[Welcome, our number one player.]
[The "Infinite Split Game" has loaded, and you are about to enter the "character creation" stage.]
At first, Ji Minghuan thought he had seen a ghost. Although he was conscious, he couldn't open his eyelids, as if they were glued shut with tape.
In fact, this situation is not uncommon and is often referred to as "sleep paralysis" in Chinese folklore.
Everyone experiences sleep paralysis once or twice in their lives. The scientific explanation is that part of your brain nerves have not fully awakened from sleep, and your body hasn't yet reconnected, making you feel as if you're pinned down by a ghost and unable to move.
However, Ji Minghuan soon realized it wasn't sleep paralysis.
It was something far more mysterious.
Emerging slowly from the darkness was a panel with a red and black interwoven background, resembling a UI from an RPG game. In the center, pixels spelled out a sentence:
[Before the game begins, we need to confirm one question—"Can you tell if you're dreaming or in reality?"]
The standard Simplified Chinese text was easy to read with no difficulty in understanding.
Normally, no matter how familiar or simple a sentence is, it takes at least a second for the brain to process and understand it.
But the words flowed into Ji Minghuan's mind like a stream into the sea, perfectly aligned with his reading habits.
At this moment, four letter options floated below the panel: ABCD.
From left to right, the options read: [A. I'm in a dream] [B. I'm in reality] [C. It's neither a dream nor reality] [D. It's both a dream and reality].
It was then Ji Minghuan suddenly remembered the words his mentor had said earlier in the detention room.
"Since you say you like playing games, your superpower may appear before you in a form related to 'games'."
"Any form of superpower helps the superpower user understand it. Since you like video games, your superpower might appear in this form—it might manifest as a game level to test and guide you, helping you understand how to use the superpower clearly."
"So... this is my superpower?"
Ji Minghuan raised an eyebrow, thought to himself, but didn't hurry to address the question on the panel. Instead, he tried moving his eyes to look into the surrounding darkness.
Within two seconds, he realized his vision was locked in this corner, forced to focus solely on the four "text options" in front of him.
In a VR game, locked perspective is understandable, but in reality, it felt eerie, like an invisible presence was holding his head and shoulders, pinning his eyes in a specific area of his eye sockets.
Out of necessity, Ji Minghuan refocused his attention to the text.
At that moment, beside the four options, he suddenly noticed something bone-chilling—a slender 2cm wide object covered in corpse-like pale skin, almost covering the blood vessels.
It was... his index finger.
Yes, the sight confirmed it was Ji Minghuan's index finger; he recognized it by the marks on the knuckles.
In the darkness, he quietly stared at this finger.
Under normal circumstances, seeing one's own finger wouldn't be surprising, it's not like he was crazy.
But this situation was different; only this lone finger appeared bizarrely in the dark, as if someone had cut it off and placed it on a chopping board.
In the blink of an eye, Ji Minghuan found he could control this "index finger" with his mind.
To be more precise, it felt like his finger had been separated from his body, becoming a "mouse" in the game interface.
With just a thought, this finger, now detached from his right hand, would move rapidly across the text interface like a "mouse cursor."
A normal person might feel shocked or disgusted seeing their body part become an independent device.
But Ji Minghuan, who had been confined in the lab for a month, had long raised his psychological threshold.
He just curiously blinked, accepted this series of settings, and regarded the finger as a novel toy, moving it up, down, left, and right, even trying to mentally break the "index finger mouse."
When the attempt failed, Ji Minghuan set aside his playfulness and turned back to the text problem on the panel.
[Can you tell if you're dreaming or in reality?]
"Am I dreaming?" he thought.
Even at this point, Ji Minghuan couldn't determine if he was dreaming.
If this were a dream, the sensations were too real; more importantly, the series of thoughts in his mind were clear, without any gaps or leaps in logic. Even if he wrote the whole thought process on a blackboard, he couldn't find any issues.