Chapter 45 The Sleeping Curse (9) A Confession Both Sacred and Demonic...
They sat at opposite ends of the table. The girl had her head bowed low, her hands clasped together, holding her phone on the table. Xie Tan, though languid, sat fairly upright, expressionless, staring at her indifferently.
As dusk fell upon the skull lamps that ignited among them, it was as if a strange fire was being lit, and they were conducting a confession and judgment that was both sacred and demonic.
The freckled girl tensed up, her spirit hanging by a thread, and dared not look up: "...She didn't come back at all last night."
Xie Tan: "Let me tell you something I don't know." There's no need to bring up things that everyone already knows.
He was a little sleepy.
The freckled girl trembled and gripped her phone even tighter: "So you knew all along."
Xie Tan didn't answer. He didn't know where the girl's respect for him came from.
The freckled girl asked in a low voice, "What would you do if someone you care about had a secret?"
Xie Tan was pondering the source of the girl's awe towards him and what he should know when he heard the girl's question, and Lu Jinzhao's face suddenly appeared in his mind.
Having another person's memory is the only downside.
To ensure his brain functions better, he only sorts through memories that might be useful at this stage, most of which are related to new stories.
Other memories are jumbled together in a box; they will only pop up automatically when a keyword is triggered.
But this also means that it is a deeper instinctive reaction of the brain, avoiding layers of psychological deception. It is difficult for him to suppress or deceive himself with emotions and experiences before his thoughts become aware of them.
By the time he remembered, it was already clearly displayed before his eyes, forcing him to take a look.
Xie Tan looked inward and, after instinctively thinking, his delayed reaction was... resistance, and a little annoyance.
He knew the source of his anger: fear.
This is not a good sign, Xie Tan said to himself, and to the girl: "So, you've got a Pandora's box."
The freckled girl lowered her head even further, her voice even softer: "Should I turn it on?"
Xie Tan knew he wasn't qualified to give advice to others in this matter; he could only offer his own approach as a reference: "You can pretend it doesn't exist."
Everyone has hidden desires deep down, but few of them can be fulfilled.
So people create dreams for themselves, which is a cowardly and self-deceptive practice. However, those who are deeply immersed in the dream know that it is very difficult to maintain this cowardice and self-deception.
Because no one is a fool, and there are always times when one wants to disregard everything, dreams become precarious.
Da da da da...
The faint, continuous tapping sounds made Xie Tan look at her hand. The freckled girl was trembling, but the movement was very small. The bottom of her phone, which was already pressed against the table, was inevitably tapping the table quickly and continuously.
The freckled girl said with difficulty, "What if I can't stand it anymore?"
Xie Tan looked at her calmly and said, "Then you must bear the price of opening it."
"I don't dare... I don't dare," she sobbed softly. "I have nothing left."
The beautiful light of the setting sun also fell on the girl. The highly saturated colors and the shadows of the old hotel overlapped, and she sat in the ubiquitous intricate patterns, as if she were in a dreamlike sea.
Everything was clear, yet everything was like a dream. The door was neither open nor closed, but Xie Tan heard the wind chimes tapping on the door, ringing out, one after another, like the ever-present underlying tone of the world.
For a fleeting moment, in Xie Tan's eyes, the person opposite him who shrank back, lowered his head, and covered his face became himself, seemingly smaller, yet also seemingly the same person he was now, and his words just now were merely his own question and answer.
He didn't hear his own crying, but the crying seemed to be there all the time, only intermittent, like a ringing bell, one ring after another.
He was getting sleepy again.
Xie Tan closed his eyes briefly, then opened them again, no longer looking at her, but instead gazing out the window at the true sunset.
“But you’ve already opened it,” he said coldly.
"They just had to leave me!" The freckled girl suddenly looked up, her eyes bloodshot, like two red spots formed at dusk, with a strange madness in them. "I have no parents anymore, I only have them. She is my friend, he is my childhood friend, he is my lover, but what about the three of them? She... not only took one, but also the other. I have lost all three of them."
“But it’s okay, I can pretend I don’t know, as long as they don’t leave me. But what did they do? It was the same last time. I told them not to go to such a dangerous place, but they didn’t listen. As a result, the ghost came after them and wanted to grab a substitute. They abandoned me without hesitation… I understand. In times of crisis, survival is instinct. If they can remember my kindness, I saved my friend, and I’ll consider it worth it… But I didn’t die.”
"I didn't die. I still want to see them and be with them. But after all the hardship of escaping, what did I hear? It turned out that it was all part of their plan. They were thanking me, saying... thank goodness that fool took the fall with them."
As she spoke, she gradually calmed down: "So this time, I didn't try to persuade them much. Coming to the End of the Sunset was my idea. They agreed because they felt guilty. I knew that someone had gone missing in the vicinity before, so I wanted to try my luck."
"I was lucky in this downward fall thing. They were arguing and left me downstairs to check in. The owner told me not to go out at night. I didn't tell them and didn't sleep at all. When I heard the terrifying sound of chains at midnight, I knew that I had come to the right place."
The sound of chains? Xie Tan recalled whether there was any sound of chains last night; he didn't think he heard it.
There were too many and too many sounds, and I heard them while I was half asleep.
The girl had stopped speaking, but Xie Tan hadn't reacted at all. He seemed to have been looking at the patterns inside the room for too long, and now, looking out the window, those incantation-like patterns were imprinted on the demonic orange-purple sky, becoming even clearer as his vision expanded.
So he had to turn back and look at the girl opposite him; this time, she looked exactly like her.
Xie Tan was a beat slow to recall her words. Was her silence a sign of her malice? To be honest, even if you told her rebellious friends not to go out, they wouldn't take it seriously and would still go anyway.
But that's not all.
Xie Tan wondered, why was the blue-haired girl's phone in her hands?
The last phone call... the blue-haired girl may have fallen into the sea, along with her phone. How will she be retrieved...? Wait, did the blue-haired girl really fall into the sea?
The freckled girl was also looking at Xie Tan. His expression was too indifferent, not like listening to a criminal's confession, but rather a boring hypnotic story.
It seems that no matter how much pain she expressed or how much she hated them, that was all there was to it. In her world, this was the cruelest revenge she could imagine.
But in his eyes, it was just a minor squabble; if it were him…
She suddenly wondered, would someone as unfathomable as him also want revenge on someone?
Then the freckled girl suddenly said, "I envy you."
"What do you envy about me?"
Xie Tan heard this for the first time and thought he was hallucinating. Who was he envious of? Him?
“Anyone who would make you choose to ignore the box must be a really good person.” The freckled girl laughed, but her eyes were still crying, like a pieced-together face, very ugly. “Unlike me, three lousy people, still clinging on… But that’s all I have left, why are they leaving me?”
“Because it never belonged to you.” Xie Tan blurted out calmly, as if this answer had long been part of his understanding, and he was taken aback by it.
He felt increasingly sleepy, rubbed his temples, and, unable to stay awake any longer, got up to go back to his room.
The freckled girl fell silent again.
Perhaps because he saw her as a figment of his imagination for a moment, Xie Tan recalled what he did when he was in a bad mood, and finally realized that he hadn't actually done anything, he just...
"Go to sleep," he said softly.
It's not that you'll feel better after a good night's sleep, but rather that you still have to live after you wake up, and over time, you naturally become numb to it.
Just then, the hotel door was pushed open, the wind chimes rang, and Xia Wujin and Sun Enze entered the hotel, where they heard his last words before going upstairs.
They drove the RV back first, and the others rode in Xue Hong's and the red-haired boy's car.
Sun Enze silently went to the RV to move his luggage, while Xia Wujin handed a tissue to the girl who was sobbing on the table.
The girl whispered thank you, secretly wiping her face with a tissue inside her arm without looking up, but she seemed to calm down slowly, her trembling stopped, and her crying ceased.
But she still didn't want to move, so she quietly pressed down on the table. If Xia Wujin hadn't heard her crying earlier, he would have thought she was asleep.
Seeing that she wanted to be alone, Xia Wujin went to the hotel owner to help everyone check in first.
But the hotel owner wasn't at the front desk.
Xia Wujin remembered Xue Hong saying that the hotel owner's room was on the far end of the first floor, number 101. If he wasn't at the front desk, he should be in his room.
Most of the first floor consists of the lobby reception, a converted kitchen and dining tables, and a rest area, so there is only a corridor on one side, which contains the laundry room, linen room, washing sink, and the hotel owner's room at the very back.
But when Xia Wujin arrived at door 101, he felt something was wrong. According to the layout, door 101 was located at position 102.
The actual location, number 101, has no door, only a wall.
Does this mean they've combined two rooms into one?
She knocked on the door of 101, but no one answered, and the owner didn't seem to be inside either.
She tentatively felt around the wall, but couldn't find the hidden door. However, the wall... seemed a bit uneven.
Moreover, there seemed to be some sound inside the wall. She pressed her ear close and suddenly remembered Xue Hong's words.
“There were signs of a wedding ring on his hand, but no signs of a relationship anywhere. I didn’t see his wife either. When I asked him, he just said that he had always been a bachelor and had no wife. He said that he was hiding something and that we should be careful.”
Just as she was thinking this, suddenly, a "thump!" sound came from inside the wall, right where her ear was pressed. She was startled and took a step back.
"Sister Xia?" Sun Enze pushed his luggage and stood at the entrance of the corridor. "Is the boss here?"
“It’s not here.” Xia Wujin calmed down. Just to be on the safe side, she didn’t touch 101 again, whether it was the wall or the door, and returned to the lobby.
When I got to the stairwell, I ran into the freckled girl coming upstairs with her phone. Her eyes were swollen from crying and she could barely open them. Her steps were a little unsteady. She rubbed her eyes, not knowing if they were too dry or if she was just tired from crying, so she was a little sleepy.
Xia Wujin stopped and let the freckled girl go first, afraid that she might not be able to react in time and fall again.
Once Xia Wujin was sure the girl could get to the second floor without any problems, she continued walking. However, she noticed that the freckled girl seemed to have a cell phone in her shorts pocket, which made her take another look.
She was about to help Sun Enze carry the rest of his luggage when she suddenly stopped and realized, "Is that my phone?"
When Xie Tan went upstairs, he felt that someone was watching him from above.
He looked up, his gaze passing through the gap in the stair railing, and saw a wide-open, aged eye staring straight at him, as if suspended in mid-air.
Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be the hotel owner standing on the third floor; his wrinkled skin and earth-toned wallpaper were just too similar.
He shook his head; he was really out of his mind.
When Xie Tan reached the third floor, the hotel owner showed no awareness of peeping or frightening anyone. He asked Xie Tan to help hold the ladder so that the windows on both sides of the corridor could be sealed off.
Xie Tan, holding the ladder, looked at the faint ring mark on the boss's ring finger. Xue Hong was right. So where was his wife? Had she passed away?
After hammering in the last nail and sealing the window with an iron plate, the boss climbed down the ladder shakily and said in a sarcastic tone, "You were told to hold the ladder, so you just held the ladder. You didn't care about anything else. Poor old bones of mine."
He was too lazy to pay attention to Xie Tan, but he was so sleepy that the part of his consciousness shaped by his own memories was also drowsy, which gave the annoying young master a chance to speak: "Don't try to play hard to get like a young man with your old bones. Just bury it."
The old man glared, so angry he almost slipped off the ladder on the last step, but luckily he grabbed the windowsill and managed to stay upright.
Realizing what he had said, Xie Tan looked at him innocently, but combined with his expressionless face, it looked more like a provocation.
Before the old man could utter another harsh word, he interrupted with two yawns: "There are hotels downstairs, I'm going back to sleep."
Seeing his exhausted appearance, the old man stopped talking, gave a forced smile, and went downstairs in a sinister tone.
Xie Tan returned to the house, went straight to the bathroom, and splashed his face with cold water repeatedly, trying to stay awake.
He was certainly aware that something was wrong with him, but it seemed that no one else was reacting the same way.
What's the difference, and why?
But there were too many strange things happening in the town, and he couldn't immediately pinpoint what was wrong.
Cold water was no use. Xie Tan walked out of the bathroom, his hair still dripping wet, his eyelids drooping, as if he could fall asleep at any moment.
Tonight is probably going to be turbulent; he should stay alert.
So he didn't go near the bed, but slowly picked up the fruit knife from the coffee table.
Pain can keep you awake.
But just then, Cat Number 7 appeared, still sitting by the bed, gazing at the sea.
It chased its own tail, spinning twice on the soft mattress: "Meow, baby host, come and look, isn't that the sea..."
Xie Tan looked out the window following the sound. The sun had completely set, and night had fallen silently.
The vast sea blended into the night, like heaven and earth merging into one, a unified darkness, and he couldn't see anything clearly.
So he frowned, walked to the window, and tried to see if there was anything unusual about the sea.
Just as he passed the foot of the bed, the cat suddenly ran over. At that moment, it became clear that it was indeed a leopard. It bit the host's pants and pulled them inside.
Caught off guard, Xie Tan swayed slightly, his consciousness finally giving in first, and he collapsed onto the bed, the fruit knife sliding under the bedside table.
Cat number 7 wagged its tail leisurely twice, keeping its accomplishments hidden.
It skillfully jumped into Xie Tan's arms, squeezed in, curled itself into a little ball, and closed its eyes.
Goodnight, baby host, meow.
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