106 Basis for Judgment

No matter how realistic World of Arseria was, there were several reasons it still didn’t feel like reality.

For instance, whenever an enemy fell, any gory imagery was automatically blurred, and corpses didn’t remain forever but disappeared on their own after some time.

The same went for conversations with NPCs.

At first, it would have been easy to mistake them for real people, but that was limited to interactions involving specific conversation topics.

They never told their own stories.

Whenever you asked what they had eaten yesterday or who was in their family, they clamped their mouths shut as if they had lagged.

That might have been why she found the NPC named Adela so interesting.

Her reactions were so vivid that it felt as if she were truly duo-queuing with someone, and it was difficult to sense anything strange unless you dug unusually deep into the conversation.

Right—in other words, the difference between a robot implanted with memories and a dementia patient who had lost their memories. Adela was closer to the latter.

Once you came to perceive someone as human, that impression dug firmly into your mind and refused to disappear...