The unforgotten object?
The person who is not in the dream?
“What are those?” Longjing Tea frowned.
…If there is something that cannot be forgotten, then I should have the memory of it right now. However, I couldn’t recall such a thing.
That means I have never been exposed to that key item.
And if this “person who is not in the dream” is someone who was with us before but did not fall into this nightmare, how can we find him in the nightmare?
“Do you have any clue about these missions?” Longjing Tea turned to ask Delicious Wind Goose in a low voice.
“Not only do I have no clue, I’m completely in the dark.” Delicious Wind Goose replied bluntly, “I have already reached the third life… I located the Venerated Skeleton and Elle this time quickly, but nothing happened.”
“My identity seems to be an artist.” Elle replied, “I came here to find inspiration… If nothing else happened, I should have met Miss Dove.”
“Tiange told me that when he found me for the first time, I was with Miss Elle.”
Dove squatted gracefully on the ground, wagging her tail slowly, and calmly replied, “But there is one problem—if you don’t find us before 3:30, it will not be easy to find the Venerated Skeleton.”
“However, if by chance we don’t manage to catch Him, it won’t be too complicated,” Delicious Wind Goose added, “After all, we found the Venerated Skeleton previously under your lead.”
“Me?”
Delicious Wind Goose replied, “That’s right. The Longjing Tea in this world is a police officer. The police station has a monitoring room powered by Prophet Magic, which can automatically track down individuals with artificial intelligence. That’s how we find the Venerated Skeleton previously.”
“Wait,” Longjing Tea found it difficult to understand, “Is He really the Venerated Skeleton? And…why do we want to capture Him?”
“To be honest, I don’t know. But he is the Venerated Skeleton, after all, right? He may be the key to this nightmare, so I captured Him first.” Delicious Wind Goose added, “Previously, we received help from a centaur. She said that this child is the Venerated Skeleton. I initially wanted to capture and interrogate Him, but I didn’t expect Him to become an NPC…”
“I don’t know what the Venerated Skeleton is…” The white-haired youth in a shirt struggled, trying to escape Delicious Wind Goose’s grasp. “Let me go…”
However, Delicious Wind Goose quickly slapped the back of His head hard.
He was knocked out immediately. Perhaps it could be out of fear, or His “aggro” was reset. He seemed to have forgotten entirely about the fact that Delicious Wind Goose attacked Him and stayed where He was.
“This AI is quite peculiar.” Longjing Tea pondered, “It seems real, yet there’s a mechanical oddity to it. But if you call it mechanical, they indeed possess intelligence.”
“Not just the AI. The whole city is weird.” Delicious Wind Goose took a deep breath, “Don’t forget. This is the third life… Do you know what it means?”
“It means that our whole party has died twice.”
Longjing Tea glanced at the white-clothed youth strangely, “Could it be that this kid will directly transform into the “second phase” and beat us all to death?”
[TN: Reference to the second stage in Boss fight commonly found in games.]
“That’s not true.” Delicious Wind Goose said in a deep voice, “Simply put, this city is safe ‘until sunset’. But after the sun sets, it will gradually become terrifying.”
“It will gradually become fragmented, and everything will become supernatural and abstract…Have you seen the magic girl Madoka? It’s like in the witch’s barrier.”
“Witch’s barrier? Is there a familiar?”
[TN: Puella Magi Madoka reference. Here’s the fandom link about the witch barrier.]
“No, at least I didn’t see it.”
“Then what killed us?” Longjing Tea was puzzled.
They were all Silver Rank transcenders, at the very least.
Even if the city becomes supernatural, we would still effortlessly vanquish the evil spirits.
Delicious Wind Goose’s expression became serious, “It should be our teammates.”
“What?”
To be precise, it’s everyone around you. The exact mechanism is still unclear, but out of the blue, people go mad and attack those near them… And in the second playthrough, the order in which they lose their sanity is entirely different.”
Delicious Wind Goose said thoughtfully, “Do you know why I didn’t go to Child God first?”
“…Cade? Why? You…you want to social bully him?” Longjing Tea raised his eyebrow and made a joke casually.
“Pfft, nonsense.” Delicious Wind Goose snorted, “It’s because the Child went crazy first. I thought it might be dangerous to find him. You and I were those who didn’t go crazy in the end.”
“Besides, there is the group of people who brought Elle here—those on the ‘Silver ship’. They are also in the nightmare.”
“So, are they friend or foe?”
“That depends on whether they have gone crazy. If they are not crazy, everyone is naturally an ally. But if they turn crazy…” Delicious Wind Goose shrugged, “Yes.”
“Like that centaur girl, cute and good-looking, but she’s always the first to go crazy; while that bard named Orpheus, he can persist until the end.”
“There seems to be something wrong here.” Longjing Tea frowned slightly.
He seemed to have caught a glimmer of inspiration.
“Specifically,” Longjing Tea asked, “Tell me about everyone’s identities in this nightmare.”
“That is a new question you haven’t asked me before.” Delicious Wind Goose also raised his eyebrows, “I feel that it would be great if you were the one who was responsible for inheriting the memory at the beginning… I mean, my brain works, but it’s not as sharp as yours.”
“But my memory is not bad for the time being. I have all this information memorized, and I am waiting for us to analyze it. Listen carefully—”
Delicious Wind Goose cleared his throat and narrated.
The nightmare’s identity of Arthur Searing-Fang, whom the players had met once in “Witch Hunting Nightmare”, was the Chief Justice.
The centaur girl was a forest ranger for a neglected nature reserve that hardly gets any visitors on regular days.
The heir of Denizoya — the man named Orpheus Denizoya was a famous singer; the woman, who went by the name “Lily”, had become a wandering thief without any family or friends.
Celecia became a graduate student under an elderly scholar; The Wandering Child became a wealthy man who owned a museum of collections; Dove was a hunter.
“I seem to have found some clues.” Longjing Tea frowned slightly, “These identities are not randomly arranged. Does it imply something? Or is it simply a manifestation of the deepest desire in your heart?”
“It is indeed possible.” Delicious Wind Goose nodded.
“Is everything safe until the sun goes down?”
Longjing Tea took a deep breath.
He realized that the mechanism of this nightmare seemed to be to let them find teammates.
In a sense, the nightmare had not yet fully begun.
He thought of a game.
It was a game where you only had 60 seconds to collect resources, and then you had to live in the shelter all the time…
Now, it was the stage where they started “searching for companions” and “collecting resources”.
“Uh!” The thin, white-haired youth asked softly, “What have you been talking about since just now? Although I don’t understand, do you have anything to ask me?”
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