Chapter 175: The Disappearing “Roommates” (Please Check the Author’s Note～)

Chapter 175 The Vanishing "Roommates" (Please check the author's note~)

"Hah, hah—"

The cold air rushed into her nostrils as Researcher B abruptly sat up. The eerie metallic room before her had vanished, leaving only her ordinary staff dormitory, unchanged as always.

Was that... just a nightmare?

Researcher B clutched her head, uncertain.

She had just dreamed of a square room, its walls constructed entirely of impenetrable metal. The room was empty, save for silent troughs of water encircling the space, herself, and...

A woman trapped in a straitjacket.

The mysterious voice from the room’s ceiling still seemed to echo in her ears. Researcher B could vividly recall the self-proclaimed witch, every word she uttered, the amused tone and deliberate pauses:

"Welcome to the Witch’s Box."

"To leave this place, you must play a game with me—"

And the rule of the game was simple: to move forward, one had to sacrifice something, offering it to the sealed door.

The first door demanded a random day’s worth of memories or one little finger.

It sounded like a macabre demand.

As she pondered, Researcher B’s gaze swept across the room, once again landing on the woman in the straitjacket.

The woman’s face was obscured, but she suddenly twitched, writhing faintly like some pale grub on the ground, startling Researcher B into taking an instinctive step back.

She slipped her hand into her pocket and felt something thin, hard, and cold.

As a former medical student, Researcher B recognized it immediately—it was a small scalpel.

Her fingers trembled, and the sharp blade left a shallow cut on her fingertip. A bead of red welled up from the crescent-shaped wound, like a crimson crescent.

Researcher B puzzled. Why did she have a scalpel on her?

Though she had often held one during her lab classes, performing precise dissections, ever since her professor had recommended her and she was recruited into the Longinus Research Institute...

She hadn’t touched a scalpel in a long, long time.

This was Researcher B’s first encounter with the PTSD from witnessing human experimentation.

Back then, she had been overjoyed, thinking she had landed a great job. But the moment she followed her mentor into the lab, the horrific reality assaulted her—human forms swathed like enormous cocoons, test subjects grotesquely transformed, would-be colleagues joking about human livestock...

It was a shattering revelation.

Like a bucket of ice water dumped over her head, she instantly realized this was no legitimate research institution.

Researcher B vomited on the spot, later displaying severe physiological distress, psychological trauma, and other side effects. Her mentor shook his head in disappointment, lamenting:

"What a shame. I had such high hopes for your research talent... Yet you couldn’t even cross this final threshold?"

Under her mentor’s disappointed gaze, Researcher B felt a rebellious flicker of relief.

Yes, she couldn’t cross that threshold.

She couldn’t betray her own humanity.

At the peak of her trauma, Researcher B couldn’t even use knives or sharp, reflective objects in daily life. Her frantic, hysterical outbursts successfully dashed her mentor’s last hopes.

She was finally "abandoned," written off as useless by the institute.

Rated as having unacceptably low competence, Researcher B was relegated to menial tasks—counting lab equipment, cleaning, printing documents, running errands...

Of course, she longed to return to a normal life. It had been three years since she last saw her family. Her loved ones' faces had grown indistinct with time, like overexposed old photographs.

But Longinus would never allow her—or any of them—to leave.

The institute's rule was absolute: once you joined, you became a silent keeper of secrets, a prized or disposable asset, destined to dedicate everything—your life, intellect, and freedom—to the cause.

Researchers who accessed the institute’s core secrets were especially bound. The only way out was as a corpse, incapable of speaking or leaking secrets.

Researcher B tightened her grip on the scalpel in her pocket, warily scanning her surroundings.

So, what did this strange room signify?

Was it a variable unrelated to Longinus, or an even deeper abyss?

"The Witch’s Box"—could it really be the codename for some new project? Had she, judged worthless, been turned into a test subject?

Suppressing her racing thoughts, Researcher B turned her attention to the other person in the room.

It was easy to deduce that the game’s rules required both participants to offer a sacrifice, likely forcing them to compete or even resort to violence. But...

In this empty room, did the captives’ struggle even matter?

Researcher B wasn’t altruistic enough to vow to bear all the sacrifices herself, to open the door and ensure the stranger survived. But neither was she so cruel as to ignore the other person, helplessly trapped in the straitjacket, unable to act or resist.

As an ordinary person raised with ethics, she simply believed the other deserved the right to choose and be heard.

Gritting her teeth, she gripped the scalpel, fighting the tremors in her hands as best she could, and cut through the restraints binding the other’s limbs.

The straitjacket was difficult to remove, layered and tightly secured, engineered to prevent escape. It had to be undone starting from the feet and back.

Researcher B worked methodically, but to her surprise, the other woman remained perfectly compliant—docile, patient, even shifting to assist.

As if the person inside had always known her, trusted her completely, certain she meant no harm.

When the final restraint around the neck loosened, the heavy straitjacket slid to the ground. Researcher B’s eyes widened in disbelief.

The woman beneath had her exact face!

In an instant, Researcher B’s awareness fragmented.

In the dream that followed, she felt herself being restrained, pinned, forced to lie motionless on the cold floor. The gleam of metal walls shimmered before her eyes. Then, someone released her, and her body gradually grew lighter...

And then, she woke up, back in her familiar dorm.

As if it had all been nothing but a strange dream.

Rubbing her head, Researcher B checked the time: 6:30 AM.

She dug back under the covers and slept for two more hours before rising as usual to wash up, preparing for another mind-numbing routine.

But when she opened the dormitory door, she stopped cold—

Why were there so few staff in the institute today?

The entire corridor was deathly quiet, with several dormitory doors even gaping open, swaying faintly in the breeze as if their occupants had left in too much of a hurry to close them.

But had these doors been open all night?

Something’s wrong.

Researcher B's gaze wandered over the doors, feeling that ever since last night's dream of the "Witch’s Box," something deeply unnatural had occurred.

She approached the open doors, about to call out the names of their occupants, but the words died in her throat.

Wait…

What were their names again?

She shook her head, Researcher B frantically searched her memory, only to realize in horror—

She couldn’t remember anything about these people!

It was as if real people had faded into shadows in her mind, rapidly fading away, making her subconsciously dismiss their existence—even the very fact that she was forgetting them!

"Wait."

Researcher B took a few steps back, backing into her own room. As she looked around, she muttered to herself, "There are two beds, two desks—this is a standard two-person dorm. There are even two toothbrush cups on the sink… I should have a 'roommate'!"

"Where is she?"

When it hit her, Researcher B went ice-cold.

She walked to her roommate’s desk, hoping to trigger her memory by searching for items like the other’s lab ID card or photos, but her fingers phased straight through the objects on the desk.

Traces of her roommate’s existence turned transparent between her fingers before winking out of existence, like bubbles popping without a trace.

Researcher B stood paralyzed for a long time, deciphering the phenomenon before her:

Perhaps it wasn’t her memory that was faulty.

Rather, some force was erasing certain people’s existence, like erasing chalk from a board, leaving behind only a world that continued to function as usual.

Researcher B murmured, "Is this related to the witch’s game?"

As she spoke, she slipped her hand into her pocket, absentmindedly rubbing her fingertips—only to feel a sudden, jolt of pain.

"Ah!"

She immediately pulled her hand out and examined it. Under the bright light, a fresh, crimson cut marked the center of her fingertip, like a tiny, curved red moon.

The witch’s brand.

……

For divine beings like Truth Key, who were forged from the pursuit of knowledge, spending days and nights analyzing oceans of data without leaving the office was perfectly normal.

What ordinary lifeforms saw as torture, a psychological torment, Truth Key considered an unparalleled pleasure—nothing was more delightful than methodically dissecting knowledge and then absorbing it like a parched sponge!

This incremental march to truth was an addiction for any creature with the bloodline of Fallen Knowledge.

After four straight days of research, Truth Key finally surfaced from its focus and decided to check on the progress of the various labs.

Today, the labs seemed quieter and emptier than usual, stripped of their usual buzz.

Only a few researchers in white lab coats hurried past, their footsteps dispelling the creeping sense of unease rising in Truth Key’s mind.

Yes, this was the research institute it knew!

Though Truth Key vaguely noticed that these researchers’ faces seemed unfamiliar, it had always struggled at distinguishing human features—just as humans couldn’t discern the beauty or ugliness of jellyfish.

So, it dismissed this sense of unfamiliarity.

Within the institute, Truth Key was confident in its absolute, overwhelming superiority in rank, which meant it had no reason to pay undue attention to faceless worker ants.

In its eyes, test subjects were expendable, and researchers were merely higher-grade instruments.

Tools weren’t worth attention, remembrance, or caution.

Their only value lay in using their meager human intellect to perform simple calculations and rote procedures in experiments.

As the researchers entered Lab No. 06, Truth Key quickly recalled that this lab was working on the "Collective Consciousness of the Mental Sea" project.

If successful, the minds and souls of all organization members would be linked together, stripped of the "freedom" and "individual consciousness" deemed superfluous by those in power, and transformed into a vast hive-mind akin to a bee colony.

By then, Longinus would no longer need to worry about betrayal.

Every member’s mind would be under the hive’s dominion, turning them into obedient, faceless drones.

At that point, the Surveillance Division would become obsolete, and Shadow of the Mind would be repurposed for other fields—or perhaps…

Become one of the high-level test subjects, fuel for another breakthrough.

The thought filled Truth Key with indescribable excitement.

Though its previous creation, "01-Curse Domain·Moth," had failed—falling short of the heights it had envisioned—its enthusiasm for experimentation remained unshaken. It still longed to create a god!

Not a false god like Hekate, spawned from stolen divinity through twisted means, but a true deity sculpted from nothing by its own hands.

A god wielding supreme authority—

And Truth Key desired to be the one controlling that god.

Only by mastering the supreme art of "god-making" could it truly reach the pinnacle of research, knowledge, and truth, surpassing all its kin—even all of creation!

So, Truth Key called out to the researchers, "How is your project progressing?"

The researchers paused. The one at the front slowly turned its head, its mask twitching over a distorted mouth as if smiling. "It’s progressing smoothly. Would you like to come in and inspect our results?"

Truth Key’s bulbous singular eye fixed on the researcher, finally realizing the horror.

The researcher’s body remained motionless from the neck down, but its head had rotated a full 180 degrees backward, staring at it with an eerie, inviting smile.

Even if Truth Key couldn’t distinguish human faces, it knew fundamental anatomy—human heads weren’t supposed to twist 180 degrees on their necks!