Players, Please Board the Train

”Materialized Library, your mental world is pretty impressive.” Madame Butterfly casually surveyed the stacked floors and bookshelves. She turned to speak to Xu Huo, but the spot where his voice had come from was empty now, and a nearby floor’s door had just closed.

She didn’t pay much attention to the person who vanished in an instant. Instead, she reached out into the air, and a giant zipper appeared from nowhere. She walked through it and arrived on the adjacent floor, then opened the nearest door.

Xu Huo’s mental world was a circular tower library. The exact number of floors was hard to count. Each level was filled with bookshelves, forming a huge ring. At intervals there were gaps the width of a door, and one could not see what lay beyond those doors from the outside.

Madame Butterfly assumed there might be nothing behind those doors. This mental world was materialized into a large library, and to her it was already one of the more complex mental worlds she had seen. Normally, without sufficient evolution level it was hard to support the brain’s secondary evolution, especially in terms of mental power.

Xu Huo was only a D-level player, and his evolution rate was not high, so unless he had some extraordinary talent…

When she opened the door, she realized she had been wrong. Someone could indeed have mental power evolution even at a relatively low evolution level.

Mental power evolution becomes more complete as a person advances. That means even if a super evolution happened in mental power, the initial stage would definitely be incomplete and one-sided. Yet the internal library Xu Huo had created already looked very complete to her. She watched as the bookshelves ahead slowly swung open—unexpectedly, the room beyond was also a ring structure, layer upon layer of rooms stacked as if endless.

She walked through several rooms in succession, but each time she entered the next room, the bookshelf wall opposite would automatically open left and right, revealing another room whose four walls were also lined with bookshelves.

The shelves behind her closed again, and Madame Butterfly felt the room begin to rotate left and right. If she tried to turn back now she absolutely would not return to where she had been earlier. If Xu Huo’s mental world were even more complex, she might not be able to find her way back into the tower.

After a moment’s thought, she swiped in the air and a silver zipper appeared. She stepped through it.After passing through the mental-world portal she had opened, she found herself back on the spiral staircase. At that moment she heard the sound of a door closing not far away.

”Trying to lure me in?” Madame Butterfly smiled secretly. She stopped attempting to enter the rooms and continued walking down the spiral staircase.

After the silver zipper repeated a few times, she finally saw the room at the bottom of the stairs.

The first things she noticed were the items stacked on the table: books, a dagger, playing cards, and a black fragment that seemed to be flowing.

Madame Butterfly did not rush to the round table. She circled it, inspecting from all sides.

These materialized mental items were motionless. After a while she reached out to take the topmost book, but before her hand touched it countless daggers pierced her body from all directions.

One Madame Butterfly died in front of the round table. Her body split along the lines where the daggers struck, tearing into fragments like soft cloth, which fell and vanished.

A second Madame Butterfly descended the white spiral staircase. This time she opened a silver zipper at the round table and then thrust her hand inside.

The zipper seemed like a thin barrier, but her hand extended at a strange angle, as if separated from her body.

This is absolutely impossible in the real world, but in the mental world it was not strange.

When she reached for the book again, playing cards suddenly flew at the back of that hand. Because the hand was separated from the body by some distance, from Madame Butterfly’s standing position the cards should have missed, but unexpectedly some of the playing cards bent at the zipper and attacked her!

The second Madame Butterfly, along with the arm separated by the zipper, was torn into pieces.

A third Madame Butterfly walked down the stairs.

This time she didn’t reach for the things on the table. She raised both hands and a massive golden zipper appeared directly above the round table. When it opened it slowly descended, swallowing.

Just as the zipper was about to envelop the table, the white floor began to flow and pushed the round table away.

But Madame Butterfly seemed to have anticipated this. With a flick of her finger the same golden zipper blocked the table’s fleeing path, waiting with its maw open.

The round table halted in front of the golden metal teeth, which then melted into a milky substance that swallowed the four items on the table and rapidly sank into the ground.

”Where do you think you’re running off to?” Madame Butterfly’s high heels scratched the surface, and chain-like teeth opened in the white floor, ready to devour the floor and the spiral staircase together.

”Clap!” The sound of a single handclap echoed through the circular tower. Blackness spread from the ground, covering the original white and rapidly devouring the spiral stairs and surrounding library floors.

”Trying to trap me in the deepest part of your mental world?” Madame Butterfly laughed loudly. ”Aren’t you afraid I’ll tear this place apart and make you into an idiot?”

After saying that she stopped smiling. Dense zippers radiated from her, instantly numbering in the hundreds or thousands. Those biting teeth opened as they unzipped, like hundreds of mouths.

Xu Huo felt the strain and quickly recovered the blackness, restoring the library to its original state, and he reappeared in front of the white round table.

Madame Butterfly curved her lips in a smile and snapped her fingers. All the portals that had appeared in his mental world vanished.

”Your mental world has a high completion rate,” she said as she sat by the table, pointing at the objects weighed down by the book, ”but there are only three materialized items here. Does your personality have gaps?”

”No.” Xu Huo also sat down. ”I just don’t want them materialized for the moment.”

He was referring to the black fragment that represented his childhood personality.

Madame Butterfly didn’t bother to judge whether he was telling the truth. She continued, ”Although your mental world is highly complete and complex, openly displaying it is dangerous. If someone can get down here, they can find ways to destroy your materialized items.”

”In the mental world, materialized items are symbols of the mind. If they’re destroyed, the person will suffer a shock. You need to hide them.”

”Why hide them?” Xu Huo asked back. ”I’m not planning to open my mental world to others.”

Madame Butterfly stared at him for two seconds and then burst out laughing. ”You just had a super evolution. You don’t yet know how to use that power. Once you learn how, you’re bound to open doors for others.”

”I call the act of dragging others into your mental world opening the door. You could call it opening a window instead.”

”Opening the door sounds good.” Xu Huo’s gaze lingered on the woman’s face. ”You know how to use it, but you won’t teach me.”