153 - Numbness and Despair

Translated by rabbitrisu

“How did you appear here?” After entering the nightmare world, Mu Feng seemed to have separated himself from his identity as the Su family housekeeper. He was of course extremely surprised that he would meet Su Zimo in the twentieth nightmare world.

If Mu Feng remembered correctly, the last time he entered a nightmare world with Su Zimo, he was just a newcomer who had experienced his second, or at most third, nightmare world.

How could he enter this nightmare world with him?!

“Don’t think about such trivial things right now. It seems that there are still some old friends here.” Su Zimo already saw Liu Xu, an old acquaintance, was standing next to Mu Feng.

This army veteran who was physically strong and fit with high personal combat effectiveness left a deep impression on Su Zimo during their previous nightmare world.

Perhaps Su Zimo had entered the nightmare world relatively late, so right when he arrived, Mu Feng had obviously teamed up with Liu Xu.

“What’s going on in this world?” Su Zimo’s weapon this time wasn’t the metal pen, but instead the black umbrella that contained almost all of his belongings and the powerful ghost tools left behind by his mother.

“We…” Mu Feng seemed stunned. He looked at Su Zimo and didn’t know what to say.

So Liu Xu, who was still wearing the pair of red gloves, said: “We don’t know what’s going on here, but there seems to be something strange in that place surrounded by people.”

With that said, Liu Xu looked at Su Zimo who was still wearing the chained glass. He shook his head and said to him: “Although I don’t know how you’re here, you really don’t need to be here.”

Everyone who was ready to calmly face the twentieth nightmare world had already made plans to not return. They may even have written suicide notes.

Feeling the pity in Liu Xu’s tone, Su Zimo only gave a faint smile, then changed the subject and mentioned: “I didn’t expect that so many people could enter a nightmare world at the same time.”

“No.” Liu Xu shook his head. “There were only four or five people who arrived with us. It’s much less than the number of people who participate in a normal nightmare world. The others… seem to have been here for a long time.”

After hearing what Liu Xu said, Su Zimo once again began to look at the space before him where many people stood.

Although there were nearly one hundred people at first glance, the entire space didn’t appear crowded at all. The whiteness made it hard to distinguish the boundaries of the room for a while, and they couldn’t even see where the dazzling light in the room came from.

But he could tell that the entire space was ginormous. Most people had indeed been there for a long time as Liu Xu said.

Except for Su Zimo and the others with blank faces, only a small part of the remaining people stood there watching them. They could see some fiendish delight in their eyes.

Most of the other people… some of them were sitting together in groups. Some were even lying directly on the ground, covering their faces with clothing. If they couldn’t see the up and down motions of their chests, then the ones lying there would be really worrying.

Some people seemed to be sitting against the edge, so Su Zimo could guess where the edge was.

After observing for a long time, Su Zimo found that the people who had just arrived and those who had stayed for a long time were easy to distinguish. Those who didn’t know why they had been there for so long had nothing in their eyes and chaos in their entire figures from top to bottom. Although he wasn’t sure what the passage of time or physical changes in this space looked like, those people seemed as if they hadn’t bathed for a long time.

They just didn’t smell.

Generally, they have off an inexplicable sense of lifelessness. Although Liu Xu and Mu Feng had serious faces and their bodies were alert, they were still more alive than the others in this place.

Liu Xu said before that there was something strange about the place surrounded by people, so Su Zimo paid special attention to it.

The trainers who had been in the white space for an unknown period of time seemed to have divided into teams. Each ‘camp’ was standing or stationed around something.

There was an apparently large camp in the center than attracted Su Zimo’s attention. Each of them wore a small, sun-like badge, the symbol of the Dawn Organization.

There were few people watching the excitement in the ‘camp’ organized by Dawn, so most of them were sitting on the ground. It allowed Su Zimo so see through them to what was hidden behind them–

It was a delicate-looking doll house!

The doll house was a toy shaped after a certain scaled-down building. Although it had been shrunk and was called a toy, it was much taller than most five or six year old children.

One side of the doll house was exactly the same as the main building, but the other side could be opened. The inside looked like a cross-sectional view of the building. There were all kinds of toy furniture, toy stairs, and various toy dolls representing a family.

Su Zimo felt that this kind of doll house was usually very expensive. If someone looked too closely, they would feel uncomfortable.

Especially for this doll house that appeared in the nightmare world; even if it was empty, it was covered with mysterious and ominous colors. Not to mention that the doll house Su Zimo saw was as exquisitely detailed as a real residential building. Even the antiquated feelings of the outer walls and the glass texture of the windows was exactly the same.

This was also the first time Su Zimo had seen a scaled down doll house with an old or run-down building as a template. With his current vision, he could even see that the glass on a certain window was broken, and he could even tell that the metal window framed had long been rusted.

Just as Su Zimo was about to pull his gaze away, from the corner of his eye, it seemed as if a figure was dangling from the window of the doll house.

When Su Zimo looked again, there was nothing there.

The more he watched, the more he felt… as if he couldn’t simply use to term ‘doll house’ to refer to this shrunken building.

[There’s a lot of ghost essence.] Although Ghost Umbrella didn’t appear near Su Zimo, his voice entered his ears.

Sure enough, no matter how strange the beginning of the nightmare world was, the nightmare world was still the nightmare world.

“There are many more buildings like that.” Mu Feng seemed to have finally calmed down and spoke softly, “Most of them look like residential buildings, but some look like streets, schools, or even hospitals.”

“Although people are always around these buildings, they don’t seem to have any particular meaning. People from Dawn Organization over there keep welcoming us over.” Liu Xu said, but frowned.

“Liu-dage doesn’t like Dawn Organization?” Speaking of, Su Zimo rarely met anyone who didn’t like Dawn Organization.

He originally thought Liu Xu would deny it. He didn’t expect that the other party wouldn’t. He just whispered: “It’s an organization of unknown origin.”

“But we still need someone to guide us for now.” Su Zimo nodded to the Dawn Organization that waved at them. “Although we don’t know the origin of the organization, if we want to learn more about this, it wouldn’t be wrong to ask a good old person from the Dawn Organization about the situation.”

After the three people reached a consensus, they went to the ‘camp’ organized by Dawn together.

What surprised Su Zimo was that he actually saw a familiar person within the Dawn Organization group. It was Su Zixiang who he had seen not long ago.

When the two cousins met face to face, they couldn’t help but become stunned. As for Su Zixiang’s internal conflict at that moment, even if Su Zimo couldn’t hear it, he knew it must be rich and exciting.

“Fewer and fewer people have entered recently. Everyone who is willing o enter is someone courageous.”

Someone in the Dawn camp smiled regretfully at Su Zimo and the others, but someone from the camp next to him sneered and said: “It’s nothing to come here. Only the ones who leave here are courageous. The ones who stay are just cowards.”

The person from Dawn Organization had a stiff expression, but soon adjusted himself, and spoke as Su Zimo expected: “You must think this place is strange and different from other nightmare worlds, but really…”

“Really, it’s hell. It’s still a nightmare.” Another cynic spoke from another camp to the other side.

“What the hell is going on here?” Su Zimo looked at Su Zixiang, who claimed to be on top of the world, obediently standing among a group of people who were higher than him yet called themselves cowards, and pretended not to know him at all. He didn’t even look at Su Zimo, so Su Zimo tacitly didn’t try and expose him.

“My name is Wan Hao, you can call me Old Wan.” The members of Dawn Organization that welcomed Su Zimo had standard kind smiles, but there was unconcealed fatigue and reluctance in their smiles. Their spirit didn’t seem very good.

“This is just the starting point of the nightmare world.” Wan Hao sighed. “It’s like the login interface of a game. You can choose any miniature building here, then walk into the building to enter the real nightmare world.”

“Walk in?” Su Zimo looked at the toy building just slightly taller than his waist, and was a bit confused about how it worked.

“Yeah. Don’t worry about whether or not you can walk in. As long as you keep walking forward, you can leave here and go to the nightmare world.” Wan Hao raised his left arm again as he spoke: “The bloody lettering of our task requirements disappeared. This method of entering the nightmare world was figured out by previous people.”

“What about you guys? Won’t you go in?” Hearing Wan Hao say it so simply, Su Zimo thought it was strange that so many people stayed in the white space.

“……” Wan Hao paused for a moment, not answering Su Zimo’s question. Instead, he said, “Every time a new person comes in, we ask them a question. We asked too many times, and we don’t even dare to learn the answer now.”

“What’s the problem?” Su Zimo asked.

“Before you came in, has anyone succeeded in leaving the twentieth nightmare world?” Wan Hao asked with a wry smile.

Su Zimo and Mu Feng glanced at each other in unavoidable silence.

They had really never heard of anyone who left the twentieth nightmare world alive.

Although Su Zimo and the others didn’t answer, Wan Hao who stood there already knew. He said with a wry smile, “There shouldn’t be anyone yet, ba? After all, the answer is the same every time.”

“And the people who enter these buildings… never come out.” Wan Hao glanced at the miniature run-down building behind him, his body trembling slightly. “No one who stays here knows what happens after entering there.”

“Let’s stay.” A stranger on the other side answered. “If we stay here we won’t feel hungry, nor is it dangerous. Although it’s a bit boring, some people brought cards and books.”

At that moment, Su Zimo understood that although the trainers who stayed there had all entered the twentieth nightmare world for various reasons, they all felt conflicted at the last moment when they entered the nightmare world.

Seeing those numb, tired, sleepy, even desperate faces, Su Zimo really felt that the nightmare world itself was the most torturous existence when compared to malicious spirits.

It put people inside of a nightmare, and no one could wake up.