Mu Jiashi is not the only one to notice the problem with the door. The only woman present has also quietly approached to test the handle. Then, she gasps in silence.
Mu Jiashi glances at her.
Her appearance is fine, but what is most striking about her is her blue-green hair. Mu Jiashi is suddenly reminded of something and reflexively says, “you must be…”
The woman nods and says softly, “sorry, but please keep my identity secret.”
Mu Jiashi nods.
He knows this woman with grue hair. Her name is Ding Yi.
She is a famous Necessities Merchant of the bottom floor, known as the ‘Billionaire.’
Mu Jiashi knew her because long ago, when he was still in the carrying business, she introduced customers to him. They didn’t interact much beyond that, but she left a deep impression on him.
Especially because of the grue hair. It is rare enough on its own, and rumours say that Ding Yi once had black hair, but because of a special utility card, her hair became this mystical blue-green colour.
Though… a utility card?
Besides the Modification cards and Fusion cards, what other utility cards can even affect appearances? Yet, if it were one of those two types, isn’t it lasting way too long?
While curious, Mu Jiashi couldn’t just ask Ding Yi outright, either.
Her appearance aside, another reason she is well known may be because of the contrast between her personality and her role. She is a Necessities Merchant, but for some reason, she is extremely introverted in her daily life. She never speaks much. It is hard to imagine what led her to becoming a merchant.
Though… Later, Mu Jiashi speculated that it was perhaps because Ding Yi came to know many Tower residents.
The Necessities Merchants had to acquire their goods from the Tower residents. As outsiders, the Missiontakers’ quality of life is directly affected by their relationship with the Tower residents.
And especially so for the Necessities Merchants.
In the Tower, most of the Missiontakers treat Tower residents like the three men treated Xü Beijin a few days ago – ignoring them entirely.
Some Necessities Merchants, and other Missiontakers who came to assume special roles, would instead need to establish a good relationship with the residents.
The Tower is filled with an endless grey fog and hopeless black Nightmares, but the occasional special career and role is able to brighten up the daily lives on the bottom floor of the Tower a little with some colour.
Mu Jiashi and Ding Yi’s conversation, and the two’s checking of the door handle lasted but a moment, and nobody paid any attention… but Lin Qin.
He narrows his eyes to examine those two a little.
She has secrets… Who is she?
Though after a second of curiosity, it has faded already and Lin Qin looks away already, disinterested. He is the Crownless King of the Tower, and he is often disinterested in many things.
Many would even question his humanity, too. Other than seeing him occasionally leave the house to wander aimlessly or go into Nightmares, he’s practically unseen anywhere else.
Though he does possess that enviable fighting strength.
Many Missiontakers wanted to take advantage of that, but could never manage to align themselves with his thought processes. In general, Lin Qin isn’t exactly temperamental, even too lazy to respond to people provoking him on purpose sometimes.
That said, sometimes the well-tempered baby-face Lin Qin would go berserk and go completely mad.
Nobody has managed to stop him when he is mad all the way up to this point.
Missiontakers ending up in a Nightmare alongside Lin Qin often both revere and fear him.
Not that Lin Qin himself cares. He is leaning on the wall right now while the argument between the three men is playing out right beside his ears. He can’t help but wonder how this bunch of Missiontakers can be so… dumb.
Even he could figure out that this Nightmare probably requires some cooperation——Or rather, all Nightmares on the bottom floor require Missiontakers’ cooperation, just perhaps up to different degrees.
And now, they’re arguing?
Lin Qin is a little irritated already.
He usually treats Nightmares as a way to kill time. Therefore, the performance of the Missiontakers in the Nightmares naturally plays a role in that. He treats the Nightmares as something akin to interesting novels, or TV dramas, or movies.
And now, he can only see a bunch of terrible third-rate actors displaying their incompetence in all their inglorious form.
In this sense, Lin Qin would certainly be nodding along the viewers of the stream if he could see them.
“slowly typing a question mark.jpg”
“what r they doing? srsly???”
“… Perhaps this is just human nature”
“no wait where’s the psycho murderer in black? where is he?”
That is when Erge coldly, impatiently orders, “shut the fuck up you all!”
Selfish, Scapegoat and Laoda all turn towards him with the last of them shutting up. The other two still want to keep going when Erge slams them to the wall with his legs, one by one.
He didn’t use enough force to cause injuries, and the Server doesn’t go so far as to ban even something as mild as that. Though it was enough to intimidate.
Scapegoat couldn’t say anything before Selfish is already about to cuss with his red steaming face while getting up from the ground.
“I suggest you wake up,” Erge coldly says, ‘tch’ing, and adding, “and take a good look around.”
“Look around what?” Selfish retorts, saying, “look at how safe we are?”
Erge then says, “hoh. Yeah——So, where is that man in black, who you said were chasing you before?”
Selfish goes quiet. His head has finally cooled enough to allow him to realise the strange mood in the corridor. He hesitates for a bit before shutting up entirely.
Laosan says with a worried tone, “we’re locked out of the bedroom,” he also tested the handle already, and concludes, “this means we might be trapped in this run of the Nightmare.”
“Trapped?”
Laosan says, “we… we could go to the end of the corridor. I suspect… We can’t get out anymore.”
A minute later, they’re at the end of the corridor, and the door that was supposed to lead them to the car park outside is inexplicably gone, leaving only the empty wall blocking them out entirely.
Laoda is widening his eyes, going, “fuck, this means we’re just gonna wait and die here?!”
“Not exactly,” Erge might not be as smart as Laosan, but he could make simple deductions too, “with that man in black they said would chase them also gone——We can’t even wait for something to kill us.”
Laoda “…”
He kicks the wall out of spite.
Selfish speaks up with a bleak smirk, “why did you even run outside, if you didn’t…”
Erge turns to him and says with a frigid tone, “what about, if you blabber a single sentence more, then go kill yourself and restart the Nightmare for us?”
Selfish retorts, “I’m not the only one speaking, even!”
Laoda gives him a good hard kick.
Selfish falls down, wailing.
Erge praises his Laoda, “nice kick.”
Although Laoda isn’t much better than a reckless pile of temperamental muscles, but at least he listens to people.
“Umm…” Laosan suddenly asks, “about the man in black that was chasing you… Did he have a weapon?”
Scapegoat is gloating over Selfish’s misfortune while answering, “yes, a big machete.”
Laosan’s eyes seem to glow as he murmurs, “a big machete… The man that was slashing us was using something similar…”
Mu Jiashi is the only one to immediately realise what he’s getting at, and restates, “when the man in black was chasing us on the road, he suddenly disappeared once.”
And the two of them look at each other to say, “so he can only ever appear in one place at a time!”
Erge doesn’t exactly understand why they’re talking about that, and asks, “can we use that somehow?”
“If he can only appear in one scene at a time, we can cooperate,” Mu Jiashi says, matter-of-factly, “according to you, the man in black appears in the bedroom for exactly one minute. This means that if we can somehow force the man in black to stay with us for a minute, then the bedroom would be safe. You would have time to try out more numbers.”
After saying all that, the man suddenly pauses and gives an awkward smile when everyone is looking at him, and adds, “but, you don’t have to listen to me. I’m just a piece of trash, a loser…” He sighs as he says it.
Laosan and Ding Yi both look at him with strange gazes.
The two of them are possibly the only people present who fully realise the value of Mu Jiashi here.
From what he spoke of, they can see that Mu Jiashi is someone who puts teamwork above all else.
In Nightmares, because only one person needs to achieve a True End for all of them to be offered to ascend to higher floors, theoretically, if the Missiontakers were all selfless and cooperative, then it would not be too hard to achieve a True End for any Nightmare.
For example, this one, where if they did as Mu Jiashi just said, with the corridor team focusing on keeping the man in black occupied without letting him teleport to the bedroom, then the bedroom group could ignore the penalties for a wrong number and keep trying. No matter how many times it took, they could eventually stumble on the correct sequence.
This is definitely one piece of key information in this Nightmare guaranteed.
So the problem lies on the corridor team. Mu Jiashi, who proposed it, and Lin Qin, whose physical prowess is unparalleled, might agree, but what about Selfish and Scapegoat?
And as expected, almost as soon as Mu Jiashi said his laments ago Selfish has climbed back up from the ground to yell, “you’re kidding me! Keeping the man in black here? You’re mad! You can’t be so selfish! You can be a flowery saint all you want, but don’t involve me in this!”
Mu Jiashi responds to the criticism with silence.
Laosan and Ding Yi both look like they have something to say, but the two rather shy persons ends up staying silent as well.
Erge is much more straightforward though, cracking his knuckles to say, “so, you ready to die?”
Selfish’s expression immediately changes. He loudly chastises everyone and says spitefully, “die? Why me?! You bunch of uncaring, miserly miscreants!”
Laoda rolls his eyes, feeling like giving him another kick again. He is mentally exhausted at this point.
How did he even spend so long arguing with someone like him? He must have been out of his mind, or just trying to loosen himself after that terrifying, suffocating experience being slaughtered to death by the man in black in the bedroom.
They are at a standstill.
This run of the Nightmare is ground to a halt in the corridor now, but what should they do to start the next run?
And… in theory, the Server never arranges a true dead end no matter what, right?
While the eight Missiontakers fall into silence in the corridor, Xü Beijin is already out of his bookstore and walking about the service area with the audience.
The viewers kept egging him on, and he is interested as well, so he stopped observing the Missiontakers.
The service area is actually pretty lively, with eateries, a supermarket and tuck shops. Even though there are no Missiontakers in sight, the Actors are still diligently going about their work.
Some of them give Xü Beijin odd looks when he appears, though they do not pay him further attention. Many Actors have become used to the routine already; they might even mistake Xü Beijin for being a Missiontaker given what he’s doing too.
In a sense, many of the Actors have truly become ‘NPCs.’
Xü Beijin takes a deep breath and also pays those Actors no mind. After circling the area once to get a sense of its layout, he walks straight for the supermarket.
“Welcome to… Oh, it’s you,” behind the register is the young man from before, who smiles and asks, “so, here to join our ‘Operation Defeat NE’?”
Xü Beijin shakes his head.
The viewers are typing the myriad of questions they have on the comment barrage. Xü Beijin takes a look and decides to go with the flow and ask about this Nightmare.
“I’m just curious what the truth of this Nightmare is.”
The young man’s eyes seem to glow a little when he replies, “that kind of curiosity is rare around here.”
Xü Beijin sighs and wonders if this is the young man’s attempt to segue into his… ‘Operation Defeat NE’?
He can understand what he is trying to do given most of the Actors have lost interest in Nightmares entirely. Their lives are emotionless, meaningless. They live like true NPCs – only following predetermined scripts and repeating their lives day after repeated day.
Perhaps it couldn’t even be called ‘living’ anymore.
And so, someone like Xü Beijin, who is still proactively exploring the Nightmares and curious about their truths, is exceedingly rare.
Though that is of course because he got a streaming service that allows him to spy on the Missiontakers from afar, so his interest would naturally be piqued; his original life as dull as dishwater has already changed.
The young man shrugs as he continues examining Xü Beijin with a pleasantly surprised expression, before getting back on track to say, “I’m just a side character here… I don’t have too much information here.”
Xü Beijin nods to say, “I’m just an extra.”
“An extra?” The young man repeats and remarks, “I thought you would be more…”
“Antagonist?”
The young man smiles in response and nods, “alright, I admit I was thinking that.”
Xü Beijin “…”
He frowns.
“See? See? That’s it. The face you’re making seriously screams ‘the big bad guy behind everything’ here,” the young man is guffawing when he continues, “nobody says extras are definitely nobodies. Sure, a lot of them do blend entirely into the background, but in some movies, these insignificant roles are actually the heart and soul of them.”
Xü Beijin pauses for a second before speaking up, “movies… huh.”
He can feel his memories stretching far back into the past, back before the days he entered the Tower. It is no exaggeration to say that for many of them, it is as far as a lifetime ago.
The young man here just casually mentioned it, as if it was the everyday, regular topic that it used to be.
He is sharp, too, immediately asking, “you’re thinking about the Tower?”
Xü Beijin is quiet for a moment before slowly nodding.
The young man thinks before patting Xü Beijin on the shoulder and answering, “be more optimistic, bro,” then his gaze drifts towards the heavy eyebags on Xü Beijin’s face and he can’t help but ask, “you haven’t slept for a really long time, huh?”
Xü Beijin is surprised by the question and glances at the young man curiously, before nodding in the end.
“Think of it this way. We’re just experiencing a ‘second life’ of sorts,” the young man has a big grin on as he continues, “on the other hand, though, a ‘second life’ means greater stress, that’s for sure.”
Xü Beijin couldn’t help but smile at the response, “you’re really living the life.”
The young man shrugs, answering, “how else would you survive in the Tower?” Then he changes topics, “so, anyway, back to this Nightmare…”
Xü Beijin is taken aback, only now realising that the topic has digressed way off the rails.
He checks the comments, but it seems the comments are not too confused. The viewers are probably taking their conversation to be two players who ended up unfortunately as Actors complaining about the Server and the game company behind it.
Xü Beijin’s face turns gloomier as his thoughts digress again. When he snaps back to reality, the young man in front of him happens to be retrieving a packet of soft candy from the shelves, handing it over.
Xü Beijin receives it with a blanked out face.
The young man then inexplicably chuckles before answering, “wouldn’t it be boring if I told you the truth right now? Actually, in that bookstore you’re in, there are some clues already. The Missiontakers would probably visit later, too,” then he points to the packet of sweets he handed over, saying, “take the sweets as my apology. Too bad we can’t take them outside of Nightmares, but they taste pretty well.”
Xü Beijin “…”
He is hesitant, and makes a glance at the stream before replying, “alright,” and finishes with a “thank you.”
“No problem,” the young man replies, “I also don’t want to lose another companion.”
The young man’s expression could almost be said to be sombre when he says that.
They’re quiet for a moment.
Then the young man speaks back up, “oh, I haven’t introduced myself, have I… I’m Dai Wu.”
“Xü Beijin.”
Dai Wu nods and puts his smile back on to say, “ah, so you’re the rumoured — I should’ve guessed when I saw those eyebags…”
Xü Beijin nods, slightly awkward from embarrassment this time.
Dai Wu remarks, “and you’re actually harmless, huh.”
Xü Beijin falls into thought for a second before shaking his head, saying, “no, I’m not,” then his face turns serious. The pale man with the dark eyebags beneath his eyes says calmly, “I just do not mind how things are most of the time.”
Dai Wu’s eyes widen a little.
It is difficult to describe all the complex thoughts going through his mind right now.
Perhaps his eyes really deceived him? Perhaps Xü Beijin really is a terrifying person? Well, there’s at least that ability to switch between his faces on demand…
Xü Beijin suddenly puts on a harmless smile to ask, “… see, it’s more frightening than harmless, isn’t it?”
Dai Wu “…”
He angrily speaks up, “oi oi, man, you…”
Xü Beijin raises his hand with the packet of sweets and waves at Dai Wu with a smile before leaving the supermarket.
The viewers are expressing their awe in the stream.
“woah, pretty naughty huh Beibei”
“more like only our Bei can act naughty that way”
“hahaha look at the dude with his frightened face.”
“Sigh, there wasn’t any useful information…”
“the detective dalao’s career minded heart is really impressive”
“look at the other camera! the missiontakers look like theyre about to do something!”
Since Xü Beijin left the bookstore, he has set the scene of the corridor at the bottom right corner of his stream.
The Missiontakers spent the whole time thinking about how to resolve this dead-end too.
The whole corridor is really like the kind of scene you’d see in a dream, too. The open windows are blocked by some kind of invisible wall. Even though it is brightly lit close to the car park, but the other end grows darker and eerier with every step inside.
Still, they checked every door, window and all the corners, until they were forced to conclude——There is nowhere to go.
Laoda is saying dejectedly, “seriously? Is this a Server bug? A real dead-end?”
Erge coldly retorts, “there’s never been any Nightmare that has trapped Missiontakers in a dead-end besides those Collapsed Nightmares…” He pauses before saying, “there is definitely a way out. We just haven’t discovered it yet.”
It really is fortunate that the moment he said that, the stream’s audio source wasn’t fixed on them, or the viewers should be questioning what a ‘Collapsed Nightmare’ is.
Suddenly Laosan says hesitantly, “do you hear something?”
“What?”
The Missiontakers all look at each other and quiet down. Then, there is suddenly a series of strange noises approaching them from afar.
Erge furrows his brows and listens for a bit before saying, “it’s the bedroom.”
They look at each other and quietly approach the bedroom.
What kind of… noise is that?
The horrifying wailings of a woman in pain. Cries and yells, and a series of——Thump. Thump. Thump. What sounds like chopping meat.
The Missiontakers’ steps become slow and hesitant. They can sense the fear crawling on their backs, as if the thumping meat-chopping sounds are chopping directly on their backs.
Laosan is murmuring like a sleepwalker would, “that man, was holding… a big machete…”
Suddenly, he recalls that, in the last Nightmare, he remembers hearing a woman’s cries in his dizziness. He thought it was Ding Yi’s whimpers, but… perhaps they weren’t?
It was like, there was another simultaneous bloody slaughter in that dark room. It was right next to them, but they didn’t even realise.
“What is going on in the room?” Scapegoat forces himself to ask, “who is he… killing?”
They are standing right in front of the door in silence. The woman’s screams have disappeared by now, rendering the whole corridor silent again; outside, the Missiontakers are indecisive and standing still.
Mu Jiashi quietly murmurs, “perhaps… this is related to the truth in this Nightmare. The Nightmare plays out, with or without the Missiontakers…”
He is about to say something else when suddenly, the man dressed in black, with his big machete in hand, bursts out of the bedroom door. On the blade of his machete, is fresh, red blood that is still dripping!
Mu Jiashi is not the only one to notice the problem with the door. The only woman present has also quietly approached to test the handle. Then, she gasps in silence.
Mu Jiashi glances at her.
Her appearance is fine, but what is most striking about her is her blue-green hair. Mu Jiashi is suddenly reminded of something and reflexively says, “you must be…”
The woman nods and says softly, “sorry, but please keep my identity secret.”
Mu Jiashi nods.
He knows this woman with grue hair. Her name is Ding Yi.
She is a famous Necessities Merchant of the bottom floor, known as the ‘Billionaire.’
Mu Jiashi knew her because long ago, when he was still in the carrying business, she introduced customers to him. They didn’t interact much beyond that, but she left a deep impression on him.
Especially because of the grue hair. It is rare enough on its own, and rumours say that Ding Yi once had black hair, but because of a special utility card, her hair became this mystical blue-green colour.
Though… a utility card?
Besides the Modification cards and Fusion cards, what other utility cards can even affect appearances? Yet, if it were one of those two types, isn’t it lasting way too long?
While curious, Mu Jiashi couldn’t just ask Ding Yi outright, either.
Her appearance aside, another reason she is well known may be because of the contrast between her personality and her role. She is a Necessities Merchant, but for some reason, she is extremely introverted in her daily life. She never speaks much. It is hard to imagine what led her to becoming a merchant.
Though… Later, Mu Jiashi speculated that it was perhaps because Ding Yi came to know many Tower residents.
The Necessities Merchants had to acquire their goods from the Tower residents. As outsiders, the Missiontakers’ quality of life is directly affected by their relationship with the Tower residents.
And especially so for the Necessities Merchants.
In the Tower, most of the Missiontakers treat Tower residents like the three men treated Xü Beijin a few days ago – ignoring them entirely.
Some Necessities Merchants, and other Missiontakers who came to assume special roles, would instead need to establish a good relationship with the residents.
The Tower is filled with an endless grey fog and hopeless black Nightmares, but the occasional special career and role is able to brighten up the daily lives on the bottom floor of the Tower a little with some colour.
Mu Jiashi and Ding Yi’s conversation, and the two’s checking of the door handle lasted but a moment, and nobody paid any attention… but Lin Qin.
He narrows his eyes to examine those two a little.
She has secrets… Who is she?
Though after a second of curiosity, it has faded already and Lin Qin looks away already, disinterested. He is the Crownless King of the Tower, and he is often disinterested in many things.
Many would even question his humanity, too. Other than seeing him occasionally leave the house to wander aimlessly or go into Nightmares, he’s practically unseen anywhere else.
Though he does possess that enviable fighting strength.
Many Missiontakers wanted to take advantage of that, but could never manage to align themselves with his thought processes. In general, Lin Qin isn’t exactly temperamental, even too lazy to respond to people provoking him on purpose sometimes.
That said, sometimes the well-tempered baby-face Lin Qin would go berserk and go completely mad.
Nobody has managed to stop him when he is mad all the way up to this point.
Missiontakers ending up in a Nightmare alongside Lin Qin often both revere and fear him.
Not that Lin Qin himself cares. He is leaning on the wall right now while the argument between the three men is playing out right beside his ears. He can’t help but wonder how this bunch of Missiontakers can be so… dumb.
Even he could figure out that this Nightmare probably requires some cooperation——Or rather, all Nightmares on the bottom floor require Missiontakers’ cooperation, just perhaps up to different degrees.
And now, they’re arguing?
Lin Qin is a little irritated already.
He usually treats Nightmares as a way to kill time. Therefore, the performance of the Missiontakers in the Nightmares naturally plays a role in that. He treats the Nightmares as something akin to interesting novels, or TV dramas, or movies.
And now, he can only see a bunch of terrible third-rate actors displaying their incompetence in all their inglorious form.
In this sense, Lin Qin would certainly be nodding along the viewers of the stream if he could see them.
“slowly typing a question mark.jpg”
“what r they doing? srsly???”
“… Perhaps this is just human nature”
“no wait where’s the psycho murderer in black? where is he?”
That is when Erge coldly, impatiently orders, “shut the fuck up you all!”
Selfish, Scapegoat and Laoda all turn towards him with the last of them shutting up. The other two still want to keep going when Erge slams them to the wall with his legs, one by one.
He didn’t use enough force to cause injuries, and the Server doesn’t go so far as to ban even something as mild as that. Though it was enough to intimidate.
Scapegoat couldn’t say anything before Selfish is already about to cuss with his red steaming face while getting up from the ground.
“I suggest you wake up,” Erge coldly says, ‘tch’ing, and adding, “and take a good look around.”
“Look around what?” Selfish retorts, saying, “look at how safe we are?”
Erge then says, “hoh. Yeah——So, where is that man in black, who you said were chasing you before?”
Selfish goes quiet. His head has finally cooled enough to allow him to realise the strange mood in the corridor. He hesitates for a bit before shutting up entirely.
Laosan says with a worried tone, “we’re locked out of the bedroom,” he also tested the handle already, and concludes, “this means we might be trapped in this run of the Nightmare.”
“Trapped?”
Laosan says, “we… we could go to the end of the corridor. I suspect… We can’t get out anymore.”
A minute later, they’re at the end of the corridor, and the door that was supposed to lead them to the car park outside is inexplicably gone, leaving only the empty wall blocking them out entirely.
Laoda is widening his eyes, going, “fuck, this means we’re just gonna wait and die here?!”
“Not exactly,” Erge might not be as smart as Laosan, but he could make simple deductions too, “with that man in black they said would chase them also gone——We can’t even wait for something to kill us.”
Laoda “…”
He kicks the wall out of spite.
Selfish speaks up with a bleak smirk, “why did you even run outside, if you didn’t…”
Erge turns to him and says with a frigid tone, “what about, if you blabber a single sentence more, then go kill yourself and restart the Nightmare for us?”
Selfish retorts, “I’m not the only one speaking, even!”
Laoda gives him a good hard kick.
Selfish falls down, wailing.
Erge praises his Laoda, “nice kick.”
Although Laoda isn’t much better than a reckless pile of temperamental muscles, but at least he listens to people.
“Umm…” Laosan suddenly asks, “about the man in black that was chasing you… Did he have a weapon?”
Scapegoat is gloating over Selfish’s misfortune while answering, “yes, a big machete.”
Laosan’s eyes seem to glow as he murmurs, “a big machete… The man that was slashing us was using something similar…”
Mu Jiashi is the only one to immediately realise what he’s getting at, and restates, “when the man in black was chasing us on the road, he suddenly disappeared once.”
And the two of them look at each other to say, “so he can only ever appear in one place at a time!”
Erge doesn’t exactly understand why they’re talking about that, and asks, “can we use that somehow?”
“If he can only appear in one scene at a time, we can cooperate,” Mu Jiashi says, matter-of-factly, “according to you, the man in black appears in the bedroom for exactly one minute. This means that if we can somehow force the man in black to stay with us for a minute, then the bedroom would be safe. You would have time to try out more numbers.”
After saying all that, the man suddenly pauses and gives an awkward smile when everyone is looking at him, and adds, “but, you don’t have to listen to me. I’m just a piece of trash, a loser…” He sighs as he says it.
Laosan and Ding Yi both look at him with strange gazes.
The two of them are possibly the only people present who fully realise the value of Mu Jiashi here.
From what he spoke of, they can see that Mu Jiashi is someone who puts teamwork above all else.
In Nightmares, because only one person needs to achieve a True End for all of them to be offered to ascend to higher floors, theoretically, if the Missiontakers were all selfless and cooperative, then it would not be too hard to achieve a True End for any Nightmare.
For example, this one, where if they did as Mu Jiashi just said, with the corridor team focusing on keeping the man in black occupied without letting him teleport to the bedroom, then the bedroom group could ignore the penalties for a wrong number and keep trying. No matter how many times it took, they could eventually stumble on the correct sequence.
This is definitely one piece of key information in this Nightmare guaranteed.
So the problem lies on the corridor team. Mu Jiashi, who proposed it, and Lin Qin, whose physical prowess is unparalleled, might agree, but what about Selfish and Scapegoat?
And as expected, almost as soon as Mu Jiashi said his laments ago Selfish has climbed back up from the ground to yell, “you’re kidding me! Keeping the man in black here? You’re mad! You can’t be so selfish! You can be a flowery saint all you want, but don’t involve me in this!”
Mu Jiashi responds to the criticism with silence.
Laosan and Ding Yi both look like they have something to say, but the two rather shy persons ends up staying silent as well.
Erge is much more straightforward though, cracking his knuckles to say, “so, you ready to die?”
Selfish’s expression immediately changes. He loudly chastises everyone and says spitefully, “die? Why me?! You bunch of uncaring, miserly miscreants!”
Laoda rolls his eyes, feeling like giving him another kick again. He is mentally exhausted at this point.
How did he even spend so long arguing with someone like him? He must have been out of his mind, or just trying to loosen himself after that terrifying, suffocating experience being slaughtered to death by the man in black in the bedroom.
They are at a standstill.
This run of the Nightmare is ground to a halt in the corridor now, but what should they do to start the next run?
And… in theory, the Server never arranges a true dead end no matter what, right?
While the eight Missiontakers fall into silence in the corridor, Xü Beijin is already out of his bookstore and walking about the service area with the audience.
The viewers kept egging him on, and he is interested as well, so he stopped observing the Missiontakers.
The service area is actually pretty lively, with eateries, a supermarket and tuck shops. Even though there are no Missiontakers in sight, the Actors are still diligently going about their work.
Some of them give Xü Beijin odd looks when he appears, though they do not pay him further attention. Many Actors have become used to the routine already; they might even mistake Xü Beijin for being a Missiontaker given what he’s doing too.
In a sense, many of the Actors have truly become ‘NPCs.’
Xü Beijin takes a deep breath and also pays those Actors no mind. After circling the area once to get a sense of its layout, he walks straight for the supermarket.
“Welcome to… Oh, it’s you,” behind the register is the young man from before, who smiles and asks, “so, here to join our ‘Operation Defeat NE’?”
Xü Beijin shakes his head.
The viewers are typing the myriad of questions they have on the comment barrage. Xü Beijin takes a look and decides to go with the flow and ask about this Nightmare.
“I’m just curious what the truth of this Nightmare is.”
The young man’s eyes seem to glow a little when he replies, “that kind of curiosity is rare around here.”
Xü Beijin sighs and wonders if this is the young man’s attempt to segue into his… ‘Operation Defeat NE’?
He can understand what he is trying to do given most of the Actors have lost interest in Nightmares entirely. Their lives are emotionless, meaningless. They live like true NPCs – only following predetermined scripts and repeating their lives day after repeated day.
Perhaps it couldn’t even be called ‘living’ anymore.
And so, someone like Xü Beijin, who is still proactively exploring the Nightmares and curious about their truths, is exceedingly rare.
Though that is of course because he got a streaming service that allows him to spy on the Missiontakers from afar, so his interest would naturally be piqued; his original life as dull as dishwater has already changed.
The young man shrugs as he continues examining Xü Beijin with a pleasantly surprised expression, before getting back on track to say, “I’m just a side character here… I don’t have too much information here.”
Xü Beijin nods to say, “I’m just an extra.”
“An extra?” The young man repeats and remarks, “I thought you would be more…”
“Antagonist?”
The young man smiles in response and nods, “alright, I admit I was thinking that.”
Xü Beijin “…”
He frowns.
“See? See? That’s it. The face you’re making seriously screams ‘the big bad guy behind everything’ here,” the young man is guffawing when he continues, “nobody says extras are definitely nobodies. Sure, a lot of them do blend entirely into the background, but in some movies, these insignificant roles are actually the heart and soul of them.”
Xü Beijin pauses for a second before speaking up, “movies… huh.”
He can feel his memories stretching far back into the past, back before the days he entered the Tower. It is no exaggeration to say that for many of them, it is as far as a lifetime ago.
The young man here just casually mentioned it, as if it was the everyday, regular topic that it used to be.
He is sharp, too, immediately asking, “you’re thinking about the Tower?”
Xü Beijin is quiet for a moment before slowly nodding.
The young man thinks before patting Xü Beijin on the shoulder and answering, “be more optimistic, bro,” then his gaze drifts towards the heavy eyebags on Xü Beijin’s face and he can’t help but ask, “you haven’t slept for a really long time, huh?”
Xü Beijin is surprised by the question and glances at the young man curiously, before nodding in the end.
“Think of it this way. We’re just experiencing a ‘second life’ of sorts,” the young man has a big grin on as he continues, “on the other hand, though, a ‘second life’ means greater stress, that’s for sure.”
Xü Beijin couldn’t help but smile at the response, “you’re really living the life.”
The young man shrugs, answering, “how else would you survive in the Tower?” Then he changes topics, “so, anyway, back to this Nightmare…”
Xü Beijin is taken aback, only now realising that the topic has digressed way off the rails.
He checks the comments, but it seems the comments are not too confused. The viewers are probably taking their conversation to be two players who ended up unfortunately as Actors complaining about the Server and the game company behind it.
Xü Beijin’s face turns gloomier as his thoughts digress again. When he snaps back to reality, the young man in front of him happens to be retrieving a packet of soft candy from the shelves, handing it over.
Xü Beijin receives it with a blanked out face.
The young man then inexplicably chuckles before answering, “wouldn’t it be boring if I told you the truth right now? Actually, in that bookstore you’re in, there are some clues already. The Missiontakers would probably visit later, too,” then he points to the packet of sweets he handed over, saying, “take the sweets as my apology. Too bad we can’t take them outside of Nightmares, but they taste pretty well.”
Xü Beijin “…”
He is hesitant, and makes a glance at the stream before replying, “alright,” and finishes with a “thank you.”
“No problem,” the young man replies, “I also don’t want to lose another companion.”
The young man’s expression could almost be said to be sombre when he says that.
They’re quiet for a moment.
Then the young man speaks back up, “oh, I haven’t introduced myself, have I… I’m Dai Wu.”
“Xü Beijin.”
Dai Wu nods and puts his smile back on to say, “ah, so you’re the rumoured — I should’ve guessed when I saw those eyebags…”
Xü Beijin nods, slightly awkward from embarrassment this time.
Dai Wu remarks, “and you’re actually harmless, huh.”
Xü Beijin falls into thought for a second before shaking his head, saying, “no, I’m not,” then his face turns serious. The pale man with the dark eyebags beneath his eyes says calmly, “I just do not mind how things are most of the time.”
Dai Wu’s eyes widen a little.
It is difficult to describe all the complex thoughts going through his mind right now.
Perhaps his eyes really deceived him? Perhaps Xü Beijin really is a terrifying person? Well, there’s at least that ability to switch between his faces on demand…
Xü Beijin suddenly puts on a harmless smile to ask, “… see, it’s more frightening than harmless, isn’t it?”
Dai Wu “…”
He angrily speaks up, “oi oi, man, you…”
Xü Beijin raises his hand with the packet of sweets and waves at Dai Wu with a smile before leaving the supermarket.
The viewers are expressing their awe in the stream.
“woah, pretty naughty huh Beibei”
“more like only our Bei can act naughty that way”
“hahaha look at the dude with his frightened face.”
“Sigh, there wasn’t any useful information…”
“the detective dalao’s career minded heart is really impressive”
“look at the other camera! the missiontakers look like theyre about to do something!”
Since Xü Beijin left the bookstore, he has set the scene of the corridor at the bottom right corner of his stream.
The Missiontakers spent the whole time thinking about how to resolve this dead-end too.
The whole corridor is really like the kind of scene you’d see in a dream, too. The open windows are blocked by some kind of invisible wall. Even though it is brightly lit close to the car park, but the other end grows darker and eerier with every step inside.
Still, they checked every door, window and all the corners, until they were forced to conclude——There is nowhere to go.
Laoda is saying dejectedly, “seriously? Is this a Server bug? A real dead-end?”
Erge coldly retorts, “there’s never been any Nightmare that has trapped Missiontakers in a dead-end besides those Collapsed Nightmares…” He pauses before saying, “there is definitely a way out. We just haven’t discovered it yet.”
It really is fortunate that the moment he said that, the stream’s audio source wasn’t fixed on them, or the viewers should be questioning what a ‘Collapsed Nightmare’ is.
Suddenly Laosan says hesitantly, “do you hear something?”
“What?”
The Missiontakers all look at each other and quiet down. Then, there is suddenly a series of strange noises approaching them from afar.
Erge furrows his brows and listens for a bit before saying, “it’s the bedroom.”
They look at each other and quietly approach the bedroom.
What kind of… noise is that?
The horrifying wailings of a woman in pain. Cries and yells, and a series of——Thump. Thump. Thump. What sounds like chopping meat.
The Missiontakers’ steps become slow and hesitant. They can sense the fear crawling on their backs, as if the thumping meat-chopping sounds are chopping directly on their backs.
Laosan is murmuring like a sleepwalker would, “that man, was holding… a big machete…”
Suddenly, he recalls that, in the last Nightmare, he remembers hearing a woman’s cries in his dizziness. He thought it was Ding Yi’s whimpers, but… perhaps they weren’t?
It was like, there was another simultaneous bloody slaughter in that dark room. It was right next to them, but they didn’t even realise.
“What is going on in the room?” Scapegoat forces himself to ask, “who is he… killing?”
They are standing right in front of the door in silence. The woman’s screams have disappeared by now, rendering the whole corridor silent again; outside, the Missiontakers are indecisive and standing still.
Mu Jiashi quietly murmurs, “perhaps… this is related to the truth in this Nightmare. The Nightmare plays out, with or without the Missiontakers…”
He is about to say something else when suddenly, the man dressed in black, with his big machete in hand, bursts out of the bedroom door. On the blade of his machete, is fresh, red blood that is still dripping!
