Doomsday Wonderland Vol. 13: Sleepwalking in Dreamland

1651: Unexpected During Negotiation

When Lin Sanjiu turned at the sound of the voice, she paused for a moment, surprised to see her own reflection in the appliance store's window. It looked so unfamiliar.

She had spent so long inside the memories of Wu Yiliu and the others that this was the first time she was seeing herself again after coming out. It felt strange, almost like returning to her hometown after many years away and unexpectedly meeting an old childhood friend. The sense of familiarity only slowly resurfaced after the shadow of time had faded away.

'What exactly are these memoirs?' she wondered. If she went through two or three more of them, would she still be able to remember who she was?

If the purpose of these memoirs was to make people lose themselves, it didn't quite make sense—they didn't seem to have any "malicious intent" to actively harm. The sense of disorientation was probably just a side effect. This only made her more puzzled about the nature of this space.

"What is this place?" Lin Sanjiu asked, looking at a speaker. "And what are these memoirs?"

She didn't get a response from the speaker. Instead, as soon as she asked her question, a voice came out of the bustling, hurried crowd behind her. "Why are you asking me?"

Lin Sanjiu immediately spun around. Her gaze quickly landed on a man carrying a briefcase, striding purposefully forward. He looked nothing like the man she had heard earlier. While checking his watch, his mouth moved, speaking with the other man's voice. "Don't try to fool me. If you don't know what this place is, how did you get here?"

As the office worker walked past her, the latter half of his sentence was spoken by a street musician in a black shirt.

It turned out that the man's voice could come from any direction, any person, making it impossible for her to locate him.

"You saw our spaceship, didn't you?" Lin Sanjiu's eyes darted from one passerby to another on the street, unsure who would respond next. Regardless of age or gender, every voice that came back was that of the man in the flip-flops.

For a moment, no one answered. People simply walked by, busy making phone calls, listening to music, and sipping drinks. Lin Sanjiu squinted, adding, "I already told you, I mean no harm. Our spaceship accidentally entered this place. All I want now is to find my friends and leave."

A young woman hailing a cab suddenly let out a snort. Then, a beauty salon employee handing out flyers across the street spoke up. "Look at that; you're already lying to me."

"What lie?" Lin Sanjiu asked, confused, striding towards the employee.

Before she could get closer, an old woman with a grandchild chimed in from behind her, "You didn't come here with the spaceship. You think I don't know? You and that other one... let's just call him a person, though he somehow managed to form a body out of thin air. The two of you entered before the spaceship. A while later, the spaceship followed and appeared. So how is it 'your' ship?"

It was indeed a complicated situation to explain. Lin Sanjiu and "let's just call him a person," Yu Yuan, had both left the spaceship earlier, exploring the remnants of the Mother Queen in space. That's why they entered this strange space before the Exodus, which had been pulled in by the Great Deluge.

She tried explaining, but her efforts only earned her a dismissive sniff from a nearby street vendor. Although more people were becoming aware of the Great Deluge's existence, it seemed this person had never heard of it—making the whole situation even harder to explain and believe.

Lin Sanjiu swallowed her frustration.

Most likely, both Yu Yuan and the grand prize were also trapped in different memoirs. With an ocean of memoirs, countless and vast, the only way to rescue them in time was to catch that man in flip-flops.

He had control over the memoirs, and this city must be one of them. But why was he lingering here, engaging her in conversation?

He could easily summon another memoir to whisk him away without Lin Sanjiu noticing. Once he left, how would she ever find him again?

The reason that man didn't leave was probably because there was only one possible explanation: this urban memory was special to him. He couldn't leave it.

Could it be something like a command center or a cockpit?

When Lin Sanjiu first fell into this space, she had landed in a forested area. She had walked for a while in the dark, feeling that her spacesuit was too cumbersome in this gravity environment, and had put it away. It was only after that when she triggered Wu Yiliu's memory.

As for the grand prize, he had piloted Exodus in after her and clearly ended up in this urban area—evidenced by the ship's presence as his trace. He wasn't on the ship now; maybe he had thought his sister was somewhere in the city streets and left the ship to search for her. Although she didn't yet know where Yu Yuan was, he had likely landed in a different area as well.

The three of them had entered one after another, only to be separated far apart, as if it had been done deliberately.

If that man had been sitting here the whole time, monitoring them through some means and sending them to different locations, it all made sense.

"You really don't have any other choice but to trust me," Lin Sanjiu said, keeping her tone as calm as possible. "I won't leave this urban area, and it looks like you won't either. As for your combat capabilities... I don't think you have enough power to take me down. If you did, you would've already attacked me. Right now, I'm like a big fish bone stuck in your throat—you can't swallow me, and you can't spit me out."

The crowd on the street continued bustling by, but no one answered her.

"What are you going to do with me? As long as I don't trigger any memories, the memoir itself isn't dangerous. You can keep me trapped here, but I won't be harmed. However, the longer I stay here, the more destructive the methods I'll resort to for getting out. That will only make things worse for your territory. If you let us reunite, all it takes is a small risk, trusting me just once, and you can rid yourself of this troublesome interruption... No risk, no reward, right?"

Lin Sanjiu waited for a response, longer this time.

Amid the bustling crowd, it sounded like someone had sighed. She couldn't tell who it was, as the sigh quickly dissipated.

"I don't know what this Great Deluge you mentioned is, or if it's even real," the flyer-handing shop clerk beside Lin Sanjiu said in a low voice.

"All I know is, after so many years, you're the first group to break in here. You don't understand... Even if I wanted to take a risk and believe you, it would be completely pointless for you."

The shop clerk's expression remained unchanged, but there was a hint of a bitter smile in his voice.

"Because... I don't know how to leave either."