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Ch46 - Sha, Sha, Sha
Jiang Fang used the non-existent key to open the door of existence in front of him.
Click.
The door of the boys’ dormitory slowly opened. They entered an ordinary boys’ dormitory. There weren’t many miscellaneous things. There were just clothes and some books. The quilt on the bed wasn’t folded and was kicked to the end of the bed. Clothes were piled in a mess on the back of the chair in layers like a matryoshka doll. The bottom edge of the outermost jacket was almost dangling on the ground. The chair was well-worn and at a glance, it looked like a person was sitting alone on it. There were cheap, colored barbells near the radiator. A football was quietly placed near the barbells.
Nan Zhou stood in the middle of a small four person room full of life. He tried not to trust his senses or to use the conclusions of his ‘senses’ as part of his chain of thinking. Nan Zhou asked, “How many people live in this dormitory?”
Jiang Fang answered, “Four.”
All four beds were lined with mattresses and the heavy signs of life were impossible to ignore.
Nan Zhou asked again, “How many people should there be?”
Jiang Fang stopped and seemed to realize something. “Four.”
“On the door nameplate, how many people did you see?”
Li Yinhang saw Jiang Fang frown without answering and was somewhat puzzled. “Four.”
Nan Zhou turned to stare into her eyes. “Which four?”
Li Yinhang used her memory from customer service to quickly recite them. “The player with the surname Xie, Liu Shuoqi, there is also a Yu… something or other.”
Nanzhou wondered, “How many people are there?”
Li Yinhang instinctively replied, “Four.”
“Count again.”
Li Yinhang found it strange but she lowered her head and carefully counted them. “One, two…”
She reached ‘three’ and was horrified to realize one thing. She couldn’t remember the name of the ‘fourth person’ she just confirmed existed.
Nan Zhou turned to look at Jiang Fang. The best way to solve chaos was to report it as the truth. Some of the facts that they were convinced about in their hearts would only have the problem discovered after repeating it through their own mouths.
Nan Zhou wondered, “So how many people should there be in this dormitory?”
No one answered him. The cold wind of the late autumn blew through the screens over the windows. Several hangers hanging on the balcony collided with the iron drying racks, causing the clear sound that was like wind chimes.
The three of them stood in this warm dormitory and shuddered.
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
***
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Sun Guojing instinctively didn’t want to deal with Nan Zhou’s group but after being awakened by Jiang Fang, his impression of Xie Xiangyu was also poor. The thought of working with this person was as disgusting as eating a fly.
Due to all the worries, he had to ask his companions for peace of mind. “What should we do? Who are we going to work with?”
Qi Tianyun was silent. Now he could obviously see it. It didn’t really matter who they worked with. Based on their abilities, they weren’t worthy of talking about ‘cooperation’ at all. It didn’t matter if it was Xie Xiangyu’s initiative to get close and provide information or Jiang Fang’s warm words and advice—the three of them were too useless. The two groups of people didn’t need partners but a ‘stone’ to throw and ask the way. Oh no, there were three of them so they should be three stones.
Qi Tianyun thought of this but it never occurred to him that one team was just trying to cooperate with them because the team didn’t want them to die, thus lowering the score their own team might get.
The three of them were at a loss when Luo Ge suddenly ‘shh’ them. He pointed to the door and motioned for the other two people to listen.
Creak—
The faint sound of nails scraping against the wall was heard from the door. Tapping, scratching and rubbing. It was light but close at hand.
Creak—
Luo Ge looked down. The dormitory’s door had a crack. At night, the goose-yellow lights of the hallway often penetrated from under the door. Now at this moment, the crack of the door was pitch black. There was something standing outside their door now!
It was broad daylight but the three of them were covered in sweat. Sun Guojing had been frightened by one thing after another and had long become a mess. His heart was chaotic and his eyes were wide as he strode to the door, pulling it open with great movement. The movement was so fast and powerful that he almost hit himself in the nose.
He uttered a magnificent shout, “Who—”
At the door, Jiang Fang was watching Nan Zhou take off the nameplate. He looked at the dumbfounded Sun Guojing and gave a polite nod. “Hello, we have come to check a clue.”
Sun Guojing was speechless.
Fuck, if it hadn’t been for their inability to fight, he would’ve already done so.
***
Nan Zhou didn’t like to talk to them so it was handed over to Jiang Fang. In view of his good performance in discovering the clue just now, Nan Zhou rewarded himself with a coconut bread. He swallowed the last of the coconut pieces while Jiang Fang narrated their findings.
Two out of the three people didn’t understand at all. Qi Tianyun was the only one who wasn’t confused and he asked, “Where is the evidence?”
Jiang Fang told him, “Hand.”
Qi Tianyun was stunned before tentatively and warily holding out a hand. Jiang Fang held something and placed it on Qi Tianyun’s palm. The next moment, his palm sank subtly like something had really been put on it. Qi Tianyun closed his eyes and tried to read the patterns with his sense of touch, looking extraordinarily serious.
…It was like a comical performance without physical objects.
Sun Guojing watched it with amusement. What was this? Blind people touching an elephant?
The next second, Qi Tianyun abruptly opened his eyes. His face paled and he quickly threw away the thing in his hand like it was burning him! Sun Guojing didn’t see anything flying or hear anything falling down. He wondered, “Old Qi, have you been tricked? What did you see?”
Qi Tianyun took two breaths, barely relieving the short suffocation caused by panic. He answered, “…A name card.”
“Huh?”
Qi Tianyun raised his eyes and spoke in a depressed voice, “It was a name card taken from in front of our door. There was a name on it.”
Qi Tianyun felt a pain in his throat as he spoke of this. He stimulated two swallowing actions, only to find that the tip of his tongue had no saliva. There was just a bitter, acidic feeling. The Sun Luo duo saw that he had learned how to keep people in suspense and were inevitably angry. “Say it! What was written? What is the name?”
Qi Tianyun answered quietly, “…Hu Li.”
“We are in the same dormitory as Hu Li. Yes… he turned out to be a person from our dormitory.”
Sun Guojing was stunned for a moment before saying, “What nonsense are you talking about? There are only the three of us in our dormitory.”
Qi Tianyun pointed to one of the double beds. “So why do we have four quilts?”
Sun Guojing was confused.
…Yes. They didn’t seem to have commented on the fourth bed in the room and the full set of bedding on it. There was no discussion about whether the fourth roommate would come back. They didn’t discuss how they would get along with him when he came back. There was no discussion about why he didn’t come back at night. Even when Xie Xiangyu sought their cooperation and stayed in their dormitory, they didn’t discuss how to explain that a stranger was sleeping in his bed if the person came back. It seemed that in their hearts, a certain voice had already identified that it was impossible for that extra person to come back.
Sun Guojing glanced down at his arm. It was covered in goosebumps. Sun Guojing’s teeth started to chatter but he still tried hard to find a rationale behind it. “Perhaps he hadn’t lived here for a long time… oh, maybe he has quit school and this bed belongs to Xie Xiangyu. Aren’t we bullying him? So we had him stay here…”
Qi Tianyun shook his head and closed his eyes with a bit of pain. He had touched the name card and it clearly had the name Hu Li on it. Yet once he informed Sun Guojing about this situation, he still got Sun Guojing’s denial. “Impossible! Maybe he moved away! He didn’t have time to remove his things or the card…”
The things they were encountering right now were too out of the ordinary. Sun Guojing had imagined that the worst outcome for himself was death. It definitely wasn’t disappearing alone with no one noticing. Disappearance might mean ‘death’ in the game. Yes, in fact, could he really have a good time? What if he was still conscious? If at that time, his name and things were all forgotten—even if others saw it, they would turn a blind eye…
Sun Guojing didn’t know anything. He could only say that the horror came from the unexplained ‘rustling’ sound. Now he had heard the rustling sound five times. Damocles, the sword of destiny, had cut down on Hu Li and killed Zuo Jiaming. Now it was hanging over his head.
Therefore, this speculation couldn’t be true. How could it be true? The more Sun Guojing denied it, the more his san value dropped.
Luo Ge saw the important numerical change of his teammate and was flustered. Once one encountered incomprehensible and unbearable terror, the san value would fall all the way down. If it broke the threshold of 1 and fell to 0, they would suffer irreversible damage to the mind. There would be abnormal phenomena such as a cognitive disorder, behavior going out of control, confused thinking, etc.
Once it reached 0, it meant permanent madness. In other words, the system identified them as ‘crazy’.
Luo Ge couldn’t control Sun Guojing to not think about it. He saw that Sun Guojing’s san value had dropped below 3 and quickly changed his tone. He cried out anxiously toward Nan Zhou and the others, “Think of a way!”
Currently, Nan Zhou was touching another coconut bread. He wanted to open the packaging but he resisted and put it back, ready to save it for a late night snack. He heard Luo Ge’s sorrowful plea for help and met Sun Guojing’s empty eyes. This caused him to slightly frown and he exchanged glances with Jiang Fang.
Presently, Sun Guojing’s heart was shaken by the unknown terror that bit and tangled around him like a poisonous snake. He refused to believe in their judgment. He refused to believe that a living person could disappear from the world like pencil marks under an eraser. Uncertainty and distrust were all accompanied by the instability of ‘what if it is true?’
These three forces were about to tear Sun Guojing’s mind into three different parts.
Facing Sun Guojing who was on the verge of collapse, Jiang Fang and Nan Zhou decided to administer fierce medicine. They wanted to roughly and simply dispel two of these forces. They wanted to convince Sun Guojing in a very short time that it was real and feasible for a person to be completely erased from this world.
Jiang Fang stepped forward and told Sun Guojing, “Mobile phone.”
Sun Guojing’s response was slow due to the rapid decrease of his san value. He looked up blankly, unable to understand the meaning of Jiang Fang’s words.
Jiang Fang just greeted him. He leaned over and took the phone from Sun Guojing’s pocket. He pulled this person’s hand over, unlocked it with the fingerprint and clicked on WeChat. With a stroke of his slender thumb, a small program was opened. It was a voice reading software.
Jiang Fang’s fingers were flexible as he clicked on Sun Guojing’s WeChat friends list and searched the initials for the column beginning with ‘H’. Both Hu Li and Zuo Jiaming might’ve been forgotten by the world but there were many things about them that still existed objectively in the world.
For example, the dormitory key lost by Zuo Jiaming in the tin cabinet. For example, the door name sign with the name engraved on it. For example, the bed that belonged to them. For example…
The chat history left on the phone. They just didn’t seem to exist.
Jiang Fang’s hands had perfect memory ability. This short operation was enough for him to master all the key positions of Sun Guojing’s phone. He went down the list of contacts, searching for Hu Li who no longer existed. He searched for Hu Li in the gaps of the column beginning with the letter H. He clicked into Sun Guojing’s chat boxes with other people again and again, patiently exiting again and again.
Finally, he had just poked at the gap between two contacts on the screen when the screen of the phone froze. It was like a crash. The phone didn’t respond when clicking on another person’s name. On the phone screen, the contacts interface was still displayed but Jiang Fang knew he had found that gap that didn’t exist.
Jiang Fang quickly slid up the invisible chat record a few days while calculating the interval between speech bubbles. He copied several pieces of information and placed them in the text reading software.
He wanted to let the reading software prove the identity of the disappeared person. A few moments later, everyone heard a mechanical, inorganic male voice. It was the set voice that came with the reading software. This robotic voice couldn’t sense the emotions of the person talking. It didn’t know how anxious, panicked and desperate the person was. It faced what was a seemingly blank input box and coldly repeated the text it read. These were the messages Hu Li sent to his dear friends when he was still in existence.
“Do you see it?”
“Old Sun, there is a man standing by your bed!”
“Why can’t you see it?”
“Aren’t you playing with your phone? Why are you ignoring me?”