Chapter 6

Chapter 6

When you wake up this time, you feel somewhat drained.

Bathed in the light of dusk, you remain silent for a long while. This exploration may not have gone entirely as planned, but it has more or less achieved your goals.

This was the longest you had ever survived in a cycle. In this cycle, you stepped out of the apartment building for the first time and reached the basketball court. You confirmed the bizarre behavior of everyone in the neighborhood, including your parents. You survived past two days for the first time and obtained even more detailed information. Of course, most importantly, you finally believed That Voice.

“Don’t let them know you can see.”

Indeed. As long as no one discovered that you could see, you would not be in danger.

Next, all you had to do was keep going like this, and you would surely draw closer to the truth, bit by bit. Before that, what you needed to do was gather information.

So you needed to live longer and go farther.

Pay attention to every useful piece of information and connect them together. If the truth was a puzzle, then information was its countless scattered pieces.

You were only an ordinary person. You did not possess Sherlock Holmes’s intellect or powers of deduction. All you could do was rely on your own attentiveness and patience, using a massive amount of information to reconstruct the real picture.

You begin to notice more details you would normally overlook, even searching your room all over again.

Although you do not find anything new, you do notice a few strange things. For example, the poster on the wall. This poster, which you have paid attention to several times before, has changed again. In the stands behind Kobe Bryant, the blurry figures that had once been sitting upright now each have different postures. Their faces are covered by a layer of shadow, making their expressions impossible to see. What are they doing? Then there are the books on your desk. The words inside have all been twisted into strange tadpole-like script, and compared with last time, the blank spaces inside are gradually increasing as well. Often, there are more than a dozen empty pages in a row.

You silently make note of all this, preparing to verify it again in the next cycle.

…

Time: 5:45 p.m.

After living through four more deaths, you arrive at your eleventh cycle. The moment you open your eyes, you collapse onto the floor.

Your entire body is as pale as paper, your forehead covered in cold sweat. Only by gritting your teeth do you manage to endure it.

Over the past few cycles, you have discovered that your mental state is getting worse and worse. At first, you were only a little tired, but by the last two cycles, the pain had become almost unbearable, as if bamboo splinters were stirring your nerves inside your flesh.

You even begin to wonder whether Death Return can truly continue without limit.

Of course, those four cycles have also brought you far more information than before. The shortest of the four lasted three days, while the longest lasted a full week.

Aside from one place, your range of activity has expanded to the entire neighborhood. You have walked through all twelve buildings and both gardens. Although you have also tried to leave the neighborhood, no matter how hard you try, you cannot succeed. The towering walls on all sides and the tightly locked iron gates are like an impassable chasm, cutting you off from the outside world.

You have no choice but to turn your attention back to the neighborhood. To that one place you have never set foot in. That place your body fears approaching, the place even your subconscious has been deliberately avoiding.

You understand that if there is an answer, it can only be there.