Dokidoki Voting
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[You have already sent an anonymous invite to your ‘Dokidoki Target’~ Will he/she also choose you? Waiting with heart thumping…]
After the choice, a gigantic heart animation is thumping, taking up over half the screen.
Heart thumping, yeah, right. Her heart has never ever beaten so slowly before.
After the girl with short hair has chosen her older sister, she throws her phone to the side and lies flat on the bed.
Although she’s kinda sorry for thinking like this when other players’ are fighting tooth and nail, but she was really relieved when she heard the rules in this challenge.
In fact, she is even a bit thrilled – who could’ve guessed she just had her first love-at-first-sight ever?
The Captain is really too handsome! Handsome and strong, and saved her countless times already. She thought she could even use this chance to get close to the Captain, if not for her older sister ruining it.
She buries her head into the pillow and makes muffled screams into it to blow off steam, then she relaxes back down after she feels tired.
Now… she wonders who the Captain picked.
[‘Dokidoki Voting’ is over! Have you managed to find the connection and mutually pick one another? The results will remain undisclosed for now. Maybe a few minutes later, someone will be knocking on your door already!]
The heart on the phone has disappeared, and the names and portraits of everyone else has been greyed out.
Du Yixin puts his phone down. Shortly after, someone has knocked on the door.
Without a peephole, observation is impossible. Du Yixin opens his door to find his older brother standing outside.
“Have you calmed down yet?” Du Heng walks inside, “I was really worried that you really wouldn’t pick anyone. Thank God.”
Du Yixin is quiet for a while before finally speaking up, “… ge, I’ll be ‘Loading’ tomorrow.”
Du Heng stops and turns back to his younger brother, asking, “what was that?”
The tone is really unfriendly, but Du Yixin is determined, and tells him, “I will kill myself and then ‘Load.'”
“So,” Du Heng gives it a thought and then asks, “you picked me today just to tell me this?”
“You should pick someone else tomorrow,” Du Yixin avoids the question, “I don’t want you to fall into danger.”
“Then why do you think I will just watch you fall into danger?”
Du Yixin lowers his head, and starts begging, “… please. I don’t want my actions to put you into danger, but I can also never forget everything.”
Du Heng ponders for a little bit before asking, “you’re going back to save those people you just told me about?”
“Yes.”
“How? Ying Sheng killed them. How do you plan on stopping Ying Sheng with just your current self?”
“…”
Du Heng leaves his younger brother enough time to think before concluding, “see, you’re just getting emotional. Your ability has a limited number of uses. Even if it’s unlimited, you’ll still be unable to change the past without solving the fundamental issue.”
“But I…” Du Yixin looks to be in pain, putting his hand on his forehead, “I have to try, I have to do anything; they just died right in front of me.”
Maybe it really was blood rushing to his head that he thought to kill himself immediately, but even after thinking about it calmly, he is still unable to accept it.
Du Heng sighs, looking at his younger brother, and tells him, “it’s not completely impossible for you to go back and save them.”
“Wh-, what should I do?”
“This Ying Sheng is never wary of you. So if you’re careful enough, you might be able to kill him.”
Du Yixin looks stupefied as he slowly puts his hand back down and blankly repeats, “kill… him?”
Du Heng would really much rather not talk of such things with his younger brother, but this seems to be the only way to get him to give up on those stupid ideas. In the end, no matter whether his younger brother may want to save or even kill people, he still cannot possibly let him ‘Load.’
“It’s Ying Sheng who killed them, so the fundamental solution is to kill him yourself. Can you do it?”
Du Yixin lowers his head back down again. He closes his eyes to try to picture it, but no matter how it might play out, he finds himself in greater and greater mental anguish.
And just knowing that is making him even more depressed. He mutters, “… I can’t.”
Du Heng slowly pats his younger brother on the head and begins soothing him, “in this game, death awaits at every corner. There is no way for us to fight that trend. Even I may not be able to escape such a fate one day; your ability is the only, and the most important means you have in fighting that. You can only ever use it for yourself. Do you understand?”
His younger brother is deep in thought now. Du Heng wants to keep up and try to root the stupid idea out of his dumb little head completely, but there is a sudden loud crash outside the room, spooking the both of them. Du Yixin is reflexively going to check the door, but his older brother pushes him back down to the seat and orders, “you’ll stay here.”
Then he walks over to the door, and tries to turn the handle, but fails. It’s not so much as locked as being blocked by some mysterious force.
The crashes outside is still continuing, or rather, it’s intensifying. There’s even the occasional sound of tearing skin and male screams.
If it’s on the same floor as them, then could it be Wang Lu? Did he fail to couple up in the end and something is happening to him?
“Is the door locked?” Du Yixin approaches his older brother.
Du Heng scolds him with his brows furrowed, “I thought I told you to stay there.”
And that’s all the conversation time they had before there’s suddenly a knock on their door.
‘Bonk’
‘Bonk, bonk!’
It begins intensifying in frequency and strength, as if it’s trying to break down the whole door.
It is hard to imagine the door still staying completely intact like this. While the mysterious force has blocked their exit, but it is also protecting them from things beyond the door. The unknown thing outside still fails to open the door.
The knocking suddenly stops as sudden as it came.
What is going on?
The brothers look each other in the eye, and Du Heng pulls his younger brother behind him, saying, “I’ll open the door with ‘Nullification.’ Stay away.”
“Are you going to save him?”
Du Heng doesn’t answer. Well, he would if he could, but he mostly wants to take a look at what the ‘thing’ outside is.
It’s important to follow the rules the NPCs laid out, but they must not obey them blindly either, or it could put them in highly disadvantageous positions.
Du Heng puts his hand onto the handle and activates his ability. A dim white light spreads out from his palm, and then begins enveloping the entire surface of the door, before sinking inside.
He turns the handle slowly, and this time, there is nothing blocking him.
He opens the door very little, and finds nothing in the corridor. If there wasn’t the countless number of dents and crashes throughout the walls, he’d have suspected they were both hallucinating the knocks.
That is when someone walks outside from the room next door.
Wang Lu?
No, he isn’t Wang Lu. Du Heng can see it. His appearance is Wang Lu, but his whole body is wrong. The man is walking with the hands and legs on the same side, and through the dim corridor lights, he can clearly see the man’s head having turned 180 degrees.
‘Wang Lu’ takes a few awkward steps as black smoke begins emerging from the orifices over his entire body. The smoke begins converging and forms a large shapeless entity.
The ‘man’ inside finally falls down, and the lighter in his pocket falls out, making a spark as it touches the floor. The entity seems to shake a little, and its colour fades just ever so slightly, being barely perceptible, before immediately returning to normal.
As if it can tell it is being observed, it begins to turn slowly.
Any more than this would be dangerous, and Du Heng immediately closes the door.
“What did you see?”
“It’s some kind of black shadow thing…” Du Heng knits his brows, and adds, “Wang Lu has been killed.”
Although Du Yixin doesn’t know him well, but he did see the name written on the door when they came up. He asks, “was he alone?”
“Yeah. It looks like he failed to match up,” Du Heng can remember the man hurriedly carrying the woman with the doll upstairs once the countdown started, to wake her up and couple up.
He must have failed, but whether it’s because the person is still unconscious or not having voted for him is unknown.
“Will the shadow thing try to come inside?”
“I don’t know,” Du Heng turns towards the door. It seems like one of the mechanisms of this challenge is that it forms a protective shield when two people are inside one room. He just nullified it, and has equivalently wiped out their own protection.
“Don’t worry, I’ll keep watch. You should go to sleep,” Du Heng is already used to staying up overnight given his many experiences in Instance conquering.
Du Yixin does not comply and sits onto the sofa.
Du Heng “…” Well, he’ll just fall asleep when he’s tired enough.
He underestimated his younger brother’s stubbornness, though. All the way until dawn, they’ve just effectively had a staring contest, neither falling asleep before the other.
As the first rays of sunlight begins flooding the room, the TV in the room suddenly blinks and turns on. The NPC is blabbering again.
“Buenos dias (good morning), has everyone enjoyed a lovely night?” The porcelain doll is still in his beach shorts and lying on the beach chair, but the difference is the couple of hotties dressed in bikinis serving him left and right.
It is enjoying their company while reporting, “I had a truly wild night last night. Let’s see what happened——Four have successfully spent the night in another’s company. Three ended up ‘Single dogs,’ and…” it pauses, “one has died.”
“Well, no big surprises. Appetites have to be built up, and it’s only been the hors d’oeuvres,” the doll says with a chuckle, “by the way, those who successfully coupled up yesterday can no longer pick each other again! You should diversify your selection, and work hard to find someone new to spend a night with.”
Then the TV shuts back down.
The night is over, and from what the NPC just said, the next time that ‘shadow’ thing might get to more than one person.
They open the door back out, and the ruined corridor from last night is now completely repaired. There is only the man’s body lying on the ground now, and immediately they realise that it is all crumpled – the insides; the organs and the bones, they’re all gone. The corpse is only the clean skin and clothes.
Without the bone structure, human skin sure looks farcical.
The others also come upstairs one by one. The girl with short hair takes one look and immediately turns away, too sickened by the scene.
“What happened?” The girl with glasses pushes her glasses up and asks the girl with the doll, “why did he end up single? Did you not pick him?”
The woman is caressing her doll’s hair with her slim fingers as she explains, “this humble lady already has someone in her heart, but he did not choose this humble lady.”
“The hell are you even going on about?!”
Du Heng asks, “did you pick Ying Sheng last night?”
The girl nods, and then says with a sad tone, “yet the personnage did not accept this humble lady’s feelings. Why?”
“Why else?” The girl with glasses mocks her, “you’re way too weird.”
“The personnage is no one as narrow-minded as that!” The girl is yelling with a sharp voice, “only this humble lady can understand him, so I believe he understands this humble lady as well. There must be some other obstacle. Yes! He might be illiterate, or he does not know how to utilise the smart electronic phone.”
It makes the girl with glasses speechless, “it sounds like this personnage of yours is really lame.”
“This humble lady will immediately enlighten him with this knowledge! Tonight he will surely be able to operate it,” she immediately runs off after that.
“Let’s assemble at the living room first,” Du Heng says, “there’s some points I want to discuss, and we also have to establish a voting scheme for tonight.”
The sisters nod and leave. Du Heng looks towards Du Yixin, who is searching the corpse.
“What is it?”
“Nothing, really, but I found this,” Du Yixin shows Du Heng a shiny new lighter.
Du Heng recognises it. It is the thing that fell out of the man’s pockets yesterday night.
“You should keep that,” Du Heng says, “I’m not 100% sure, but the shadow might be scared of it.”
Du Yixin flips the lighter open, and asks, staring at the little flame, “so it’s afraid of fire?”
Du Heng nods and explains, “in this large mansion, not even the kitchen has anything that could make an open flame. Since we can’t vote for each other tonight, if anything were to happen, you could use this to buy some time.”
Although he doesn’t want to believe it either, but he cannot trust his Group members to never pull anything on Du Yixin either.
“I see,” Du Yixin then puts the lighter away.
They don’t want to leave the body as-is either, so they put it back into his own room.
Du Heng then leaves downstairs first, and lets Du Yixin wash his face in the bathroom.
There’s an ensuite bathroom installed in each of the bedrooms, but it is only separated from the main room by a panel of glass. There is zero privacy inside. He turns on the faucet and floods his face in the flowing water. Slowly, he begins to feel a little more awake.
He observes the reflection in the mirror closely. There’s still water dripping down the man’s hair. There’s big black bags under the man’s eyes. He looks exhausted.
How many hours has it already been in this Instance? He’s been working like a spinning top without ever stopping or sleeping or even resting. The things just keep happening, and not just his body, but his mind and psychology is suffering as well.
Then, another form enters the reflection. It’s Ying Sheng, leaning on the wall with his arms crossed.
“Let’s talk,” he says.
TL’s notes: These chapters are really long, but well, after this the Instances will be shorter. We’re past the halfway point already, I think.
Oriental Rabbit 