by N. Heller
When the real Reno sensed that something was wrong with the 'sister' beside him, fake Rena started to cajole Lin Sanjiu into believing her. Perhaps, the duoluozhong was unable to launch a direct attack, so she wanted Lin Sanjiu to work together with her to attack Reno. As Lin Sanjiu was convinced that the real Reno in front of her was an imposter, she wasted no time agreeing to that course of action.
"Yes, I took a hit from you. I was already shocked by that sudden attack in the dark. Then, that duoluozhong pressed a creepy, cold item on me. I am sure that was something which sped up the corrosion process..." Reno ranted and showed his sister the green impression on his skin. "Ah, but why did you suddenly switched to attacking the duoluozhong instead?"
If Lin Sanjiu didn't notice and react in time, Reno would have died there and then after a few attacks.
"It is largely due to luck," Lin Sanjiu couldn't help feeling a retrospective fear when she remembered the events, "When you came out from the bathroom and saw that no one was around, you said: Gosh. Did they disappear again?"
Lin Sanjiu realized that something was wrong when she heard that sentence. At that time, she had the impression the Reno she met incidentally in the corridor (who was looking for hers and Rena) and the Reno with the mark on his wrist was one and the same person, that is the real Reno. In other words, only the real Reno found Lin Sanjiu and Rena missing twice. The fake Reno did not meet such a situation and he did not need to mutter this to himself when no one was around.
If that was the tipping point that made Lin Sanjiu reconsider her suspicions. She was finally convinced when she saw Reno shivering with chattering teeth as if he was very cold. As expected, after being attacked, that fake Rena could no longer maintain its form. It escaped in a hurry.
"However, after I rushed into the corridor and lost sight of the fake Rena, I didn't return to the same room... The room with the fake Reno had taken its place."
Due to this ingenious combination of factors, Lin Sanjiu started believing that the fake Reno was real. When both of them went upstairs, they found the real Rena successfully. This was because the fake Reno had to be by the real Rena. Moreover, at that point, the cotton wadding called Lin Sanjiu was totally deceived and would no longer pose as a troublesome pest.
"Wait. You say you went upstairs with the fake Reno... But, I saw you on another floor."
Lin Sanjiu floated silently for a moment before the words on her skulls confirmed his suspicion, "That's not me. I guess that fake Rena, who was nearly killed, couldn't recover its original form in a short time. So, it must have chosen to impersonate me, due to my smaller size."
Rena was stunned as she read what Lin Sanjiu wrote. Based on Lin Sanjiu's description, there were three narratives progressing at the same time. Every now and then, they would influence each other. Rena never even thought that it would be so complicated.
Lin Sanjiu was just inwardly thankful that they were very lucky. Without using her [Consciousness Mimicry], she wouldn't discover who the real Reno was if she had not used her Diary Card.
However, when she finished reading her Diary Card. The building also sensed that she had discovered something, so it moved the fake Reno from his original floor to the 26th floor. This was probably to confuse Lin Sanjiu so that she would lose her target.
At the same time, the fake Lin Sanjiu and the real Reno decided to go to the 26th floor to find for Rena.
"Why did the building lead me to Rena? There was already a duoluozhong by my side..." Reno asked unable to understand the logic behind that decision. On the other, Lin Sanjiu quickly figured that out. The biggest difference between Lin Sanjiu and the siblings was that she was just a higher consciousness being. This probably made it very hard for the duoluozhong to imitate.
When the duoluozhong impersonated Reno, it only needed to maintain Reno's appearance. When it impersonated Rena, it doesn't have to stretch its body up to two meters every now and then. Whereas, Lin Sanjiu, who could morph herself into many shapes and even form words in midair, wasn't that easy to imitate convincingly.
Reno didn't even need to do much. If he tried to communicate with the fake Lin Sanjiu, the duoluozhong would probably slip up.
As for the events which played out on the 26th floor, Rena explained, "At that time, I followed the fake Reno up to the 26th floor. We were supposed to each take a corridor. According to him, we not only had to look for Lin Sanjiu, but we had the obligation to search every inch for the duoluozhong that was creating all sorts of trouble there as the 26th floor was the most suspicious. Don't you think that made sense? I agreed and when I was checking one of the apartment units, both of you entered the door without any warning..."
Things became interesting after that. The two teenagers, who had each been accompanied by a duoluozhong for the past few hours without even a shred of suspicion, became paranoid after their experiences. When the real siblings reunited, they instead grew very suspicious of each other.
As they were both guarded, none of them could suddenly take any action. The siblings started grilling each other on their past experiences. However, after so many journeys together over so many years, they each have their own angle and perspective on a similar event. So, obviously, their memories of the same event could be different. Furthermore, they weren't on good terms and were always quarreling.
Under such circ.u.mstances, even when the other party could answer the questions, they would start wondering about why that person doesn't know this or that. When the other party is unable to answer, it would just create a confirmatory bias to prove that 'ah, this person isn't my brother/sister'.
When they were on the 26th floor, Rena was once again badly deceived.
"According to Lin Sanjiu theory that the building shifts the apartment units around like toy blocks, when my brother entered the bathroom, the building shifted the bathroom away. He was replaced by the fake Reno. So, the person that walked out wasn't even my brother," Rena concluded and turned to pat Reno's shoulder, "You might not know this, but I was scared witless! When I peeped at you, I could see your back, yet your face was looking back at me..."
"At that time, it didn't feel like I was being shifted," Reno said puzzledly. "When I came out of the bathroom, I saw Rena but I didn't see Lin Sanjiu."
"From what you say, that duoluozhong recovered? It changed into my appearance again..." Rena asked, "Then, why didn't the building keep things this way? Why did it let my brother return?"
Lin Sanjiu felt as if she had written all the words she could write in her entire life. She slowly scribbled, "Because, that would help it reach its goal quicker. The building couldn't predict if I would fly here and there again. In fact, I did fly around the entire building once. To prevent me from spoiling its plans, I think it changed its strategy. It wanted to make both of you suspect each other and attack each other."
Its strategy nearly worked. Rena immediately looked at her brother apologetically, but before he realized that, she hastily turned her eyes away.
"At that point, how did you know we were both ourselves?" Rena asked, tilting her head to look at Lin Sanjiu. The way she crooked her head resembled what Reno did previously, it was quite obvious that they were blood-related.
"He said to me, 'That's right, Lin Sanjiu why have you been running around these two days?'" Lin Sanjiu wrote those words in bold, "I hadn't been running around those two days because you were watching me closely. I was in the apartment all this time... That would only mean that the Reno who said this had been in an environment that I wasn't around. By then, I already had the vague theory about the toy blocks. When I heard what he said, I knew something was wrong. He must have been shifted to another space previously! If that was true, he must be the real Reno."
Lin Sanjiu didn't have to mention their escape. Both siblings clicked their tongue, lamenting. Reno even praised Lin Sanjiu, "Who would have known that you're this smart." Hearing this, Lin Sanjiu couldn't help feeling slightly pleased with herself. This time she didn't rely on Nüwa's wisd
om to solve this difficult problem. This gave Lin Sanjiu a feeling like she was heading closer toward some sort of high benchmark.
"Ah. A B-level world is indeed dangerous," Reno let out a long sigh. He lay supine on the ground just outside the train station. "I feel a little like giving up on the training. I just want to find a place to quickly pass our remaining time here."
Reno followed her brother and also laid on the ground. She laughed and said, "Coward!"
...?
When Reno and Lin Sanjiu suddenly became silent, Rena laughed out loudly, "Did I scare you guys? Are you stupid? If I hadn't learned that word after reading what Lin Sanjiu wrote, you guys should be worried!"
While the siblings burst out into bouts of laughter, Lin Sanjiu felt a great sense of relief. Lin Sanjiu followed the siblings, stretched herself and lowered herself to the ground. Before they knew it, a thread of blue peeked through the thick gray clouds that hung above them.
Chapter 219 - Suspicious Mrs. Manas
The three people lay on the floor quietly. After a while, Lin Sanjiu realized that her surroundings grew silent. She immediately flew up from the ground to look and found the siblings with their eyes shut. Both of them had fainted. Reno and Rena' wounds were worse than she thought, especially Reno, who released those explosives too close to himself. His legs were covered by countless metal shards. Blood mixed with fat cells oozed out from his wounds making his pants stick to his legs. Lin Sanjiu wanted to, but couldn't even check his wounds.
With their body conditions, they naturally weren't going anywhere.
After searching the two siblings, Lin Sanjiu found a knife. She morphed herself into two fingers to pinch the knife. Then, she used the knife to cut Reno's pants, revealing his large patch of ghastly-looking wounds. The 'gear' which had been damaged appeared no different from normal tattered clothes. Lin Sanjiu cut off a few cleaner bits of fabrics and cleaned the area around his wounds before stopping. There were quite a few pharmacies nearby, but the rubbing alcohol and medicine in those stores were already corroded by black matter long ago. She didn't have the courage to use those things on the siblings, who were now very weak.
And just like that, Lin Sanjiu stayed by the unconscious siblings' side, guarding them a little anxiously. Based on her own judgment, she fed them some water they had with them and placed headrests made of rags under their heads... This was the limit to what she could do. The siblings could only depend on their own body constitution to recover.
The skies grew dark once again. Considering this, daylight in Kisaragi Station World only lasted for four to five hours. In addition to that, there were always gray, gloomy clouds in the sky, creating an atmosphere which seemed devoid of life.
Darkness came over them, covering the scenery with a quiet dark shadow.
"This is weird... Are there really no survivors in this world?" Lin Sanjiu thought to herself, overcome by boredom, as she circled the siblings.
Corpses eventually attract flies. In the same manner, the two half-dead humans on the ground attracted quite a lot of duoluozhongs. Sometimes, when Lin Sanjiu wasn't as vigilant, she might even find a greenish shadow looming between the siblings. She had to chase them all away every ten minutes or so and even exorcised a few duoluozhongs. They gave her quite a bit of trouble.
Originally, she told Mrs. Manas to keep a lookout for her so she could do a bit of training. However, she was called to 'chase away flies' every few minutes. Naturally, she couldn't do anything else but let her higher consciousness recover at its own speed. Luckily, her training over this period of time was not in vain, and the recovery speed of her higher consciousness was now much faster.
Under the tar-black skies, two motionless bodies lay under the pale, white light that shone from the interior of the train station. A skull floated around them, as a few vertebrae slowly formed from the top of its spine. "If anyone saw us, they would probably think that a duoluozhong had just killed two people, right?" When that thought disappeared from Lin Sanjiu's mind, she suddenly heard Mrs. Manas grumbling, "If you are that free, can you think of something more positive?"
"Huh?" Lin Sanjiu made a meaningless sound in her head.
Almost as if lazy to explain herself, Mrs. Manas activated Lin Sanjiu's higher consciousness scanning ability and presented the image to Lin Sanjiu. The area it covered was much wider than what Lin Sanjiu had seen previously, so she was a little shocked by that.
"Stop acting like a country bumpkin." For some reasons, Mrs. Manas sounded very unhappy. "Your ability has improved, so it is just common sense that you can now scan a wider area... Is this something very shocking?"
That was theoretically true. However, Lin Sanjiu had been 'conserving her resources', so she always kept her scanning range only within the radius of a few meters. Because of that, it had become something habitual to her. When her scanning range was pushed to nearly one kilometer in radius, she couldn't really adapt to seeing that much detail in such a large area. At the same time, Lin Sanjiu found out why Mrs. Manas was unhappy.
"Croaker!" Mrs. Manas mumbled.
At the edge of her scanning range, about a kilometer away from them, there was a row of office buildings. There were a few black shadows standing on the rooftop of one of the buildings and they were pointing at the train station. With a single thought, Lin Sanjiu's higher consciousness allowed her to zoom in on the people. The small black shadows instantly became clear in her mind.
Even though Lin Sanjiu could not hear them, from what she saw, she could sense that they were telling each other something like, "There is a powerful one in front of the train station. Guys, don't show any mercy."
"Huh? Why are these troublesome things happening..." Lin Sanjiu first reaction was to make a grievous comment, "Don't tell me everyone can actually see my higher consciousness form?"
"Of course not," Mrs. Manas replied.
"I mean, these two kids are fully geared to gain experience in this place. It isn't that weird that they can see me. But, why can some random people there see me?"
"If these two kids have their own methods of seeing you. There are definitely other ways in this world that would allow people to see higher consciousness entities. Explaining why you meet people that can see you consecutively... Um, coincidence." Mrs. Manas answered unhurriedly and sounded quite irresponsible. With her keen intuition, Lin Sanjiu immediately sensed that something was amiss.
"Are you hiding something from me?" Lin Sanjiu asked skeptically. In the meantime, the small team that was still some distance away wouldn't reach her so quickly. She had some time to prepare.
Suspiciously, Mrs. Manas grew silent for a while before she replied, "I didn't." Her voice sharpened, making it rather obvious that she was faking innocence. After looking at the people in the image, Lin Sanjiu weighed her priorities and decided to let the matter with Mrs. Manas rest. If she thought about it carefully, that teacher probably hid more than one thing from her. Lin Sanjiu was determined to find a good opportunity to count these debts. She suppressed her suspicion and split her body into two long 'ropes'. She decided that she would move the siblings to another place before those people came. She always felt that it was unnecessary to engage in any random meaningless fights.
There was no way Lin Sanjiu would go to any of the residential areas nearby. Even though the residential buildings around here looked very different from where that demonic building was, she didn't want to take any risks with the siblings' current condition. Going to the office buildings in the opposite direction was also not an option. From the looks of it, they could only hide in those pharmacy stores nearby. After she found a hiding place, she started pulling the siblings toward the spot. The process was much harder than she anticipated. With her current strength, she could wrap herself around one of them and lift them slightly off the ground. However, it takes up too much energy for her to carry both of them at the same time. She thought that she could carry them over one by one. However, that was not the case. When Lin Sanjiu carried Ren
o and flew a few meters toward the pharmacy store she had chosen, she turned her 'head' casually and looked behind. At that point, she couldn't help abandoning Reno to rush over to Rena's side.
"Get lost! Yes, you!" Lin Sanjiu scolded before she condensed herself into a small missile and shot herself to the spot beside Rena. A little girl with two braided pigtails was facing Rena with her back. Shocked, that little thing ran into the train station before turning around and showing another pair of braided pigtails. That thing was an example of those famous ghosts who show the back of their head even when they turn around.
Lin Sanjiu was already fed up with those pestering spirits. She sped toward the child's back. It made a strange wail and the upper body of the child lost its form and became a cloud of green smoke. Meanwhile, it continued running to the depths of the train station anxiously with the bottom half of its body. Lin Sanjiu stopped herself then. After spending so much effort chasing off just one duoluozhong, she floated up once more. She looked through the glass walls of the train station and noticed that something was kneeling by Reno's side.
When Mrs. Manas 'witness' Lin Sanjiu flying between the two siblings busily before finally moving them to the pharmacy store, she couldn't help sighing.
"While you desperately move to and fro between the siblings, do you think you can conceal your tracks? I guess those people could already tell where you are heading. I guess they're coming soon," Mrs. Manas said, almost as if disappointed by Lin Sanjiu's performance.
Lin Sanjiu didn't seem to mind. She acknowledged the teacher's words half-heartedly. Next, she checked the interior of the store cautiously. She chose the smallest pharmacy store on purpose so she could keep her eyes on the siblings and protect them at all times.
"Look at them, they probably just want to board the train," Lin Sanjiu said while she slipped behind the counter. She found herself staring straight at a old man with huge eyes. She stretched her body and smacked the old man's face. The old man shrieked and disappeared into a cloud of smoke. Then, she added, "We were blocking the entrance just now, so it is reasonable to think that they had no choice but to fight with us then. Since I have avoided them, they would just head for the train. Why would they still bother me?"