The circumstances surrounding the first use of the time door had been somewhat special. Now that Ye Yuzhi thought back to what had happened at that time, he instead had a slightly better understanding of why he had chosen to return to the moment when Sean appeared in the mirror.
If he had not lost his memory, then the question he asked Sean at that time would definitely have been different from the one he asked later.
Moreover, he did not know about the existence of the Hound. In other words, at that time, he believed that it was simply a matter of using the time door one more time. After all, the amount of Willpower consumed was determined by the number of days and the number of people, rather than by the number of times it was used.
During that period, he did not come into contact with anyone. After briefly speaking with Sean, he immediately used the time door again.
By the time he returned to the moment when he had just entered the train with Xia Jienan, he had actually already used it for the fourth time.
If everything he had sensed when using the time door for the fourth time had not been an illusion, then he should also have come face-to-face with the Hound.
Xia Jienan had said that the Hound could not be killed. What he had seen at that time, he did not even know whether it could be considered to have “killed” it or not. It was only that the thing attacking the Hound…
There was also something Ye Yuzhi had never told Xia Jienan about: the ending he had been unable to remember before, in which everyone died, while he alone walked toward the end and almost broke through the entire scenario.
Something else extremely unusual had also happened at that time. At the instant Duniya, or rather Constance, stood in front of him, it seemed as though something had also surged out from behind him. The thing that killed Constance and stopped the train from continuing forward, the thing that could even be said to have killed everyone, was identical to the thing that had previously killed Julie in Dorville Town.
Was there something behind him?
Ye Yuzhi did not know. There was an indescribable uneasiness in his heart. Perhaps some people liked being special and standing apart from everyone else, but he would rather become an ordinary person who was no different from everyone around him.
He could only temporarily suppress the speculation in his heart and continue reading Xia Jienan’s summary.
The hidden check on the first night was Listening or Willpower resistance, because at that time, it was very likely that Sergei was performing the ritual, and the location of the ritual was near the bloodstains at the rear of the carriage.
The abnormality in the bathroom, meanwhile, was the unfolding of the sacrificial ritual.
In his document, Xia Jienan mentioned that the method he had ultimately chosen was to first steal a photograph of the real “Duniya” from Alexander’s side and hand it over to the special police officer, then use the accusation of “child trafficking” to trigger the first wave of chaos.
Originally, if Alexander had cooperated properly, perhaps it would not have caused such a major problem. It was just that his mental state was truly terrible. Whenever the matter of Duniya was touched upon, even Sergei, who had used magic on him, found it difficult to control him. Alexander’s attack on the special police officer had practically confirmed that there was something wrong with him.
Immediately afterward, he went to the trash can and found some leftover food from dinner. Then, using stomach pain as an excuse, he went to seek help from the medical student. He also had the chef testify for him, and the chef, who had already been suspicious to begin with, immediately followed the medical student over.
With a retired military man and the special police officer, together with Beizhu, who was equally skilled at fighting, Alexander was knocked unconscious and subdued. Constance was temporarily taken away and placed under Alide’s care.
At the same time, the matter of the train chef drugging people was exposed. The diary related to the evil cult attracted attention, forcing the train to stop. Sergei’s plan was completely disrupted.
At the very last moment, Sergei still attempted to use psychological suggestion to control everyone and make the train continue forward.
Xia Jienan, who had already been on guard against him for a long time, immediately used the Song of Hastur to fight against him.
Perhaps it was because Xia Jienan himself was relatively strong. In any case, his Song of Hastur did not merely serve a defensive purpose. It simultaneously attacked Sergei as well, causing the skin all over his body to become ulcerated.
This was also the reason why Ye Yuzhi had heard those words from them at the very end.
At the end, Xia Jienan had written:
“Regarding the ‘Sean’ you saw in the mirror, he should be a ‘person’ who simultaneously exists in both the past and the present.”
“Appendix: In addition to defense, the Song of Hastur is also a single-target offensive ability. Even if other people hear it as well, only one person will actually be injured by it.”
Ye Yuzhi closed the document and shut his eyes, taking a deep breath.
Xia Jienan… how much did he actually know?
He seemed to know about Sean too… Yes, he had said before that he had seen photographs of Sean, so it was perfectly normal for him to know about Sean’s affairs. At that time, he had even made quite a few comments about the fact that Sean was actually himself.
Could it be that the person known as “Sean” had appeared many times in investigations that other people had participated in as well? Could it even be that he had appeared in the exact form that Ye Yuzhi had seen inside the mirror?
But what Xia Jienan had said at that time should have been about a photograph…
Indeed, there were many photographs of Sean preserved. Even Alide had one in her possession.
Back then, before Ye Yuzhi had completely descended into madness, he had gone to Anthony’s room. There had been an extremely large number of photographs of Sean preserved inside. Although Ye Yuzhi had basically destroyed all of them at the time, he had not found many negatives.
And as long as the negatives still existed, there was no guarantee that those photographs would not reappear in the world.
He knew that this Alide was also some kind of granddaughter of the previous Sister Alide, and it was not strange for her to possess a photograph of Sean. But this was the first time he had learned that, after he left, Sister Alide had searched for the “fog.”
It was not something related to the Yellow Robe in the photograph, but the fog.
Could it be that if this were investigated further, it would lead to the fog?
And as for the fog… Ye Yuzhi also felt that this thing might have countless intricate connections with him, but up until now, he had still been unable to find complete evidence.
Moreover, just as the “Hound” was not actually a “dog,” the “fog” did not necessarily have to be fog either.
If he could completely understand everything concerning “Sean,” perhaps he would also be able to understand all of these matters.
Ye Yuzhi hesitated for a moment. He was just about to send Xia Jienan a message asking about matters related to Sean when the other person seemed to have timed it perfectly and sent him a message first.
“If there’s anything else you don’t understand, you can just ask me directly. Or, if you’re still confused about that, you can invite me to your interlude and watch the replay from your perspective again.”
Ye Yuzhi almost immediately rejected the idea of watching the replay.
There were many secrets surrounding him, and none of them were suitable for being exposed.
Although if he continued cooperating with Xia Jienan like this, given the other person’s abilities, it was only a matter of time before he guessed that something was wrong with him, Ye Yuzhi still did not want him to know too much right now.
Besides, even Ye Yuzhi himself could not make sense of these matters.
He thought for a while before typing on the screen:
“Sean was also one of my previous character cards. But from the way you describe him, it sounds as though he is also a person.”
The other side remained quiet for a while before several characters appeared, indicating that he was typing.
A moment later, Xia Jienan replied:
“Character cards automatically fill in and complete themselves. For example, the story that originally belonged to your card and his later story were both automatically completed.”
“Perhaps the card itself has also given birth to some kind of existence similar to a ‘soul’?”
When Ye Yuzhi saw those two lines, he suddenly felt a chill rise through his entire body.
Indeed, when he had obtained the Sean card, it had already possessed an extremely detailed identity setting. Later, he had even used the card from Sean’s youth, which was Liki.
Because he had never really experienced a situation where an ordinary card continued living properly, Ye Yuzhi also did not know whether other people were like him.
When they did not use those cards, would the stories within them continue developing on their own, just as though they were truly living inside them?
Then, when he was not in those worlds, could the one controlling the body… be someone else?
For example, could it be the Sean he had seen in the mirror?
Ye Yuzhi could not quite figure it out himself, but he felt that the fact Xia Jienan had been able to say those things earlier meant that he should know something.
Feeling somewhat restless and irritated, he closed his phone, casually stuffed several notebooks into his bag, then shouldered the bag and left.
At the time, Ye Yuzhi had only known a little about Sean’s past from the background setting. The rest had been filled in later during the investigation. Back then, it had been his first time entering that kind of world, and his understanding of everything had been far from clear, so he had not felt that there was anything particularly wrong with it.
Moreover, Ke Hu had also told him quite a few interesting stories about tabletop role-playing groups. If he had understood correctly, there really were modules of this type, namely deeper-level secret groups. There were an extremely large number of preset details concerning the characters’ backgrounds, almost like role-playing.
But if he was the only one like this…
Wouldn’t that mean all of his cards were NPCs as well?
He had considered pretending to be an NPC when it was convenient for certain situations, but that did not mean he wanted to actually be an NPC himself. He did not like this kind of thing that made him different from ordinary people.
Meanwhile, on the other side, after replying to those words, Xia Jienan also put down his phone.
He looked at the chat window with the group owner on his computer, deep in thought.
Before entering together with Ye Yuzhi, he had asked the group owner to investigate matters related to the background stories of old cards.
Based on the experiences of people like them who were “old players,” what Zhong Liyu had said was indeed true: the more times a “virtual card” was used, the more detailed its background became.
But at the same time, there was one problem.
This “detailed background” was not quite as able to withstand investigation as one might expect.
For example, there was someone the group owner knew who was quite capable, named Qiu Hui. He had a card whose setting stated that both of his parents had died and that he had grown up in a welfare institution. That card had been used a total of three times. During the third time, because of a disability, he did not use it again, and afterward, that card remained in that state.
There had even been one occasion when he was using another card and happened to encounter that card in person.
The other party seemed to maintain its original “setting,” regularly living according to that established life trajectory, almost as though it were a living person.
But according to Qiu Hui, during his own tests, he could also sense that the card had no “soul.” In other words, all of its actions were extremely mechanical, and many things seemed almost as though it were imitating Qiu Hui himself.
That had made Qiu Hui extremely uncomfortable at the time. For a period of time, he had even been afraid to use virtual cards, believing that he was “replacing” the people in that world.
Because he cared so much about this, he later used another card to investigate in detail the entire background of the card that had become disabled.
From the background, he discovered that the card that had become disabled had indeed come from a certain welfare institution, and that there were even quite a few people who knew him that Qiu Hui himself had never known about. Although those people had not had any particularly profound influence on him, they had indeed existed.
Just when Qiu Hui had become even more uncomfortable because of this, he discovered another extremely strange matter.
That was, people knew his already-disabled card, and there were even memories of having interacted with him. Yet before the age at which he had begun using that card, there were almost no written records or photographic materials related to him at all.
All of the surviving materials that could be examined in detail contained no trace of this person. There were only memories of him in other people’s minds.
It was as though the memories of these people had been collectively altered.
Xia Jienan sent the group owner a “Thank you,” then opened another message window.
It was the Huaguo Mutual Aid Group, which had just posted a new help announcement.
The bright-red words did more than simply stab into Xia Jienan’s retinas. They also caused his entire heart to sink.
“Forum administrator 05, codename Yundou, the original card has gone missing inside the module. We are now looking for people to return to the module and search for her during the interlude. Please note that the lost rate for this module’s interlude is extremely high.”
It was rare for the mutual aid group to receive a request for help of this level.
Most people, after a module ended, would accept the final outcome of the module, regardless of whether that outcome was good or bad, and regardless of whether anyone had died.
But occasionally, there would be people who were unwilling to accept it, or who believed there was still an opportunity to save someone. Usually, when someone proposed a rescue operation, it was no more than a situation where someone had been locked up in a police station or something similar. The card-loss rate existed in those circumstances, but it was not high.
This announcement, however, was obviously the kind where someone simply refused to believe that there was no hope. Even if their teammate had truly died, they still wanted to charge back inside and recklessly try one more time.
What caught Xia Jienan’s attention was that Yundou was Du Yun’s codename.
Xia Jienan would not find it strange at all for Du Yun to disappear inside a module. In worlds like those, they had already come into contact with existences belonging to the mysterious side.
And Du Yun…
Xia Jienan could guess what she wanted to do.
She wanted to resurrect Sophia.
For investigators like them, even if they attempted resurrection, there was no way to truly resurrect the original person inside that kind of world.
Perhaps because they themselves came from the “outside world,” even if something like that happened, it would amount to nothing more than awakening a lump of deformed flesh. Not only would it be impossible for their intelligence or consciousness to recover, but even for that thing to simply remain “alive” would be an extraordinarily difficult matter.
Sophia was different.
Sophia was a native inhabitant of those worlds.
Therefore, theoretically, as long as she learned the relevant knowledge and was fortunate enough to return to that world, she could resurrect Sophia.
Xia Jienan sent a message to the person who had posted the announcement:
“I’ll go.”
The person on the other side immediately replied:
“Brother Xia?”
Xia Jienan froze for a moment before realizing that it was Jiang Xing.
Not long ago, he and Du Yun had brought Jiang Xing, a newcomer, through the procedures and helped him become familiar with the process. And now, he had actually received news from Jiang Xing that Du Yun had gone missing.
Everyone was being forced to become familiar with everything at an extremely rapid pace.
Xia Jienan typed his reply:
“It’s me. Where did Du Yun go?”
Jiang Xing answered him almost without hesitation, immediately telling him the location:
“Around 1900, an unnamed village near the Hossens Plains.”
“I understand.” Xia Jienan replied. “I’ll go. I’ll use a new card to go over.”
“Sorry to trouble you, Brother Xia.”
“It’s nothing. Du Yun is also my friend. Do you know what she did after entering?”
The other side typed for quite a while, but what came through was still only a single line:
“She left the team right at the beginning. After that, I never saw her again.”
“What ending did you get?”
“NE, just the two of us. She told me earlier that she needed my help, gave me a new card, and then I went in with her.”
Xia Jienan pondered for a moment before bringing up another review document.
This was a record of investigations into all the modules he had participated in. There were TE endings, FE endings, NE endings, as well as some BE endings.
Having learned from the experiences of his former companions, he generally only maintained one card at a time. Before using Xia Jienan, the card he had always used was Samuel. That card could be said to have experienced more than half of the modules he had run, and as a former mercenary, it had even been taken onto battlefields.
The people who had originally formed a team together had all liked conducting reviews. This might also have been one of the reasons their survival rate was so high.
But even so, by now, only Du Yun and he remained. Even Zhong Liyu had come into contact with them slightly later than Du Yun.
Before Du Yun had been “corrupted,” they had once escaped from a world with an NE ending. At that time, everyone had lost their memories when they left. They had merely stood outside the town and looked at one another, and while everyone was wearing a completely bewildered expression, the ending had arrived.
Only the flyers left in their hands had allowed them to somewhat confirm that they should have entered the town.
Because they really wanted to know what had happened back then, the few of them had later investigated the matter through different means. But until the time he used the Samuel card again, he had still been unable to find any further information related to that town.
Dorville Town, the City of Fog on the Coast of the Dying Sea.
Everyone in the town suffered from relatively severe paranoia or delusions. They had created a false person and stubbornly believed that “he” definitely existed.
It was only for the sake of saving them that “he” had returned to a place they could never reach again.
When he left that place, he had also picked up a green-skinned camera.
Because of the collective hysterical condition in that town, Xia Jienan later learned that quite a few psychology experts and psychiatric disease specialists had gone there to conduct investigations, wanting to understand what had caused them all to experience the same hallucination.
But Xia Jienan and the others all knew that the matter was not that simple.
Their FE had allowed them to learn quite a few things about “Liki,” including a whole collection of stories written in a child’s immature handwriting. It was only that they had been unable to investigate Liki’s final whereabouts.
Whether everything had merely been fabricated by the townspeople, or whether there had truly been such a person, they did not know.
The boundary between reality and illusion had left even themselves trapped in confusion, so in the end, it could only be an FE.
The reason Xia Jienan had taken this particular review out again was not for anything else. It was because the Hossens Plains were located not far from this town.
His Samuel card was still in Dorville Town. Judging from the timeline, the time Du Yun and the others had gone to was later than the point in time where Samuel was currently located.
Even if he could use the Samuel card to go there, Xia Jienan would not use it to rescue Du Yun.
It was precisely because the distance was so close that the matter of Dorville Town was worth taking out and reviewing all over again.
Most of the information left behind by Dorville Town indicated that the Evil God associated with it was also related to the sea. In addition, the town had a nickname related to fog for a period of time, so Xia Jienan deduced that the Evil God existing in Dorville Town was “Cthulhu.”
Although the sea area did not quite correspond with the “R’lyeh” found in the relevant mythology they had learned about, when these two factors existed simultaneously, Xia Jienan believed that Cthulhu was the most likely possibility.
By ordinary deduction, within such a close range, it was highly possible that the Evil God associated with the village in Hossens was also “Cthulhu.”
But there was some information they had found while investigating the hotel that Xia Jienan found rather concerning.
It had merely been a coincidence, but at the time, it had indeed led them into a misunderstanding.
One of their teammates had conducted a Mythology check on a strange smell and some traces in a storage room at the hotel and achieved a great success. The information they obtained was that there had once been traces of another Evil God’s follower having been there.
It was an Evil God associated with gestation, and some people also called Him the “Black Goat of the Woods.”
Cthulhu might not necessarily be able to help Du Yun resurrect Sophia, but if it were the Black Goat of the Woods, who gave birth to countless descendants… this was not impossible.
Xia Jienan confirmed the information once again and recorded all of those details.
Afterward, he asked Jiang Xing again, “When are you planning to go?”
Jiang Xing answered, “Tonight. I’m afraid it’ll be too late if we wait.”
In truth, they both knew that since Jiang Xing was able to come out now, and was able to talk to him here, the possibility of Du Yun’s death had already reached nine out of ten.
But for that remaining one-tenth chance, they still intended to go inside and take a gamble.
“Did she tell you why she wanted to use her original card?” Xia Jienan asked.
“She said it was because ‘this is a necessary measure.’”
A necessary measure…
Du Yun knew far more about mythology than Xia Jienan did. In particular, she also possessed a copy of Sophia’s Notes. Even if reading through the entire thing did not mean knowing everything, finding a method to resurrect someone should certainly not be a problem.
It was just that…
The method Du Yun had borrowed was related to the Black Goat of the Woods…
Xia Jienan thought for a moment, then typed another message:
“Send me everything you know.”
✦ ✧ ✦
Nycreth
[Translator]
☕ A LITTLE SOMETHING FOR THE TRANSLATOR
(¬‿¬ ) the Ko-fi button is looking at you
☕ BUY THEM A COFFEE →
✧ (づ｡•ㅅ•｡)づ ☕ ✧
✦ thank you for reading ✦
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ChaptersChapter 1 · Guerrero’s Lair (1)Chapter 2 · Guerrero’s Lair (2)Chapter 3 · Guerrero’s Lair (3)Chapter 4 · Guerrero’s Lair (4)Chapter 5 · Guerrero’s Lair (5)Chapter 6 · Guerrero’s Lair (6)Chapter 7 · Guerrero’s Lair (7)Chapter 8 · Guerrero’s Lair (8)Chapter 9 · Guerrero’s Lair (9)Chapter 10 · Guerrero’s Lair (10)Chapter 11 · Guerrero’s Lair (11)Chapter 12 · Guerrero’s Lair (12)Chapter 13 · Guerrero’s Lair (13)Chapter 14 · Guerrero’s Lair (14)Chapter 15 · Guerrero’s Lair (15)Chapter 16 · Guerrero’s Lair (16)Chapter 17 · Guerrero’s Lair (17)Chapter 18 · Guerrero’s Lair (18)Chapter 19 · Guerrero’s Lair (19)Chapter 20 · Guerrero’s Lair (20)Chapter 21 · Guerrero’s Lair (21)Chapter 22 · Guerrero’s Lair (22)Chapter 23 · Interlude (1)Chapter 24 · The interlude (2)Chapter 25 · The interlude (3)Chapter 26 Part 1 · Calling in the Wind (1)Chapter 26 Part 2 · Calling in the Wind (1)Chapter 27 · Calling in the Wind (2)Chapter 28 · Calling in the Wind (3)Chapter 29 · Calling in the Wind (4)Chapter 30 · Calling in the Wind (5)Chapter 31 · Calling in the Wind (6)Chapter 32 · Calling in the Wind (7)Chapter 33 · Calling in the Wind (8)Chapter 34 · Calling in the Wind (9)Chapter 35 · Calling in the Wind (10)Chapter 36 · Interlude (4)Chapter 37 · Interlude (5)Chapter 38 · Interlude (6)Chapter 39 · Interlude (7)Chapter 40 · Interlude (8)Chapter 41 · Interlude (9)Chapter 42 · Welcome to Doville (1)Chapter 43 · Welcome to Doville (2)Chapter 44 · Welcome to Doville (3)Chapter 45 · Welcome to Doville (4)Chapter 46 · Welcome to Doville (5)Chapter 47 · Welcome to Doville (6)Chapter 48 · Welcome to Doville (7)Chapter 49 · Welcome to Doville (8)Chapter 50 · Welcome to Doville (9)Chapter 51 · Welcome to Doville (10)Chapter 52 · Welcome to Doville (11)Chapter 53 · Welcome to Doville (12)Chapter 54 · Interlude (10)Chapter 55 · Interlude (11)Chapter 56 · Interlude (12)Chapter 57 · Interlude (13)Chapter 58 · Interlude (14)Chapter 59 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (1)Chapter 60 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (2)Chapter 61 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (3)Chapter 62 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (4)Chapter 63 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (5)Chapter 64 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (6)Chapter 65 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (7)Chapter 66 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (8)Chapter 67 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (9)Chapter 68 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (10)Chapter 69 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (11)Chapter 70 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (12)Chapter 71 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (13)Chapter 72 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (14)Chapter 73 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (15)Chapter 74 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (16)Chapter 75 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (17)Chapter 76 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (18)Chapter 77 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (19)Chapter 78 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (20)Chapter 79 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (21)Chapter 80 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (22)Chapter 81 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (23)Chapter 82 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (24)Chapter 83 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (25)Chapter 84 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (26)Chapter 85 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (27)Chapter 86 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (28)Chapter 87 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (29)Chapter 88 · Tunnel in the Dark Night (30)Chapter 89 · Interlude (15)Chapter 90 · Interlude (16)Chapter 91 · Interlude (17)Chapter 92 · The Promise of Hamelin (1)Chapter 93 · The Promise of Hamelin (2)Chapter 94 · The Promise of Hamelin (3)Chapter 95 · The Promise of Hamelin (4)Chapter 96 · The Promise of Hamelin (5)Chapter 97 · The Promise of Hamelin (6)Chapter 98 · The Promise of Hamelin (7)Chapter 99 · The Promise of Hamelin (8)Chapter 100 · The Promise of Hamelin (9)Chapter 101 · The Promise of Hamelin (10)Chapter 102 · The Promise of Hamelin (11)Chapter 103 · The Promise of Hamelin (12)Chapter 104 · The Promise of Hamelin (13)Chapter 105 · The Promise of Hamelin (14)Chapter 106 · The Promise of Hamelin (15)Chapter 107 · The Promise of Hamelin (16)Chapter 109 · The Promise of Hamelin (18)Chapter 110 · The Promise of Hamelin (19)