Chapter 208: Transforming Community Experience (XVII)
In the countless nightmares of those three years, this feeling of being submerged in ice was not unfamiliar, and was even familiar to the bone.
Unforgettable memories resurfaced.
First comes the fall.
Her body was trapped in an empty, dark, endless space, falling continuously in the cold air. Then came the sharp laughter, the shrill crying, the hoarse roaring, from far away to near, from sparse to dense, spreading and interweaving beneath her body like a huge net, encircling her.
Then comes the unknown.
The sounds of footsteps, climbing, sliding and dripping with sticky water, these invisible things rushed towards her from behind at an extremely fast speed, as if if she was a second late, she would be drowned on the spot.
But Tang Xinjue knew clearly that all these sounds and colors, visible and invisible existences, were meant to break her psychological defenses, make her collapse, become terrified, lose her mind, and then make wrong judgments and choices.
The darkness's goal from the beginning to the end was to devour and assimilate her.
Then her spirit must be completely shattered in order to tear open the protective layer outside her soul and take it into the bag.
And she never made it work.
But this time, all escape and struggle seemed to be wiped out, and the darkness like falling into an ice cave instantly covered the sea of consciousness, pulling all senses into the bottomless abyss.
Resentment... Hatred... Anger... Pain... Madness...
The endless cold did not freeze her consciousness, but instead made these heart-wrenching emotions burn like icy fire, penetrating her heart bit by bit, and finally burning into a ball of chaotic ashes.
"Am I dead?"
In the faint consciousness, Tang Xinjue heard his own voice.
There was no answer in the darkness, and she didn't press the issue. It was as if she didn't need an answer at all, and she didn't think any answer that existed was worthy of entering her ears.
Amidst the growing stalemate, she allowed her consciousness to sink again.
After the soul was eroded and reshaped, all the emotions that had originally been human were quietly replaced. It was like a house that was once clean and tidy. The rooms were unchanged, but all the furniture was covered with a layer of black slime, which seeped out from the inside out continuously and would never stop.
That is endless malice.
Without her actively thinking about it, greed, cruelty, and a desire for bloodshed permeated her. Her heart and soul seemed to have been pierced and burned into a hollow mass, and her body had become a giant maw.
This stomach seemed to never be filled, and she could only swim upwards, burning with hunger, through the thick and dense black fog, looking for something to fill her appetite. Otherwise, she would eat herself or be swallowed up by the darkness.
"Where is this?"
Amidst the extreme pain and devastation of his soul, a wisp of consciousness quietly drifted away. Tang Xinjue heard his own voice again.
“…”
The darkness remains silent.
Tang Xin Jue didn't care how abrupt this scene seemed in the dark, hellish abyss. She even tried to escape from the decaying body and gaze from afar. But as soon as she thought about it, a sharp pain pierced through her, reminding her not to act rashly.
"All right."
She smiled softly, then sank into consciousness again, letting her body float upwards in a daze.
In the darkness, even their own kind are fraught with danger. When food is scarce, they often resort to cannibalism. Sometimes it's an unconscious instinct, sometimes it's a desperate venting after a shred of reasoning has returned.
These supplements made it increasingly stable and lucid. But as its mind became clearer, the few remaining fragments that reminded it of its human identity completely sank and melted away. At the same time, another world slowly unfolded before it.
A world that is crueler, more treacherous, more chaotic and dangerous, but also its only hope.
When a dazzling ray of light cracked through the black fog and a new identity slowly emerged in his mind, all his senses and images suddenly seemed to be sped up five hundred times, operating at a speed that the brain could hardly imagine and understand.
If Tang Xinjue's consciousness was intact at this moment, she would tell somewhere in the darkness: In addition to fast forwarding , there is also a way of moving the progress bar called "jump".
But in reality, her self-awareness was covered by some force, and she could only glimpse a vague light and shadow from the gap, so naturally she had no way to complain.
When the fast forward finally ended, negative consciousness and pain hundreds of times stronger than before descended without warning, dragging her into a torn body.
It can be vaguely seen that this is the body of a young girl, which has been carefully designed to be the closest to the human shadow deep in its memory.
Of course, it is also possible that this is just its confused imagination, which is no longer important.
Because it has been chopped and dissolved inch by inch by hand, coated with a thick layer of oil in the stench of tar, and decorated on the plate.
In the steaming hot air mixed with black blood, severe pain filled every inch of the body, but the owner of the body was laughing .
[Way out? I don’t have any.]
Rather than letting me rot and sink back into the ground, turning into mindless ooze, it's better to end it this way. At least it proves that I once lived... I once lived, right?
[…Have I really lived?]
The last words were so soft that they were barely audible, yet Tang Xin Jue's consciousness was alert as never before. As expected, the sigh suddenly became as heavy as a thousand pounds the moment it landed on his sea of consciousness, slamming heavily into the depths of his subconscious.
The world fell into darkness again.
This time, Tang Xinjue could clearly feel that "he" was in trouble - literally in trouble.
The food court was filled with heat, yet the food was completely cold. Its already limited consciousness was fragmented into countless pieces, attached to the marinated meat, with price tags on them, like a truly dead object.
I was in this daze for an unknown amount of time before vague figures appeared at the end of the street: they were four young girls.
They walked together, their expressions varied, and they exuded a familiar yet unfamiliar human aura. Then, one of them, a girl with a ponytail and light steps, stopped in front of it.
The other person held a long, sinister tool in his hand, one that emanated a ferocious aura and made even the food shudder. The girl, seemingly carelessly, placed it on the stall, and this immediately aroused the last remnants of his consciousness. In the final moments of his long and painful life, he miraculously regained consciousness and recalled an old saying buried deep within his soul:
[Don’t get close to me!!!]
Bang!
The smoke and fire dissipated, and everything was like a passing cloud.
When Tang Xinjue opened his eyes again, he realized that everything he had just experienced was just an illusion condensed in an instant.
She was pulled into a ghost's perspective, receiving countless fleeting pieces of information in a concentrated moment, as if she had actually died once.
But that wasn't what touched her most.
What impressed her most was that from the ghost's fleeting perspective, she saw the real "university town".
This is a world that belongs to ghosts.
The twisted matter, the mutated souls and bones, the countless screaming shadows, were suppressed by an invisible and intangible force field. It was forced to hunch over in a half-human, half-ghost body, thus preventing it from rushing towards the examinees with boundless malice, and from truly unleashing its desire to kill.
That's why they see everything now.
The other side of the iceberg was briefly revealed to her for a moment, but it was enough to make Tang Xinjue brainstorm.
At this moment, the guide's voice sounded again:
"Now, you still don't want to try these foods?"
Compared with failing to clear the dungeon, dying completely, or even becoming an eternally trapped in hell as depicted in the illusion, being slightly contaminated and fused with ghosts does not seem to be the most unbearable thing.
Tang Xin Jue breathed quietly for a few seconds, then suddenly asked, "Is this how you persuade others?"
The guide was startled, then explained professionally: "So far today, only a few lucky people have entered the food court..."
Tang Xin Jue shook his head and repeated the question again, but his voice was clearer:
"Did you persuade other people the same way, like my roommates?"
The guide's smile remained unchanged, but he did not say anything else, as if he was trying to determine whether Tang Xin Jue was fishing or not.
After a moment, he replied, "Aren't your roommates just walking ahead of you?"
"A guide cannot lie."
Tang Xinjue stared at him and sighed softly, "But now, you lied."
