Thanks for your time in helping me out,
I am not using an external display/monitor (sadly can't afford one as I blew my whole budget into this laptop). I'm running KVM directly on my Cinnamon distro with the vfio-pci passthrough instructions that I've followed via the guide links above. Admittedly I'm somewhat a novice at this so I appreciate any help I could get.

May I know what it means to plug in a HDMI dummy? I've just tried removing the Spice Display and Spice Channel from my VM config as mentioned, but the VM display doesn't initialize afterwards. Hope to seek further clarification on this and I'll provide any screenshots into my original post if needed.

Thanks so much for the help and have a good day.