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The door to the dorm room was not locked.
Mystic can see a little girl, whose arms and legs are all tied to the sides of the bed. Her father is holding up the book for her to see.
Something is forcing her eyelids open at all times. Her mother, with eye drops in her hands, standing at the side, gives her a drip with anxious hands every so often.
Mystic can’t help but shudder.
While He ShujĂźn looks at the girl closely.
This Nightmare owner, if you only went by this scene, is certainly pitiable. But if you really ended up in her Nightmare, and has to help her escape from the school, she will become a ‘companion’ in name only.
She sells out whoever helps her in the blink of an eye. If Missiontakers are caught by the school, they will also end up bound and forced to read and study, until the punishment period is over.
During this period, they are offered no food or water or even the right to use the bathroom. The period lasts for as long as a day or two.
They will lose bowel control on the bed. They will feel the encroaching starvation and dehydration. If they struggled, the remaining time bound will be doubled, or until the teachers can confidently confirm that they are willing to study.
And how to convince the teachers of that is also quite the subtle task.
Some teachers still have some conscience, and you only needed pretty words to have them let you go;
While some are utterly incommunicable.
Also, if you struggled without end, then the punishment would be escalated to a physical degree.
The school says that they do not want to employ violence either, but they would also say, that some students really would never listen to anything but force.
It is how it is. Some students died; some parents died; some teachers end up horribly scarred thanks to the punishments.
But no one would bat an eye. Everyone knows the Gaokao is important; well, it is, but the madness has only exaggerated the anxiety, and fundamentally twisted it.
The students, parents and teachers, who spend their entire stay and tenure torturing each other, are practically living in a nightmarish hell. The same can be said for any unfortunate Missiontaker who took on this Nightmare.
In fact, if the Missiontakers successfully helped the girl escape from the school, they receive a Bad End.
If they remain oblivious of the school’s treatment of the girl, becoming guilty by complicity, they receive a Normal End.
He Shujün isn’t sure what the True End is; in fact, she suspects, this Nightmare might not even have a True End.
Helping the girl escape the school, is simply running away from the problem, moving the girl from this ‘prison’ to another, bigger ‘prison.’ That is why they get a Bad End – you’ve done nothing to help her truly free herself.
How are people supposed to even escape from the permeating madness?
No one knows.
A Nightmare without a solution.
It’s like when the Missiontakers discussed Nightmares they’ve been to before entering Xü Beijin’s Nightmare… And, they mentioned Su Enya’ Nightmare.
Su Enya’s Nightmare is the one about the furniture becoming sentient.
How is that Nightmare to be resolved? How could a True End be achieved in that?
Even if they take the Nightmare owner away from the apartment, again, it’s moving from a smaller ‘prison’ to a bigger one.
How are they supposed to resolve humanity’s entire conundrum? Rather than just one person within?
A true, unresolvable, predicament.
He ShujĂźn gives the girl a deep, complicated look, before stepping through the dorm door, and watching the grey fog roll out.
She reflexively sighs in relief.
The fourth person to regain their sense of self, is Shen YĂźnjĂź.
He is somewhere both he and XĂź Beijin will be familiar with.
The building on the verge of collapsing, with malfunctioning elevators.
He almost immediately recalls what happened, and after the brief shock, he heads for the stairs with Ye Lan, who asks, curious, “you know this place?”
Shen YĂźnjĂź nods.
He wonders which door would be the one they need.
Though, let’s backtrack a little.
Moving onto the ‘door’ immediately means his thoughts are distracted from something else.
These Nightmares in the grey fog are not completely the same as the ones in the Tower. While the ‘Nightmare owner’ always exists conceptually, they are not always present.
For example, in this building, the little girl is still in the Tower. So obviously, she can’t be in here.
This means that this scene is born courtesy of a succumbed Missiontaker who lost himself in this Nightmare in the Tower.
Who would the Missiontaker be? From what they already know of the content in this Nightmare, he thinks there isn’t anything to drive one completely mad.
Shen Yünjü is wondering now. There are two types of scenes in the Nightmares of the grey fog. One, belonging to a succumbed Nightmare owner’s Collapsed Nightmare; two, a partial Nightmare replicated here due to a Missiontaker succumbing only, so the Nightmare would not feature the complete roster.
Of course, it’s quite likely both Missiontakers and the Nightmare owner would succumb in quick succession, but it’s not rare for them to happen independently.
Though… if a Nightmare owner succumbed after some previous Missiontakers have succumbed, would they end up in the same Nightmare in the grey fog?
Or would each instance produce a brand new scene here?
It seems both would be plausible, but considering the chronological implications of both… Shen Yünjü finds the latter more likely.
That is, each new succumbing produces a new scene.
But then, that would put the estimate for the total number of scenes here in the fog to a staggering number.
Each succumbing reproduces, at least, a majority of a Nightmare here? The amount of useless, tied-up data must be astronomical.
Rather than Xü Beijin’s Nightmare, Shen Yünjü thinks, it’s more like it’s NE’s Nightmare.
Yes. An artificial intelligence must find the grey fog to be a terribly space-hogging burden.
Speaking of which, they’ve been questioning Xü Beijin’s relationship to NE for a while now.
If Xü Beijin really is NE, that would lead to strange questions, like how Xü Beijin clearly doesn’t act like a robotic, monotonous AI should. Can AI even process emotions like love?
Besides, Xü Beijin didn’t sleep for years so that people can’t enter his Nightmare; if he really were NE, why would he be worried about that? He could just set it so that no one could use his bookstore’s door or something.
NE is omniscient in the Tower, after all.
Entering Xü Beijin’s Nightmare results in all of them ‘faux-succumbing,’ which is clearly a demonstration of NE’s power – powerful enough to affect their brains and will. It’s difficult to imagine NE is trapped on the bottom floor in any sense, as Xü Beijin apparently is.
So basically, while XĂź Beijin seems like he would be NE, with much supporting evidence, there are just as much evidence to the contrary for now.
When Shen YĂźnjĂź listened to the discussion about the Nightmare with the Raining Hellfire, he noted the prominent contradictory nature of the Nightmare owner within.
He can’t help but draw a connection between Ke Zhu and Xie Ji’s connection, and the condition between Xü Beijin and NE.
Though he can’t exactly come up with an explanation for why Xü Beijin and NE would have ended up in a dualistic situation in the first place.
Shen YĂźnjĂź cannot understand.