Theoretically, using Toshima Shiki for the test made more sense, but given the "omniscience" he had displayed earlier, Fu Qian ultimately chose Loretta.
This world offered little entertainment anyway. Sending her off early was no bad thing.
Now he had two bottles of sedatives left, and three people to give them to.
That was right. Even though the world was "collapsing" toward Kelly's perception, Fu Qian hadn't excluded her from his list.
Who said a mental patient couldn't be a doctor?
All that remained was to pick two people from the final three and have them drink in order.
And Fu Qian's first choice was Kelly.
The previous test was about much more than just making another lucky guess.
Fu Qian began to ponder a question: what was the "reason" the Containment Conditions required him to administer them in a specific order?
...
"Wh... y?"
Kelly was clearly unwilling to accept this development.
"I have never believed in any 'child of destiny' nonsense."
Faced with her utter bewilderment, Fu Qian smiled and shook his head.
"I find it hard to believe a five-percent probability would just happen to hit. A sixty-percent chance, on the other hand, makes far more sense."
"Wh... at..."
Kelly was visibly confused, but Fu Qian had no intention of explaining it to her.
The next moment, the red liquid formed a thin stream and poured into her forced-open mouth.
"Amidst the anxious unknown, we've taken another step toward the correct answer."
Laying the unconscious Kelly on the floor, Fu Qian looked at the empty bottle in his hand and let out a soft sigh.
To put it plainly, those two probabilities were quite simple.
Having Nancy and Loretta drink the sedatives earlier was undoubtedly done without a single clue to the underlying pattern.
Under purely random conditions, correctly picking two out of five people in the exact right order carried a mere five-percent chance of success.
As mentioned earlier, Fu Qian never bought into any 'child of destiny' nonsense. Probability was always a thing worthy of respect.
Rather than believing a one-in-twenty chance had occurred, he leaned toward a different possibility: the "correct" sequence wasn't actually that strict. He simply had to avoid picking the one person who absolutely couldn't drink the sedative.
Put simply, out of the five of them, there was one who could not take the sedative, lest disastrous consequences follow. That was why the task demanded a specific "order."
The only actual rule for sequencing the five was that this specific person had to be placed last. Everyone else would drink, and he would not.
Following that train of thought, the chance of him randomly picking two people in a row without hitting "him" was sixty percent.
Fu Qian obviously preferred those odds.
Of course, the odds were now forty percent. He had just navigated a one-out-of-three choice, leaving only one bottle.
His reason for choosing Kelly directly was also quite simple—Fu Qian suspected Sam was that special individual.
...
From the very beginning, this world had clearly been surreal, highly unlikely to exist in reality.
And when it came to dreams and illusions, Fu Qian was already something of an expert.
Taking the frequently used Lucid Dream as an example, if one were to categorize the characters inside, Fu Qian himself was essentially an observer.
He perceived the big picture and guided its changes, much like he had done with Nancy and Kelly in this scenario.
At the same time, every dream needed an anchor to sustain it—the core subject tied directly to the rules for ending the dream.
Among the remaining people, Fu Qian believed Toshima Keiji fit that role.
His reasoning was based on Keiji's impossibly detailed awareness of every piece of information. He was undoubtedly the person most likely to say, "This is my dream."
That was also why Fu Qian had subconsciously left him for last.
Ensuring the dream's maximum stability before everyone else took their dose was a necessary precaution.
Outside of these specific roles, Sam stood out as a glaring anomaly.
He knew absolutely nothing, yet his reactions were incredibly sharp.
As noted earlier, he functioned exactly like a "radar."
This tied back to the question he had just been pondering: what were the risks of getting the order wrong?
Drawing on his extensive experience, Fu Qian doubted that a mortal's dream could generate any internal crisis dangerous enough for the Warehouse to care.
That meant the true risk most likely came from the outside.
And the concept of a "radar" was far too easy to link to an external threat.
Fu Qian's guess was that Sam himself acted as a kind of alarm.
Within this dream, there was a possibility of triggering his alarm and drawing a violent reaction from the outside world.
Therefore, he had to tread carefully, using the sedatives to evacuate the crowd and ensure the alarm remained silent. That was the real reason the Warehouse had sent him in.
Based on all of this, Fu Qian formulated his bold hypothesis, which had led to his current three-for-three success streak.
Now he was at the final step. A one-in-two choice.
It was like playing Russian roulette with one bullet in the cylinder, and the trigger had already been pulled three times.
He was only one step away from success, but the danger had multiplied.
Ignoring Sam, Fu Qian fished the Key out of Kelly's pocket and headed straight downstairs.
Letting the radar naturally shatter alongside the dream seemed like the most reasonable course of action.
...
Is he still busy?
Rushing to Toshima Shiki's residence, Fu Qian knocked on the door but received no response.
At the same time, a distinct scent caught his attention.
This guy isn't trying to cremate himself with those candles, is he?
With a sigh, Fu Qian used a piece of wire and a few makeshift tools he'd picked up along the way to deal with the door lock and the security chain.
The sight that awaited him inside was truly astonishing.
With his back to the door, Toshima Shiki was slowly submerging his face into a pool of dark red liquid.
The strange scent he had noticed earlier was emanating straight from it.
No wonder he'd asked for a full ten jin of them. It looked like the man had melted down every single candle to boil a pot of liquid wax.
In that case, it was a good thing there had been a bunch of low-temperature candles in the mix, otherwise his physical state would be in serious jeopardy.
Even so, when Toshima Shiki lifted his face, the skin around the edges of the wax mask was already scalded red.
His entire head was completely encased in the dark red wax.
What a ruthless guy.
"Can you hear me?"
Fu Qian stepped forward and helped the already-struggling Toshima Shiki peel a chunk of wax away from his nose and mouth, asking casually as he did so.
"I can..."
Freeing himself from the Suffocation, Toshima Shiki answered with difficulty.
"You were trying to seal off your own eyes and ears, weren't you? Is that thing really so terrifying?"
"It is..."
Toshima Shiki panted heavily.
"But I feel much better now. I can barely hear a thing."
Is it really that effective? Then how are you still hearing me?
Swallowing his retort, Fu Qian pulled out the last bottle of sedatives.
"Drink this. You'll feel even better."
...
Toshima Shiki's reactions seemed noticeably sluggish, but the temptation of "feeling even better" was clearly too powerful to resist.
A few seconds later, he blindly reached out, accepted the bottle of sedatives, and downed it in a single gulp.
An instant later, his entire body went limp and he collapsed forward, plunging straight toward the pool of scalding wax.
In the end, however, he was spared the fate of taking another dip in the pot.
Because before his body could even hit the ground, everything before his eyes shattered into nothingness like a bursting bubble.
[Task completed. Containment of No. 2-506 successful]
Along with it came a deeply satisfying system prompt.
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