"Lucky Favored by Vicious Spirits, your courage is surprising. This nightmare mission is both a test and a reward!"
"The name of the next game is Deep Water. It can bridge life and death, allowing you to see someone who has passed on."
"Mission requirements: At 3:30 AM, enter the bathroom alone, lock the bathroom door, turn off the lights, fill the bathtub with water, light a candle beside it, and then lie down inside."
"From 3:30 AM to 3:44 AM is the darkest stretch of night, the turning point where yin and yang shift over the course of the day. What you need to do is hold your breath at 3:44 and sink to the bottom of the pool, silently reciting the name of the person you wish to see most."
"When the clock reaches the crack between night and dawn, you will see them at the boundary between life and death."
"If you successfully see the person you long for, the mission is complete. If you never see them, the mission auto-completes after sixty seconds of holding your breath."
Having finished reading the mission details on the Black Phone, Chen Ge's feelings were complicated.
Compared to the first nightmare-level mission, this one seemed far simpler. Shutting one's eyes for thirty minutes in a terrifying environment demanded exceptional mental fortitude and extraordinary courage, whereas holding one's breath for sixty seconds was something the vast majority of people could manage.
But it was precisely because most people could do it that he felt uneasy. This was, after all, a nightmare-level mission — there had to be some unknown risk lurking within.
"The location is the same as the last nightmare mission — both take place in the bathroom. The difference is that this time I need to sink into the tub and hold my breath for sixty seconds." He thought through the entire mission process carefully. Including preparation time, it was only a matter of roughly ten-odd minutes. What horrifying thing could happen in such a short window?
Chen Ge felt himself wavering — not just because the mission looked relatively simple, but because of one line in the mission description: it can bridge life and death, letting you see a longed-for person who has passed on.
The more critical the situation, the calmer Chen Ge became. He sat in his chair, turning over a certain possibility in his mind.
His parents had disappeared at an abandoned hospital in the suburbs, leaving behind the Black Phone and a cloth doll. Just as he was about to give up on the haunted house, he had activated the Black Phone.
Later, during the first nightmare-level mission, the cloth doll had become the key item that stopped the monster in the mirror from getting out. What was worth pondering was that both the doll and the Black Phone were relics left by his parents. Was it possible that these two things had been deliberately left behind for him?
If everything really had been arranged by them, then this second nightmare-level mission was worth savoring.
"Could they be trying to reach me this way, to pass along more information?" Of course, this was only Chen Ge's speculation. In truth, whether or not the nightmare-level mission had been set up by his parents, he would undertake it regardless.
Bridging life and death, seeing the person he wished to see — for Chen Ge, this was an opportunity to confirm whether his parents still existed in this world.
If he couldn't see them, that would mean his parents had merely gone missing and were still alive.
If he could see them, that would prove his initial guess: the Black Phone had indeed been left behind because his parents had something to tell him. Perhaps hidden within the phone was their true final message.
"Looks like I don't have a choice." Chen Ge glanced at his watch. It was 2:55 AM — thirty-five minutes until the mission began. "Breaking those mirrors on the third floor ate up too much time. This puts me in a tight spot."
The mission required lying in a bathtub full of water, but the only room in the entire haunted house that had a bathtub was in the Midnight Pursuit scene.
At the end of the employee corridor was a room connected to one with a bathtub. When Chen Ge had been scaring He Shan and the others, it was through that room that he had entered and exited the scene.