Chapter 77 - 32: Confused Source Memories

Chapter 77: Chapter 32: Confused Source Memories

After a long moment, her voice trembled.

"Yu Xian, this is just your speculation, right? We need proof..."

"I have proof."

Yu Xian took half a step forward, looking into Yang Yiyi’s eyes under the dim yellow light.

"Senior Sister, do you remember what I told you yesterday? I remember what happened in that dream. I went through that training—I was in a pure white room, reciting the TDI user agreement ten thousand times. For ten whole days and nights."

Yang Yiyi’s pupils constricted. She stared blankly at Yu Xian, repeating his words as if muttering to herself.

"Ten days..."

"Yes. And even though only a few hours had passed in reality when I woke up, the feeling of despair—so intense I wanted to end it all—was very real." Yu Xian gave a bitter smile.

Yang Yiyi didn’t speak. She just looked at Yu Xian for a long time before she seemed to pull herself together.

"No one else is doing it."

Her voice was very soft.

"This field of research was pretty hot five or six years ago. Back then, a few top labs, including teams from Stanford and Harvard, were working on it. Everyone believed that if we could unlock the mechanism behind dream-forgetting, we could potentially extend human active hours to a full twenty-four."

"And then?"

"And then... they all failed."

Yang Yiyi shook her head.

"The risks were too high, and the potential returns were unpredictable. MCH neurons have been located, but their connections in the brain are just too complex. They don’t just control forgetting; they’re also tied to sleep cycles and energy regulation. You pull one thread, and the whole thing unravels. The side effects were too severe and commercialization was a distant prospect. Many teams burned through their funding at the animal testing stage and eventually moved on to other fields."

Yang Yiyi looked up into Yu Xian’s eyes.

"As far as I know, in this specific niche, the only research group in the entire world that is still pushing forward and has made any real, substantive breakthroughs... is probably my mentor’s."

Yu Xian’s heart skipped a beat.

’If all the top labs in the world have given up, and if Senior Sister Yiyi’s mentor is the only front-runner, then where did TDI get its technology?’

’How did they manage to break the forgetting mechanism, letting people remember their dreams, while also keeping their test subjects physiologically healthy?’

"So, your team..." Yu Xian hesitated, then decided to just ask directly. "What’s your current progress, exactly?"

Yang Yiyi hesitated for a moment, but told him anyway.

"We did find a target to inhibit MCH neuron activity. In recent mouse trials, and..."

She paused, as if carefully choosing her words, and finally confessed:

"...and in a handful of non-invasive sleep studies on volunteers—all approved by the ethics committee—we succeeded."

"You succeeded?" 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ

"Yes. We suppressed the firing frequency of the subjects’ MCH neurons during sleep."

Yang Yiyi explained:

"After waking up, the subjects could indeed clearly recall the details of their dreams. They could even remember the words on a page of a book they saw in a dream. From a data perspective, we had actually achieved ’memory retention.’"

"Then that should count as a success, right? Why...?"

"Because of the side effects."

It was as if Yang Yiyi had guessed what Yu Xian was about to ask.

She looked into Yu Xian’s eyes and said, enunciating each word:

"The test subjects... couldn’t tell the difference anymore."

"Couldn’t tell the difference between... what?"

"Dreams... and reality."

Yu Xian froze.

"When dream memories are perfectly preserved, it means they gain the same ’weight’ as real memories."

Yang Yiyi gave Yu Xian a meaningful look.

"In a normal person’s brain, dream memories are vague and fragmented, so the brain can label them as ’false.’ But after suppressing the MCH neurons, dream memories become vivid, logically coherent, and rich in detail. When these kinds of memories enter the hippocampus for long-term storage, the brain’s retrieval mechanism gets confused."

"One of the volunteers had to be forcibly removed from the study after a week. He started to believe that the things he experienced in his dreams were real. He’d demand to know why people around him didn’t remember things they’d agreed to do yesterday, but no one remembered because it had actually happened in his dream. In cognitive science, this is called ’Source Memory Confusion.’"

Yu Xian stood rooted to the spot, his hands and feet numb.

’Source Memory Confusion.’

’Being unable to tell dreams from reality.’

’Believing that what you experience in your dreams is real.’

Those phrases made him think of Xia Li with a jolt.

The girl who had vanished in the downpour, the girl who had been utterly erased from everyone’s memory and the physical world.

’If the test subject Yang Yiyi mentioned had his memories scrambled because he couldn’t tell dreams from reality...’

’...then what about me?’

’Could the reason I still remember Xia Li, the reason I’m so convinced she existed, also be because...’

’...I’ve long since fallen into this state of "Source Memory Confusion" myself?’

’Could it be that Xia Li is just a character my brain made up during a deep sleep?’

’And since I already experienced that bug—the one where I didn’t forget my dream—when I used the TDI program, could I also have mistaken a dream experience for a real memory?’

The thought was so overwhelming it nearly suffocated him.

"Yu Xian? Yu Xian, what’s wrong?"

Yang Yiyi’s anxious voice pulled him out of the swamp of his thoughts.

"I... I’m fine."

’No, that definitely wasn’t a dream.’

’If it was a dream, then why did only the parts involving Xia Li disappear?’