Chapter 9 8

3:03 Our point of view returns to Eri Asai's room.Looking around, the situation in the room is the same as before, it's just that the night is getting darker with the passage of time, and the silence is getting more sluggish. —No, no, not really.Something has changed, something in the room is very different from before. The difference was immediately apparent: the bed was empty.Eri Asai's figure was no longer on the bed.From the fact that the bedding was not messy, it didn't look like she woke up and went somewhere while we were away.Everything on the bed was intact, but there was no trace of Ellie sleeping on the bed just now.strangeness!What happened?

look around. The TV is still on.The room looked exactly the same as before.Spacious empty room without furniture.Fluorescent lights with no personality.Linoleum floor.However, the TV screen is as stable as a new TV at this time, there is no noise, the image is sharp, there is no snowflakes, and the wiring is firmly connected wherever it is—no matter where it is.The bright TV screen illuminates the room, like a bright moon shining on a deserted grassland.Objects in the room were without exception placed under the magnetic influence of the television, although the influence was somewhat strong.

TV screen.The Faceless Man was still sitting in that chair.Brown suit, black leather shoes, white dust, and a glossy mask tightly attached to the face.The posture is also the same as the last time I saw it: back stretched, hands neatly placed on the knees, slightly leaning forward to look at what is in front of me.A pair of eyes are hidden behind the mask, but it's not hard to tell from the atmosphere that he's staring at something.What is it that looks so engrossing?The camera moved along the man's line of sight as if to answer our questions.In front of his sight was a plain single wooden bed—Eri Asai slept there.

We looked back and forth between the empty bed in this room and the one pushed out on the TV screen, comparing every detail.No matter how you look at it, the two are the same bed, and the bed cover is the same bed cover, but one bed is on the TV screen, and the other is in the room on the other side, and Eri Asai is sleeping on the bed on the TV screen. We presumed that the one over there was the real bed.The real bed was moved to the other side along with Eri Asai during the time we looked away (we had been out of this room for more than two hours), and there was only a substitute bed left here—probably as a Symbols that fill the empty space that should exist there.

Allie continued to sleep drowsily on the bed in that different world, just like when she was in this room.Sleeping with exactly the same beauty, with exactly the same richness.She didn't realize that she (perhaps her own body) had been moved into the TV screen by unknown hands.Even the blinding fluorescent lights lining the ceiling do not illuminate the lower floors of its sleeping trenches. The faceless man watched Eri from inside the tent with his invisible eyes, and his ears that concealed his shape relentlessly pointed at her.Whether it's Eri or the Faceless Man, they always maintain the same posture.The two are like mimic animals, each reducing breathing, lowering body temperature, keeping silent, relaxing muscles, and covering all the outlets of consciousness.What we are witnessing may at first glance appear to be still images, but it is not.That is a live image transmitted to us in real time.Whether it is the room on this side or the room on the other side, time passes in the same way.Both are in the same temporality.This is not difficult to see from the slowly rising and falling shoulders of the faceless man from time to time.Regardless of our respective intentions, we are all moving downstream in the river of time at an equal speed.