Chapter 59: The Completionist Player and a Long-Awaited Calculus Problem

The Absolute Zero Vault wasn’t actually cold; rather, it was defined by a profound, hollow silence.

At the edge of the void-like dream, a dazzling array of transcendental materials were encased within individual “Dream Bubbles,” utilizing the properties of a True Dream to simulate their ideal preservation conditions. Because there were so many bubbles, this area couldn’t even maintain the “Virtual-Real Dream” characteristics of the Shelter itself. It was unrefined and raw—the most primitive and violent periphery of the dreamscape.

The surrounding scenery shifted incessantly. At any moment, one risked falling into the depths of the dream.

The dreamscape was like an ocean, where the deep sea was the “Deep Dream Domain.” Countless cognition-warping Nightmare Aberrations prowled those depths. Even Transcendentals with profound mastery over the “Dream” pathway didn’t dare lightly touch the Deep Dream Domain.

Consequently, even veteran Priests of the Dream Sanctum couldn’t step into the Absolute Zero Vault at will. A single lapse in focus could result in a plunge into the abyss. Furthermore, Hume—who had been responsible for constructing the vault—had intentionally amplified the instability of the surroundings, creating a “door lock” that was nearly impregnable.

Of course, the reason Lucius personally escorted Claudia was not out of concern for her safety. After all, she was the student Hume had personally recognized and taught; her understanding of the Dream pathway might actually be deeper than that of the two current High Priests.

…He was worried that Claudia would “tax” too many materials. Even if her teacher, Hume, had always been cautious with their usage, the girl might not be as stingy.

As the saying goes, the son doesn’t feel the heartache of selling the father’s land…

“Wow…”

Luo Wei’s gaze swept over the bubbles in the vault. Looking at the sheer variety of transcendental materials, she couldn’t help but let out a cry of admiration. She just didn’t recognize any of them.

She had been cramming transcendental knowledge recently, but she hadn’t yet found the time to flip through a bestiary or material encyclopedia.

Lucius raised a hand and tapped the air. A bubble burst, and a notebook that wasn’t particularly thick fell out. He handed it to Luo Wei.

“The manifest for all materials is here, along with their effects. I suggest you only take two or three items with you.”

He called it a “suggestion,” but he was essentially making it clear that this was all he would allow her to take.

“Oh.”

Luo Wei nodded and began flipping through it. The notebook was in Hume’s handwriting—scripts she was all too familiar with. Soon, she found several materials that could potentially be used to concoct the “Blood Refinement” potion. However, they were of extremely high rarity. Judging by Lucius’s nervous gaze, she would face significant resistance if she actually picked those.

Besides, if she were to truly brew the “Blood Refinement” potion, she would need far more than just two or three items.

“Just these few, then.”

Luo Wei flipped back to the front and pointed randomly at a few materials related to mental fortification. She had used the excuse of “repairing Claudia’s soul” to get in; she had to keep up appearances.

“No problem.”

Lucius let out a sigh of relief. He reached out to take the notebook back from “Claudia,” but saw that she had already conjured a Dream Bubble to encase the book.

This didn’t matter. The notebook was just an ordinary journal. It was only wrapped in a bubble to prevent it from getting lost in the deep dream; it didn’t require a specific preservation environment.

“…I’ll go get the items for you.”

Lucius turned to fetch the materials, his eyes fixed on “Claudia” the entire time, worried her small hands might wander. To his surprise, “Claudia” made no further moves, waiting obediently by his side. It was only after they left the Absolute Zero Vault and Claudia departed the Shelter under the gaze of the crowd that Lucius finally relaxed.

Though my intuition tells me something is off… fine, perhaps I was just being prejudiced against her, Lucius thought. He recalled previous events and frowned slightly. Hume’s student… it’s hard to imagine he’d take someone like her…

The failure of the ritual invited much speculation. But at the very least, the decision to appoint Claudia as the third High Priest came from the Divine Envoy himself. That fact was indisputable; no one could change the outcome.

However, the Dream Sanctum was now left with only two functioning High Priests. The sacrificial ritual had failed, and the connection with the Lord of Ravings had weakened significantly. The coming period would likely be difficult.

Still, there was one thing Lucius couldn’t wrap his head around.

Why was the Divine Envoy so calm about the failure? Usually, whenever the connection with our Lord weakened, he would become extremely anxious…

Last time, after consecutive failures, the Envoy hadn’t even hesitated to cooperate with the Crimson Order just to maintain the intensity of the sacrifices. Now, he had merely appointed Claudia and given no further instructions. Lucius and Ayne had discussed this in private, but reached no conclusion.

“Regardless, let’s just maintain the current situation for now…”

Lucius closed his eyes and began to wake up. Once again, Mura was the only one left in the Shelter, guarding the icon of the Lord of Ravings.

…No, he wasn’t the only one.

A kaleidoscopic world surfaced in Luo Wei’s vision. Countless Dream Bubbles and shifting scenery filled her sight—a scene both grotesque and harmonious. This was the Absolute Zero Vault.

It worked…

Luo Wei was overjoyed, unable to suppress her smile. She had successfully “hacked” the vault. When she had finished reading the notebook, she had conjured a bubble to re-wrap it—but she hadn’t just wrapped the notebook. She had hidden the Grimoire of Forbidden Curses inside as well.

She had taken advantage of Lucius’s slight lapse in attention to dump the Grimoire into the vault. She wasn’t worried about losing it; even if someone else picked it up—especially a cultist—Luo Wei would be happy to let them take a peek out of curiosity. Her “wandering spirit” perspective was tied to the Grimoire. Once she detached from Claudia, she could only monitor Claudia’s status via the Information Stream.

Her motive for leaving the Grimoire here was, of course, the mountain of transcendental materials the Dream Sanctum had hoarded for years. It was a joke to think otherwise; once an interactive treasure vault is discovered by an RPG player, they’ll use every glitch in the book to loot it clean. Even in a simple villager’s house, an RPG player would smash every pot and pan to strip it bare!

“Education really does have its benefits,” Luo Wei mused. Because her understanding of the Dream pathway was so deep, she knew this place was almost entirely outside the Shelter’s surveillance and its connection to the physical world was weaker than one would think. More importantly, she knew exactly how to “hack out” once she had hacked in.

These details were hidden within the knowledge Hume had poured into her.

“No time to lose. Let’s start collecting.”

Luo Wei didn’t dare dawdle. She steered her bubble with her consciousness, crashing it into the other Dream Bubbles. When she had first formed this bubble, she had left a “backdoor” allowing it to act as a multi-layered dream. The price was that Claudia’s soul weakened significantly again.

In this state, as long as other bubbles touched hers, they would naturally merge. Like a game of Agar.io, Luo Wei went on a rampage. In no time, she had swept up all the materials in the vault. Her bubble now occupied more than half the space of the vault. Finally, she steered the massive bubble through the periphery and dove headlong into the Deep Dream Domain.

The terrifying depths of the dream were a forbidden zone for any sentient being. But it was no forbidden zone for Luo Wei. Normally, a human’s will would irrevocably collapse upon entry, their shattered soul becoming fodder for Nightmare Aberrations. Simply put: Sanity drops to zero, followed by total madness.

But Luo Wei had no Sanity to lose, and she had no soul for the aberrations to eat. Despite often calling herself a ghost, she knew her current state was vastly different from a spirit. In all her reading, she hadn’t found a single description that matched her. She wasn’t a ghost; she had no soul. She wasn’t a “Lingering Thought” because her thinking was too complex and diverse. She didn’t even fit the hypothetical “Thoughtform.”

A “Thoughtform” was purely theoretical. The hypothesis suggested that after a person dies and their soul dissipates, their thoughts persist—able to watch the world without being observed or being able to interfere. Because they were unobservable and unverified, the theory remained a mere hypothesis. In contrast, Luo Wei could interfere with reality to a certain extent even without external power.

In short, her uniqueness allowed her to perform operations far beyond human cognition.

At this moment, her Dream Bubble was like a high-lumen light bulb. While illuminating the Deep Dream, it restored the warped surroundings until she completely broke free from the Shelter’s range and left the Virtual-Real Dream. She didn’t encounter the Avatar of the Lord of Ravings during her escape because her path led to a deeper dimension of the dream, whereas the Avatar’s domain merely wrapped around the Shelter in the same dimension.

This path was likely exclusive to Luo Wei. Although Claudia ignored sanity loss, her soul was too fragile. Even if her mind didn’t break, her soul would be devoured.

This wasn’t a problem that a “Lifespan-Burning” talent could solve.

After breaking away from the Shelter’s dimensions, Luo Wei immediately woke up. The Dream Bubbles shifted between virtual and real, appearing inside her small room in a flash.

“Phew, done!”

Luo Wei immediately hopped off the desk—now that her consciousness was implanted in the Wisdom Core, jumping around as a sphere was a bit undignified, but it was much more efficient for interacting with reality. No one could see her anyway.

Luo Wei used a small sharp point on the sphere to pop the outermost bubble. In an instant, dozens of bubbles of varying sizes were released, filling every corner of the room. Fortunately, these weren’t ordinary bubbles; they were specially treated based on the properties of each material and wouldn’t pop easily.

With the candlelight and the bubbles, the small room looked like something out of a fairy tale. The only eyesore was the mess of books and splintered cabinets on the floor. Luo Wei liked things tidy; in her past life, she had kept jars of reptile specimens, yet her room had never been messy or smelly. However, since she currently had no hands or feet, there was nothing she could do about it.

“It’s fine. Once I build my puppet, the first thing I’ll do is clean the room!”

Sphere-Luo Wei rolled a few times on the floor as a substitute for pumping her fist. She was an optimist; if she weren’t, she wouldn’t have survived three years in this room. She opened the notebook and cross-referenced the materials with the recipe for the “Blood Refinement” potion for the “Puppet.” Finally, she found a formula she could concoct given her current situation.

Because it focused on the principles of the process, Lilith’s recipe wasn’t strict. For instance, for the primary material, after listing the “Optimal Solution,” she had noted: “Other transcendental blood can be used as a substitute.” This saved Luo Wei the trouble of a specific search.

“Let’s see what blood I have… Enchanting Nightmare blood? Those things have blood? Why is it a mass of gray gas…”

Will it work? It probably will…

Luo Wei wasn’t entirely sure. The Enchanting Nightmare was one of the most dangerous entities in the Deep Dream, though its lethality didn’t lie in physical combat. It transformed into its host’s deepest desire—and not just lust. For a gaming enthusiast, the Enchanting Nightmare might appear as a PC with eight 5080s in SLI. If one succumbed, they became its puppet, and the “infection” would spread like a virus to nearby dreams.

“Whatever, the book says it’s blood, so it’s blood!”

The decades of hoarding by the Dream Sanctum were truly magnificent. It didn’t take long for Luo Wei to find the remaining auxiliary materials. In truth, many of these could be replaced with ordinary items; for instance, a common “Ancient Tree Heart” could be substituted with a pig’s heart in a pinch. But Luo Wei was rich now. She had the sect’s resources to squander, so she went straight for the top-tier configuration.

Of course, using all high-tier materials usually caused a massive problem: the conflict of wills during concoction was more than a normal Transcendental could bear, and consuming it was an even greater risk. Without mild auxiliary agents to harmonize the mixture, it was “one sip, one madness.” Even a Sequence 6 wouldn’t survive it.

The good news was that these drawbacks didn’t apply to her.

If I don’t have a brain, I can’t go crazy!

A puppet wasn’t human. It shared a similar exterior, but its internal structure was a different story entirely—it lacked organs like a brain. To use an analogy, the puppet Luo Wei was creating was more like a robot with flesh and blood for components.

Luo Wei spent a great deal of effort gathering all the potion ingredients from the bubbles, piling them nearby. Now, she needed to finalize the “Ritual of Supplication for Fusion – Birth,” which was the most critical part of the entire puppet recipe. Without the ritual circuit already etched on the floor, she would have needed ages to finish the research. She’d probably have died of old age alongside Kolun County before finishing.

“Luckily, I had help from a good person.”

Luo Wei muttered as she began studying the ritual section of the recipe. She only halfway understood the various formulas and operating principles, but by cross-referencing her basic transcendental knowledge with the circuit on the ground and using the quill from the Grimoire, she was able to attempt the patterns. There was no harm in trying; if it didn’t work, she’d just wipe it off and start over.

While “studying advanced calculus with a middle-school education,” Luo Wei didn’t forget about Claudia. The potion and ritual to restore Claudia had already been prepared; she just needed to execute the steps. Thus, over the next few days, Luo Wei researched the ritual while simultaneously resuscitating Claudia. It took several hundred “Save Scums” before she finally hit the correct answer.

“I can’t believe I just had to sketch a seventh-page incantation in this spot…”

Luo Wei sighed. Asking a middle-schooler to solve advanced calculus was indeed a bit much. Despite having infinite energy and no need for sleep or fear of madness, it had still taken her a long time. For anyone else, this would have been an impossible mission. It was truly the work of the Ancestor of Incantations.

Seeing the ritual begin to take effect, Luo Wei quickly rolled over, pushing the blended “Blood Refinement” potion into place. A mass of gray gas enveloped the various materials, landing at the core of the “Ritual of Supplication for Fusion – Birth.” Luo Wei leaped into the center.

As the incantations on the circuit lit up one by one, the “Blood Refinement” potion began to boil violently. From the depths of the unknown, Luo Wei felt a gaze cast from somewhere very far away. It was watching her—or rather, watching the ritual.

It was cold, emotionless, and devoid of any fluctuation.

…One of the Gods?

The thought flashed through Luo Wei’s mind. But… it didn’t quite seem like it.