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Jiang Shuangjie saw Jiang Shuangmei, who is currently crouched down, hugging her thighs by the wall almost immediately. She reflexively yells out, “Shuangshuang!”
That call seems to have triggered something, and Jiang Shuangmei just shot right back up from the ground like a spring and flies over to hug Jiang Shuangjie, her body still trembling ceaselessly from the horror.
Jiang Shuangjie hurriedly embraces her and quietly coos her.
Thin looks like he wants to say something. While he is curious what really happened the last run of the Nightmare, seeing how unstable Jiang Shuangmei seemed mentally isn’t a good sign that they’ll get anything useful out of this.
He looks towards the Muscular instead, or more specifically, towards the paper he is holding.
Muscular shrugs and hands the letter over to Thin, who is about to say something after having finished reading it when Shen Yünjü interjects, “it looks like there is something wrong with the facilities in the apartment building.”
Thin then remains silent.
Muscular nods, saying, “that’s right.”
Thin looks at Shen YĂźnjĂź then at Muscular in silence. He hands the piece of paper over to the teenage girl, who also says nothing after reading.
The entire ground floor lobby is silent.
Muscular looks around with a curious expression, but he’s not sure if anything is wrong, so he assumes they are thinking; he himself doesn’t like to think, he has always been so.
Whatever Nightmare it was, he’d always put that honest, trustworthy look on his face and do whatever was told to him and win other Missiontakers’ trust. Sometimes those Missiontakers’d still guide him out of Nightmares even though he’d stolen their utility cards already.
By luck, he might reach a higher floor, unfortunately, he does not have the capability to remain on a higher floor.
Nightmares on the higher floors are unlike ones on the bottom floor. They are more dangerous, more mad, more… cruel.
On the bottom floor, Missiontakers could often resolve a Nightmare through simple cooperation. In that case, while True Ends remain elusive, Normal Ends are easily within reach.
And, Bad Ends aren’t exactly as problematic, since there isn’t a lower floor for them to go to. Though he’s heard that people who achieve Bad Ends might end up succumbing to a Collapsed Nightmare… Who knows, it’s just another of those common circulating rumours.
On higher floors, the theme of competition between Missiontakers is much more apparent. They no longer belonged to a single cohesive group. In fact, they might be deposited into multiple, or even rival factions.
They’d drag each other back, which causes a more barbaric kind of ruthlessness to permeate the Nightmares across the upper floors of the Tower. Some Missiontakers even hold the attitude of ‘Rather the world burns with me than I suffering alone.’
Therefore, after a few times on the upper floors, Muscular was no longer interested. He felt like if he was going to sink to the depths of depravity, he’d rather do that on the bottom floor.
Besides, his greediness tells him, that stealing utility cards on the bottom floor of the Tower is much easier than doing it on a higher floor.
So he stayed on the bottom floor. So he became lazier and lazier in thinking.
He waits for the rest of the Missiontakers to speak.
Thin looks at Jiang Shuangjie, who is still coddling her younger sister. She continues cheering her up while raising her eyes to meet Thin’s gaze coldly.
Shortly thereafter, Thin nods slightly.
He suddenly turns towards Muscular, telling him, “please go into a room and do not come outside again.”
Muscular freezes for a moment before yelling with a beet-red face, “what… what the hell?! I told you I wasn’t a Carddealer! Why are you believing in that madwoman?!”
“I saw,” Shen Yünjü suddenly interjects, “I saw it, a blade between your fingers.”
He stares at the Missiontaker with the typical distant gaze of a ‘zombie.’
Muscular is all trembling. A few minutes ago, he was still fantasising about how he could ‘succeed’ twice in this Nightmare, but now, the rest of the Missiontakers are sending him into exile.
… You’re kidding him!
Muscular yells out angrily, “that’s not… You all don’t have proof! Carddealer… What the actual fuck!” Then he glares intensely at Jiang Shuangjie, threatening her, “… madwoman, just wait and see!”
He wants to walk towards Jiang Shuangjie, but Thin and Shen Yünjü both take a step forward. Jiang Shuangjie caresses her younger sister’s hair while calmly uttering, “I’ll be waiting.”
Muscular grips his fists tight, while most of his body is now the same redness as on his face. He cannot accept this failure, so he just makes a loud, dismissive chuckle. He ignores Thin’s demand for him to retreat into an empty room and stay put, and rushes out of the apartment complex completely.
Thin wipes his face with slight frustration, and tells Jiang Shuangjie, “I apologise.”
Jiang Shuangjie shakes her head at him, and says gently, “you don’t need to… Thank you, to everyone.”
Thin then says, “he might have put your utility cards in his apartment unit,” he hesitantly proposes, “we could grab a master key from Management and then search his house?”
Somehow, those words seem to trigger something in Jiang Shuangmei’s fear reflex, and she screams, “no! Don’t go to the apartments! You… You mustn’t!”
The rest of the Missiontakers are taken aback.
Jiang Shuangjie continues smoothing her younger sister’s hair as she gently asks, “Shuangshuang, what happened before?”
“Madness…” Jiang Shuangmei is shaking as he recounts her experience, “jiejie, those furniture were mad. All the furniture. The bathtub filled with water… the Roomba kept knocking me over… the air-con… the bedroom locked up…  They, they are trying to kill me… You can’t go…”
Her sentences are fragmented and her logic is a mess, but the Missiontakers are able to understand now.
“Electronics!”
They simultaneously proclaim.
Then Thin exasperatedly asks, “the household devices… have gained sentience? What kind of unreal Nightmare is this?”
When suddenly, he recalls how he went to the toilet and it flushed itself. Suddenly, he felt oddly uncomfortable.
… No no no, he shouldn’t be trying to humanise a toilet.
He tells himself that inside.
Fortunately, because the first run of the Nightmare prepared him mentally, he was able to forcibly relax himself when the second run of the Nightmare started. He succeeded in ignoring the anxiety and therefore avoided the stomach-aches.
Though he’s probably going to have PTSD reactions to toilets for the rest of his life.
The rest of the Missiontakers may never figure out what Thin is thinking, because none of them have redeveloped the biological needs of hunger, thirst, and excretion in this Nightmare either. Even Thin himself… isn’t sure why he suddenly needed to do a number two.
Could this Nightmare just have had an ultrarealistic setting?
In any case, the Missiontakers have all achieved a basic level of understanding of this Nightmare.
Thin asks, “so… what now?”
“The Management office,” replies the teenage girl, “we’ll search again, for a master key and other things. We probably missed something.”
Thin thinks about it and adds, “we’ve went through the whole apartment but Lin Qin, the dalao was nowhere to be seen. We don’t know where he is, so we’ll have to look for him.”
The rest of the Missiontakers nods.
Jiang Shuangmei, who has thoroughly recovered already, looks like she really wants to dissuade them. She really, really doesn’t want back inside the apartment units. They’re dangerous.
But… With her rationale returned, she knows that if they do not explore, then how ever are they going to be able to leave this Nightmare?
So, she stays silent, but is gripping on her older sister’s sleeve tightly, not willing to be separated from her at all.
They head for the Management office directly.
On the other hand, Muscular, who has left the Luoke Apartment complex by now, naturally heads for the commercial area instead. He manages to run into XĂź Beijin after a few minutes.