Interesting subversion of the original story. Though it begs the question of why Rika would willingly dream that she had suffered numerous horrible deaths for most of a century—with most of the outcomes being bleak and horrible to varying degrees (except the last few months)—when it seems in principle she could have dreamed a near-perfect world for that entire time instead. Anyone who's watched Higurashi and Higurashi Kai (or their manga / visual novel equivalents) would know that those theme-and-variation repetitions of death and pain weren't exactly "escapes from suffering." I wonder if the author thought that Rika would reject a too-perfect variation of her world right away, and so instead she dreamed of a century of gradually overcoming of the obstacles that prevented the "perfect ending"? In any case, the nature of the problem in this world is entirely different, since there is no "Hinamizawa Syndrome" here, no Takano pulling the strings—just Rika being tortured by a deity she was born to be miko for. Everyone else is worse off, but at least they won't all be killed when she dies.