Chapter 74 - 31: "Midnight Bus

Chapter 74: Chapter 31: "Midnight Bus

"I remember it crystal clear."

Those five words were like steel needles stabbing into Yu Xian’s brain.

Yu Xian stared blankly at his reflection in the window, wondering if he had misheard.

’No forgetting mechanism?’

His conversation with Senior Sister Yang Yiyi in the hot water room was still vivid in his mind.

According to her, the forgetting of dreams wasn’t a feature specifically "designed" or "developed" by the TDI project. It was a fundamental mechanism etched into human genes over millions of years—the cleanup function of MCH neurons.

It was like the brain’s janitor, responsible for sweeping all the chaotic, illogical junk data from a dream into the trash before a person woke up, preventing it from contaminating real memories.

The TDI project actually took advantage of this mechanism, exploiting a loophole in the brain.

It made test subjects repeat tedious training tens of thousands of times in their dreams, then used the MCH mechanism to make them forget the process, retaining only the resulting muscle memory and instincts.

In a way, this "forgetting" had become a safety lock for the TDI project.

It protected the test subjects from breaking down under the mental torture of thousands upon thousands of repetitions and kept them from confusing dreams with reality.

But now...

This "pirated audio file" circulating in the underground, costing only 100 yuan, had somehow picked that one and only safety lock?

It could let people wake up with complete, clear memories that they could even "endlessly savor"?

Wasn’t this the very subject that Senior Sister Yang Yiyi and her team were researching?

’How... did this little audio file manage to do it instead?’

"Hey, bro, are you buying this or not?"

Another message from the seller popped up, followed by a voice message:

"They’re cracking down on this stuff. If you’re not buying, I’m deleting you. If you want it, transfer the money now."

Yu Xian snapped back to his senses and took a deep breath.

No matter how this thing achieved its effect, he had to get his hands on it first.

Only by getting the source file, sending it to Wen Xiao for reverse-engineering analysis, and then asking Senior Sister Yang Yiyi about the mechanism inside could he figure it out.

"I’ll buy it. Give me that latest version, the bus one you mentioned."

Without wasting any time, he opened the transfer screen, entered 100 yuan, and confirmed with his password.

The person on the other end accepted the 100 yuan almost instantly. A moment later, a file box popped up.

NightBus_V3.1.1.mp3, file size 18.1 MB.

’The name is... Midnight... Bus?’

As he watched the circular progress bar of the download fill up and finally turn into a playable audio icon, Yu Xian felt a pang of panic. The psychological trauma from the TDI project was just too great.

"Alright, sent you the goods. There’s also a .txt instruction file, read it yourself."

The seller seemed to be in a good mood. He sent another voice message, his tone full of hidden meaning, as if he were imparting some exclusive secret:

"But hey, bro, since you’re a newbie, let me give you a piece of advice. Before you go to sleep tonight, go on a short-video app and watch a few pretty girls you like. You’ll thank me for it."

Yu Xian frowned and asked:

"What do you mean?"

The seller let out a sly chuckle and sent two more voice messages, each several tens of seconds long:

"C’mon, haven’t you heard the saying ’What you think about by day, you dream of by night’? The script for this thing is fixed, like this bus scenario, but the scenes, the people, all that stuff... it’s all related to the people you think about and the things you see during the day. In other words... whoever you most want to see, or most want to be with... the person in the dream will look just like them."

"And since you can remember everything so clearly, when you wake up, you’ll feel like something really happened with her... Heh, you’ll have to experience it for yourself, bro."

Yu Xian was stunned. ’So this dream... is connected to my own memories and my subconscious?’

It was as if he’d been struck by lightning; he suddenly seemed to understand something.

He had been wondering how the white room in the TDI dream, along with the text, countdowns, and various buttons inside it, had come to be.

At the time, his biggest suspect was the audio file. But he found it hard to understand how an audio file of just over 40 MB could possibly pack all those "scenes" and transmit them into his brain.

Let alone the "models" in the dream, which were so realistic they were indistinguishable from reality—even the scenes and interactive UI for a VR device or a 3D game couldn’t possibly be just 40 MB!

He had looked into the relevant technology before. VR games like *Half-Life* and *Asgard’s Wrath*, for example, were easily hundreds of gigabytes in size. This was due to stereoscopic rendering for both eyes, which caused an explosive increase in the required asset resolution.

For instance, with traditional games, you typically view the screen from a distance of 50 to 100 centimeters. In a VR headset, however, your eyes are only 2 centimeters from the screen. Objects become noticeably pixelated up close, so to avoid a mosaic effect, the resolution has to be increased. And file size increases with the square of the resolution; for example, 4K isn’t just four times larger than 1K, but a full 16 times larger.

On top of that, VR devices also require spatial audio. Many are configured with 16-channel sound, allowing you to hear different sound sources from all directions to simulate a real environment and enhance immersion.

Even so, the experience is still a far cry from reality. Insufficient frame rates cause many people to experience VR sickness.

But in the TDI dream, Yu Xian could guarantee from his own ten days and ten nights of personal experience that the scene in the dream was absolutely identical to reality, without the slightest difference!

That was why he was still baffled as to how that 40-plus-megabyte audio file could transmit such high-definition models, audio, and interactive UI into his brain.