Recap
Wang Yueran tried to rack her brains, “Speaking of which, how do we know that the world we are in now is still a dream world? We were all sleeping when Huang Mo died, and we didn’t experience the same dizziness and double vision. Maybe this is the real world, and the main monster is in this world?”
Xia Jing turned to look at the clock on the wall and quickly answered this question, “Because we all started this game by waking up from sleep, and Huang Mo’s death time has also been confirmed to be midnight, which is a very clear signal in this instance.”
Wang Yueran scratched her head after hearing this.
But they hadn’t communicated with Huang Mo after entering the instance, so they didn’t know what his source of fear was at all!
Song Yang was tugged on the sleeve by Xia Jing.
Since they met, the young man had always kept a lukewarm, distant attitude. This was the first time he had touched him, and Song Yang was a little surprised.
Xia Jing kept staring at the clock on the wall, without even turning his head.
But this time, what he was paying attention to was no longer time, but—
“Song Yang, do you think this clock looks familiar?”
Song Yang was taken aback, and following Xia Jing’s gaze, he turned his head and carefully examined the clock on the wall again.
The clock looked very ordinary. Under the light, it had a pure white base, and the black slender hands were rotating regularly. Judging from the plastic casing, it even looked a bit cheap.
However, Xia Jing wouldn’t waste his words.
Since he mentioned this clock, he must have thought of something.
Song Yang narrowed his eyes.
Hearing Xia Jing’s words, the others also hurriedly observed the clock again, but still couldn’t find anything unusual.
After a few seconds, Song Yang suddenly said thoughtfully, “Yes, I’ve seen it before.”
The others were stunned.
Xia Jing murmured as if talking to himself, “Against a black background.”
Song Yang tried hard to recall and shook his head, denying this answer, “…Not a black background.”
He turned his head and looked at Xia Jing, “It was on a metal panel!”
“That’s right,” Xia Jing raised his eyebrows, and because of this strange development, he even laughed, “It seems that part of our memory has been erased.”
Jia Qing and the others got goosebumps, “What do you mean, what are you talking about? What metal panel, what memory erasure?”
“You have no memory at all?” Xia Jing turned around, pointed at the clock, and said, “I think it should be the memory before we entered Huang Mo’s dream world, that is, the memory about the real world of this instance, but this part of the memory may have been erased by the monster during our first deep sleep.”
Xia Jing felt familiar with this clock at first glance.
At first, he wondered if it was because he had seen similar clocks in other instances, but Xia Jing always trusted his intuition. He believed that this “sense of familiarity” that surfaced in his heart was something to pay attention to, something meaningful.
And after escaping from the dream layer by layer, the image in his mind became clearer and clearer.
“We should have all seen it before.” Xia Jing closed his eyes and described in a soft voice everything he saw in his not-so-clear memory.
“It was in a confined, very narrow environment, a place that could only accommodate one person. After entering the instance, I appeared lying flat in that place. There was a metal panel close at hand, right above my field of vision… The same style of clock, scaled down proportionally, was embedded on this metal panel.”
Xia Jing’s voice was soft but certain, “…It looked like a metal cabin.”
Jia Qing and the others were already dumbfounded.
The old lady clutched her chest, took a deep breath, and asked carefully, “Child, you mean, after we entered this game, we actually entered that metal cabin first, and then appeared in this initial dream world, but we forgot?”
“That’s right,” Song Yang paused and said, “It should be a sleeping cabin.”
Perhaps because an opening had been opened, at this moment, Song Yang could even clearly recall the series of events that happened after entering the instance.
Just as Xia Jing said, he appeared in a small single-person sleeping cabin, lying flat inside.
A small clock was embedded on the metal ceiling panel close at hand. The hands of the clock started spinning crazily, quickly fast-forwarding the time to zero hours, zero minutes, and zero seconds. He fell into a deep sleep—
When he woke up again, it was the scene when they first met in the dormitory.
Song Yang speculated that although the nine players entered the instance at different times, their experiences should be the same.
After the instance adjusted their time to zero hours and zero minutes, it started waiting for the rest of the players to arrive.
After all nine players were in place, the instance game officially began.
Wang Yueran clapped her hands and said, “That’s right, when I first woke up in the game, I felt my head was very heavy, and it took a while to recover! That feeling was very different from the several times I slept later!”
Jia Qing came back to his senses and said, “It seems, it seems to be true! Could it be because the first sleep was the real sleep, and because our memories were erased…?”
It was probably so.
But this also meant—
Jia Qing’s expression changed, “Things like sleeping cabins don’t seem like something that would appear in a school world, Brother Jing. Could it be that the real instance world is completely different from this school world?!”
“Yes,” Xia Jing laughed with interest, “This also means that this school world was completely built from the dream of the first player, a world completely different from the real instance world.”
“After we entered the instance, we should have all only stayed in that sleeping cabin for about a second. In that second, besides a clock, there was nothing else that could induce horror imaginations in the players. This also proves that the real first horror imagination induction may have started before we entered the instance—”
Xia Jing looked at Liu Yi.
Speaking of Huang Mo, Liu Yi was the one with the heaviest heart.
At this moment, he was slightly open-mouthed, listening to everyone’s discussion, a little dazed.
Xia Jing asked him, “Did Huang Mo say anything to you before entering the instance?”
Liu Yi trembled and couldn’t help but recall everything that happened after he and Huang Mo entered their respective login rooms in the game hall.
They were good brothers who entered Smiley City together in an accident. After that, they also agreed to challenge every instance together in the future.
Before this game, as usual, they were browsing the instance menu in their respective login rooms and communicating through the holographic mini-screen.
When he saw the “Don’t Think About It!” instance, he asked, “Five people have already entered this instance, should we choose this one?”
Huang Mo was silent on the other side, he didn’t know if he was distracted and didn’t hear him.
Liu Yi urged, “Lao Mo, what do you say? Now this is the only two-star instance that has enough people for the two of us, and it’s almost fully assembled. If we miss this instance, it might not be possible today.”
Huang Mo seemed to hesitate for a moment on the other side, then said, “Okay, let’s choose this one.”
…
Recalling this now, Liu Yi’s face gradually turned pale.
In the middle of the cover of the “Don’t Think About It!” instance was a dark shadow like an octopus monster, and behind the shadow were various fragmented scenes.
There was a big supermarket, an open office space, a street, a home, and a school…
These backgrounds were like materials for imagination. From school to home to workplace, almost all the places that ordinary people—whether children or adults—would use in their daily lives were included.
Almost everyone who saw this cover would have some imagination.
—What kind of scene will this game take place in?
When this question arose in their minds, their eyes would naturally focus on the scene they were most familiar with.
What Liu Yi saw at first glance was home.
But because he was nervous and didn’t dare to overthink the content of the instance, he only glanced at it and then shifted his attention.
And at this moment, he could still clearly recall that he stared at the octopus monster for a while at that time, and seemed to vaguely see a blurred human face in it, like an illusion.
He didn’t pay much attention to it at that time, and didn’t even think of asking Liu Yi whose face he saw in the octopus monster…
Xia Jing said, “This dream has no marker, but there is one thing that is different from the dreams of the others. Huang Mo’s mobile phone was confiscated.”
Outside the door, the NPC started banging frantically.
The terrifying sound of the door panel shaking stimulated everyone’s nerves, and almost everyone was sweating.
“Before entering the instance, what did he see on the cover, or what did that cover induce him to imagine,” Xia Jing looked into Liu Yi’s eyes, helping him recall the clues through soothing descriptions, “As soon as he entered the instance, he lay down in the single-person sleeping cabin just like us. After falling asleep, he became the first player to be chosen by the main monster of the instance, and we entered his dream together.”
“And in his dream, he was awakened in the middle of the night by the phone vibrating twice. He sat up from the bed, maybe it was a text message, maybe it was a phone call, maybe he looked at it, maybe he didn’t, but he must have known what was in that phone. It was also the thing in the phone that made him sit on the bed in the middle of the night. He looked at his roommates, maybe wanting to ask for help, maybe for some other reason.”
Liu Yi obviously thought of something, but hadn’t fully figured it out yet. Sadness and confusion were mixed on his face.
Song Yang said calmly, “Dreams are bizarre and illogical. Everything in a dream may be the result of distorted and deformed real elements. So in this dream, Huang Mo, just like in reality, is a student who is often called to the teacher’s office by his classmates and doesn’t have a close relationship with other students. That’s why you found that school rules manual in the school broadcasting room. However, apart from this, the school in this dream is completely different from the school in Huang Mo’s reality.”
“But a dream is also a projection of one’s heart. In Huang Mo’s heart, this school must be a nightmare.”
“‘Don’t think about it’ itself is a kind of inducement. Its purpose is to induce us to have terrifying imaginations, and it actually has nothing to do with ‘study hard’. But in the dream world, whether it’s the teacher or the school broadcast, they repeatedly link these two things. This must also be because Huang Mo had some imagination when he saw the cover and the instance title ‘Don’t Think About It’.”
“This imagination is related to studying, to teachers and students, and also to parents.”
Liu Yi’s eyes widened, and he suddenly started to whimper.
___
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