"Why put in hints for me?" Beihan asked, his gaze fixed nervously on the reflection in the glass.
"Bleeding and getting hurt might cloud your mind, making it hard for you to communicate with me." Schiller's voice seemed to resonate with the air in the corridor; to Beihan it sounded less like a voice and more like a vibration.
"Who are they?" Beihan took a step closer and asked.
"A global organization."
A sudden thump in Beihan's chest reminded him of the organization he first heard about in prison, the Shadow Warrior Alliance.
"What did they do you?" Beihan's lips moved on their own, dry and parched, only regaining their feeling when his words had fallen silent.
"What did they do to you?" Schiller retorted.
Beihan hurried to the window, pressing his hand against the glass, staring hard at Schiller's reflection in it. "Don't answer a question with a question. Tell me what they did."
"They are conducting human experiments."
Schiller's figure disappeared again. Beihan, one hand still on the window, looked dazedly at the moonlight outside. In a soft voice, he said, "They killed my parents."
A gust of cold wind blew his hair forward and brought him back to his senses, and he began to think. He remembered his earlier assumptions.
Given that Schiller, the man in the suit, hadn't offered any hints this time, it implied that there probably weren't any troublesome entities on this floor. Beihan quickly found the doctor's office and picked up a pen and paper, beginning to write and sketch
After drawing for a while, he looked up to see Schiller's reflection in the opposite window, standing behind him and appearing interested in what he was drawing on the paper.
"Do you want to hear my thoughts?" Beihan scribbled as he spoke, "But the prerequisite is, stop saying things that mess with my mind."
Beihan saw Schiller behind him nod.
So Beihan lightly touched the paper with the tip of his pen, and spoke up a word: "Wind."
"The moment that examination room door opened, I felt something was off; there was too much wind in the corridor." Beihan spoke as he thought, "Of course, airlift is very common in these kind of corridors, but I clearly saw the windows weren't open when the gust blew in."
"The view outside the window was blurry, so there's no way to determine wind direction or force by seeing how the leaves or other objects are blown. But as I moved through the corridor, I realized the wind direction was very odd."
Beihan drew a sketch of two corridor structures on the paper.
The lower corridor was labeled as '1'; Beihan referred to it as the first corridor. The upper corridor was labeled as '2'; it was referred to as the second corridor.
The corridor where Schiller and Beihan had their psychological examination was the first corridor, which is the lower corridor. It is also the same corridor where Beihan had encountered the Hunting earlier. It became classified as the Hunting's territory.
Now, the corridor where Beihan currently was, was the second corridor, where he and Schiller had come after escaping the Hunting by moving up a floor. It was also the corridor where they had separated, and was now considered a temporary safe zone.
What this means is Beihan's movement was like this: from the first corridor with Schiller, they headed to the second corridor, separated from Schiller, back again to the first corridor where he encountered the Hunting. Then in order to evade the Hunting, he came back to the second corridor.
But during this time back and forth, he hadn't been using the same staircase.
If you consider the wall of the psychologist's office as the front, Beihan and Schiller originally went upstairs using the staircase on the right. After splitting from Schiller, he went left, down the stairs on the left side, confronted the Hunting, crossed the entire corridor, then climbed the stairs on the right side again.
In other words, he had made a circle between these two floors.
Beihan sketched a circle on the left half of the second corridor. "After Dr. Schiller and I separated, I've been going left. My face has always been toward the left."
"But after going downstairs, I kept going right, crossing the whole corridor again to climb the stairs on the right."
"However, no matter whether I went left in the second corridor or went right in the first corridor, the wind always blew towards me. I always found myself walking into the wind."
"If it was draft from the window, it couldn't possibly change to the absolute opposite direction in these two closely-placed corridors, let alone continuously. The wind was always blowing my hair forward."
"I've thought before, do our sensations in dreams really stem from the dream or are they some projection from the real world?"
"Although we can't see the real world in our dreams, does that mean we can't feel anything at all? Or do we actually feel things, but we interpret them as phenomena of the dream world?"
Beihan sighed. "Many children wet their bed in their dreams. That's because they dreamt that they've gone to the bathroom."
"Even after wetting the bed, many younger children don't wake up, sleeping till dawn, because they believe they peed in their dream. They treat the sensation of urination as a normal occurrence in dreams."
"Could the wind be the same?" Beihan asked, resting his chin on his knuckles. "There are windows in our dreams, so we accept the wind in the corridor as normal."
"Or perhaps someone designed the corridor this way, with windows on both sides, just to make us think that wind in the corridor is normal."
After pausing for a moment, Beihan added, "If the windows were open, it would be more deceptive, so why didn't they do that?"
"Do you know the scenario that most easily awakens people from a dream?" Shiller interjected.
Beihan paused, then exclaimed with sudden understanding, "It's falling, falling easily rouses people awake."
"So, he doesn't refuse to open the window out of unwillingness, but out of fear, because if we choose to jump from the window, it could awaken us."
"Could the way to break the stalemate be opening the window?" After contemplating it, Beihan shook his head, "I'm afraid it's not that simple."
"If the opponent has the power to create an entire hospital, they could absolutely create a window we could never open. Wasting time on forcibly tearing it down would be falling right into their trap."
As Beihan proposed his theories, he failed to notice the appreciative gaze from Shiller standing behind him.
"If we stick to my initial deduction that the wind doesn't come from the dream, but from reality - a sensation we experience in reality - then there's a crucial point to note."
"Regardless of which side of the corridor I walk on, the wind always comes from my front, indicating that in reality the wind is also blowing from my front."
"But in reality, the bus window is on my side." Beihan moved the tip of his pen to another sketch he had drawn. It was a blueprint of a bus, with each seat represented as a small rectangle.
He colored one of the rectangles and said, "This is my seat, right side, second row, nearest to the aisle, and the window closest to me is also the one on the right side, in the second row."
"If I recall correctly, this window was not open, and even if it was, the wind should be blowing from my left, not straight ahead."
"But if the wind is blowing straight from my front... is the bus door open?!"
Beihan widened his eyes in surprise. Clearly, he was thinking and deducing as he went along. He added a rectangular shape next to the seats on his sketch, then said, "I'm afraid this is true, because the front half of this bus doesn't have any windows that can be opened, and the door, positioned on the right side, is directly in front of me."
Suddenly he paused, his eyes fixated in front of him, "If the bus comes to a stop and opens its door for the wind to blow in, the wind wouldn't come directly at me. So, there's only one possibility left... "
"The bus is speeding, but the front door is open!"
Beihan stared at the paper in front of him with a solemn expression, "The killer devil must have a purpose in doing this. The most probable motive is that he wants to throw us out of the bus."
"Setting aside whether this would break the rules, getting thrown off a bus moving at high speed, without realizing it, is no different than being hit by a train. It would unquestionably result in severe injury or death."
"If our physical strength hadn't been weakened, we might have only suffered severe injuries, but now that everyone's physical condition has been significantly reduced, once thrown out, the probability of death is high, and killer devil's goal would be achieved."
"No, no, that's not it." Beihan suddenly realized something, "If this killer devil has already boarded the bus, ready to move us who are still asleep, I wouldn't possibly be still facing forward, therefore, I wouldn't be able to feel the wind blowing straight at me."
"So, if he doesn't move us, how will he get us to..."
Beihan abruptly froze.
"Wait, it's that theory again. We think we're performing an action in a dream, but in reality, are we just doing it in the dream?"
"What if, in our fear, we run, constantly moving forward? We think we are running in our dreams, but what if we are actually moving forward in reality?"
"Killer devil wants us to jump out of the bus ourselves!!!"
Beihan suddenly stood up, prepared to find his teammates and share his discoveries, but then he seemed to think of something and stopped.
Then he turned to look at the smiling reflection of Shiller standing behind him, as he said, "You knew it all along, didn't you? You knew that the killer devil's actions in the hospital were meant to herd us into running, so that's why you let out these insane personalities, changing the rules of the game."
Beihan glanced away slightly, then lowered his head to look at the paper in his hand, saying, "Come to think of it, there's something odd about the structure of this hospital. Why is every floor one long straight corridor, and why is the corridor especially lengthy?"
"I fear that our actions in the dream correspond to those in reality. If we just run in a straight line, our bodies will continue moving forward until we are near the bus door. The long straight corridor significantly accelerates this process."
"And the abnormalities he has created are solely meant to make us cross the corridor over and over to expedite our movement in reality."
"If we want to prove we're not mental patients, we are bound to investigate within the hospital, either searching for our own medical records or looking for diagnostic and medication records. Even if we didn't actively investigate, he would concoct a ghost girl to scare us, prompting us to flee."
"But now, with your crazed personalities unleashed, each with their own characteristics, many situations can't be resolved by simply running away. Like that so-called hunting, running away is the easiest way to get injured."
"And you, or maybe one of your other personalities, warn me and my teammates that we'd best follow your rules, while the illusions you show me are merely to intimidate me, letting me know the consequences of getting caught by them."
Shiller was smiling as he looked at Beihan. His voice echoed in Beihan's ear, "There's one thing you got wrong."
"What?"
"That wasn't a threat."
The next second, a blood-soaked figure descended in the reflection of the pen.