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Chapter 116 The Palace of Memories
In fact, players who can figure out this password have basically solved the mystery.

The fat man was still somewhat dazed, as if he didn't quite understand why Gu Mian would press those three numbers.

Gu Mian glanced at him: "In this instance, there's a strange and eerie feeling as soon as you enter this house."

"The clock runs backwards."

"Upon entering the house, I did not find any asymmetrical writing or numbers."

"The clock face had no numbers, the computer had no keyboard, and the phone buttons were blurry; and the mobile phone guy who might have seen the entire text vanished into thin air, along with his piece of paper."

Leaving this gate does not complete the 'Escape from the Horror Manor' mission.

"Zhao Lei always felt something was wrong with the house, but he couldn't pinpoint what was different from before..."

"Based on the above clues, we can guess that the moment we entered this villa, we were sucked into the world in the mirror."

The clock in the mirror is running backwards;

All the letters and numbers are reversed;
The world in the mirror has no signal, so it cannot contact the outside world.

"We've been living inside the mirror of the haunted manor, so as long as we don't leave the mirror world, no matter where we escape to, we won't have completed our mission."

After Gu Mian pressed the three buttons, the phone screen lit up, as if it was turning on.

It seems the password is correct.

"We are in a mirror world, and the alarm clock in Zhao Lei's room is set to 9:02. If the alarm clock in the mirror shows 9:02, then what time is the alarm clock outside the mirror?"

The fat man immediately put his somewhat rusty brain to work and then exclaimed in sudden realization, "Two fifty-eight!"

So Gu Mian dialed 258 to try it out, and sure enough, the phone turned on.

He walked towards the door, holding his lit-up phone: "Theoretically speaking, the way to escape the mirror world is to walk through the mirror."

But Gu Mian had tried touching a mirror before.

The mirrors here are incredibly hard, and there's no way they could be used to travel between the two worlds. Gu Mian estimated that if she were to crash into one, she would probably die on the spot.

"But I don't know how to get out of the world in the mirror yet, or I need to continue the story..."

However, the plot seems to be nearing its end. It's estimated that they will soon be able to solve the mystery of Zhao Guanhai's disappearance and find a way to leave the mirror world.

Gu Mian kept talking to herself: "But I suspect that the closer we get to the end, the greater the resistance we will encounter... I mean, ghosts should start appearing more frequently from now on."

The fat man spoke in a low voice: "But doctor, haven't we figured out who the ghost here is yet?"

Is it Zhao Guanhai who mysteriously disappeared?
Or is it Zhao Lei, who is behaving strangely?
It could also be other wandering spirits, but that's unlikely.

Gu Mian held her phone and started going down the stairs. The lights above her had been off for a long time, and they could only rely on flashlights for light in this pitch-black house.

“Zhao Lei has memory discrepancies, which means he has probably lost some memories, but I don’t know exactly how many. I think he may have lost more than one memory.” At this point, his phone was fully powered on.

This phone isn't a smartphone, and Gu Mian hasn't used this type of phone for quite some time, so it's a bit slow to operate.

The phone was empty except for one app, which looked like either call logs or a dial pad.

Gu Mian pressed the button on her phone to open the app.

This phone is probably old and out of repair; it's extremely laggy, and even opening an app requires waiting for the screen to go blank for a while.

Taking this opportunity, the fat man asked, "Doctor, why do you think Zhao Lei has suffered from amnesia many times?"

Gu Mian paused slightly: "Do you remember what Zhao Lei said when we first entered this house?"

He said he remembered people who had been in the same situation as us before, trapped on the mountain by heavy snow, but he also said this was the first time in his memory that the mountain had been blocked by heavy snow.

"At that time, I felt that the group of people he was talking about who were trapped might be like us, players who had entered the instance."

"This instance has been running for quite some time now. I suspect that many groups of players have entered it, and after each group leaves, Zhao Lei experiences amnesia, forgetting the specifics, before accepting the next group of players."

"That's why Zhao Lei thinks we weren't the first people trapped on the mountain."

By this time, the group had arrived on the first floor, which was pitch black.

The gate was still open, and the wind was slapping against it, making strange sounds.

The fat man felt a bit cold, so he hugged his arms and said, "Speaking of which, the way this dungeon resets NPC memories is too hasty, isn't it? It's amazing that it even allowed Zhao Lei to remember a little bit."

"No," Gu Mian shook her head: "I'm afraid it's not a dungeon reset. Actually, I noticed it before..."

"It seems this game doesn't have a function to reset instances; neither NPC memories nor plot development can be interfered with by the game."

"At most, this game just issues a task to the player and then can't do anything about it anymore. It's like throwing the player into another world, a world that the game doesn't control."

The fat man was somewhat surprised: "No way... a dungeon needs to accommodate many batches of players. If it's not reset, and the previous batch of players manages to suppress the ghost, how will the next batch of players play?"

In the darkness, Gu Mian turned her head to look: "Have you ever seen a player who has suppressed a ghost?"

The fat man shrank back guiltily: "I see him every day, damn it."

"Theoretically speaking, the ghosts in the dungeon shouldn't be able to be suppressed. We've already obtained quite a few special items. Do you see one that can attack ghosts that are possessing us?"

The fat man nodded in agreement: "That's true. Those things are basically for survival. At most, they can attack other players, but I've never seen them be able to fight ghosts..."

"In this game, the initial design was that players could not damage the ghosts in the dungeons. As long as the ghosts in the dungeons did not die, the dungeons could continue to operate normally for a long time; however, if a key ghost in the dungeon died, the core would be lost, and since the dungeon could not be reset, it would no longer be able to continue."

"Back to the initial topic," Gu Mian looked at her phone, "Since the game can't interfere with the development of the dungeon's storyline, how did Zhao Lei lose his memories time and time again?"

The author is getting idle again! No way, I need to write 10,000 words a day tomorrow!
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(End of this chapter)