“If it were any other place, I’d be jumping for joy, but because it’s here, I honestly wouldn’t want Papa to come.” An expression of dread flashed across Bai Wu’s face as he remarked with a hint of worry.

“Why? I came here to find you. I lost my phone when I was in the middle of chasing someone, so I wasn’t able to pick up your call.” Xu Lan declined the bread that Bai Wu offered and went to sit on a stool inside the house.

The relatively modest house was made of mud brick. Its furnishings were quite simple: a table, a bed, and a few stools.

“…” Bai Wu, with his reddened eye sockets, looked down.

“I’m sorry. Just recently you mentioned that the void didn’t have that big of an effect, so I became careless. I came to apologize. I was too busy with the case and we never had a chance to sit down and properly talk about it.”

Bai Wu lifted his head abruptly, revealing a constant flow of tears.

“It’s…it’s my fault.” His constant anger led to him transforming into a dragon more frequently. In turn, it caused the crack to increase in size within a short span of time.

“I’ve said all that I have to say. Since you don’t want me here, I’ll leave when the crack appears again.” Xu Lan’s veins bulged slightly as he made the blunt remark.

“No! I don’t mean it that way. I’m just worried that Papa would not be able to wait until the crack appears,” Bai Wu explained immediately.

“What do you mean?” Noticing that something did not seem quite right, Xu Lan raised an eyebrow.

Technically, the place could not be considered a parallel universe: to a certain extent, its scope was limited, but its self-sufficient counterpart existed in space and time.

At the dawn of a new day, missions would be given to everyone who was trapped within its scope. The people would then have to complete the missions according to a set of requirements and within a certain amount of time. Those who deviate from the requirements or fail to complete the mission within the specified time would, oddly enough, find themselves dead the following day.

Like battling monsters in a video game, the missions had varying levels of difficulty. Upon completing the missions, one would be rewarded with things that were of equivalent worth to the mission’s difficulty. The rewards were treated as gold coins.

Depending on the difficulty, the rewards would either be five hundred, seven hundred, or nine hundred. In the process of completing the mission, there may be hidden tasks. Extra gold coins could be obtained if those hidden missions were discovered. The number of gold coins that one could collect in a day was capped at one thousand.

Those coins could be exchanged for daily necessities such as food and clothing; the coins were also very valuable by themselves. If anyone was able to collect ten thousand gold coins, he or she would be freed from that world and another new person would take their place. If someone died, new people would also take their place. The total number of persons in the game was somewhere between twenty and thirty.

Each newcomer would be given some food to enable them to survive for a short period of time. If the newcomer was killed by everyone else, the food would revert back and be shared between them. It was a dog-eat-dog world. Those who found themselves unable to complete a mission or ran out of money could elect to kill those weaker than them: doing so could cancel out their own fate while gaining all the deceased’s gold coins at the same time.

“So, if you’re stronger than them, they’ll fear you,” Bai Wu said.

There was another rule in that dimension: the strongest person could get more resources. For example, their daily limit could be upped to one thousand two hundred, or they could enjoy a nine percent discount.

“Game?” Xu Lan mulled over that word.

“The thing is, I’m worried about tomorrow. For newcomers, the first day would be a day where the master of the dimension would assign a special mission to them. Most people aren’t even able to pass this first round, and you have to do it alone!” Bai Wu exclaimed distressingly.

“Mm, if the people in the house were able to pass it, I think I won’t be too bad at it,” Xu Lan cheerfully remarked after a moment of silence.