Chapter 28: I Must Replace This Breeder!

Translator: Henyee Translations  Editor: Henyee Translations

The single room of North City University wasn’t too luxurious, but all the necessary facilities were there… It was just that living alone made Qiu Ren, who was used to a four-bed dorm, feel a little lonely.

Luckily, he had a Nightmare Seed with him.

Qiu Ren took everything out of the luggage and organized them once. The most important things inside were his laptop, the mouse graphics tablet Qiu Ren used to make a living with, and a few stacks of unfinished game proposals.

After Qiu Ren came to this world, he had made a lot of drafts of movie scripts and game projects.

A small part was written by Qiu Ren himself, while the rest was from his original world.

“Let’s try it with the Dark Souls series first.”

Qiu Ren picked the thickest game project plan out of a pile of drafts. This project included the design concept of the Dark Souls Trilogy.

He had also prepared some simple drafts for the Demon’s Souls before that and the spiritual sequels, Bloodborne and Sekiro.

But for now, Qiu Ren felt like Dark Souls was the most suitable, and Dark Souls III had the most perfect game system.

Thinking of this, Qiu Ren looked at the Level D Nightmare Seed he had put on his desk.

This Level D Nightmare Seed had the fantasy genre. If it was truly derived from the Level S Nightmare Seed in the Central Research Institute, then there shouldn’t be any problem using it as a demo for Dark Souls to test the compatibility of that Lord of Nightmare and the world view, game rule template, and power system of Dark Souls.

Qiu Ren didn’t delay any longer, as he didn’t have much time right now. He jumped into this Level D Nightmare Seed without having dinner.

When Qiu Ren opened his eyes again, he found that he was in a dark space.

And yet, this dimension wasn’t borderless like the space where the Lords of Nightmare were. The floor here was made up of flagged paths covered with bloodstains. Looking out, it seemed to be one or two thousand square meters large.

The only conspicuous thing in the entire space was a collapsed city wall, or was it an outpost?

Qiu Ren carefully walked to the edge of that collapsed city wall and found a soldier’s corpse in armor. A spear had pierced through the body of this soldier, and he had already turned into a skeleton.

Just as he wanted to search what the dead body was carrying…

“Owooooo!” a long howl exploded in Qiu Ren’s ears.

A wild wolf as emaciated as a fowl rushed out from nowhere and bit at Qiu Ren.

Qiu Ren stretched out his arm to block the wolf’s bite, but the pain of his flesh being torn apart still came from his arm!

Where did this dog come from?

Qiu Ren found that the size of this wild wolf was at least that of a North American gray wolf. It was over two meters long, and it almost crushed Qiu Ren’s arm when it bit him.

However, it didn’t bite down completely. When it was halfway there, it felt something amiss.

There were smells of more than one Lord of Nightmare… on Qiu Ren’s body.

Tapir’s smell only made it feel a bit scared, but the other Lord of Nightmare scared this grey wolf senseless. It let go of its mouth and quickly took a few steps back.

It went all the way back to that dead body and stared at Qiu Ren with a vigilant look.

This grey wolf should be the body of consciousness of the Nightmare Seed.

The consciousness in Level E to Level C Nightmare Seeds would be mainly animals. As for Level B Nightmare Seeds, they would start to have a certain degree of intelligence. Level A Nightmare Seeds had an almost complete personality but with more or less some mental defects. Only the Lords of Nightmare in the Level S Nightmare Seeds had self-consciousness comparable to that of humans or even cleverer.

Qiu Ren swung the arm bitten by the grey wolf and used a few Creation Points to heal the wound. He then observed the attitude of the wolf.

It looked like if Qiu Ren wanted to purify this Nightmare Seed, he must defeat this grey wolf first.

However, the way to defeat it wasn’t just to create a shotgun and kill it. Judging from its behavior, it was willing to accept Qiu Ren’s challenge.

But he should have a good fight with a sword and a shield like a real man!

If Qiu Ren said, “Time has changed! Doggie!” and took out a shotgun to shoot it, it might directly bite Qiu Ren instead and cause mental damage to him.

The Creation Points for making a shotgun would be used on this Nightmare Seed.

This might be difficult to understand. For example, if Qiu Ren used some Creation Points to feed the wolf a piece of meat, the wolf could use the power it got from the meat to spit out a shotgun to Qiu Ren.

If it didn’t want to spit out a shotgun and directly bit Qiu Ren instead, there was truly nothing he could do.

This was the difficult part of purifying a Nightmare Seed. It must be a creation that the consciousness in the Nightmare Seed could accept. At the same time, it must reduce the stubbornness and strength of the Nightmare Seed.

There were also ways of directly destroying this Nightmare Seed: let the characters from other Dream Seeds invade this place and kill this grey wolf. However, there would be nothing left after killing it.

What Qiu Ren wanted was the Dream Seed after the nightmare was purified, not a pile of broken pieces.

“Is this what you want?”

A sword appeared in one of Qiu Ren’s hands and a knight’s shield on the other. He adopted a posture to prepare for a fight.

That wolf howled to the sky and bared its fangs. It looked like it was ready to duke it out with Qiu Ren.

However, Qiu Ren wasn’t in a hurry. He had no idea how to use the sword and shield in his hands. After all, most Dream Explorers wouldn’t use these weapons.

If Qiu Ren truly wanted to use this wolf to test the combat system of the Dark Souls, then he would need to add a few rule templates to this battle.

Rule template was a name used between Dream Makers, but Qiu Ren preferred to call it game mechanism.

The most intuitive example was that in most Shooter Dream Games, players only needed to do the action of loading the bullets if they wanted to do so. This was a game mechanism that sacrificed the real shooting experience for gameplay.

If players had to load the bullets into the backup magazine after emptying all their rounds like in the real world, it would affect the pace of the game and make it “not interesting.”

Of course, this didn’t include some of the shooter games that pursued extreme authenticity.

The Dark Souls had a lot of game mechanics. Among the combat system, the two most essential mechanisms were rolling and rebound.

Qiu Ren originally planned to change the rolling mechanic to the sliding in Bloodborne, but after a second thought, he kept both of them. Simply put, it was a “dodging” action.

When the Dream Explorers did the rolling and sliding action, they could get an invisible time of a few tenths of a second. The attacks from their enemies would pass by right next to their bodies.

The other one was rebound. When some attacks from the enemies were about to connect, the Dream Explorers could bounce off the enemy’s attacks and give them a fatal blow if they used the shield at a good time.

These two mechanics were the reasons why the battles of Dark Souls made people suffer and made their blood boil.

When Qiu Ren used his Creation Points to create these two rule templates on the combat system, the wolf shook its head and looked a bit doubtful. Nevertheless, it still accepted Qiu Ren’s amendment on the rules.

“Let’s try.”

Qiu Ren went into a fight with this wolf using the default combat system.

It obviously had rich experience in fighting against humans. Qiu Ren’s first two attempts ended with this grey wolf biting his neck. The notice “YOU DIE” popped out.

Of course, this grey wolf didn’t really want to kill Qiu Ren. It was accurate in how hard it bit. Every time it chewed his neck, it released its mouth whenever it saw that Qiu Ren wasn’t moving. It then stepped back a little, signaling Qiu Ren to continue to challenge it.

In fact, rather than an enemy, this wolf looked more like a training partner. This made it difficult for Qiu Ren to slash it directly with his sword.

In the end, Qiu Ren fought with the wolf for more than an hour. While at it, he modified the rule template of the combat system bit by bit to a level he was satisfied with.

In the last round of battle, Qiu Ren seized the opportunity and directly smacked the wolf down on the ground with the shield. He then stabbed the sword straight in its neck.

The wolf didn’t struggle anymore. It made eye contact with Qiu Ren as he yanked the sword out and took a few steps back.

The wolf didn’t have many expressions. It went over and laid next to the dead body of that soldier to rest in exhaustion.

“Are you starving?”

The sword and shield in Qiu Ren’s hands all disappeared.

Qiu Ren thought the reason why it didn’t hurt him was probably because of the Lord of Nightmare at the Central Research Institute.

The wolf didn’t answer Qiu Ren. It looked burned out. Qiu Ren only had to kill it constantly until it couldn’t maintain its own consciousness. Then, it would automatically disappear.

This Level D Nightmare Seed would also be purified to a Level D Dream Seed.

However, Qiu Ren wasn’t satisfied with this. A Level D Nightmare Seed could also swallow the emotions of other people and evolve into… a Level C Nightmare Seed.

Qiu Ren was planning to raise this wolf a bit bigger and fatter and see what would happen…

“Let me think…”

While Qiu Ren was fighting with it just now, anger rose in his heart after being defeated several times in a row. Its power obviously became a lot stronger.

This wolf fed on humans’ anger. This was a lot easier than the tricky requests of those Lords of Nightmare.

Qiu Ren swiped his finger and checked how many Creation Points he had right now: 1721 points.

The scholarship North City University gave Qiu Ren had two thousand Creation Points. That was comparable to a large amount of money.

In building a Dream Dimension, the construction of rule templates was one of the projects that used the most Creation Points.

Qiu Ren had already used 267 points for creating two rules, “rolling” and “rebound.” This was even under the premise that “rolling” and “rebound” only had an effect on this wolf.

If Qiu Ren wanted to “rebound” the attack of that Lord of Nightmare, he would probably need at least a hundred thousand Creation Points.

Qiu Ren pondered for a while and decided to make this wolf a bit fatter. For this, Qiu Ren started to build a… mini-game which was enough to make people so enraged that they would smash a wall.

The wolf suddenly pricked up its ears and looked around anxiously.

Under Qiu Ren’s construction, a large pile of building fragments rose from the ground. These irregular building debris stacked up bit by bit, rising into the sky.

The wolf looked at Qiu Ren in confusion. It might be thinking, “What the hell is this human doing?”

“This is the source of your food,” Qiu Ren said as he tapped the water tank under this pile of building debris and a long climbing stick.

The wolf squinted its eyes, yawned, and went back to sleep with a bored look.

“Crazy! The water tank makes food for me? Will there be humans falling into it?”

Qiu Ren didn’t say much to this wolf. He spent almost two hundred Creation Points again to add some rule templates to this water tank and finished building this mini-game.

Qiu Ren had kind of completed the construction of this Nightmare Seed. The mini-game was composed of groups of buildings in front of the grey wolf. The players had to jump over the debris mountain to get to the wolf. The humans joining the game would be its food, while the gameplay could be used to test the demo of Dark Souls.

The last thing Qiu Ren had to do was to upload this Nightmare Dungeon to the World’s Dream Dungeon Level Library.

In the Celestial Empire, people were allowed to directly upload Nightmare Dungeons below Level D. An official review was needed before uploading Level C Nightmare Dungeons, though. If they uploaded it without being reviewed and were caught, they could go to jail.

Qiu Ren named this Nightmare Dungeon, “Getting Over It.” After the upload finished, the number of visits was zero.

It was a Level D Dream Dungeon and was even a nightmare. So, it would be shocking if someone would enter before he promoted it!

Qiu Ren pondered for a while and started checking the operation of Battle Royale on the World’s Dream Dungeon Level Library.

The popularity of Battle Royale was now rising straight up.

After Tapir opened the “little biscuit mode,” its popularity had soared to newer heights. The number of people online right now had reached 2100, and there were 193 games in progress.

This was because Tapir could only hold around 190 games at the moment since more than half of her energy was used to resist the invasion of her own kind. So, a lot of people were still waiting to play the “little biscuit mode.”

In the list of friends on the World’s Dream Dungeon Level Library… Tapir was one of Qiu Ren’s friends. He had no idea how he had added this friend, but he still sent a message to Tapir.

“Are you there?”

“?”

Tapir immediately replied. She seemed to feel like the question mark would make Qiu Ren misunderstand her, so she added another message, “Have you encountered some danger? Mr. Qiu Ren.”

She knew how to type!

“I’m not in danger, but I’ve created a new Nightmare Dungeon. Please help me promote it on the page of your battle royale game dungeon.”

“Have you… been threatened by other Lords of Nightmare?”

“No! I’m creating a little game myself! The level code is QXGE-12ZX-KNZ1,” Qiu Ren replied a bit speechlessly.

“I’ve already… put it up. The Internet humans invented is very… convenient.”

Tapir had just started using the Internet now?

“Then, it should be fine. I still have some drafts to draw. I’ll contact you if I need your help again next time.”

“…Hm.”

Qiu Ren looked at the recommendation of “Getting Over It” on the page of Battle Royale.

“You’ve already waited to enter Battle Royale for so long anyway. Why don’t you come and play this heartwarming little game while you’re waiting?”

After uploading this Nightmare Dungeon, Qiu Ren didn’t care too much about it. The remaining time was tight. Qiu Ren had to draw more character design drafts and setting design drafts for Dark Souls!

…

At the bottom level of the Central Research Institute, that Lord of Nightmare sealed in the Central Research Institute was caught in some tangled emotions after Qiu Ren left.

It was pondering if it was worth it… to ask this young Dream Maker, Qiu Ren, to build a new Nightmare Dungeon for it.

Perhaps Tapir was only lucky to have encountered Qiu Ren’s outburst of inspiration, which was why he created an extremely suitable Nightmare Dungeon for her?

Would there truly be a second outburst of inspiration consecutively in humans?

It remained silent for a very, very long time. Thinking about it carefully, the environment in the Central Research Institute wasn’t too bad.

Dozens of Dream Explorers headed to all its Nightmare Dungeons to fight every day. They gave it part of their emotional energy as replenishment.

When its own kind intruded it, that annoying monkey would jump to its help. It didn’t have to worry about being the first target to be devoured by its own kind overseas at all.

No… it shouldn’t put hope on that monkey. To choose between humans and it, humans would undoubtedly abandon it completely and turn it into its own kind overseas.

It must think of a way to protect itself and also a way to protect its children.

Thinking of its children, the heart of this Lord of Nightmare was full of sadness. It sensed that more and more of its children were taken away and then purified by those humans.

The memories of the weaker children would be erased. They would be changed to another form. The stronger ones would also choose to betray their own kind and join the side of humans.

At first, it resisted, but now, it felt like it was also a pretty good choice to let its children abandon their tragic past. They could embrace a new life after changing their form from Nightmare Seeds to Dream Seeds.

It felt another dozen of its children being taken away from it again today. They would probably be purified any time soon…

But wait… what was going on?

The Lord of Nightmare opened its eyes wide and stood up from its throne.

It sensed that a Nightmare Seed that was taken away hadn’t been purified to weaken its existence. Instead, its power as a Nightmare Seed kept growing. It was gulping down emotional energy from all directions delightfully.

That one seemed to be… the one Qiu Ren took away?

What was this? It put in so much effort to find a state banquet chef, yet this chef went to make a feast for its pet?

How could it be like that? No! Even if it had to die with the Central Research Institute, it had to find Qiu Ren to build a Nightmare Dungeon for it!

It must replace this breeder!

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