Chapter 201
Chapter 201
Qin Nan naturally hadn’t expected Yellow Hair to come up with an answer.
The question had been directed at Jian Fan.
Unfortunately, Jian Fan was frowning too and said nothing.
Mu Xin, on the other hand, had begun rapidly turning the matter over in her head as soon as Qin Nan finished speaking. It didn’t take her long to seize on a few crucial points.
“If we set aside the method of upgrading the cards, the basic premise of this whole game is that, to break out of this world, you have to become an SSR card–in other words, the female lead’s male lead. There should be other ways to become her male lead besides killing people to upgrade your card. I think that may be the key to getting us out of here.”
Qin Nan’s eyes flashed at her words.
He abruptly opened the tablet, tapped into WeChat, and started talking to Little Princess.
“Hey, gorgeous. Other than killing to claim cards, how else can someone become your male lead?”
Little Princess: “…”
“Why would you think I’d tell you?”
Her reply came quickly, but another message followed right on its heels.
“There isn’t any other way.”
How could there possibly not be?
Qin Nan’s mind turned, and he kept typing.
“All of us want to be your male lead, but there’s only one spot. That’s way too few. Come on, gorgeous–can’t you make an exception?”
After sending that, Qin Nan picked out an aggressively cute sticker to go with it: a chibi character covering its mouth, red stars shining in its eyes, with the words *Whoa, a beautiful woman!* written above its head.
Jian Fan happened to glance over. The corner of his mouth twitched, and he silently shifted his chair away from Qin Nan.
Under Qin Nan’s barrage of stickers, Little Princess seemed to waver.
“If you want to become my male lead, be good and kill to claim cards. Trust me, it’s the simplest and most direct way.”
Qin Nan raised an eyebrow. That phrasing meant there really was another way. As for whether it was harder than killing… Qin Nan couldn’t imagine anything harder than murdering every last one of his companions.
Still, there was probably no hope of getting this NPC to say it outright.
Qin Nan never wasted effort once he knew it was pointless.
He promptly flipped the tablet facedown on the table. “Confirmed. There’s another way besides killing.”
The typing indicator in the WeChat window suddenly paused. A moment later, two new messages appeared.
Little Princess: “????”
Little Princess: “Did you just use me for information??”
Qin Nan heard the notification but didn’t look.
No one paid any more attention to Little Princess.
After thinking through everything that had happened, Jian Fan spoke. “She said something before.”
He hadn’t even finished the sentence when every head whipped toward him.
Entirely unmoved, Jian Fan continued, “Only a Trainee Male Lead who reaches SSR can go to her world and become her true male lead.”
“Her world,” Qin Weiyi immediately repeated, catching the key phrase.
Jian Fan nodded.
Mu Xin listened to their exchange, then said, “So the world we’re in and her world exist in different dimensions. Speaking of which, this villa didn’t look like this before. It was clean, not abandoned the way it is now, and then it suddenly changed. Did you see that happen too?”
“Mm.” Qin Nan pointed at Jian Fan.
Mu Xin turned to Jian Fan and asked hesitantly, “You did this? What happened?”
“What we’re seeing now is the real condition of the villa. What we saw before was an illusion, but Jian Fan already broke it,” Qin Nan explained briefly.
Instead of looking reassured, Mu Xin knitted her brows. “An illusion?”
She suddenly looked up at Qin Nan and the others, uncertainty in her eyes.
Qin Nan paused.
“You don’t think we’re illusions too, do you?” he blurted, reading the look on her face.
Caught out, Mu Xin cleared her throat awkwardly and avoided his gaze. “Of course not. If you were illusions, would you really be stupid enough to tell me that illusions exist?”
That was what she said, but the thought truly had flashed through her mind.
Only for an instant, though. There was something more important to consider.
“Still, something doesn’t add up. Our world and the female lead’s world are separate, and our world itself is an illusion… Have any of you tried leaving the villa? I suspect that what we’re seeing now might still be an illusion,” Mu Xin said.
Qin Nan froze.
Jian Fan had already lifted his head to look at her.
His thoughts began racing.
If they and Little Princess did not occupy the same world, then their world should be independent and complete in its own right. It ought to contain all kinds of people, and its map could not possibly be limited to a single villa.
This wasn’t Deserted Island Survival or an Escape Room. Logically, they shouldn’t be trapped in one place.
There was still something wrong with this world.
They didn’t need to kill their companions, seize their cards, and reach SSR to escape. This world had to possess another weakness. If they could find it and break the restraints before their eyes, they would be able to reach Little Princess’s world.
Only that would count as truly breaking the game–a perfect new life.
But where was this world’s weakness?
Jian Fan still couldn’t find the answer.
Without a definite line of reasoning, he chose to remain silent.
“An illusion inside an illusion? Come on… the game can’t be that vicious, can it?” Qin Nan muttered.
They had discovered the first illusion because something was wrong with the scent in the greenhouse. If what they saw now was still an illusion, then what was causing this one? Qin Nan genuinely couldn’t think of anything else strange.
Yet when his gaze landed on the tablet, he had the uneasy feeling that Mu Xin might be right.
After all, a tablet abandoned for years had turned on without a problem.
“I think Mu Xin has a point,” Qin Weiyi said.
Qin Nan instinctively looked at him.
Qin Weiyi continued, “Strictly speaking, from a logical perspective…” He pointed at the tablet in Qin Nan’s hands. “In a real world, even if a tablet abandoned for years could still turn on, it shouldn’t still be logged into an account. And something else just occurred to me: smells spread.”
How much fragrance could there possibly have been in the greenhouse?
If they were in an independent world, then once the scent escaped the greenhouse it would keep dispersing outward. Just how overpowering would it have to be to drag an entire world into an illusion?
Therefore–
“The only space in which we can move is this villa. There is definitely something wrong with this world,” Qin Weiyi said.
Then he laughed. “Of course, from another, less scientific perspective…” He looked at Qin Nan. “There is also something Qin Nan once said.”
“What?” Qin Nan asked blankly.