Lu Mi refused outright.
"This isn't an instance. There's no rule saying you have to stay in your own dorm..."
Roman was still trying to persuade him, but Lu Mi was already contacting the administrative office through his wristband.
"Found it. Your dorm is in Building 5, Room 710." Lu Mi glanced around. "It's the one right across from here."
Even though their rooms were so close, Roman blinked his red eyes. "You don't understand. I'm actually really scared of being alone."
"Oh. Don't believe you."
In the end, Lu Mi couldn't withstand his relentless pleading, and they each compromised a little.
"Let's be clear. You can stay until nine tonight, at the latest. You have to go back to your own room to sleep."
Roman obediently nodded.
Lu Mi pressed his finger against the scanner beside the door. It accepted his fingerprint with a beep, and the door opened.
According to the girl in the elevator, the room was identical to the bedroom he had lived in back in the real world.
Perhaps the familiar surroundings would help him remember something.
Beyond the door, large patches of gray-white paint were peeling off the walls.
The table, chairs, bed, and cabinets were all wooden, covered with white dust sheets. The balcony was crowded with potted plants, along with a rocking chair that swayed in the breeze.
No matter how he looked at it, this was an elderly person's home.
Lu Mi went over and opened all the cabinets and drawers to look inside. The clothes stored in them were also styles worn by elderly women.
Roman behaved himself, following Lu Mi around the room without touching anything.
Puzzled, Lu Mi was about to close the drawer in front of him when Roman reminded him, "Pull it out a little farther. There seems to be something else inside."
Several secondary school textbooks lay at the back of the drawer.
When he flipped them open, he found almost every page densely marked with circles and annotations in red ink.
Soon, they found handwritten cards and gifts from students elsewhere in the room, along with a thick stack of photographs.
Most were graduation group photos. Aside from the students changing with each graduating class, every photo also featured numerous teachers.
"The owner of this room must be an elderly teacher who's already retired." Lu Mi stared at the most recent group photo, hoping to discover something.
While playing the jigsaw puzzle game with the Ghost Infant, he had briefly remembered a stooped elderly person reaching toward him and calling him "mi" something.
There were three elderly female teachers in the group photo. At a glance, the kindly, gray-haired old woman in the middle immediately caught his attention.
Could it be her?
The longer Lu Mi looked at the old woman, the more familiar she seemed.
Vague, fragmented images surfaced from the memories that had been forcibly erased.
In those images, he seemed very short, not even reaching the old woman's knees. Yet sometimes he became tall enough to look down at her.
The moment he realized this, a sudden pain struck Lu Mi's head, a hundred times worse than when he had tried to remember things in the instance.
He clutched his head, his awareness scattering for a moment.
When he opened his eyes again, he found himself sitting on the floor.
Roman crouched beside him, supporting his back with one hand while stroking his forehead with the other through a rough fabric glove.
He still wore his mask, but this was the first time Lu Mi had seen his exposed eyes and the contours outlined by the mask at such close range.
Lu Mi's heart fluttered. He had to admit, Roman really was beautiful.
Roman asked worriedly, "Are you okay?"
Lu Mi braced a hand against the floor and spent a moment recovering in his arms. "...Water."
"If you can't remember, don't force yourself." Roman helped him onto the bed, then handed him a glass of water. "Memories aren't necessarily happy. Sometimes forgetting makes life easier."
"How do you know I lost my memory?" Holding the water, Lu Mi raised his eyes warily.
"You're so unfamiliar with the room you used to live in. It wasn't hard to guess."
Roman sat on the edge of the bed and changed the subject. "Let me stay tonight. I'm really worried about you. Please?"
Lu Mi stared into his eyes, once again inwardly marveling at how outrageously beautiful the man before him was, enough to make anyone's heart soften.
So he answered gently:
"No."
When Roman returned to his own room, he slammed the door extremely loudly.
Lu Mi got up early the next morning. After all, he would have to enter another instance before long.
His room was full of things for an elderly person, with no trace of a teenage boy having lived there.
He activated his wristband to try shopping through the interface, only to discover that the popularity value in his status bar had risen from zero to over three hundred.
His gold coins had also increased by several dozen. A notification said they had come from audience tips.
He muttered to himself, "2044 said our experiences in the instances would be made into shows. Looks like my episode is finished, and people have watched it."
With nothing to compare it to, and the screen in the plaza displaying only the overall rankings, Lu Mi had no idea whether three hundred was a lot or a little for a newcomer.
Next, he opened the interface's shop, but it informed him that its items could only be purchased inside an instance.
It looked like he would have to check out the rest area's shopping center.
When he opened the door, a tall figure was leaning outside it, smiling at him. "Good morning."
Lu Mi got a genuine fright, but once he remembered that the person in front of him was Roman, it didn't seem so strange.
"Morning. You haven't been waiting long, have you?"
Lu Mi closed the door, then suddenly eyed Roman suspiciously. "Wait. You slept in your own room last night, right?"
Roman merely blinked.
Lu Mi pressed him. "You didn't wait out here all night, did you? You didn't, right?"
Roman blinked again. Seeing Lu Mi looking ready to bristle, he chuckled. "Of course not. You're just too cute, Lu Mi."
Meanwhile, in the central control building's surveillance room, a junior employee hurriedly called over the supervisor. "Boss, this person's acting really strangely. Could he be some kind of terrorist?"
The supervisor exclaimed, "We can't have that! We need to eliminate any destabilizing factors as soon as possible!"
He approached the screen and dragged the playback bar, watching carefully.
On-screen, the man tossed and turned in his room until three in the morning, then silently sat up and walked over to Room 210.
He didn't call out to the person inside. He simply sat quietly against the door until dawn.
The junior employee asked, "Should we send the guards to deal with him?"
"Have you seen the scrolling display outside our building?" The supervisor patted his shoulder. "We'll be lucky if this guy doesn't come looking for trouble with us."
It was still early, and the shopping center was relatively quiet.
The two entered side by side and discovered that it was nothing like an ordinary supermarket.
A counter stood directly opposite the entrance, with several elevators on either side.
Aside from those, there were only sofas where people could rest. There were no shelves, let alone dazzling displays of merchandise.
Only after asking at the counter did Lu Mi understand how shopping worked here.
He chose the self-service option and searched for what he wanted to buy on a machine. The screen showed which floor carried that category of item.
He took the elevator to the designated floor, where shelves stretched endlessly in both directions. They held all sorts of things, as though the miscellaneous contents of a warehouse had been neatly arranged.
There was only one bottle of body wash in front of Lu Mi. Its price was 30 gold coins.
He currently had just 20 points, equivalent to two thousand gold coins.
The problem was that leaving the game would cost 1,000 points.
He silently took the shopping list from his pocket and crossed off several nonessential items.
Meanwhile, since Roman couldn't read, he had to shop with staff assistance.
"What do you need, sir? We have everything here," the staff member said.
Roman thought for a moment. "Do you have anything that can make a kitty happy?"
Before you continue