Volume 7 - CH 120.1

Amusement Park

Translated by boilpoil

Edited by boilpoil

If you ask Wu Jian, he wasn’t actually that interested in joining the conspiracists.

He’s quite passive in personality. So about all that truth behind the scenes stuff, or the real culprit of their suffering, whatever, like, it’s good to know;

But even if he can’t, life still goes on. He’s happy to just scrape by.

Even when he’s inducted, his rather brusque and careless personality would show up in the organisation quite often.

It was really dumb luck in the beginning that he was inducted at all.

In a past Nightmare, he happened to meet the founder of that organisation… Or rather, it was more because of that Nightmare, that the Missiontaker chose to found an organisation, to look for information related to the truth.

So all the other Missiontakers inside that Nightmare, for the sake of maintaining secrecy, were half forced into the newborn organisation at the coercion of the founding Missiontaker.

This means Wu Jian is actually a founding member of the organisation because of that.

Not that he’s that interested in his role, especially when all he wants to do is to go along with everything. He’s joined simply because it would have been troublesome to refuse.

In the organisation, he’d often feel subtly excluded. He sees the other fellow members as rather unusually serious and stubborn, utilising their overly imaginative minds to conjure up all sorts of ludicrous theories.

While he… Well, he’s not incapable, and being in the organisation does mean he has become rather receptive to their ideas, but this also means he ended up viewing the Tower through rather fearful, disgusted and hopeless eyes.

If anything, it didn’t actually make him want to know the truth any more than he once had been.

There is anxiety, there is fear, so in turn, there comes a pushback against wanting to know the truth.

In fact, he would largely share the same sentiment as the Missiontakers outside of the organisation – that those… conspiracies, really are just that. He doesn’t want to accept that reality could be as grim as they make it out to be.

But nowadays, when he thinks back to that very Nightmare that got him inducted, when he thinks about how casually he went about it, it felt like… fate, having already arranged everything for him, in time.

He followed Fei and went back down to the bottom floor only for a simple, investigative mission. He and Fei were assigned, and Wu Jian was happy to deal with something simple.

He definitely wasn’t expecting, to be involved in such… convoluted affairs.

They actually stumbled upon the truth all by accident, and now, they’re even here to try and save all of humanity from the predicament.

They’re going to be the messiahs!

The grandeur of the whole achievement contrasts starkly against his minute, insignificant form. It makes him positively rapt with fascination both before entering this Nightmare, and now, after having recovered his memories.

He can’t help but think, wish, that someone is pushing all this along;

NE, Xü Beijin, whoever, but to shoulder the deep burden of this ultimate quest, he would need a helping hand.

Because, what if he failed?

Can mankind really continue to endure the endless solitary confinement? Will all hopes of leaving the Tower successfully be dashed?

It’s been dozens of years since they have entered the Tower in the first place.

Just thinking about that length of time is enough to dampen Wu Jian’s spirits down to hell.

He’d still try to cheer himself up. He tells himself, they won’t fail. They will not. They cannot.

He has companions with him, so many of them, working hard alongside him… one day… there will come a day when dawn breaks, won’t there?

He really wants out of the Tower.

Cangcheng. Maybe it was his hometown. He thinks it is, because in that Nightmare, he felt an ungodly amount of inexplicable familiarity with the whole place.

He knows the déjà vus are likely coming from what he has forgotten; from the memories of Earth that he has lost.

Forgetting. This is also what happens in Xü Beijin’s Nightmare.

Thinking about it makes Wu Jian worried and even anxious.

No one could have imagined his Nightmare to be like this. Xü Beijin never told them about it…

Or maybe he couldn’t. Anything that was too direct was likely to be stopped by NE;

Just giving them vague, incomprehensible words would have been less than helpful when it inevitably leads to them drawing the wrong conclusions.

Since Xü Beijin’s Nightmare, is truly, principally, different from all the Nightmares in the Tower!

His Nightmare is like a gargantuan, majestic platform, where they can travel into other Nightmares.

It’s a common speculation that Xü Beijin has a unique status as a Tower resident. They’re all curious about what his role in the Tower could be.

Even so, nobody could have expected his Nightmare to be so utterly unique, completely distinct and even directly contravening of what Missiontakers have taken for granted as the basic constitution of a Nightmare.

They are entirely unprepared.

It is really fortunate… that NE seems to be on their side.

Wu Jian, feeling extremely conflicted inside, looks at the scene in front of him with a deep, piercing gaze.

This Nightmare that changed his fate, that took his future path on a wild rollercoaster ride… It was in a stadium.

A large, all-purpose stadium, probably known officially as some ‘Olympic centre’ or something like that. It was likely a landmark structure in whatever place it stood.

Though at the time of the Nightmare, it seems to be functioning as more of a community exercise centre for the residents of the city. Every night, many people would gather here to jog or train.

The incident in this Nightmare takes place on the greenery of the grounds.

A group of people plays football there, but half of the grounds is also used for another group to perform Taiji there. It’s actually not that big of a deal, because the football players are actually playing futsal, so they don’t actually need the entire area of the football field.

The older aunts and uncles, here to participate in Taiji, already negotiated with the footballers in the past, and they split the grounds without a problem.

There are at most a dozen or so people who want to play football in the community anyway, and with not everyone present, the arrangement suited both groups.

So half of the field played futsal, the other half had people doing Taiji. The arrangement went on for some time until the accident happened… When was it?

Scouring his memories, Wu Jian is finding it rather difficult to recall the details of a Nightmare in the long past.

Then he remembers it.