Get out of trouble

…

It was 6:45 at night, before the camp's curfew.

In the rusty caravan, I sat on the floor, holding a self-heating hot pot in my hands, eating silently with an expressionless face.

Gao Liu stared at me and said, "Advisor, you don't believe it?"

I swallowed the last mouthful of soup with difficulty and said no, asking everyone to relax and that the current situation was not difficult.

The grocery store was filled with people who had gone to the fields with us, some standing and some squatting. When they heard what we said, their faces looked a little complicated and confused.

We were all brought here by Senior Six just after we came down from the tunnel ten minutes ago. At this moment, many people were still secretly touching their faces covered in mud, with expressions of disgust and surprise.

"Could it be that this... this Möbius strip and this loop are fake?" Fang Ao was a little confused. "I heard the deputy captain speak very sincerely. And her set of incomprehensible words sounded like something you, the consultant in the loop, taught her."

"It's probably true," I answered helplessly, stroking my brand new brain. "The rules of the trap are indeed difficult, and I haven't figured it out yet. But this doesn't prevent our current situation from being simple."

"..." Fang Ao didn't say anything, but just looked at me. His expression turned into some kind of Tibetan fox emoticon, as if he thought I was crazy because of my incoherent speech.

"Then, what should we do?"

"Eat, sleep. All lie down in the room and sleep." I sighed. "That's it."

Everyone in the room looked at each other.

I understand everyone's confusion now, because I myself now realize how smart I was before, to the point of ignoring many very simple problems, which led to such a complicated and difficult situation.

The story of the pit is indeed horrible beyond description, but if we small shrimps want to survive, it is not difficult if we don't seek to understand it too much. It was because I pursued the mystery too deeply that I fell into madness and couldn't extricate myself in front of the horrible truth.

Why did the Zhang family members evacuate so calmly, leaving behind a camp full of idiots and an abnormal Yan Er?

I was really stupid, of course, because the Pitfalls are, to some extent, very benign and harmless as long as you don't dig too deep into their essence. If you count it as a game, it's just a "babysitter-level novice copy".

There's a lot to explain right now, so I just confirmed two things.

The first question I asked Fang Ao was whether this was his real name.

Fang Ao was stunned for a moment and said no, his family name was Liu and his original name was very delicate. It was just that "just now" in the tunnel, he was the one who laughed at me the loudest, and when I suddenly asked him his name, he was afraid that I would make trouble for him, so he made up one on the spot. Anyway, we are all brothers in the team, and we will not expose him for such a small matter.

I couldn't help but let out a sigh of relief and laughed, then asked the second question, asking Yan Er why the real name column was deliberately blacked out on the registration form eight years ago.

He was silent for a while and answered that he didn't know. It was the first fellow who died during the day who painted it black. They were just alert and did it. They didn't know what the fellow found before he died.

I know.

I reorganized my thoughts and felt my heart beating so violently that it got stuck in my throat.

Because this is a very simple and superficial fact, but I have always ignored it.

Let’s start from the beginning, I said to myself.

First, all the people I met along the way after the night at the sentry box. In order of acquaintance, they are:

Brother Li, Xu You, the team leader, Wild Cat, Gao Liu, Yan Er (Yan Mo), Glasses (Zhou Tingmao), and Xiao Liu.

Then came the guys who were strangers to me. Many of them were deformed, missing, out of contact, or had died according to others’ accounts.

But what I can confirm is that I witnessed the deaths of only two people.

One was Zhou Tingmao, who was receiving an IV drip when he suddenly attacked the team doctor and escaped from the tent, then died in front of me with blood bursting all over his body. But the team leader just told me that the four-eyed guy named Zhou Tingmao was not seriously injured.

One was Yan Mo, who voted when the fog cleared, stated his real name and identity, and then instantly melted in front of me.

The same thing happened to all of them before they died.

——I know their names.

Different from those code names, nicknames and nicknames, these are names given to them by their biological parents to prove that they have already been born into this world.

It was I who witnessed and determined that they were not "fetuses".

For all the other people, in our long conversations, due to rough language habits, their real names were never mentioned once.

Including Xu You. "Xu You" was a pseudonym he temporarily gave himself just to show his loyalty to me. Even his name and surname were fake. They all called him the team leader.

The operating mechanism of the pit is actually so simple, if exposed, it will be cleaned. And no matter how polluted and deformed the fetuses are, from the perspective of the pit, they are just undergoing normal development and transformation in a very gentle manner.

Before a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, its fleshy body melts into soup, and a new individual develops from the soup. This is the natural law, and no one would find it scary.

It’s just that right now, we realize that we may have become the piece of meat that is melting into the soup, and we are particularly frightened and desperate.

Secondly, there is the campground that has always made me feel conflicted.

On the one hand, the camp sheltered me during my coma, allowing me to not vote in the beginning and live safely until I faced the horrific end of the Matrix.

But on the other hand, the people in the camp will have an anchoring effect on us, the monsters in the mud, accelerating our distortion.

For the pitfall rules that are just silently running to nurture the fetus and passively discover and eliminate "counterfeit and shoddy products", the contradictory performance of the camp seems very sudden and redundant.

That was because I made a mistake. I confused the camp buildings with the people in the camp.

I forgot that I was the one who caused the conflict between the sentry box ghost story and the pit.

I once speculated that all of us in the camp were reflections of a mirror. Later, I learned that the mirror was the "moon" above our heads. It was the eye.

Yes, if we go back to the day of the moonlit mud disaster, things are still very simple.

The moment I triggered the Lunar Disaster, only one thing happened:

The high "moon" instantly illuminated the entire convoy, me, and the camp. At that moment, the mother saw me eating the pit water sample (amniotic fluid) and determined that I was its fetus.

At this time, three mirrors appeared. They were the Moon Eye of the Matrix, my eyes, the only one still awake and facing the moonlight, and the mirror made of mud that engulfed the sunken camp during the collapse.

When I was taken to the camp by the convoy, on this night, the three mirrors overlapped.

When three mirrors are placed together, they will reflect the scenes inside each other, and there are countless mirrors in the mirrors.

So what is finally presented to the eyes of the Matrix are the countless of us going to the fields, the countless of us in the camps, and the countless Matrix itself.

That’s the nature of the cycle.

But the refraction in the mirror will be deformed.

In the mirror, we encounter each other with countless different degrees of deformation. On the one hand, we cannot distinguish ourselves, and on the other hand, we question the existence of each other and spontaneously begin to distinguish who is the alien monster.

The mother reads information from our senses, and her judgments and distinctions about us come from this.

The same is true for those people in the thick fog who can ignore the distance. They are just the most fragmented images produced by the refraction in the mirror. As reflections, they are always connected to us, so how can there be any so-called distance?

As for the buildings in the camp, they were simply swallowed up by the mud, but they still had actual physical existence and were not completely dragged into the mirror loop brought about by the pit ghost story.

Because these buildings are "sentry boxes." They are part of the rules of the sentry box. The same is true for the rusty caravan and the general store.

They were captured by the strange stories I brought to the sentry box.

Therefore, the team leader who was not seriously polluted at the beginning was hiding in the car without coming out, not thinking, not observing, not participating, and only drinking and eating the inventory of the grocery store. I once forgot his existence in my cognition. He never participated in the first few votes.

'Because he was in the sentry box, first as a guard on the guy in the corner who he said had a breakdown and was crazy, and then as a guard on me.

It wasn't until we went out together that the horrible ending came.

So the camp is a safe spot for me most of the time.

Those metal fragments that could resist digestion and finally remain in the pit tunnel also survived under the power of the sentry box rules and became important clues to remind me. Because the sentry box that originally sheltered me was made of glass and metal.

When I was in the convoy, the mysterious man in the wall had actually reminded me a long time ago.

The person said, don’t think too much, don’t recall the past, just sleep peacefully.

Yes, that's the mistake I made.

I have been trying to get into the horrific nature of the ghost story. I have reviewed and observed what happened eight years ago again and again, reviewed the past events of each fetus, and discovered them for the mother again and again.

Most importantly, I violated the cardinal rule that had always protected me.

I was lured away from the post.

To break this cycle of infinite mirror refraction, my mirror must be turned off.

Without the refraction and reflection of the mirror, the existence of us unborn fetuses depends only on mutual observation, and then on the perception of the mother. So in order to make the mother unable to see us and think that we do not exist, all fetuses must be put to sleep at the same time.

This is the final and simple solution to the puzzle.

It has to be said that from a narrow human perspective, sentry box stories and pit stories are two sides of the same coin in many rules, but they are also conflicting and independent of each other.

Therefore, many times, I find that the definitions of sentry box, guard, mother, wall, and womb are very ambiguous and metaphorically equated in both stories, and at the same time they work within the rules of both stories.

Coming across these two strange stories is like a blind man touching an elephant in an infinitely large room, touching the elephant's ear and leg respectively.

They all belong to the elephant that I cannot fully understand, and the way they appear to me seems very different at first glance.

The space I can find to struggle at this moment is to take advantage of this similarity and difference.

This grocery store has always been completely mine in every sense of the word. It is my original post and nest, another little womb that has captured me long ago. I must sleep here.

The others were no longer fetuses at this time, but guards who belonged to me, to the "advisors", and to the "young master" in various senses along the way.

As the prey of the Gangting Ghost Talk, I must fight for the ownership and interpretation rights of this definition for the Gangting Ghost Talk.

If you want to eat us, let’s have a fight and see who wins.

"Let's go to sleep." I said with a smile, "Everyone squeeze in together, and don't think about anything when you fall asleep. At most, you can think about my little ancestor. See you tomorrow."

The room was quiet for a while. Without any explanation, I knew that most people must be very suspicious.

But I can't explain too much at this moment. This experience has taught me that the more familiar you are with the rules of ghost stories, the closer you are to this madness, the more you will be captured by it.

Five minutes later, the room was quiet. My companions chose to trust me and all fell to the ground and fell asleep.

I sat alone in anxiety for a while, and then fell asleep on the floor, letting myself be swallowed by sleep very slowly. I felt the long-lost pain in the blue bite mark on my ankle.

Falling asleep in my own shop, I felt myself waking up several times in a trance, as if being called by some gentle motherly voice, and forcing myself to continue sleeping several times. This time there was no disturbance, and in my sinking consciousness, my perception of everything around me became blurred.

The knocking on the door in my sleep stopped and disappeared.

(End of this volume)