/
Vol. 1 Chapter 18: Besides You
“There are two possibilities,” says Glasses.
“One, Wu Shen lost his memory of the occurrence, perhaps because something really shook him to the core, like watching the criminals drag his daughter away right before his very eyes, or even seeing her killed this way. The heavy trauma means he has instinctively chosen to forget the memories.
Two, it could be that… Wu Shen doesn’t want anyone to see that part of his memories! Probably because it was of him attacking Wu Chun!”
In the stream, the dalao adds to Glasses’ fiery analysis, typing, “When the players were speaking to Wu Shen, he never mentioned the fact that he once went downstairs the day Wu Chun disappeared. I was also led to think that he stayed in his workshop the whole day and didn’t notice his daughter’s situation. He should not have omitted the fact under any circumstances.”
Ponytail furrows her brows to ask, though, “yet, from what his expression, action and body language suggested before he walked down the stairs, he looked absolutely normal. What drove him to suddenly go mad and attack his own daughter?”
Glasses goes silent.
Yes. It makes no sense. Why would a father getting called downstairs by his daughter suddenly turn against her?
Quarrelsome says impatiently, “so the first guess was more plausible?”
Glasses seem convinced Wu Shen is the one behind it all, somehow, still visibly wanting to argue, but he doesn’t seem to have reliable proof.
Wu Shen is suspicious——Ok, and so is his wife. And so is the bookstore owner next door.
But what about definitive proof?
Up to this point, they’ve been merely circling outside of it. They got a whole mess of clues around, but they can’t find a link through it all.
Not even following Wu Shen’s own flashback back to the day his daughter disappeared did they discover any useful clues whatsoever.
Why is the flashback cut off there?
And there are yet many questions remaining as well.
Why did someone (suspected to be Wu Shen’s ex-wife) call him mad?
Did Wu Shen’s ex-wife treat her daughter well or badly?
Why is Wu Shen sleeping in his daughter’s room?
Why are the dolls even after them in the Nightmare in the first place?
Why does the doll of the little girl want eyes?
These are all questions that may be very easily answered if they know the truth, but they don’t, and that’s what they’re here for.
The mood is rather sombre among the three Missiontakers.
Right now, they’re still standing on the second-floor corridor, on top of the creaky floorboards. Wu Shen is lying on his bed again, perhaps staring at the air with his eyes open like a doll. The doll of the little girl is still missing.
A while later, Ponytail says, “let’s go to the workshop first. We’ll check what is written on the pieces of paper.”
Quarrelsome says, “I feel like nothing would come up.”
Glasses suddenly interjects, “if triggering Wu Shen could change the Nightmare, then if we trigger him some more, could we somehow end up in a time before the letters were torn?”
Ponytail agrees, saying with sparkling eyes, “makes sense, it might work!” She quickly begins to think about putting it to action, “talking about his missing daughter sends him into the flashback of the day she disappeared. If the paper fragments really were letters from his wife, then if we talk about her…”
Quarrelsome says, “let’s do it!”
Glasses “…”
He quietly gives Quarrelsome a glance. The guy really looks like he’s sarcastically mocking him.
So he ends up slapping his own face by saying, “we should still split up. One can check out those paper, the rest will deal with Wu Shen.”
Ponytail nods and they both look towards Quarrelsome, who rolls his eyes and says, “fine, fine, I’ll go through the trash.”
Then he quickly walks to the workshop; Ponytail and Glasses (TL: Raws read Quarrelsome, which is probably an oversight by the author) walk into the bedroom to wait for Wu Shen to sit back up and look strange again.
The viewers in the stream are also talking about if they can succeed and whether it will really play out like they hope it would.
Wu Shen still has his eyes open in the second-floor bedroom. A long time passes, and even after Quarrelsome has finished looking at all the paper fragments and runs over, looking all enthused, Wu Shen is still showing no response.
“What’s going on?” Ponytail asks, furrowing her brows, “does one run allow only one Nightmare change?”
“Who knows,” Quarrelsome skips to question to instead say, “you’ll never believe what I found out from the trash!”
Ponytail and Glasses, despite being concerned with Wu Shen’s unresponsiveness, turns to Quarrelsome now that he said that.
None of them see, therefore, that Wu Shen’s eyes have turned as they moved.
The viewers of the stream did, though.
“holy shit!”
“no no no no no this is so scary!”
“I’m really curious about the difference in his reaction. Do the letters in the study and the workshop imply different things? Wu Shen seems to be reacting differently when players are touching different things”
“dalao, plz, were super scared right now aaaa!”
“host doesn’t look scared though, I’m disappointed”
“or maybe hes scared stiff as a rod”
Xü Beijin “…”
No, you!
He just… Uh, he didn’t even notice Wu Shen’s eyes turning.
He heard Quarrelsome say he discovered something, so he looked over instead. Was that strange…
Look, not even the dalao is concerned with his eyes, ok?!
Xü Beijin quietly touches his nose in slight guilt. With Lin Qin by his side, he can’t speak comfortably to them, so he tries to keep a poker face on while continuing to watch the stream.
But thinking of Lin Qin… Xü Beijin reflexively takes a look.
The babyface kept sitting here, neither speaking nor moving. He really just screams ‘I’m bored.’
Lin Qin gives him a look as well, asking, “what is it?”
Xü Beijin asks, “are you not bored? Why don’t you go look for the truth with the others?”
Lin Qin, sitting there, leaning his back on the wall, smirks out of nowhere and says, “I’m not interested.”
“But you still went into this Nightmare.”
“That I did,” Lin Qin says, looking at Xü Beijin with his amber eyes as he explains, “because I need to move about. Like running.”
Xü Beijin “…”
So getting chased by the dolls is equivalent to a jog for this dalao?
XĂź Beijin is speechless.
“And… to me, there’s nothing in this world that makes me interested at all,” Lin Qin continues, “besides you.”
Xü Beijin is looking visibly surprised, even feeling slightly touched by it. Perhaps it is because no one is interested in him in somewhere as dark and depressing as the Tower——Other than the Missiontakers all determined to enter his Nightmare.
In other words, he is special to Lin Qin; and this pure curiosity and interest in him, is also special to XĂź Beijin in that sense.
Then Lin Qin says, “so let’s fight.”
“No.”
“Oh.”
Lin Qin turns his head away, ignoring him.
Xü Beijin feels like chuckling. Well, it’s annoying Lin Qin keeps wanting to fight with him, but perhaps, incidentally, he could use it to toy with… No, that’s the wrong word. To tease the dalao.
He packs his emotions back in to look back at the stream.
Which is just as well, as Quarrelsome has unfurled a piece of paper in his hand and says proudly, “look what’s written here!”
XĂź Beijin moves the camera closer to take a closer look at it.
The handwriting is still smudged as always, but it is already legible enough to read.
“… perhaps love me and xiao-Chun, but you love those dolls even more than…”
“Those dolls?!” Ponytail says, clearly shocked, “this sentence…”
Glasses is looking at the paper with furrowed brows. His expression is changing frequently.
The detective dalao in the stream makes a few more exclamation marks before typing, “That’s confirmed! The paper really must be from Wu Shen’s wife to him!”
XĂź Beijin, resting his chin on his arm, thinks quietly.
The sentence could be interpreted in several ways.
The dollmaker’s wife accuses him of loving those dolls more. Does this ‘love’ just simply mean to be passionate about his career, or… Does it mean something else?
Given prior information that the wife is a busy worker, juggling both her job and household matters at once, perhaps the letter is simply her complaint that Wu Shen is all too fixated on making dolls and neglected his wife and daughter.
Yet, in the context of Wu Chun’s disappearance, the implications are much more subtle.
Put most simply, she could merely be blaming Wu Shen for being too absorbed in dollmaking to notice his own daughter disappearing from the store the day she went missing.
That seems unlikely given the flashback they just saw.
Wu Chun called out to her father, and he replied, ready to go downstairs immediately. This is evidence that Wu Shen was not wholly indulged in his job. He may not be by his daughter’s side, but he is definitely keeping an ear out for anything on the first floor.
Given that, what the wife wrote…
XĂź Beijin continues watching the stream while thinking, when suddenly, his gaze turns sharp.
“Who are you?”
While the three Missiontakers are talking about the information on the piece of paper, Wu Shen is already sitting up quietly, without so much as a sound.
He looks at them with this grim expression, questioning, “why, are you in my house?”
The trio is rightly spooked.
Ponytail almost instinctively pulls out her excuse from before, saying, “hello, we’re here to investigate the case of Wu Chun’s disappearance. There was no response when we called from downstairs, so…”
Wu Shen is staring straight at them with his black pupils. After a short while, this stinky, dirty man begins chuckling, “heee~, for my daughter’s disappearance?”
Both Ponytail and Glasses furrow their brows.
The attitude is off. When they said this before, whether he was hopeful or frustrated, he is at least not entirely disinterested like this.
It feels like Wu Shen…
Suddenly, became another person.
The two Missiontakers look at each other, and confirmed their thoughts.
While the Missiontakers are standing off against Wu Shen, the viewers suddenly begin to barrage the comments in shock.
“the door!!!”
The doll of the little girl, that has been missing this whole time, is now quietly poking her head out of the door that was left ajar, and looking at the people inside.
She is murmuring, “eyes…”