Volume 3 - CH 41.1

The female Missiontaker continues pacing about the apartment unit, unable to discern where the gaze troubling her is coming from.

This is a 2LD apartment, but she is alone.

Something feels off to her, because she entered with her younger sister, but she is nowhere to be found here.

She makes towards the entrance, trying to open it and leave, but finds the door locked in place by some mysterious force.

Therefore, this female Missiontaker now knows that she likely cannot leave this room in the beginning of the Nightmare.

Taking a deep breath, she tries to calm herself down.

The stare… is still pointed at her back.

She can feel goosebumps climbing on her back, along a chill which is enveloping her hair, seeping into her brain, turning all her thoughts into mush.

She shudders, and turns around yet again, this time putting her back to the cold, front door. Her gaze is swimming everywhere in the room.

She can only see the quiet, normal living room in her vision. Outside is the balcony, the glass door leading to which is closed and the curtains have been let down, covering up most of it, but part of the vibrant nightlife is still visible outside.

The living room lights are all on, casting a slightly dirty, aging yellow shade on the white walls. Before the beanbag sofa is a wooden coffee table. There is a remote there, the TV that it is controlling isn’t powered on. It is all dark.

Two doors on the far side of both the left and right of the living room lead to the bedrooms. To the left of the apartment entrance is the bathroom with white light and clean white porcelain tiles. To the right is the dining table and the kitchen. All the lights have been turned on.

There is central heating in this building, switched on. Warm air is slowly filing down from the vent, maintaining a pleasant temperature inside, but somehow, the female Missiontaker continues dripping cold sweat.

Everything is normal…

Everything is normal is the biggest abnormality!

Her attention is deeply focused, but everything seems to be acting as they should in this quiet, dead room.

Until she suddenly sees that the curtain has moved.

It is suffocating… The door to the balcony is shut. The window to the balcony is also tightly shut. Why did the curtain move?

She clenches her fists, perhaps trying to give herself courage. She slowly walks over, step by step, carefully, until she is next to the glass door, and quickly pulls the curtain open.

The blank wall is revealed. Nobody is hiding there.

The female Missiontaker sighs in relief, finally.

This is also when the strange, unsettling feeling of being stared at, being ogled at, is gone.

She lets the curtain back down, and knits her brow to think if the movement of the curtain was a hallucination because she was too tensed up?

… Perhaps. This is her first Nightmare after a very long hiatus. It took all her courage just to enter. She wants to achieve a True End.

Her expectations, the changes in this Nightmare, and the inexplicable stares have made her too tensed up.

She sighs and turns to examine the apartment unit again, with less wariness this time. She is more interested in figuring out what clues might be hidden in this apartment unit.

Though unfortunately, the viewers of the stream can reassure her, responsibly, that she did not hallucinate.

Because they also saw the curtains move!

As if there was a breeze or something had grabbed it, so its lower part fluttered, just for a moment, before falling back down and going back to normal.

“AAAAA does this game have ghosts?!”

“… i, uh, um… Beibei, see u next nightmare”

“unscientific! totally unscientific!”

“Beibei, can you change the audio source over to yourself? thanks [polite emoji]”

Xü Beijin obliges with what is almost a smile on his face.

There are four viewers tuning in right now, three of them are familiar faces, with a new viewer, who seems to be pretty easily frightened, already going ‘AAAAAA’ all over the comment barrage.

Unfortunately, the detective dalao isn’t here yet.

So Xü Beijin has to provide commentary for the Nightmare himself.

He explains, “right now, the stream is pointed to one of the Missiontakers. The main scene of this Nightmare appears to be this apartment complex and the commercial complex I’m in.

This Missiontaker is inside Room 807 in the Luoke Apartment. Six others are in different rooms. We can check on each of them later.

I don’t know much about this Nightmare either. We just saw the curtain move, but there was nobody behind it, and the door and windows were all closed. It may be an actual ghost, or…”

He pauses. Instead of giving his preliminary guess and thoughts, he says, “it might be anything else.”

The viewers agree, typing, “the nightmares just begun, huh”

“i wonder what this nightmare is about”

“would it also have ridiculous conditions for true end like the first two?”

Xü Beijin skims over the comment barrage, then lands back on the long list of scenes on the right of the screen.

Luoke Apartment.

His thoughts digress for a second.

The host quieted down, but there are music and chatter coming in from the commercial complex outside, providing background noise to the stream, so the viewers don’t mind. They continue observing the female Missiontaker’s actions.

Her name is Jiang Shuangjie. She has a younger sister, Jiang Shuangmei (TL: Shuang meaning ‘double’ or ‘two,’ referring to the fact they are twins; jie is ‘older sisiter,’ mei is ‘younger sister). They are twins.

Many years ago, maybe it was when they just arrived at the Tower, with what may have been an inexplicably unscientific bond between twins, they managed to find each other.

Since then, they have been inseparable.

In the Tower, many people are unable to place trust in and rely on others as they do, even though… This close relationship did not seem to have brought much fortune for their trips in Nightmares.

They drift to-and-fro the bottom floor and slightly higher floors. Every time they happily ascend to a higher floor, they would have a streak of Bad Ends and be forced back down to the bottom floor.

Many Missiontakers share similar fate, and like them, they are thus unsatisfied with their unremarkability and the infrequent spark of brilliance that brings them the occasional True End.

They continue going through Nightmares, wishing to prove themselves… Or, perhaps, to achieve the dream of heading to a higher, higher floor.

True, Normal, Normal, Bad, Bad, True, Normal, Bad…

It was like some never-ending magic curse.