Chapter 498: One-Man Hide and Seek

"Children's clothes?" Seeing those crumpled, torn garments, a slew of vile, offensive words flashed through my mind. But with so many viewers in the stream, I kept them to myself.

"This is only a Shallow Dream Layer. It shouldn't hold memories that extreme." The more agonizing and unbearable a memory was, the deeper it hid within the heart. Those unspoken scars typically only surfaced in the Middle Dream Layer.

I rummaged through all the clothes on the bed, but the pockets were completely empty.

"I entered Ye Bing's Dream Realm, yet the clothes on this bed all belong to a little boy. Cross-dressing?" I quickly dismissed the idea. The children's clothing here was sized for a five- or six-year-old. Kids that age didn't have notions of cross-dressing; their outfits were usually picked out by their parents.

Finding nothing in the clothes, I turned and scanned the rest of the bedroom.

Aside from a ridiculously oversized double bed, the room only held a built-in wardrobe. I opened the doors to find two quilts inside.

"The quilts are very clean, but there's a faint, musty smell. The dream's owner has a pretty deep memory of them." I left the bedroom and entered the other room. It was set up as a study, with two rows of shelves completely packed with thick books.

I pulled out a few at random. They didn't have a single word in them. Clearly, the dream's owner had never opened these books.

The bookshelves were pushed against the wall. Right next to them sat an office desk and a wooden single bed. The bed had no sheets or quilts, and a series of strange symbols were drawn directly onto the cold, hard bed boards.

They looked like some kind of cipher. I couldn't understand them at all.

I walked further in. A computer sat on the desk. It was plugged in and the tower's indicator light was blinking, but the monitor was pitch black.

"Is the monitor turned off?" I reached toward it, but after touching the power button, I didn't press it immediately. "Recklessly altering things in a dream could trigger unimaginable dangers. What if something crawls out of the screen when I turn it on?"

This was a dream. All normal reasoning and logic had their blind spots here. After thinking it over for a moment, I pressed the button anyway.

The screen flickered. It didn't display some ghastly face or a gruesome murder scene like I'd imagined. The desktop only had a pitifully small handful of icons set against a solid blue background.

"This is too normal." The scene in front of me was highly irregular. The computer tower was running, but the monitor had to be manually turned on. All of this indicated that this memory must be deeply ingrained in the dream's owner.

"Could this computer be hiding some other secret?"

Looking closely, I noticed a minimized webpage at the bottom of the screen. I clicked it open and found a page that looked like an online forum.

A computer from twenty years ago didn't have many functions. Back then, large message boards didn't even exist yet; there were only extremely niche forums that required approval to join.

I stood by the desk, moving the mouse and slowly scrolling down to read the contents of the page.

It looked like a cry for help. The gist was that the poster felt incredibly lonely and was always by himself. For various reasons, no one wanted to get close to him. He desperately wanted a friend and deeply envied the kids who got to play together.

Shortly after he made the post, many forum members offered him advice, but none of it could solve his problem. That was until 2:30 AM, when someone with a hidden ID sent him a private message. The stranger told him about a way to find a friend without needing to talk or put in any effort.

"Two-thirty in the morning. That's the exact time showing on the clock outside." Connecting the dots, I paid closer attention to the private message and began to read it carefully.

"You don't need to go looking for friends at all. Your friends are already right beside you; you just can't see them. I can teach you a method to find them, so you can have lots and lots of friends."

Right after reading the first line, a strong sense of foreboding washed over me. This was obviously a trap. I wanted to shut the computer down immediately, but a sliver of curiosity kept me reading.

"This method is called—"

"—One-Man Hide and Seek."

"Before the game starts, you need to prepare a few things: a plush toy with arms and legs, white rice, nail clippers, a needle and red thread, a sharp tool, and a cup of salt water."

"Once you have everything ready, follow the steps below."

"First, give the plush toy a name. It can be a real person's name or a made-up one, but be careful—it cannot be the same as your own name."

"After naming it, remove all the stuffing from inside the doll. Put the rice and your fingernail clippings inside, then sew it back up with the red thread. Wrap the remaining red thread around the doll."

"Wait until 3:00 AM. Say to the plush toy three times, 'I am the ghost.' Remember, you must actually state your own name. After that, place the doll in a bathtub full of water."

"Turn off all the lights in the house, leaving only the TV on, and close your eyes and count for ten seconds. Next, take your prepared sharp tool to the bathroom. Say 'I found you' to the doll, and stab the tool into its body."

"Then tell the doll, 'You're next.' As soon as you say this, grab the salt water and immediately hide in a closet or somewhere else."

"After that, you just wait. Your friend will find you within two hours."

"If you regret it midway, hold a mouthful of salt water and actively go look for the plush doll. You must first splash the water from the cup onto it, then spit the water from your mouth onto it, and shout 'I win' three times. Only then will the game end properly."

"Lastly, I hope you find a friend soon. But remember: whether you find a friend or not in the end, that plush toy must be burned. Do not forget this!"

The method provided by this hidden ID was like some kind of prank.

Reading it gave me the creeps. I felt like I had heard about this game on the internet before, but I never expected someone to have actually tried it so many years ago, let alone forge such an indelible memory from it!

"Did the dream's owner actually encounter something during the game?" Analyzing it psychologically, this game merely used environmental ambiance and a person's own emotions to invoke a specific kind of terror during the anxious wait. That was why very few people could last the full two hours.

"The dream's owner couldn't have been very old at the time. Even an adult wouldn't be able to handle the psychological pressure of this game. This kid didn't actually play it to the end, did he?"

As I stared at the private message on the computer, my unease steadily grew. No longer caring about saving face, I grabbed the Underworld Live Show Phone and bolted straight for the door. Sure enough, this was another completely sealed Dream Realm—the door and windows wouldn't budge at all!

"Damn it! How do I leave? How do I break this?" Standing in the living room, I turned my head to check the clock on the wall. It was 2:45 AM.

"The game's start time is 3:00 AM. Is this dream set up specifically to make me play this game? Do I have to complete it before I can enter the Middle Dream Layer, or leave entirely?" My time was just as tight. The Underworld Live Show's task was to enter Ye Bing's Middle Dream Layer before midnight. Right now, forget about Ye Bing's Middle Dream Layer; I hadn't even figured out where the hell I currently was.

"It's the Shallow Dream Layer. It shouldn't be too dangerous. I can give this game a try." Hesitation wasn't my style. I quickly made a decision and began searching the house for the props required by the game's rules.

"There's a paring knife right on the living room coffee table, and needle and thread in the cabinet. I'm just missing the white rice, salt water, and the plush toy..." I stepped into the kitchen, originally just wanting to find some white rice, but pushing the door open revealed a completely unexpected scene.

Sitting on the kitchen cutting board was a Plush Bear, roughly the height of an adult's calf. The doll had been hacked full of gashes with a knife, its tattered cotton stuffing spilling out.

"Holy crap, why does this look so gruesome..." I steeled myself and reached inside the doll's body. The stuffing felt like rotting cotton or something worse—it was sticky and clung to my hands. It took me a dozen seconds to hollow it out completely. Then, I found some rice, poured it inside, and used the needle and red thread to give it a rough stitch job.

There were simply too many cuts on the toy. Just looking at it made my scalp tingle. If the game didn't require it, I absolutely never would have touched this thing.

"It's not quite 3:00 AM. Time to prepare for the next step."