CH 71.1

The audience of Xü Beijin’s stream are currently silent.

Since they began watching Xü Beijin stream Nightmares, and paid attention to all the mysteries surrounding this escape game, they’ve had to realise again and again that their intelligence is being called into question.

Not that it’s their fault, but merely, someone has got the answer before they did with less information, so they’re extra ashamed.

… But hey, what can’t be helped, can’t be helped, right?

So the viewers quickly turn to Xü Beijin for help──Too bad the detective dalao isn’t here, or they would probably have excitedly typed all their analysis onto the comments, and the viewers could just go ‘ooooh I see.’

Xü Beijin is the opposite, staying quiet most of the time. He is especially mysterious, and if the audience doesn’t ask, he would rarely share what he thought about and managed to analyse about the Nightmare and the truth behind it.

The viewers have had to get used to asking for help from him proactively.

Meanwhile, Xü Beijin, after his very brief excitement, awkwardly smiles and explains, “it’s actually really simple. Did you know that falling in dreams often spooks people awake from them?”

“oh… I’ve heard about it.”

“they use falling in lucid dreaming to wake up, right?”

“uhm… yeah, I got that, but Beibei, are you saying that… this execution by falling, is to escape the dream? but… this is the nightmare? like hows he even waking up?”

Xü Beijin knows what the viewer meant despite the incoherence. These ‘Nightmares’ in the Tower, while they do involve a Tower resident falling asleep and ‘dreaming,’ but this is still an Instance in a game at the end, so you can’t just ‘exit the dream’ by falling.

So he says, “what if you consider another clue? The fact that all pen and paper can only produce illegible scribbles here, and even the books only contain words of nonsense?

This is something unheard of even in other Nightmares. This makes this Nightmare special, but why? Why would not even death trigger a restart?”

“im crying… Beibei, please, just give us the answer”

“I’ll admit I’m no detective dalao, and so no guesses sob sob…”

Xü Beijin chuckles and explains, “because this is inside of a dream in the Nightmare. A dream in a dream, if you will.”

He ignores the pile of exclamation marks flying past in the comment barrage, and continues, “the most obvious sign cluing us in lies in the fact that someone is even falling off the building in the first place.

For the sake of execution, clearly, it is far more intimidating and effective to employ more direct means. Why did they choose to push someone off the rooftop instead?

Also, more strangely, among all that the eye can see, including even the scenes beyond the fog, they are all collapsed ruins. This building here is the only one standing.

Sure, it is shaky and unstable, but we have to remember that this is a game. Each and every scene’s existence must be able to justify itself.”

Xü Beijin pauses at this point.

The viewers come to some strange realisation, typing, “i know! so that means the missiontakers must also jump!”

Xü Beijin “…”

Not exactly, but… oh well.

He decides to smile instead and just say, “kind of, yeah.”

Meanwhile, not far from the building, Mu Jiashi is looking firmly at Fei, asking, “you were once pushed off the rooftop… Did you feel anything?”

He also told her about the possibility of this being a dream in a dream, though compared to how easily the audience bought everything, the Missiontakers here are far less convinced.

Put simply, the crux of the matter is that they cannot prove it.

Mu Jiashi is still collected, however, and asks Fei this question with confidence still in his tone.

Fei also seems surprised at the question.

She suddenly realised that, despite having forgotten entirely about falling off the rooftop, yet the moment Mu Jiashi mentioned the incident… she reflexively shivered.

It’s not simply fear, or hopelessness from facing certain death,

But more…

Fei is quite a sharp person, that is for sure, and so, after thinking for a bit, she tries her best to describe the odd feeling to him, “I felt like… it must have been a very… disorienting experience. I feel like it was a falsehood, that instead of just weightlessness from falling, I felt… like I was on the verge of ‘waking up,’… a dream coming to an end…”

Mu Jiashi suggests a succinct phrase to her, “would you say it was like snapping awake?”

“Snapping awake…” Fei seems hesitant to call it as such, “I cannot say for certain, but it certainly… certainly possessed a peculiar, a mind-numbing… Yes, possibly. Yes… I would agree with your hypothesis to a degree, in fact.

The hypothesis of this being a dream in a dream.”

Or more accurately, a dream in a Nightmare.

They are inside of a Nightmare, whose owner is dreaming inside, so they are currently inside the second layer of the dream.

If they really want to resolve this Nightmare, or at least, to achieve a True End, they will definitely have to leave this dream in a dream, to head outside into the real Nightmare, and look for the owner of the Nightmare there.

“So, what do you think is the purpose for this dream in a dream?” Collector asks the most pertinent question, “who might be the owner that is dreaming?”

Mu Jiashi doesn’t seem too certain himself, saying, “I cannot guarantee that my guess is correct… But I think, the owner might be the dead person.”

“The dead person?”

“He might be the author of the novel itself,” some guesses flash through Mu Jiashi’s mind, and he continues, “that would explain why the completed version of the novel would be inside of this Nightmare, and why he is falling off the rooftop in the first place; that might be his way of leaving this dream of his.

So the reason the killer and the victim both fade in and out of existence would be because of this as well. After falling off the rooftop, maybe he is outside of this dream in a dream, and back in the Nightmare itself.

It could be that he set up the fall to be a wake-up call on purpose. That explains how the killer disappears into thin air; in fact, the killer might even have been a copy of himself as well… a virtual projection of himself in this dream in a dream.”

Mu Jiashi’s explanation sends shockwaves through the minds of the other Missiontakers, but after giving it some detailed scrutiny, they all have to agree, that what Mu Jiashi said is plausible.

“The dream in a dream…” Mu Jiashi thought about it in the meantime, and comes up with more hypothesis, “first, it might be that he, the Tower resident, had his food robbed on the post-apocalyptic ruins. He is starving because of that.

So he had a nightmare, dreaming about how his food was stolen. From the information we’ve acquired thus far, this is the only possible source of fear for him.

Re-experiencing this in his own nightmares may have exhausted and pained him, so he dreamt about something else, to cheer himself up.”

“Now, inn this dream he came up with, he followed the plot of the novel he wrote. The man who stole his food would repeatedly, futilely retrieve food and then forget, every single day.

To have enough food but to continuously forget and restart, struggling, suffering, but with no way out. That is what the Nightmare owner, the novelist, intended as his revenge against that person who robbed his food.

And this ‘fog,’ might have been a subtle difference between the setting of his novel, and the actual dream he is having.

In his novel, to maintain a suspense and veneer of serious writing, it is unlikely for the plot to reveal early on that the man has lost his memories every time, or reveal the warehouse where he stored his food the whole time.

The fog delineates where the plot can take place in the novel, but when we realised that, or, perhaps, when the novel’s ending comes and passes, when the truth is all but revealed, the fog is naturally gone.”

“The final section of the novel probably involved this protagonist the author hated dying to starvation in agony. Not stopping that, could be what leads to the Bad End; if we stopped his death, it might be a Normal End at best.

Because all in all, the person made to suffer in the dream, the man walking into the fog, is not actually the person the author hated, but a product of the author’s mind, the author’s trauma.

So, that is why, when we mentioned the person falling off the rooftop to that man who walks into the fog, he would be so apprehensive, because the dreaming person doesn’t want to know the truth; he only wants to indulge himself in his petty revenge.”

“The problem here is, in the actual Nightmare outside, he is still starving. At least, according to the Nightmare. That is why his survival instincts would kick in to drag him out of his dream, even if only back into his own Nightmare.

That is the reason for the building to exist in his dream in a dream. It is the path to retreat as constructed by his own subconsciousness.

Its only use is to wake himself up, so other survivors in this dream ignores this perfect place for shelter entirely. At the same time, the bookstore and that single book within are the clearest of indicators.

While those survivors arranging for his ‘execution,’ may be a group of people he met in the Nightmare outside, or even in his reality.

They may be people that do exist in the post-apocalypse, and are related to the Nightmare owner, even. They end up being projected into this Nightmare as some sort of background characters, in charge of waking him up when required.”

Here, Mu Jiashi checks through his stream of logic, and then nods with satisfaction, “yes, I think that’s all.”