Kana’s real-life experiences.

The parts he had experienced felt somewhat illusory, while the future plot not yet experienced was exactly as once seen in the game, with no deviation.

By now, the game had progressed to a very late version.

A thought emerged in his mind...