The scene changed so quickly that it caught her off guard.
One second, she was by a small stream or on the road, and the next, Lin Sanjiu found herself in an entirely different environment. It had been only half an hour since she left Wu Yiliu, but when she looked back, she had no idea where that forest had gone.
This half hour felt like two lifetimes.
After emerging from the forest, somehow, she had triggered two more memories from different people: once, she "attached" to a woman who was trapped in her apartment due to a widespread infectious disease, evolving within; the second time, she fell into the memories of a Twelve Worlds Centrum bookseller, spanning several years. By the time Lin Sanjiu managed to get through those eight years, she felt like she knew the ins and outs of the book trade, industry rules, and business model in the Twelve Worlds Centrum.
"This can't go on," she muttered, sitting on the road, looking at a small clock in her hand. Only thirty minutes had passed since she last checked, but mentally, she couldn't help but feel a bit dazed.
People perceive the passage of time through their minds. If Lin Sanjiu continues to be swept into others' memories, experiencing one stretch of time after another, her brain will feel as though she has truly lived through all those years. This could create significant confusion in her cognition, possibly even leading to abnormalities in her brain function.
Until she figures out how to avoid triggering others' memories, Lin Sanjiu is afraid to move forward.
Looking back, she saw the bookseller sitting at the front of his shop, leisurely reading a thick book under the shiny Future Book House sign, illuminated by the sun. Like Wu Yiliu in the forest, this scene was built from memory—perhaps he yearned to return to this moment for the rest of his life.
Lin Sanjiu sighed and collected her thoughts.
She now knew that each scene carried someone's memory, and the scene itself was a physical manifestation of that memory.
Before she triggered the memory, they seemed like ordinary places—a lake, a street. When she stepped in, she noticed nothing unusual, having no idea what triggered the memory.
For instance, the memory in the apartment took place as she walked along the sidewalk beneath a row of buildings for at least five or six minutes before she fell into the memory's host body. What could have been the trigger? Was it hidden between two red bricks?
She sighed again.
This wasn't even her biggest problem right now.
Her biggest problem was that she had lost her way.
When Lin Sanjiu left Wu Yiliu, she thought she had followed the same direction. The reasoning was simple: when she triggered the memory, her body remained still, and her position didn't change. So when she awoke from the memory, her path should have been right behind her.
This reasoning seemed sound, but when she left the forest, she entered the streets of a strange seaside town, lined with three to five-story apartment buildings. It was on that street that she triggered the "apartment and infectious disease" memory.
When she finally awoke from that memory, her body was still in the same place. However, when Lin Sanjiu looked back, she found that her path had turned into a strange school playground, with green grass surrounded by a red track.
The forest where Wu Yiliu was located disappeared without a trace during the ten or so minutes that Lin Sanjiu was trapped in the memory.
Similarly, after she woke up at the entrance of the bookstore, the direction from which she came was no longer where the apartment building was located. Now, a layer of iron-gray smoke was shrouding the horizon, engulfing the end of the Twelve Worlds Centrum shopping street, thickly rolling, as if looking at it for a long time, even the gaze would not be able to be withdrawn.
"Damn, this is interesting," Lin Sanjiu muttered to herself as she sat on the curb. "How can the location just change randomly?"
The communication device given to her by the grand prize was, of course, unusable — when had Heaven ever shown mercy to her? Each memory domain was not small, and even if she screamed her lungs out in front of the bookstore, Ji Shanqing or Yu Yuan, who were in another memory domain, probably wouldn't hear her voice.
People say that if you get lost while exploring in the mountains, it's best to stay still and wait for rescue; Lin Sanjiu pondered for a while and felt that either Ji Shanqing or Yu Yuan would likely be more useful in this environment than she was, so she decided not to go anywhere and just wait there until the grand prize came to rescue her.
Properly understanding oneself is also a skill, after all.
Lin Sanjiu thought as she spread her sleeping bag on the road and took out a can of ice-cold beer. Since she had to wait anyway, why not wait comfortably?
The bookstore owner was still sitting near the entrance, leisurely flipping a page. He was a refined and plump old man, and running the bookstore in Twelve Worlds Centrum during that time must have been one of the most important memories of his life — Lin Sanjiu realized that every memory seemed to hold irreplaceable importance to its owner.
How did these people's memories end up in this space?
According to her past experiences, the Great Deluge should have sent them to another layer of the universe, but they fell into this strange space filled with human memories instead.
She lay in her sleeping bag, sipping beer and looking at the bookstore in front of her. The memory constructed by the plump old shopkeeper was quite complete, even restoring a few customers who peeked through the glass cabinet — in the shops of Twelve Worlds Centrum, theft was a big concern, so the old man simply locked all the books inside, and if someone was interested in a book, they had to call someone to get it for them.
What intrigued her was that Lin Sanjiu had experienced the plump old shopkeeper's memory, but she didn't find out where his bookstore was located in Twelve Worlds Centrum — did he really never think about his world in those years? How was that possible?
In the memories of both the plump old shopkeeper and Wu Yiliu, this piece of information was removed.
Lin Sanjiu intuitively felt that the person who removed the information made a mistake, but she couldn't understand why she felt that way after thinking about it for a long time.
With nothing to do, she kept analyzing and thinking, and unconsciously, she put down her beer can and started tossing and turning on her sleeping bag — while lost in thought, she suddenly looked up and was taken aback.
The place that had just been shrouded in dense gray fog was now slowly clearing, and from the depths of the mist, a huge celestial park was slowly approaching the shopping street; at first glance, it looked like the city of Atlantis rising from the sea floor.
Lin Sanjiu jumped up.
She understood how the positions in this space were changing.