In the dead of night, Zhang Yiyu was jolted awake by hunger.
It had been a long time since she had eaten. As a supernatural being, she didn't truly need to consume human food; she wouldn't starve to death even if she ate nothing at all.
But after dinner, she had felt a strange sort of hunger, as if some desire buried deep in her heart had been stirred and could no longer be suppressed.
After finishing what was on her own plate, she was left wanting more. Seeing the looks of revulsion on the other players' faces as they struggled to eat, she truly felt it was a criminal waste.
She knew her feelings were abnormal, so she dared not appear too eager. Under the pretext of helping out, she managed to finish half the food of the female player from the Listening Wind Guild.
The hunger subsided for a time, and she finally made it to lights-out, trying her best to sink into sleep.
She had thought she could hold out until breakfast the next morning, but in the hazy depths of her dreams, the hunger, freed from the restraints of her willpower, grew more rampant, gradually overwhelming her reason.
So hungry... I want to eat something...
Zhang Yiyu chanted silently in her mind as she rose from her bed like a specter and walked out the door.
It was as if she instinctively knew where to find food. Like a sheep in a herded flock, she followed an unseen pull down the stairs and wandered the first-floor corridor.
The scent of food grew stronger. Swallowing her saliva, Zhang Yiyu tiptoed past the office and toward the archives room next to it.
The food she sensed was inside. The door to the archives room was wide open, as if a feast had been laid out in invitation.
There was no light, yet Zhang Yiyu could clearly see the one thing in the room that drew her in.
It was a young man lying in a pool of blood. His frail limbs wouldn't offer much meat. Half of the back of his head was sheared off, and brain matter and blood were still oozing out.
He was visibly, thoroughly dead, yet he exuded an irresistible, tempting aroma, like a platter of seared foie gras that no one had yet touched.
Zhang Yiyu was startled by her own thought. Her reason briefly resurfaced, stirring a flicker of human fear.
She had gone out at night, come down to the first floor, and found a dead body... What was happening?
And why did she feel an appetite for a corpse?
Was it because she was a Pseudo-human? Why hadn't Ning Xu told her about this side effect?
This couldn't happen. She wanted to be human, not descend into a true monster...
But soon, instinct once again took command, and Zhang Yiyu's eyes glazed over.
As a monster, she couldn't livestream anyway. What did it matter if she did something forbidden by society?
The rich, metallic scent of blood was an alluring perfume. Zhang Yiyu's consciousness sank inch by inch into a fog, until only a single thought remained—
It looks so delicious... Just one bite. One bite couldn't hurt...
...
When Qi Si returned to the dormitory, Chen Lidong was still not back.
The unlit, deserted environment had become a domain for ghosts.
On the empty bed lay a gaunt figure. A childlike ghost stared at him with sorrowful eyes, its face a mask of condemnation and pain, as if questioning why he was still alive in this world.
Qi Si flicked his lighter. The small, orange flame weakly illuminated a corner of the room, and the ghost's shadow vanished in an instant, as if it had never been there at all.
"A hallucination caused by the 'Insomnia'?" Qi Si hazarded a guess, glancing down at his Fate Pocket Watch.
The hands of the watch moved diligently. The second hand ticked past each mark, its gears engaging the minute hand in an almost imperceptible turn. At first glance, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
After reading the record's mention of "mass hallucination," Qi Si had almost immediately thought of the situation in the *Hopeless Sea* instance—everyone trapped in a vast dream, needing to find the key to truly awaken.
He vaguely remembered that in the dream of the Hopeless Sea, the hands of the Fate Pocket Watch had been frozen, because the passage of time in a dream is subjective and cannot be measured by an objective instrument.
But here, the watch had been ticking away steadily from the very beginning, its speed matching the flow of time. This largely ruled out the possibility that the players were in a dream.
"Is it because hallucinations and dreams are fundamentally different? Or... is the space I'm in right now real?" Qi Si looked at the item's description—"indicates objective time"—and fell into deep thought.
Time was undoubtedly a crucial element in this instance.
In the records about the Insomnia, the timeline from the children's infection to their deaths was clearly laid out. Players needed to figure out their current point in time to make rational decisions based on those records.
So, what exactly did "objective time" refer to?
The flow of time in an instance was completely different from that in reality; "objective" was a relative concept to begin with.
Qi Si was inclined to believe that time within an instance functioned like a kind of "progress bar."
The *Grand Performance* instance had given Qi Si the idea that every instance had an underlying timeline, with specific events occurring at set points.
Just like in *Rose Manor*, where the three-day cycle repeated without fail; or in the *Double Happiness Town* instance, with the wedding feast on the second day and the parade of a hundred ghosts on the third...
The speed of the Fate Pocket Watch's hands was undoubtedly synchronized with the progression of this timeline. If that was the case, was it possible to construct a hallucinatory world, layered over the real one, that shared the exact same flow of time?
Qi Si took a piece of paper from his backpack and looked at the line he had copied down earlier: "the children's mass hallucination constructed a new school on top of the school."
The hint was so direct it was practically slapping the answer in the players' faces, which made him momentarily suspicious that it might just be a meaningless red herring.
A new school... time... two Medina ladies...
Qi Si sat on the edge of his bed, trying to follow the vine of his thoughts. A thousand loose ends drifted through his mind, a chaotic stream of useless information and meaningless images flashing before his eyes, preventing him from grasping anything concrete. He couldn't help but feel a sense of foreboding, a suspicion that the "Insomnia" was affecting not only his sleep but also his ability to think.
Qi Si cherished and trusted his own mind with a reverence bordering on worship. In his eyes, it was the only thing he could truly rely on, the singular gift that defined who he was.
Any decline in his mental acuity was enough to make him uneasy and tense. If that decline were irreversible, he would be in agony.
He had once thought that if he ever discovered he had become a fool, he would have to slit his own throat without hesitation to end his miserable existence...
After this chaotic train of thought, Qi Si realized he had lost focus.
Perhaps it was the mental fatigue from a sleepless night, but he now found himself easily distracted by sudden, bubble-like ideas, unable to concentrate his attention where it was needed.
The Fate Pocket Watch showed the time as half past two in the morning. It was still a while before the second room check at four.
Qi Si picked up a pen and, by the faint light of his lighter, began writing lines of information on the paper, from known clues and deductions about the instance to his own identity.
—He clearly remembered that as "Insomnia" reached its final stages, the patient would forget who they were.
Writing things down proved to be an effective aid to his thinking. Although his mind was still a tangle of overgrown vines, he was at last able to tease out a reasonably clear thread.
The hands on the watch reached three o'clock. Estimating the time, he figured Chen Lidong would be back soon.
Qi Si folded the written-on paper and tucked it into a compartment in his backpack.
The compartment already seemed to hold something, as he felt some resistance when he pushed the new paper inside.
His fingertips brushed against another piece of paper, folded squarely and pressed flat. He pinched it between two fingers, pulled it out, and smoothed it open.
On it, written in his own unmistakable handwriting, were the words:
[There is a calendar in the corner to the left of the school's main entrance. Today's date is June 1, 1869.]
And Qi Si had absolutely no memory of it.
...
On the second floor of the school, Lin Chen and Zhou Datong each held a torch, walking one behind the other toward the end of the corridor.
After leaving his dorm room, Lin Chen had used the Teaming Ring to call Zhou Datong, and the two had made their way to the first floor together.
He had intended to search the office, but he found that another group had beaten him to it and had already gathered inside.
Not wanting to join the crowd, and figuring he was out and about anyway, he turned and led Zhou Datong up to the second floor.
Zhou Datong had mentioned that two rooms on the second floor couldn't be opened, so no one had looked inside yet. It stood to reason that there must be something good in there.
Lin Chen happened to have a weapon-like item perfect for brute-force entry. If not now, when?
Before long, Lin Chen and Zhou Datong stood between the two rooms sealed with cement.
The rooms were on opposite walls, facing each other with a kind of axial symmetry. A thick layer of gray cement covered the doors, sealing nearly every edge. If one didn't look closely, they would never have noticed there were doors here at all.
Lin Chen retrieved the White Blade from his inventory and held it in his hand. The silver dagger flashed faintly in the dim light. Without hesitation, he reversed his grip and drove the tip into the hard wall, then dragged it downward with force, carving a long crack in the surface.
"Just what you'd expect from the boss's gear. It cuts through this stuff like butter," Lin Chen remarked, then looked at the dumbfounded Zhou Datong beside him. "Zhou, don't just stand there. Got any tools you can use? Lend a hand."
As if waking from a dream, Zhou Datong quickly pulled a crowbar from his backpack and began chipping away at the cement on the door.
After knocking loose a few more chunks of concrete, he saw something, scratched his head, and pointed at a line of serpentine scrawls on the floor. "Brother Chen, look at this. What is it? Kinda looks like writing..."
Lin Chen paused his work and followed his finger.
There, on a small patch of the cement floor, a series of intricate symbols had been carved with hair-thin strokes. They didn't belong to any language he recognized, looking more like a witch's incantation from some fantasy world.
The cement pad acting as the writing surface was clearly a later addition, likely from the same period as the cement sealing the door. It had probably spilled from the door crack, and the workers, too lazy to clean it up, had simply smoothed it over on the floor.
Lin Chen crouched down, brushed the dust from the characters, and lowered his torch to illuminate the lines of text.
He noticed faint fingerprints around the symbols, likely pressed into the cement while it was still wet.
But who would lie on the ground and press their fingerprints into wet cement?
"Brother Chen, what do you think they used to carve this? It's so delicate," Zhou Datong asked with a naive smile.
Delicate... A spark flashed in Lin Chen's mind, and he blurted out, "Fingernails."
"...They must have been carved with fingernails. Probably some kid playing around while the cement was still wet, lying there and carving stuff."
Lin Chen spoke in a casual tone, but his eyes were fixed intently on the writing on the floor.
He had a gut feeling it was a crucial clue, but no matter how long he stared at the words on the ground, no translation appeared on his system interface.
Was it because the content was unimportant, or was there another reason?