Volume 7 - CH 116.1

Door

Translated by boilpoil

Edited by boilpoil

All ten Missiontakers are now in their respective doors.

Xü Beijin watches it unfold.

He is currently in some kind of special trance; he hasn’t opened his stream, because he knows this time there will be far too many secrets that would interrupt the livestreaming, so he decides not to open it.

He can still see what all the Missiontakers are doing, however.

On the one hand, his Nightmare is pretty special. On the other, this Nightmare is also special.

Before the Missiontakers entered, when asked about his Nightmare, even if it was Lin Qin, Xü Beijin responded uniformly.

He cannot tell them what his Nightmare actually is.

In addition, even if he could tell, the Missiontakers would probably be unable to comprehend it fully.

His Nightmare, a Nightmare about Nightmares, is an amalgam of Nightmares.

But it isn’t a ‘dream in a dream’ that Lin Qin suspected it to be, or a Nightmare that has other Nightmares’ scenes in it like the one with the Raining Hellfire. His Nightmare is different from them.

His Nightmare, is the other Nightmares. It’s like an album collection of Nightmares.

His Nightmare contains all the succumbed Missiontakers and Tower residents, and the associated Collapsed Nightmares.

They’re each like a ‘cell’ in the human body, eventually linking up and forming this massive, chaotic and inescapable world of ‘Nightmare.’

A door is the only way of traversal in this Nightmare.

When Missiontakers enter a door, they can head to another ‘cell.’ Find another one, and they can head to a new ‘cell.’

These doors are analogous to the ‘doors’ of the residences of Tower residents.

Those doors lead to the Tower residents’ respective Nightmares, while in Xü Beijin’s Nightmare, they lead to Nightmares in each of the cells – they lead to ‘Cell Nightmares.’

Cells. He likes the term he’s coined, thinks Xü Beijin.

In his Nightmare, the number of Cell Nightmares reaches hundreds of millions.

Once, Lin Qin asked him, if solving all of the Nightmares in his Nightmare would resolve it, but if he saw the number of Cell Nightmares here, even Lin Qin must realise that brute force… well, is still possible, after a long delay from the shock.

It’s not absolutely impossible to resolve countless Nightmares, if given infinite time, after all.

However, the catch is, these Cell Nightmares cannot be solved. They, and the humans within, are all completely Collapsed.

If something could be done about them, NE would not have had to put them in this ‘landfill’ in the first place.

The fact is, these remain useless, literal garbage data. In fact, they’re worse than useless, because they’re more like harmful and hazardous garbage.

What is happening in these Cell Nightmares is that the succumbed humans would keep repeating the last moments of their lucidity. The Cell Nightmares continue to loop, while the humans within continue to repeat their last actions.

They continue this ad infinitum, from dawn ‘til dusk, like Sisyphus.

That is why Xü Beijin’s Nightmare does not have a restart to speak of. All that would happen to the Missiontakers, is that they would lose their sense of self eventually, as there is no exit.

If they die in the Cell Nightmares before then, it’s simple… They join that Cell Nightmare.

This place is dangerous, disordered, and full of mad people and inexplicable phenomena. This is the landfill of the Tower.

The game ‘Escape’ has been running for so long; in the beginning, all the Nightmares were in the Tower.

Then, as groups of people end up succumbing, and Nightmares end up Collapsing, these most dangerous Nightmares all ended up in the fog.

In other words, the current generation of Missiontakers, especially those on the higher floors, would have only experienced a curated selection of Nightmares that are already the tamest of the bunch, sorted by years of brute force.

The Nightmares that are actually so utterly dangerous and ruthless to no end, have already ended up in the fog, after all.

Unfortunately, the ten Missiontakers that want to find an exit to the Tower, now have to face Xü Beijin’s Nightmare, and challenge all these Nightmares that have already ‘killed’ countless Missiontakers.

They cannot even resolve them, either. All they must do… is buy time.

If they’re lucky enough, or, if NE really is on their side, then Xü Beijin expects a certain happenstance to arise in short order.

It would depend on NE’s attitude, true.

Since Xü Beijin has no control over which door the Missiontakers choose to enter, or where those doors lead.

Right now, the situation in all the cells are clearly shown to Xü Beijin.

Xü Beijin is inside the grey fog right now as well – in a certain corner of his Nightmare. If the Missiontakers did not choose to enter the door in the first place, they might even stumble upon him if they search around.

He is still in his original clothes, possessing his usual clarity and lucidity; while Tower residents generally head down the path to insanity in their own Nightmares, Xü Beijin, for some reason, appears entirely immune.

But he himself knows best, that when he entered this Nightmare, his brain and body have clearly began crumbling. They’re rotting away, so to speak.

He doesn’t have much time.

Xü Beijin is looking on with his usual calm expression, even despite the hardship playing out. To be honest, it’s not like panicking will do him any good, because all he can do, is wait for a happenstance.

He looks closely at ten particular cells in front of him, which are only the size of the dust that floats around, forming the grey fog, but he can see them amplified, forming ten simultaneous, live scenes of what is happening.

He can see the silhouettes of the people within walking, struggling, dying, resurrecting, and doing it all over again inside.

His mind drifts away for a second, as thoughts occupy his mind.

The Missiontakers in the Tower, and the Actors, too, are wailing. They decry their tragedy of confinement in the Tower, but, they have never once imagined, that in the grey fog outside the Tower, others are living through far, far worse fates than them.

Well, calling it ‘living’ might be too much of a stretch, too.

Xü Beijin can firmly say they exist there, but whether they are even ‘alive,’ or if they can even comprehend the meaning and the hope of ‘escape’ there, are questions whose answers are long gone from their hands.

Xü Beijin has been powerless to help them for many years.

He avoids talking about his Nightmare at all, because he knows what his own Nightmare── what is beyond the Tower, contains.

Every morning, for all these years, he would stand by his window, looking at the roiling fog outside.

Pain reaches for his chest, biting at his heart, but he can do nothing.

In theory, the moment he entered his own Nightmare, he would immediately dissipate and die.

Not the metaphorical ‘death’ in your typical Nightmare, but actually being wiped away from reality, unlike the humans trapped in this fog.

Therefore, only after he has confirmed for himself what the current attitude and stance of NE really are did Xü Beijin consider entering the Nightmare.

When he’s inside, as he is now, and sees that he is heading towards death, but at a much more delayed, gradual pace, he finds that his gamble has paid off – NE is allowing him time to save himself. It is only through NE’s intervention that this is possible.

NE has most definitely changed.

But why?

NE is a simple artificial intelligence. Why would it undergo change?

It doesn’t make sense at all.

So what could have happened to lead to his change?

Xü Beijin wants to know, and the best way to know, is asking directly.

And the only way to contact NE directly…

Is through his Nightmare.