Volume 1 - CH 17

Ponytail’s senses are tingling.

She could almost feel the air freezing in place. The source of all this, being from the man lying on his side.

She circles around in front of him and, in abject terror, she quickly takes two steps back with widened eyes. Her lips tremble, but she doesn’t dare utter a sound.

“What’s wrong?”

Quarrelsome, confused and worried about Ponytail, takes a few steps forward and also glances over at Wu Shen.

The next second, he yells out, “oh fuck! You’re awake?!”

Wu Shen, who everyone took to be asleep, has always been awake.

And in fact, his eyes are even fixed right at Ponytail and Quarrelsome, with a weird smile printed on his face. His posture is still unchanged. He is still on his bed.

After the initial scare, the Missiontakers calm down quickly.

While Wu Shen looks unquestionably eerie, but they have all seen even weirder and unhinged Nightmare owners. The strangeness about these Tower residents are often amplified in their Nightmares, turning even more irrational and paranoid.

Ponytail takes a deep breath to calm down, before speaking out, “Mr Wu?”

The man gives no response, still staring straight at the three people in front of him without blinking.

That is when Ponytail suddenly recalls a description from the diary.

Wu Shen wrote that a customer jokingly remarked that he is turning into a doll, stiff and rigid. It was after his daughter went missing, and as a matter of fact, doesn’t this Wu Shen look exactly like a doll?!

Recalling the dolls that would chase after them, Ponytail could feel chills down her spine.

Quarrelsome isn’t as absorbed in thought, and therefore simply asks after no response comes from Wu Shen, “so now what? He’s completely unresponsive.”

Glasses says, “perhaps… he needs to be stimulated awake?”

“Both times we saw Wu Shen wake up right after reading some of his letters,” Ponytail quickly comes to a conclusion, saying, “maybe we can test it?”

“We will certainly have to test it,” Glasses turns around and is about to walk outside when he furrows his brows and asks directly this time, “where’s the doll?”

“What?”

“The little doll in a red dress that wants eyes! She’s gone!”

Ponytail knits her brows and thinks about it, before saying, “it seems like it really must be linked to Wu Shen somehow. Perhaps it’s a doll Wu Shen personally made after his daughter went missing? In her image perhaps… To remember her?”

Glasses is rubbing his brows too. Something feels off but he can’t put his finger on it, and he can only say, “perhaps… you might be right.”

Quarrelsome, more of an active man of action than a thinker, immediately walks outside, saying, “I’ll grab the letters from the other room!”

When he’s out of sight, Ponytail and Glasses immediately focus their attention on Wu Shen.

As expected, soon enough, Wu Shen’s eyes suddenly move. Though his expression is still rigid and only slowly asks when he sees two strangers in his own room, “who… are… you?”

“Is he awake or not?” Glasses can’t help but ask, “it’s really giving me the creeps.”

Ponytail also answers quietly, the creases on her brows not smoothing out, “not sure.”

She turns back to Wu Shen, who is now slowly sitting up on the bed. All his joints and limbs are moving in an excessively mechanical manner, as if he really is a doll. Or rather, he is even clumsier than the dolls he made.

When Wu Shen is about to stand up, putting his stiff legs forward, Ponytail suddenly speaks up.

“Xiao-Chun; Wu Chun. Your daughter. She has gone missing.”

Wu Shen stops right where he is sitting on the bed. It takes a long while before he speaks up again, “yes… Yes… xiao-Chun, my daughter…”

His reaction is also different from before. That melodramatic pain and hopelessness have disappeared, only leaving behind a deep, cavernous exhaustion feeling of being lost forever in some maze, the kind that suggests he has had to endlessly face this fact, and all he can do now is admit it, numb to all the pain.

He repeats, “xiao-Chun… is missing…”

Glasses examines Wu Shen all over once, and gives his critical judgement, “to be honest, I can’t really see him doing anything to his own daughter.”

Ponytail turns to him and slowly nods in agreement, saying, “true. He looks like he terribly dotes on xiao-Chun.”

Wu Shen is sitting there, all murmuring by himself. His unfocused gaze is drifting all about the murky air. It seems like he is already unable to discern reality and dream. He has lost himself entirely.

The next second, he suddenly stands up, and his expression goes back to normal as well. He ignores Ponytail and Glasses entirely, though, and just walks outside by himself.

The moment leaves the room, the entire Nightmare is changed. All the messy, dirty scenery is gone. Instead, it is a clean, tidy room with floorboards that look recently polished.

The stink that has permeated the entire space is gone. A light, refreshing fragrance fills their every breath instead.

In the room, the dirty old bed has suddenly turned into a cute white princess bed with elegantly chiselled wooden patterns.

Ponytail looks at the curtains to see that the yellowed, mouldy curtains have reverted back to their white, slightly transparent lacy self. Its ends lay gently on the floor alongside the rays of sunlight.

Glasses says, “the Nightmare has changed.”

Ponytail nods affirmatively, and hypothesises, “it seems we have triggered a special event.”

Then she looks outside at the street through the window.

While the house is tidied and bright, the street outside is still entirely deserted, with only the bookstore next door being open.

Ponytail tells Glasses, “only the Dollmaker’s has changed. I suppose this is… regressing to the past? Something might have triggered Wu Shen’s memories and now the Nightmare has conjured up a new scene.”

She and Glasses look at each other and says in unison, “the day xiao-Chun disappeared.”

Occasionally, Nightmares have similar situations.

Nightmares, being dreams, will have strange or fantastical happenstance. For example, in this Nightmare, they can only move about between the abandoned street, the bookstore and the Dollmaker’s. It is completely different from reality, of course.

Sometimes, as Missiontakers explore the scene more, or through direct psychological stimulation on the Nightmare owner, changes can happen. A new scene to explore may appear, new characters may appear, and…

Like right now, Wu Shen, the owner of the Nightmare, is having a flashback of the past.

These are not hard-and-fast rules for Missiontakers, because each Nightmare is unique. For them, every resident of the Tower has a Nightmare belonging to their unique past, which gives rise to their unique Nightmares.

And even exactly what happens in the Nightmare may be different for different groups of Missiontakers.

This added complication, plus the Missiontakers’ tendencies to obscure their own experiences in the Nightmares, means that to this day, knowledge about Nightmare progression and associated rules still consists only of unfounded rumours. Nobody knows whether anything is true or not.

Though if you ask Xü Beijin, these rules are actually very simple for the Actors.

It is merely impromptu performance or interpreting their assigned scripts differently.

Actors, performing according to the scripts provided by the Server, are severely hampered from acting at all out-of-place when compared to the scripts handed to them.

But that does not apply to Missiontakers.

Missiontakers are unpredictable. They may act brashly or unabashedly and sometimes end up outside of the Server’s predictions.

That is when the Server has to react appropriately and adjust the scripts as needed.

Meanwhile, the Actors are also provided with an opportunity, because the adjustment means possible oversights or contradictions may occur. These make for excellent opportunities to reinterpret everything in their favour to secretly give clues to Missiontakers.

Not that Xü Beijin has anything to do with it.

Reinterpreting their own roles are only ever possible for the lead or important side characters themselves.

An extra like him?

Never mind that. Extra do not get extra performance from script adjustments.

Meanwhile, because of the sudden change in the scenery, the viewers in the stream are also expressing their shock.

“woah! suddenly an amazing setpiece!”

“I really do want to try this game… Too many of these mystery games are clichéd and rely solely on tropes. You get assigned to a crime scene, a bunch of suspects and a bunch of witnesses. Those ‘rocking chair detective’ games with you just getting to each person one by one have been boring since centuries ago!”

“dalao, dalao, its cuz ur too dalao… for little chickens like me, i cant even find the criminal in those simple games u described [emoji]”

“never mind that! the players are following wu shen already!”

Xü Beijin is also watching the scene with curiosity.

He actually feels a little bit like going outside for a walk.

As the stream shows, the three Missiontakers, plus Wu Shen, are all inside this new scene named ‘Wu Shen’s Memory,’ which means the Dollmaker’s is empty. He can definitely go for a stroll.

Unfortunately…

He glances over at Lin Qin who is standing at the entrance like a guardian angel, and gives up, sighing inside.

Although he’s not sure whether an extra walking outside of their designated activity area is running afoul of the Server’s restrictions or not, openly committing acts contrary to Nightmare requirements in public view of Missiontakers clearly counts!

The Server, really…

Xü Beijin sighs and looks back at the stream. His mind is not in it, though. His thoughts digress, and his expression turns deep and somewhat dark and gloomy.

Lin Qin suddenly turns his head towards him.

He can’t help but notice Xü Beijin in this state… He looks, powerful. Invincible.

He only ever feels this way when the aura comes from Xü Beijin.

Yet Xü Beijin is unwilling to fight with him…

Lin Qin sighs inside, and goes back to sitting quietly and blanking out.

The two men in the bookstore are both irritated by the other person.

Meanwhile, Ponytail and Glasses follow Wu Shen out of the room, meeting the confused Quarrelsome outside of the other room, whose hands are empty——The letters he held in his hands disappeared just as the scenery abruptly changed.

Ponytail quickly explains the situation to him and he nods, understands, and casts his gaze towards Wu Shen.

He is acting like they are invisible ghosts. He walks right over to his workshop, sits down, and begins working hard on making a doll.

As expected of a dollmaker, he is serious in his craft.

Glasses goes to the stairs to take a glance, and the first floor is now also a bright, colourful doll store, the type that would clearly draw children’s attention.

He tries to go downstairs, but somehow there is a force in the air blocking him. He can only return and wait for a change to happen at Wu Shen’s side.

A while later, while the three Missiontakers are losing their patience, suddenly…

“Daddy!”

A little girl is calling out from the first floor.

It sounds normal, exactly like how a daughter might call her father as something unexpected but not out-of-the-norm occurred. She is not in a hurry, scared, or glad or even surprised.

Wu Shen, who was absorbed in his work, quickly stops and stands up. Then he wipes his hands and says, “xiao-Chun, what’s wrong? Daddy’s coming now.”

He takes off his apron and closes the door to the workshop. He walks to the stairs, ready to descend the stairs to see what his daughter was on about.

The three Missiontakers follow behind him like ghosts.

When suddenly, like a blackout, the bright, homely scene of the second floor goes dark. When light comes back in, the three Missiontakers are already back inside the dirtied, dilapidated doll store.

Ponytail says, shocked, “what happened? The flashback was cut off?!”