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“what what? did Beibei understand something?”
“i think im a dumbass. i havent understood much since that flowing time thing…”
“our poor stock of brain cells might be in danger”
“… will I actually end up with a pile of hair in my hand when I shampoo today? I hope not?!”
Xü Beijin sees the pile of miserable comments——Where the detective dalao is nowhere to be seen——and can’t help but sigh inside.
Then he says, “I’ll organise the information for you again, and tell you what I just understood.”
“nice! Beibei go go!”
The viewers all look cheerful.
Yeah, they don’t get it, but then they can just ‘borrow’ their Bei’s smart little brain, can’t they?
XĂź Beijin smiles and mulls over how to talk about it for a moment. First, he gives a brief rundown of the background story in the Nightmare so far, while also framing it in the context of what the Missiontakers experienced over all the runs.
Then he begins to explain, “you can imagine this Nightmare as an obstacle course with two tracks. The boy occupies one track, the man in black another.”
“The rule of this race is that, they cannot barge into someone else’s track, and false starts are banned as well. Each runner has their own set of obstacles.
The boy starts in the dark bedroom, regardless of the state of crumbling of the Nightmare——Which in this context can be treated as the rules of the race changing. The boy’s start never changes; it is his Nightmare, it is his race, so he obeys his own rules for the course no matter what.
The man in black starts in the corridor. He is in the race because of the precondition that he murdered his wife. His start is his escape, which is slightly ahead of the boy’s start in the race.
They cannot interfere with each other in their separate runs because they are on different tracks. However, in this race, the tracks merge near the end, meaning they share the same goalpost.
However, the Missiontakers can interject, by taking the boy out from the dark bedroom, which is equivalent to pushing the boy onto the track of the man in black, stopping him wherever he was on the track. It stops him continuing to surpass the obstacles.
What can the man in black do? Nothing but continue the race.
So, because the boy was forced to take his track, the man in black goes to take the boy’s track instead. Yet, each course and the obstacles on them correspond to their own runners. A race is only completed on the condition that they cross over all the obstacles. This is also a rule of the race.
Therefore, after the man in black takes over the boy’s course, to vault over the complete list of obstacles in that course, he has to restart his race entirely——Back to the starting point where he killed his wife and began running.
Each time the Nightmare enters a new run, so does the obstacle course. As the Nightmare crumbles, so does the rules of this race.
When the rules crumbled, after the boy was forced to take the man in black’s route again thanks to intervention from the Missiontakers, the man in black had a false start instead. He was a quicker runner than the boy anyway, so, even after the boy stole his course, the man in black was still ahead of the boy, and crossed over some of the obstacles before the boy did.
Missiontakers are the main source of uncertainty in this race, because they are above all the rules of this race; which means, for example, they could open the door to the dark bedroom.
This is an act equivalent to forcibly merging the two courses from beginning to the end, but the course will still end up re-separating no matter what when the door closes.
One possibility is that a Missiontaker or more have been left behind in the room – as in run four. Nothing spectacular happens.
When the boy left the bedroom that run, he robbed the course, which resulted in the man in black disappearing, and then starting the car chase when he did. His goal was actually to reach the next obstacle before the boy.
The other possibility is that no Missiontakers remained in the bedroom – as in run two.
With both the boy and the man in black being forced onto a single lane in this situation, they have to secure the right to start their run first. Therefore, the door to the room and to the corridor either remain shut or disappear entirely. The obstacle course has been locked up.
Unfortunately, the man in black only needed to kill the boy’s mother to be able to force his way out and start his own race. That explains what happened in the second run.
… That is what underlies what the Missiontakers experienced up to this point. Does everyone understand?”
(TL: … (raises hand) I don’t understand QAQ)
XĂź Beijin has slowly laid out his analogy.
In the stream, the viewers all finally understand.
The boy’s journey and the man in black’s journey, and flow of time and fitting into the Nightmare owner’s journey… They are all just accidents that occur because the Missiontakers took the boy out and committed false starts!
“suddenly feel like the man in black is very office-slave to keep obstacle racing”
“and having to vault over every obstacle too, I don’t even know how many times by now, poor guy”
“what a diligent respectable man, so dont let him off scot free lol”
“I understand how the nightmare operates now! so Beibei, what did you understand just now?”
Xü Beijin glances at the stream’s camera to see the four Missiontakers at the service area now waiting for the bedroom team to arrive with the boy.
So XĂź Beijin begins to look through the different camera sources, checking through all the different scenes. The viewers go from confused to dumbfounded, having no idea what XĂź Beijin is doing.
The detective dalao is finally here, hinting, “The man in black is missing.”
“oh right! that guy is missing!”
“cuz the nightmare is already at the pt where the guy was arrested?”
“wait, then isn’t this already a complete crumbling? it’s not even a false start, the man in black zipped right to the goal at the start lol”
“yeah, wouldnt this just mean the nightmare is over…”
Xü Beijin explains, “this is the issue I think I understood just now. The man in black was arrested, as per the development of this event in reality, which means, the boy’s father has been apprehended by law.
That said, the boy is still trapped in the Nightmare of his mother dying. This is an experience that keeps reliving itself in his dreams, repeating endlessly…
The man in black has always been a phantom, an image in his Nightmare. It was something that represented his insane father, despite him having been put down already. The boy could not forget about the experience.
Therefore, this Nightmare’s ending…”
“ah! i got it!”
“so the boy trapped himself in his nightmare?”
“his dad has already been judged, and may even have been sentenced to death already; well, i know im speaking carelessly, but i think the boy needs to move on from his childhood trauma”
“… ah yeah, poor guy. he has to keep reliving numbering off in the dark bedroom, and without the missiontakers, he’ll keep hearing his own mother’s screams, perhaps”
“But… sigh. I also really hope he can move on from the pain and suffering. I believe his mother would wish for her son to stay well”
Xü Beijin murmurs, “that’s right… He has trapped himself in his childhood Nightmare forever. Therefore, what needs to be done is helping him move on.”
XĂź Beijin has got it, and so does Mu Jiashi, Selfish, and Laosan, Ding Yi and others who have arrived at the service area by this point.
At this point, the Nightmare is already on its seventh run. With its background story already known and laid out in front of them, these experienced Missiontakers are able to make the correct judgement soon enough.
Even Laoda is touching his head and muttering, “the killer got sentenced already, so what’s the brat still doing recalling the scene of his mom dying over and over again? Masochist?”
His words are horribly senseless, but that is to be expected of Missiontakers whose brains are only filled with True Ends, Nightmares and a drive to reach a higher floor with no place for the laments of a little boy.
Well, it’s not like they’re absolutely steel-hearted, but that emotional space is severely limited.
They themselves are trapped in the Tower, drifting through other people’s Nightmares day in, day out. They really don’t have much space for sympathies and pities for NPCs.
Even XĂź Beijin, who knows the boy is actually a human, a human Acting in accordance to the script of the boy assigned to him, can only express his surprise at the human tragedy depicted in this script.
Real? Reality?
Searching for that in the Tower is terribly misguided.
Even though, Xü Beijin also can’t help but wonder——What if there really has been such a little boy? And just like the last Nightmare too, he’d wonder what if there really existed such a little girl who experienced the insanity.
Childhood. Children. Nightmares. Violence.
XĂź Beijin sincerely hopes that all of this really is just an in-game setting. A script. An Act.