Am I really hallucinating?

Chapter 137 Does Not Exist
Tikman felt a little dizzy.

The sound of the vehicle's engine brought him back to consciousness.

What happened to him? What is he going to do now?
Thinking made his brain hurt, and he realized that he had a lot of injuries on his body, including a bullet wound in the arm. However, he had bandaged it, and if he didn't move around, it should be fine.

Think again, why did he become like this.

……

Yes, after hearing what his wife said, his mind suddenly buzzed. He trusted his wife, so he wanted to go to the monastery to have a look, even if he thought it was unlikely that these people would let him go, but he still had to fight for it.

But the monks naturally looked at him as if he were an idiot and ignored him.

When he tried to force his way in, he was naturally obstructed.

Fortunately, the fully armed men seen before seemed to have gone out, and the remaining clergymen in monk robes were of limited quality and could not stop him.

But the other side had more people and more power, so he still suffered a lot of injuries.

His wife kept giving him directions along the way, but for some reason, he started to lose his mind halfway through the journey and ended up stealing a car and driving towards the monastery.

His wife seemed to point to another road...but he remembered that road was not the monastery.

My head hurts so much, and it seems like it was hit while I was forcing my way in.

He even lost consciousness just now, while driving? Was it his wife who was driving the car? But he was in the driver's seat now...

"Darling," he called out.

no respond.

"Honey?"

He shouted again, still no response, he immediately looked inside the car.

The passenger seat was empty, and the back seat was also empty. He was the only one in the entire car.

The moment the car crashed, he slammed on the brakes. The vehicle had good performance and stopped immediately and steadily even when it braked suddenly at high speed, but the strong inertia still caused Tikman's head to hit the steering wheel.

Regardless of his splitting headache, he got out of the car, searched the car carefully again and again, and finally went to the back of the car to look at the road he came from. Only then did he realize that he was not driving to the monastery at all, but had returned to the town.

"Honey!?" he yelled, calling his wife's name, hoping for a response, but there was none.

"I must have lost her..." He quickly got into the car and turned it around, wanting to go back to find his wife.

Suddenly, he felt that something seemed to be wrong with the town in front of him.

"Here... I remember this is the Robertson family. The house he was assigned is here. Am I mistaken?" He murmured as he looked at a vacant lot at the intersection next to him.

He drove slowly on the small town road.

"Ginny, this is Ginny's house. She lives here alone, but she was lucky enough to be assigned a big house. She even showed it off to me, but... there is only a dilapidated wooden house here..." Tickman stared blankly at the familiar yet unfamiliar scenery on the roadside.

The town looked familiar at first glance, but upon closer inspection, there were many details that did not match his memory. Tikman felt as if he had gone to another parallel world.

As he was doubting himself, he stopped the car again in front of his house.

His house, however, remained the same as he remembered, which gave some comfort to his uneasy heart.

Tichelman got out of the car and entered the home through the unlocked sliding door in the yard.

"Honey, are you here?" He shouted into the house with hope, but there was no response.

He sighed, walked around the house, and suddenly stared at an empty corner. Then he slowly covered his head and said, "Oh, they cleaned up so quickly. Our things were cleared away immediately. My wife's dressing table, she will definitely be very angry if she knows..."

Talking to himself did not ease his uneasiness, because some of his things were still in the room.

In this room, the only thing that disappeared was the trace of his wife.

He sat on the sofa and fell into silence.

Suddenly, the landline in the room rang. Tikman raised his head and immediately stepped forward to answer it: "Hello!"

"Tickman?" a familiar voice on the other side asked uncertainly.

"Ryan! It's me!" Tikman responded quickly as if he had found a savior.

"Oh my God, thank God! You are really real!" Ryan said happily, looking greatly relieved.

"What? Ryan, what do you mean? Of course I'm real!" Tikman was puzzled.

"Do you remember that you complained about my coffee every time you came here for the past three years?" "Of course, even the best coffee beans taste sour in your hands, and you always blame it on the coffee beans."

"Hahaha..." Ryan laughed helplessly twice, his voice full of fatigue.

"Ryan, what happened? I feel something is wrong... My wife and I were taken to the lighthouse as you said. My wife said she saw our child in the monastery, but the people there wouldn't let me go. When I came back from the mountain, I found that the town seemed to have changed..."

Listening to Tikman's story, Ryan fell silent.

After he finished speaking, Ryan took a deep breath and said, "Tickman, I'm sorry to tell you that the town has not changed, but it has always been like this. It's just that for some reasons, it has become what we see..."

"What?" Tikman opened his mouth wide and immediately remembered his daily work. "Those ghosts did it!"

"The cause is still being investigated. This is a huge mistake on our part. We're not even sure when all this started. This town is a mixture of truth and falsehood. We're still trying to determine how much is false and how much is true." Ryan said in a very tired tone.

"How could it be..." Tikman couldn't believe it. This was an official institution of Dadu. They said that the lighthouse would protect them...

"Also, Tikman, I want to tell you something. You must stay calm... You may have realized it." Ryan suddenly said in a deep voice.

"...What?" There was a tremor in Tickman's voice that he himself didn't even notice.

"Your wife, the one you remember who accompanied you to Blackwood Town three years ago and shared your work hours with you and joined the logistics department..."

“It doesn’t exist.”

Boom!
His head started buzzing again, making it difficult for him to hear what Ryan said next.

In my memory, all the past three years were copied in one sentence, presenting their true appearance.

He cooked with his wife, but he was actually the only one sitting at the stove. He sat at the dining table, calculating his daily work hours with his wife and imagining the future, but he was actually the only one talking to the empty seat.

When he couldn't sleep all night because of the terrible work pressure, cried for the sacrifice of his teammates and felt dark about his future, there was his wife who was by his side, holding his back, supporting him and comforting him.

He was alone at that time.

all fake.

Three years of support, three years of standing together.

He was the only one who came to this town in a daze.

Only him.

Tikman knelt on the ground, with Ryan's voice constantly coming from the phone hanging beside him.

Suddenly, crisp footsteps were heard from behind, and a woman wearing thick high heels and a black dress with hollow patterns walked past him.

"Tickman." A hoarse voice called out.

Tikman looked up and saw his wife's face. Her pretty face was covered in unfamiliar black makeup, which was completely different from the gentle and quiet appearance he was familiar with.

"Get out!" he roared after being stunned.

"You are not her! You liar!" He stood up and grabbed the neck of this "wife" with both hands. His movements were so big that he pulled his gunshot-wounded arm but he didn't notice it at all. The woman whose neck was being grabbed didn't move at all, just looked at him quietly.

"You lied to me! For three years! Three whole years! What did you do?!" Tears as big as beans dripped from his eyes. Tikman's eyes turned red and he roared at his "wife" fiercely and sadly.

He pushed the other person away violently, turned around, and tried to stagger out, but he missed the step at the door and fell to the ground.

They rolled on the ground in a panic, struggled for a while before they had the strength to get up, and cried loudly in the rain. It was like they were having a nightmare, but the hard-to-accept fact was that they had just returned to reality from a "dream".

Not only him, the entire Blackwood Town woke up from a long sleep, with screams of fear and cries of grief from people who found that their relatives and friends were no longer alive.

"Nim." The calm voice of the strange woman penetrated all the noise and entered Tikman's mind.

Tikman froze in place, his voice still tearful: "You still want to lie to me..."

"The false memory has been overwritten. Your current memory contains the answer."

"..."

"terribly sorry."

The woman disappeared.

Tikman came to the car in a daze, and after a long silence, he punched the hood with all his strength, yelled feebly, and finally opened the door with force, got in, stepped on the accelerator and rushed towards the hillside.

(End of this chapter)