Doomsday Wonderland

The fact showed that even though Puppeteer and Lin Sanjiu did not go very well with each other, the difficulty of this Pocket Dimension would be elevated from hard mode to nightmare mode if they were to lose either of them.

Seeing the elegant white goose waddle in a clumsy swaying motion towards them, Lin Sanjiu quickly yelled, “Don’t let it enter the lane!” The goose stopped at the end of the lane. There was a mountain of snacks between them and the goose. Its two beady eyes glittered, staring straight at Puppeteer.

“Did the goose finish surveying the entire store? What did it see?” Lin Sanjiu did not turn off the Higher Consciousness Scan and asked, “Do you have a way to get that intel from it?”

Puppeteer huffed, as he was dismayed by her last question. Lin Sanjiu had no idea what he had done, but Puppeteer soon got the information she wanted from the goose.

The store looked small from the outside, but on the inside, it was pretty complete. The entire store was divided into eight departments and two fresh and cold departments. Each department had four back-to-back shelvings, and each shelf was responsible for one type of product. The cold and fresh section had a row of freezers that were connected from end to end that stored fresh products such as dairy, vegetables and fruits, freshly-pressed juice, and whatnots.

Unlike Lin Sanjiu, nothing stopped the goose midway, and it waddled through the entire store without facing any difficulties. However, the goose did not see anything that looked peculiar. From the information, this seemed like an ordinary convenience store.

Lin Sanjiu thought for a moment and queried again, “Did it not notice anything in particular? How about a broken jar or a toppled sample?”

Standing across the mountain of snacks, the goose’s head bobbed from side to side.

“What does it mean by that?” Lin Sanjiu asked, perplexed by the goose’s reaction.

“Send the goose to recheck the store.” Lin Sanjiu smiled bitterly. Even with Ji Shanqing’s brilliant brain, Lin Sanjiu was still having a hard time deciphering the situation. “I want every detail covered! I must know even if there’s the slightest crack on the wall.”

The goose rolled its eyes at Lin Sanjiu, then went on to do its bidding. Ironically, Puppeteer destroyed a person’s soul to turn them into one of his puppets, but each of his Special Items was more human than the other.

Lin Sanjiu looked on as the goose disappeared from her sight. Then, its master asked, “Why?”

She pondered for a moment before answering, “The Veda has infiltrated the entire Pocket Dimension. Now, it’s like we are writing a questionless paper. We are hand-tied, and since we don’t know the rules of the game, we’ll step right into the trap. However, no matter how overpowered the Veda is, there’s something they can’t change, and that is the fundamental nature of Pocket Dimension. For example, though it doesn’t have any questions, they still have to give us the test paper. Without the paper, there would be no examination. They cannot alter basic operational rules like this.”

“So, are you saying that this ‘test paper’ is the hidden information that must exist in this Pocket Dimension?”

“Exactly. Like the announcement earlier on.” Lin Sanjiu felt her ability to speak waning as she struggled to make her words as clear as possible. “I have been skeptical about this; since the Veda have altered the entire Pocket Dimension to their liking, why don’t they just delete the announcement as well? If they voided every clue and deleted every way out, they could trap us here for however long they want, and we wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. But once I thought about it further, I realized something. If the thing is related to the operational core of the Pocket Dimension, perhaps they may be able to do something to it, but they can’t. If they delete or change something, the Pocket Dimension might crash.”

“It seems that the ‘bright guy’ you asked for help from lives up to the title. So, what now?” Puppeteer asked indifferently.

“We wait.” Lin Sanjiu sighed.

“Wait? We are going to wait while we lose our ability to talk?”

“Even so, we have to wait. The only way to shatter this dilemma is to depend on how much information we can squeeze out of the Veda while they block out most of the parts.”

Puppeteer turned silent. Just when Lin Sanjiu wondered what was he doing, he began to speak again, “I don’t think you can squeeze anything bigger than a nut from them. Since they came prepared, they won’t let us go so easily.” This speech from Puppeteer sounded forlorn, but he did not say it out of depression or to discourage Lin Sanjiu. To him, this was normal. It was as if things were supposed to be like this.

“We still have to give it a shot,” Lin Sanjiu said, sounding positive. “I won’t give up until the last second. Even if I die and become a ghost, I’d do anything to drag my body out of here!”

Puppeteer let out a soft smile but did not comment on anything. They both waited in silence for the return of the goose.

Another hour passed. The hands showed no signs of going back to the dark, and worst of all, the effect of turning into chips was destroying them. Lin Sanjiu had long turned off the Higher Consciousness Mimicry. She felt that she was losing control over her body, and her sensation towards her surroundings was getting numb with every passing second. Since things had developed to this point, the Veda might already have obtained the information about her Higher Consciousness. The reason she turned off mimicry was to conserve her energy.

One hour had passed, and the second announcement rang out once more. “Mrs. Cleveland, I heard your handbag’s zipper is broken, isn’t it? I can give you a new one as compensation. Please don’t sue me because you slipped in my store.”

“Zipper?”

Lin Sanjiu returned from her stupefied pause only after the broadcast was gone. She felt her consciousness fading, and she found it harder to maintain her concentration. She tried roughly five times before she could resume the mimicry. The silver lining was that the Higher Consciousness had not wholly cut off from her. And once she had activated the Higher Consciousness Mimicry, the fog in her brain lifted.

‘This is the second time the broadcast mentioned about falling on the floor,’ Lin Sanjiu thought inwardly. Since the announcement mentioned Mrs. Cleveland falling on the floor twice, this should be the clue. Though Lin Sanjiu did not have the faintest idea about the connection between the falling and solving the catch-22 situation, starting there should not be wrong.

When she was thinking, she heard the pit-a-pat once again wafting from afar. She raised her eyes with some difficulty and met with the glance of the two beady eyes behind the mountain of snacks. The goose had returned!

“Puppeteer, can you still speak?” It was tough for Lin Sanjiu to speak now. The words that escaped her lips were dry and slow.

She waited fretfully for a moment, but there was no sound from her counterpart. As her heart plunged deeper and deeper into her stomach, she received a reply from Puppeteer. But like her, Puppeteer was not in good shape either. His voice was intermittent as if he was talking with a lisp. “The goose found something.”

Truth to be told, the thing the goose found was nothing more than a trivial discovery. Since Lin Sanjiu said it must tell her everything that it had seen when it returned, the goose just did what it was asked. Each piece of information the goose brought back was of little to no consequence.

Even though Puppeteer could hardly talk smoothly now, he still could not mask the annoyance in his words. “There’s a blurred-out price tag in the fourth department; the hotdog roaster on top of the cash register is emitting some weird smell; the Coke Zero is out of stock; there’s a stain on the floor of the fresh and cold area, but nobody is cleaning it; some of the cookies have passed the expiry date, but they’re still on the shelves…”

“Hold on.” Lin Sanjiu suddenly stopped Puppeteer. “A stain in the cold and fresh area? Can you ask the goose to elaborate more on it?”

The goose cast Lin Sanjiu a strange glance.

“There is a yellowish stain on the floor next to the freezer. It’s about the size of two palms put together. It seems like somebody spilled something on the floor, and it dried up. Anything more you want to know?”

“Yellowish… How does it smell? Was it sticky?”

“Who’d go and smell it? That’s what the goose said. By the way, the goose said it looks sticky because there is a strand of hair on the stain.” Puppeteer was already having a hard time talking, and he still needed to waste his energy to describe a patch of stain. Lin Sanjiu could sense that his anger was building up once again.

However, it wasn’t the time to concern herself about Puppeteer’s feelings. She spoke anxiously, “Send the goose back to the cold and fresh area. It’d be great if it can lick the stain… Why is it opening its beak?”

“The goose wants to bite you.”

“This is very important.” Lin Sanjiu was panic-stricken, but her tongue felt heavy. The words that escaped her lips almost clumped together. “Tell the goose if the stain is sweet and sticky, search the perimeter around the freezer. There must be something that doesn’t belong to the store!”

Like father like son, the goose glared at Lin Sanjiu menacingly. However, it still left to do its bidding, nonetheless. After the goose was gone, Puppeteer asked, shocking Lin Sanjiu, “What is your plan? Mind telling me?”

“Both of the announcements mentioned that Mrs. Cleveland tripped on the floor, so this must be the clue,” Lin Sanjiu said. Though she sounded confident, she was merely taking a guess. “The likelihood of the first announcement being fake is fifty-fifty, but that isn’t the case for the second one. In the second announcement, it said that the zipper on Mrs. Cleveland’s satchel is broken. And the most important thing is that it broke before the falling down incident.”

Puppeteer was quick with his mind, as he soon grasped what Lin Sanjiu was trying to say. “Do you suspect that when Mrs. Cleveland fell on the floor, she dropped something?”

“Exactly! The Pocket Dimension must be trying to tell us something through the announcement. Otherwise, it wouldn’t repeat the same thing again and again. Now, based on my speculation, Mrs. Cleveland dropped something. If we want to know what it is, we first have to find out where she fell. And according to the information the goose brought back to us, there might be a good chance that the stain in the cold and fresh area was what caused the incident.”

“Then, you want it to taste whether it is sweet or not…”

“It’s just a wild guess.” Lin Sanjiu smiled meekly. She was still under the influence of the grand prize; if she were her usual self, she would never have offered such a smile to Puppeteer. “How could there possibly be a yellow stain that would appear out of nowhere on the floor of a successful convenience store? I suspect that it must be a drink from the chilled department. Not only is the stain sticky, but the affected area is also small, and it looks like something has been spilled.”

The moment she finished speaking, the sound the goose made when it was walking rang out again. The goose appeared sulky, and it was holding something in its beak.