Volume 2 - CH 37.3

Selfish said, “I have a question.”

“What question?”

Selfish scratches his hair to say, “you know… Nightmares have no logic to it right? Is there even any use in analysing them?”

Mu Jiashi “…”

He just wanted a way to interpret everything that happened in the Nightmare!

Erge rolls his eyes and mocks, “tch, now I know why you’re a lone wolf.”

Selfish asks, “ho, what, I can’t even point out mistakes now?”

Mu Jiashi takes a deep breath and ignores Selfish——Really, the Tower forbidding Missiontakers from killing each other is definitely a fortunate thing.

He turns to Laosan to say, “so the question at hand is that, if we fail to resolve this Nightmare during this run, then if the Nightmare’s time continues to push forward in future runs, we will lose our initiative eventually!”

Laosan nods and hesitantly says, “I get what you’re saying, but…”

He also knows that the information they have right now will slowly turn worthless as the Nightmare’s timeline moves forward, because they have no idea what change there might be next, and what they will be facing afterwards.

Mu Jiashi wants to secure the initiative, staying one step ahead of the Nightmare, to know what will happen next in the Nightmare beforehand.

But… it’s seriously difficult.

Mu Jiashi says, “a question I just talked about was why the journey of the boy did not include his father’s escape,” he pauses before adding, “in the TV in the gas station, the police were arresting the killer live.”

Laosan nods and suddenly, he stops and raises his head to say, “so you want to say his father was arrested! The escape journey is a path of no return. That is why it could not be included in the infinite loop!”

Mu Jiashi nods, and explains, “another point is that, when his father was escaping, he did not bring the boy with him. Obviously, the boy’s path could not include what he did not experience.”

Then, after a brief silence where he was thinking some more, he adds, “the boy is the owner of the Nightmare, so the scenes, journeys and timelines are all based on his subjective experience. Therefore, even though his father was arrested, when his nightmare restarts, the man in black will still reappear… That makes more sense.”

“Who cares if it makes sense or not!” Erge impatiently says, “anyway, what you’re saying is, the next run of the Nightmare, the situation could change again, and the killer would already have been arrested?”

Mu Jiashi nods, “that’s what I think.”

Selfish goes ‘tch’ next to him and says, “why can’t it just go back to the very beginning?”

The question makes Mu Jiashi blank out a little. Hesitant, he doesn’t answer immediately.

Yes, as the Nightmare we started over and over again, the Nightmare’s time is also pushing forward.

There is no guarantee that the time never loops back.

Just as Selfish said, Nightmares have no inherent logic. They can try to logicise and rationalise it, but the result may not be as they wish.

Selfish taunts him, saying, “you really are a piece of trash.”

Laoda goes ‘hey’ and starts rolling his sleeves up.

Mu Jiashi stops him and bitterly snickers, saying, “you’re right,” then he heaves a weary sigh, wipes his face with his hand, the confident expression perishing from his face, returning to his gloomy form from when he just arrived in this Nightmare. He says, “you don’t have to listen to me. I’m a failure of a Missiontaker.”

Laosan looks like he wants to say something.

It’s painfully obvious Mu Jiashi must have been through something, but…

In places like the Tower, words of encouragement are not easily uttered. People are full of wariness, suspicions, and doubts.

In the end, Laosan stays silent.

All about the bloodied flowerbeds, the Missiontakers are covered in a blanket of suffocating silence.

In the stream, the viewers are deeply astonished at what they’re showing, and are all asking on the comments, typing, “isnt this way too serious?! its just a game!”

Xü Beijin is hesitant before suddenly saying, “it’s different. The game ‘Escape,’ you know…”

He’s testing them.

He really wants to know, what these audience refer to as ‘host-only game’ is.

The viewers fall for it immediately.

“ah, makes sense, these closed games are always a bit more solemn”

“i wonder what this games status is… i heard about similar games where the players all looks so serious just like them, like its some kinda life or death thing”

“maybe it’s because their livelihoods are at stake [laugh_cry emoji]”

“too bad hosts have these ndas… they can stream, but they can say nothing, like seriously? you can stream it already, why can’t you tell anything about it?”

“dalao, any clues and deductions, maybe?”

“Not really… These NDAs are usually very strict in terms. The hosts all have extremely tight lips. Sigh, I suddenly feel like Beibei really is a dummy, having leaked so much information to us already without thinking.”

“the more popular streamers would all refuse these kinda streams too cuz of all the stringent agreements, only newcomers like Beibei end up falling for them… uwu, our poor Bei”

“maybe even Beibei’s stream will mysteriously disappear one day…”

“no plz, im scared”

Xü Beijin “…”

He’s almost mad at this point.

It looks like the viewers have typed a lot, with all these waves of comments on the screen, but none of them are of any use!

He wants to know what the outside world is like. He wants to know what the place for these humans in the Tower is, and whether the outside world still knows about them.

The only useful information he could extract is that…

There are other games like ‘Escape’?

What does it mean? Does it mean there are other groups of people, just like them, trapped in some other game of suffering and unable to escape?

Xü Beijin only feels more hopeless at this point.

These normal viewers all seem blissfully unaware of what’s going on. They do not seem the least bit aware of what these ‘game footage’ and players they are seeing actually represent.

Nor can Xü Beijin reveal the truth to them.

Right now, both the flowerbed in the central plaza and the bookstore have fallen into silence.