/
In the stream, the viewers have become confused watching Jiang Shuangjie’s series of actions. They do not know about the gazes that are everywhere, staring at the Missiontakers at all times. So they cannot understand their fear.
“? whats wrong? some kinda monster in the corridor?”
“I don’t get it… all the missiontakers look scared of something, but I can’t tell what from the stream”
“theres a man who raised his toilet brush in broad daylight; theres a woman who ran into the elevator fleeing from nothing”
“the concluding phrase: this condo is toxic”
“Beibeibeibei, any thoughts?”
XĂź Beijin is watching the stream closely, observing the woman crouching at the corner. It was not until the elevator reaches the fourth floor and the male voice robotically reminds her of such, that she shakily exits the elevator, still looking anxious as ever.
He mulls over it for a moment, then says, “thoughts…” He pauses by habit before explaining, “it’s pretty simple, really. The Missiontakers were all inside of their own apartment units since the beginning, which implies something must have been wrong with these units, even though no Missiontaker has identified the source of it.”
“Beibeis right!”
“but Beibei, do u know what the problem is then?”
Xü Beijin replies hesitantly, “I think… I do,” but he does not elaborate, instead, he changes the topic with “she’s met up with a Missiontaker already.”
On the stream, Jiang Shuangjie has met a Missiontaker on the fourth floor.
It’s the muscular and tough-looking Missiontaker who just left Room 408, running into Jiang Shuangjie, who just left the elevator.
He left slightly later than Jiang Shuangjie did, because he explored his room once more carefully after realising the door is open.
The stares are still glued to him, like some insane, stubborn madman. The muscular guy hates dealing with people like that, but, he’s calmed down by now.
He’s been through so many Nightmares already.
Thinking this way, he is even showing a dismissive smirk on his face.
After he checked his apartment but came up with nothing, the muscular man left his apartment unit. Yet, the moment he stepped outside, before he even closed the door, he hears a woman’s yelp.
“Missiontaker?!”
A sly thought flashes across the muscular man’s mind as he turns around to put on a dumb smile, saying, “yeah, finally, a companion!”
His cooperative attitude also makes Jiang Shuangjie sigh in relief. She also gives a smile, and exchanges information with this Missiontaker.
XĂź Beijin enlarges the camera source showing them and pushes the other camera views to the side.
He listens intently to their conversation, but when he looks closely at the exaggerated, obsequious smile on the muscular man’s face, his brows furrow.
Wait, this expression… Looks familiar.
He didn’t think the man looked familiar before nor does he think has this man really appeared in his memories, but the expression… The un-Tower-like, ingratiating, social smile, has suddenly reawakened Xü Beijin’s memories.
He stands there thinking, and soon enough, he recalls the smile in his memories.
It was when the Missiontakers were extremely interested in his Nightmare.
Really, Xü Beijin didn’t know why he attracted so many Missiontakers’ attention at once all of a sudden. True, nobody did ever enter his Nightmare, but with so many Tower residents around and so many unexplored Nightmares still, why his own in particular?
Wasn’t he just some mundane bookstore owner in their eyes?
It was when Xü Beijin overheard some rumours from Missiontakers that he found out, apparently, a Missiontaker had targeted him and so waited outside his store the whole night, not knowing that he didn’t sleep.
After that fruitless waste of time, the Missiontaker became frustrated and angry, so he exaggerated Xü Beijin’s Nightmare and spread rumours all about, hoping to trick even more Missiontakers into falling into this trap like he did.
The rumours then compounded and compounded, colliding with the rather maddening paranoia abound in the Tower back then, and it escalated.
In the end, somehow, the rumours were talking about the bookstore owner’s Nightmare hiding some unknown secrets related to the Tower itself. There were even Missiontakers who asserted that a True End in this Nightmare is a key to exit the Tower itself.
Naturally, Xü Beijin knew what his own Nightmare was, but he could not stop the Missiontakers’ wild imaginations.
Therefore, the Missiontakers lunged forth for XĂź Beijin and his Nightmare with hope in their eyes, conversing with him, staying outside his door, day by day, they would wait for an opportunity to enter his Nightmare.
When it was the liveliest, there have been hundreds of people, all crowded into the little alleyway outside of Xü Beijin’s bookstore, even spilling into Respawn Avenue outside.
Yet XĂź Beijin never slept.
Which was only further proof for the rumours that, his Nightmares contained secrets. If it were just some normal Nightmare, why would this Tower resident refuse to allow Missiontakers into his Nightmare at all?
Still, over a long period of time, many Missiontakers still lost patience and left, but many more were still lying in wait.
One of them, actually did something rather nasty.
He declared that this bookstore owner isn’t actually a Tower resident, but a Missiontaker──Well, more specifically, he claimed he was an ‘outsider’ in the Tower residents’ eyes.
Though the Missiontakers all knew each other, so they could verify that Xü Beijin wasn’t one of them. Yet the guy kept accusing Xü Beijin to be an ‘outsider’ who pretended to be a Tower resident.
He proclaimed that XĂź Beijin is merely a celebrity wannabe, trying to become famous in the Tower through this.
Everyone knows that Tower residents all have some strange quirks about them, bodily, mentally, but, no matter what, Tower residents are definitely insane in some obvious sense.
Yet the bookstore owner wasn’t like this. He was exceedingly normal, even looking like he was trying to enjoy the little pleasantries of life.
How could such a person even be a Tower resident? Only an ‘outsider’ could act like this!
That was the provocation. An attempt at forcing XĂź Beijin to admit he was a Tower resident. The most direct proof, then, is of course, to open his Nightmare.
And from what they knew of the game’s setting, a Tower resident must feel insulted to be accused of being an outsider, because they themselves hate outsiders and reject them.
They knew how they would, as ‘outsiders’ themselves, do whatever they want in the Tower, even chasing after and cornering the Tower residents just to find out clues about their Nightmares. Some of them would even act way over the line in Nightmares.
Therefore, they are certainly extremely hated among the Tower residents, the ‘NPCs’ of the game.
If Xü Beijin really was labelled an ‘outsider,’ then he would be abandoned by the Tower residents while never being accepted by the Missiontakers either. He will be isolated, exiled.
Even if the Tower residents, all being Actors, will naturally never actually act as that Missiontaker hoped, but because the Server intervened, they still had to act like they hated the outsiders, or rather, the ‘outsider who pretended to be a resident.’
That, was the first time XĂź Beijin lost his temper in the Tower.
He left the bookstore he always holed up in. He opened the teleporting door the Missiontakers were all dying to enter. He watched the Missiontaker, with his sly, obsequious, gleeful smile, as he tried to push XĂź Beijin away to enter his bookstore.
The Missiontaker probably thought, with XĂź Beijin being an NPC without an actual will, could only surrender entirely, allowing them into his Nightmare. He was opening the door for them because of that.
Well… It hinged on Xü Beijin being an actual in-game NPC.
So XĂź Beijin threw that Missiontaker out. Literally.
All the Missiontakers watching were in shock.
They have never seen such a scene. Tower residents dislike the outsiders, true, but they have never seen one lash out against an outsider. It was everyone’s consensus that, in this game, the NPCs cannot do anything to the players outside of the Nightmares.
And back then, it was the first time, that a Tower resident attacked a Missiontaker outright.