Chapter 194: Volume 5 - CH 88.2

Meanwhile, the 16th floor is still shrouded in a rather awkward silence.

Lin Qin is looking at the woman with a puzzled expression, and then turns back to Xü Beijin to ponder if he should still ask Xü Beijin to deduce where the little girl went.

While Wu Jian… has been dumbfounded entirely.

Of course, he knows what the problem now is. The moment this ‘mother’ of the little girl pops up, some assumptions the Missiontakers took for granted earlier would be overturned.

Wu Jian tries to weave through the fabric of logic – it is now a given that the ‘déjà vu’ of elevator Three was probably not what happened on the 17th floor. In that case, it could be on a floor that is reached via the three other buttons. The 17th floor can be said to be a trap for the Missiontakers… in both senses of the word.

Wu Jian manages to piece together an understanding.

What happened on the 17th floor, was a complete red herring.

If the Missiontakers wrongly concluded that what happens on the 17th floor, which is to be found and slaughtered by the Cannibals carrying the corpses, as part of the ‘re-creation’ process, then they could reasonably falsely conclude that the little girl’s mother is already dead.

Yet, in the second run, when Fei is here to ask these sane survivors for clues, for reasons yet unknown, they avoided talking about what they knew, especially the mother of the little girl herself.

Wu Jian isn’t sure what to say of her either.

She left her little girl on the 31st floor alone and then turned off her radar entirely, even when others are asking about the little girl herself. Yet, the moment it turns out she went missing, she pops up all flustered to ask what’s going on.

… What a mother this is.

Wu Jian can’t help but think.

To be honest, if the Nightmare’s owner really is the little girl, then he can certainly understand why the little girl has Nightmares.

That said… His thoughts come to a pause.

So, now the question is──is the little girl really the owner of the Nightmare?

Even ‘déjà vu’s have traps set to mislead, then who’s to say the same wouldn’t happen for possible owners of the Nightmare?

In fact, it is prudent to remember that, both the little girl and her mother, are still only candidates right now. They have yet to find concrete proof for either being the Nightmare’s owner.

And some key piece of the puzzle seem to be missing in both cases.

If it’s the little girl, then how did she come to know all these things related to the elevator? Where could these ‘déjà vu’ have come from?

If it’s the mother, which is this woman right in front of him, she looked distinctly not scared or traumatised about her daughter to the point of having a Nightmare about it until very recently.

This is getting nowhere.

Before, the Missiontakers have thought that the little girl’s mother is the Nightmare’s owner because she was in deep regret and fear over abandoning her own daughter, and is subconsciously trying to excuse herself, pushing the role of the mother onto Mystic here.

But clearly, this woman who claims to be the little girl’s mother here, does not seem remotely as ashamed as she was suspected to have been.

So there’s issues with pinpointing either the mother or the daughter as the Nightmare’s owner.

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What about the others? Could these two both be red herrings?

Wu Jian finds this even less likely, though.

Because Mystic’s interactions with the little girl suggests that there must be some significance to the mother and daughter pair in this Nightmare.

Unless one of them is the Nightmare’s owner, it is unfathomable that Mystic would end up on the photograph in the first place, or all the uncharacteristic actions she has been taking, or even why the bracelet of hers ended up on the little girl’s wrist on the second run.

All these thoughts are making Wu Jian’s head throb. The Nightmare feels like a tangled web to him.

Certainly, he knows that the Normal End, the simpler one, could certainly only entail taking the little girl to her mother, or perhaps, leading this person here to her daughter.

But what could the True End be about?

Everyone knows that nothing short of the absolute truth can bring about a True End.

With everyone keeping their mouths shut, the woman is already distressed enough to sound hysterical, “tell me! What happened to my daughter?!”

Wu Jian snaps back to reality, and takes a deep breath before answering, “we did not see your daughter on the 31st floor. We suspect she went downstairs to look for you.”

The woman seems stunned by the answer.

She murmurs, “that can’t be… That can’t be… I told her, to stay somewhere safe. To wait for mommy to go back for her… It can’t be…”

Wu Jian can’t help but ask, “what were you even thinking telling such a young kid to wait on an empty, deserted floor?”

The woman looks back at him, and answers, “the 31st floor is the safest place out there.”

Wu Jian’s eyes widen.

The woman explains, “the Renovators ignore the higher floors because the damage was relatively light there. Unless they manage to figure out some genius scheme that allows them to patch up the broken windows, they would never consider going up.

The Cannibals also ignore those floors entirely because everybody wants out, and has since either… ended up in the Renovators’ buckets, or the Cannibals’ stomachs.

We’re trapped on this floor because the 16th floor happened to end up a blind spot. The Cannibals chose the 14th floor for their canteen, because… that was where the first of them went mad. Then they descended down the floors and didn’t check upstairs.

Well, they did decide to make the 15th floor their spot for execution… If anyone wanted out of their group, then they take them to the 15th floor, to watch the burning city outside. That kills all ideas of rebelling.

There aren’t many people like that nowadays, and since a few days ago when it was last used, the Cannibals haven’t taken anyone there now. I suppose only the table and desk used for execution remains there.

Anyway, while the Cannibals and Renovators ignore each other, but in the beginning, the Cannibals were wary the Renovators might try to steal their food, so they picked a floor to be their outpost and keep watch.

Since Renovators are based on the 18th floor, the Cannibals took over the 17th floor. Since then, they’ve realised that the Renovators would stick to their own jobs and ignore them entirely, they transformed the 17th floor into their food storage instead.

So that’s why, this 16th floor has ended up a safe spot for us.”

Here, the woman looks slightly more bitter, and says, “of course I know my girl would be scared on the 31st floor alone, but there was nothing else I could even do.”

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