Demon's Souls [BLES00932]

I'm playing Demon's Souls NA edition (BLES00932) and I'm using Vulkan and I do have the Write Color Buffers setting enabled.  Everything else is default.  I have a GTX 1060 and an i7 CPU in a laptop, it's plenty powerful I believe.  I am able to create a character and play all the way through the tutorial with no issues whatsoever, it plays great!  And then suddenly, as soon as I die to the tutorial boss, where it should load up the next part of the game in the nexus, it just hangs up on the loading screen forever and never goes anywhere.  Anybody ever seen this happen before?  I've played through the tutorial like 5 times, after updating to the latest version of RPCS3, after restarting my PC, and just to see if the same thing would happen at the same point every time, and it does happen at that same part every time.... I get a bunch of errors at the bottom of my log that look like this:

U {PPU[0x1000017] Thread (NexusRevolution Main) [0x01d35bc8]} sceNp TODO: sceNpManagerGetNpId(npId=*0xd02689f4) x229
E {PPU[0x100000a] Thread (Core.Res.FileLoader) [0x02092090]} SYS: 'sys_fs_open' failed with 0x80010006 : CELL_ENOENT, “/dev_hdd1/0b/e90afd228133c7d9689c4c7d9d159241” [1]
F {PPU[0x1000005] Thread (HighGraphics) [0x000353f0]} VM: Access violation writing location 0xff000000 (unmapped memory)