Over the next three days, Lu Xiu barely left the house, pouring almost all her energy into constructing the instance dungeon.
Fortunately, there was enough food in the refrigerator to last about a week. Otherwise, given her remaining Survival Points... the chances of her starving to death at home would have been pretty high.
Still, having food was one thing, but the aftereffects of her Transmigration didn't seem to have fully subsided yet.
Other things were manageable... well, not exactly.
But Lu Xiu could more or less overcome them. Although they caused all sorts of trouble, at least none of them posed any danger to her.
Cooking, however, was another matter entirely.
Lu Xiu hadn't known how to cook in her previous life, but her current body did.
This created a situation where her body told her, "I can do it!" while her brain argued otherwise... One moment it said she could, and the next it would flip the table and insist she couldn't.
As a result, every time she cooked, it felt like going into battle.
Sometimes she would fling the spatula away; other times, the pan nearly went flying.
Once, she had almost poured boiling oil directly onto her own hand.
She really hadn't expected two completely contradictory sets of memories to cause this much trouble in such an area... but at the very least, she could still barely manage to feed herself.
"Pfft, pfft, pfft. Takeout really is one of humanity's greatest inventions. Once I have enough Survival Points, I'm never cooking again..."
Lu Xiu walked out of the kitchen, spitting several times to get the hair she'd clumsily gotten into her mouth out, then tucked the loose strands behind her ears and sat down wearily to eat the beef with Chinese kale she had struggled so hard to stir-fry.
At the same time, she absentmindedly reviewed the progress she'd made on the instance dungeon over the past few days.
Generally speaking, the environment was almost completely constructed.
Only the first floor of the abandoned house and the backyard, which players needed to visit during the Early Stage of the game, remained unfinished.
After that came the characters, game flow, and branching endings.
Yesterday, she had carefully gone through the construction tutorial provided by the System, so she now felt much more confident about those aspects. However, there was still one thing that worried her greatly.
And that was—
The games she had played in her previous life followed predetermined flows. Even when there were branching choices, those choices had still been designed in advance by the developers.
But an instance dungeon constructed here didn't work that way.
Players would enter the game world with their Physical Body, so interactions with NPCs couldn't be handled through fixed dialogue options, and the System didn't seem to allow that kind of approach either.
Under those circumstances.
Determining when a player died wasn't difficult.
For example, in the section where the protagonist's wife went insane, if the player couldn't fight back or escape, they would simply be killed.
But the problem was that the protagonist also had dialogue in the story... NPCs would interact with the protagonist, and Lu Xiu had no way of predicting what the players entering the instance dungeon might say.
After all, the charm of language... based on what she knew about gamers from her previous life, once the degree of freedom became high enough, players might even propose marriage to their father-in-law. The key point was that they simply couldn't be expected to behave like normal people.
So, how was she supposed to constrain the players?
For now, Lu Xiu didn't have any good ideas.
She could only deal with it later when she designed the game flow.
Thinking about all these messy problems, Lu Xiu quickly finished her beef with Chinese kale.
Lu Xiu put down her spoon, immediately stood up, summoned the System interface, and prepared to enter the Construction Space.
But before she could go in, she glanced at the plate on the table... and her brain started fighting with itself again.
One moment she thought it would be fine to wash it after leaving the Construction Space, and the next she felt she should wash it now.
"..."
After hesitating and struggling for quite a while.
Lu Xiu finally sighed, lowered her hand, picked up the plate, and walked into the kitchen.
The afternoon sunlight was just right.
Sunlight streamed diagonally through the small kitchen window, casting a golden patch of light across the tiled floor.
The light refracted slightly against the glazed surface of the tiles, gently rippling like water and making the entire little kitchen seem softer.
Lu Xiu stood in front of the sink.
The kitchen wasn't large. The refrigerator stood against the wall, the spice rack was crowded beside the stove, and the air carried the fresh scent of Chinese kale, the lingering aroma of beef, and a faint trace of lemon from the dish soap.
The young girl wore casual hot pants and a loose T-shirt, her hair hanging freely as she skillfully washed the dishes.
The sunlight reflected from the glazed tiles onto the side of her face and her exposed, fair, delicate legs, coating them in a soft sheen that made her complexion appear even fairer and more beautiful.
The scene was as beautiful as a painting.
...It would have been even more so if the girl hadn't been muttering to herself.
***
After fussing around in reality for nearly half an hour.
Lu Xiu finally entered the Construction Space.
Then, after spending another two hours inside the Construction Space, she finally managed to finish building the entire stage for the Resident Evil instance dungeon.
"This is where the nightmare of my previous life began."
Standing in front of the abandoned house that players first visited in the original game, Lu Xiu looked at the completed structure with her hands on her hips, feeling extremely satisfied.
Although the description of Visual Mental Image stated that the System did not recommend using the function to construct an entire instance dungeon directly—only to establish the initial framework, because the discrepancy between imagination and reality could be enormous.
After all, most people's Visual Mental Image could only produce vague, indistinct pictures.
However, Lu Xiu didn't know whether it was some sort of bonus from Transmigration, but her memories were extraordinarily clear... she didn't even need to deliberately recall many of the details. The moment she thought of the overall scene, every tiny detail hidden in every corner would automatically surface in her mind.
That allowed her to use scenes created through Visual Mental Image almost directly, with barely any manual editing required.
Of course.
She hadn't checked everything yet, so she couldn't be sure whether there were any bugs.
Lu Xiu planned to inspect everything together with the game flow later. If there really weren't any bugs... then this should probably count as her Golden Finger.
Although, for the time being, she still couldn't tell how useful it actually was.
"Come on."
Lu Xiu lowered her hands, pulled over the System window that had shrunk into the upper-left corner of her vision, checked the game flow document she had spent the past several nights writing, and after confirming there were no problems, submitted it while quietly saying, "Flow Mode, Visual Mental Image Construction Method."
【Instance dungeon framework detected.】
【Instance dungeon flow document detected.】
【Checking logical connectivity...】
【Flow Mode loaded.】
As the prompts appeared.
Lu Xiu lowered her head slightly and discovered countless tiny streams of data spreading across the ground like silk threads, passing through the structure of the house and embedding themselves into the walls, floors, door locks, drawers, staircases, and so on.
It was as though a nervous System had been connected to the entire instance dungeon.
【Visual Mental Image Construction Method activating—】
【NPC behavior tree generating—】
【Starting to generate interaction core based on the flow submitted by the Dungeon Architect.】
The silk-like streams of data spreading throughout the house split off into another current and began converging in the open space of the backyard, gradually forming the outline of a human figure.
It was as though a person were slowly rising from beneath the surface of water. At first, the lines were vague, but they gradually became clearer.
It was a man wearing a white shirt who looked like an ordinary office worker, with a physiological watch on his left wrist.
He didn't have exaggerated muscles, but he wasn't frail either—just moderately sturdy.
His blond hair was neither long nor short and had been combed neatly into place.
However, he had no facial features.
A thin layer of black mist covered his face. It wasn't thick enough to completely obscure it, but rather resembled a blur that could never quite be brought into focus.
The basic outline of his face was barely visible, but his actual appearance couldn't be seen clearly.
This was none other than the protagonist of Resident Evil 7 and 8—Ethan Winters.
As for why Ethan Winters didn't have a face... that was because Lu Xiu had never seen it either. She could only construct him according to how he appeared in the original game.
"It really appeared."
Lu Xiu looked at the motionless protagonist, Ethan Winters, and circled around him like a curious cat.
Then, after reading the explanation of the interaction core that appeared in front of her, she showed a thoughtful expression and murmured, "When the time comes, the player will directly take Ethan's role... that matches the game flow, but how am I supposed to control Ethan so the story proceeds properly? This isn't a fixed scene. If I use Visual Mental Image mode, can I do something like this..."
Lu Xiu suddenly thought of something and began recalling how she had controlled Resident Evil 7 in her previous life.
Sure enough.
The memories were still crystal clear.
And as Lu Xiu began to imagine it, Ethan finally moved.
Just as Lu Xiu had controlled him in the memories of her previous life, he immediately began wandering around the backyard of the abandoned house, looking here and there, but stubbornly refusing to enter the house.
The main reason was that the inside of the house was pitch-black, and the atmosphere had been crafted extremely well. The inside and outside of the doorway felt like two completely different worlds, and going inside required a certain amount of psychological preparation.
In her previous life, when Lu Xiu played the game, she hadn't dared go inside immediately either.
However, soon.
Lu Xiu began recalling the experience of entering the abandoned house, and Ethan Winters finally stepped inside.
The moment he entered the house.
The door behind him slammed shut with a bang, and the interior instantly plunged into darkness.
Lu Xiu controlled Ethan to turn on his flashlight.
Then, after pushing open another door, light finally filtered in through the broken windows, but the atmosphere still made people deeply uneasy.
And after passing through the narrow, cramped, dilapidated corridor, turning right led to the kitchen that had left such a deep impression on players during the Early Stage of Resident Evil 7.
Lu Xiu followed behind the protagonist Ethan and began checking the flow.
There wasn't much to say about the Early Stage. She simply had to immerse herself as the player, visit every place that needed to be visited, make sure the puzzles worked properly, confirm there were no bugs, and verify that every flow node in the flow document triggered when it was supposed to.
It had to be said.
Even though Lu Xiu had played the game in her previous life... and had already reconstructed it in painstaking detail using Visual Mental Image several days ago.
Standing here and watching it now, she still felt that the environments of Resident Evil 7 were oppressive, filthy, and disgusting.
Even though there weren't any monsters during the Early Stage, she still felt uncomfortable.
But soon.
Lu Xiu no longer had the luxury of caring about that, because there really were a few minor problems.
"Manual edit."
Lu Xiu suddenly spoke softly, and the moment the words left her mouth, both the crawling cockroaches and Ethan froze in place as though someone had pressed a pause button.
Lu Xiu opened the construction tutorial and began searching for the correct editing method.
She had only Transmigrated a few days ago, let alone become a Dungeon Architect, so aside from directly projecting scenes through Visual Mental Image, there were still many things she had to learn by consulting tutorials and modifying them on the spot.
And what she wanted to adjust right now was the crawling path of the cockroaches.
Hmm.
She felt the cockroaches weren't crawling disgustingly enough.
...Professional.