Clown Game
Chapter 104 - 104 92 Not 3 days 2 sleeps Finished

Chapter 104: Chapter 92 Not 3 days 2 sleeps! Finished Chapter 104: Chapter 92 Not 3 days 2 sleeps! Finished Chen Xiao entered his own room, the door made no sound, the bed was still relatively clean, the bathroom, the showerhead, the television—everything was as familiar as if they had already existed in his mind.

But that was impossible, for he had just checked into the hotel, the first time walking up the stairs, the first time pushing the door open, the first time entering this room.

“Such a strange sense of familiarity,” Chen Xiao muttered to himself. He then walked over to the small window and glanced down.

Outside was an open space, where there were… two family cars parked.

At this moment, “Memory Flashback” occurred again, and in that memory, the scene before him should have “four cars” parked instead.

The memory of “four cars” was so vivid, almost indistinguishable from the clarity of the current scene with “two cars.” It was as if a segment of the world’s process had birthed two different branches from this point, and he remembered it all.

The sensation was incredibly mysterious, but Chen Xiao wasn’t overly surprised, just smiled thoughtfully to himself.

…

In the following hours, Chen Xiao could feel the sensation of déjà vu constantly accompanying him. With every lift of his hand, every breath he took, it was as if he could foresee the future. However, this feeling only occurred in the instant before he made the corresponding move, so he couldn’t change anything.

“Hmm… It’s about time for dinner,” he said to himself out of boredom.

At that moment, he vividly remembered that at some point previously, in the same place, using the same tone, he had said the exact same words. He could even recall that in the next second, a middle-aged woman’s shriek like that of a pig being slaughtered would echo from below.

She would say, “Dinnertime!”

Indeed, almost as soon as his thought ended, a scream indistinguishable from his memory rang out from downstairs, “Dinnertime!!”

Following that, the woman from room 204 came out, of course, as if Chen Xiao had known all along.

He pondered, reminisced, and searched for differences between the “suddenly appearing memories” and the “current scenes.”

He arrived at the dining area, where the landlady was fiddling with pots and pans in the kitchen. Different from his memory, however… there was only one person sitting at the table at that moment, that woman.

In his memory, there should have been a couple as well.

Chen Xiao sat down and asked directly, “Do you remember a couple? The man about 30 years old, and the woman, a college student?”

The woman was taken aback, looking inexplicably at Chen Xiao, then showed a disgusted expression: “Are you talking to me?”

Chen Xiao didn’t reply because he already knew the answer.

What followed was like a rehearsal of beforehand

The next morning, the couple, sticking close to each other, checked into the hotel.

That night, Chen Xiao clearly heard the sound of two showers and the almost all-night-long chirping and murmur of lovers, exactly as in his memory. On the morning of the third day, the couple, the woman, and Chen Xiao had breakfast together. On the stairs leading to the third floor, the woman from the couple froze for a moment. Chen Xiao knew it was a brief episode of “Memory Flashback.”

Around 11 a.m. on the third day, the driver uncle arrived after having driven for a full day and night. Upon entering his room, he immediately fell into a deep sleep until he was awoken by hunger in the evening for dinner. That evening’s events matched seamlessly with Chen Xiao’s memory, including the moment when the woman from room 204 froze at the staircase.

Only at this point did Chen Xiao finally stitch together this segment of “Memory Flashback” with his “actual experiences.”

It was like a dream lasting for more than a dozen hours, except this dream began much earlier, making Chen Xiao mistakenly believe that the third day of his stay, “the 25th,” was the first day, “the 23rd.”

And that dream seemed to run backwards, starting from the third day, racing back, desperately trying to converge with his self of “the 23rd.” The people missing from his dream weren’t “disappeared,” but rather hadn’t arrived yet.

The anomalous item involved in this task was actually an “Anomalous Phenomenon” – within this guesthouse, the phenomenon of “Memory Flashback” was amplified!

Ordinary people might experience it very frequently, but as for Chen Xiao? Who knows if it’s because he’s “mentally unwell” or for some other reason, anyway, his flashback lasted incredibly long, all the way to the 25th.

It’s worth mentioning that on the “24th,” Chen Xiao was lying in bed when he suddenly felt a bit unwell, sneezed, and then for some inexplicable reason, he glanced at the clothes rack on the wall. For a moment, he seemed to think there ought to be a pair of shoes there. And when he went to the bathroom, he kept feeling that the toothbrush was out of place.

After dinner on the 25th, Chen Xiao sorted through all the periods of “memory” and “flashback,” so he clicked the “Mission Complete” button on his phone and then left the guesthouse.

This task lasted three days, and during his time at the hotel, Chen Xiao slept twice.

Although it seemed like three days and two nights, Chen Xiao had another segment of memory, so adding up the “flashback memories,” it should be actually “longer” than just three days and two nights.

…

…

As for the “Memory Flashback” or “déjà vu,” Chen Xiao also gave it some thought during the time when he had nothing else to do.

“Precognition?” “Calculation?” Or “recollection?”

All he could do was guess.

Could it be that every single thing is predetermined, and that every action we take, every seemingly trivial word we utter could lead to countless divergences?

The world is like a huge tree that grows every minute, every second, constantly evolving into infinite possibilities.

And at this moment, my memory is just one leaf among the myriad tiny branches that have sprouted from this colossal tree. And one day, two leaves inadvertently touch each other, and their memories briefly intersect.

An even more frightening speculation is that there might be some higher-level entities that have prepared numerous futures for everyone, and we are just moving towards a predetermined conclusion that’s been laid out long before through our different choices.

So, can humans truly discern what is real and what is fake?

During each “Memory Flashback,” are we really experiencing it for the first time?

Or, is it just that we’ve done something similar before, and when we encounter another event, our brain automatically merges the two together?

It’s like having read a novel before, the content of which has taken root deep in our minds, and when we see another similar novel, we automatically splice the two books together, creating a sense of familiar “déjà vu.”

No one knows the real reason. There are too many unknowns in this world.

Of course, it’s this unknown that makes the world “interesting.”

…

Chen Xiao walked out of the Sheng Fu Hotel, hands in his pockets, wearing a wrinkled mask.

After a while, an uncomfortable laugh echoed through the night.

“Heh… heh… heh”

(Cough cough, sticking out my tongue – jokes aside, last year I really did hide under my blanket and laughed ehehe while watching thrillers. “Zhou Lin” has also started, and I just hope San Zha updates quicker. Well, if urging worked, Bilibili would have millions fewer bullet screen comments a month.)