"I’m just speaking literally, don’t overinterpret," Tian Bufan said indifferently, "The main thing I’m worried about is that you won’t be able to get a good night’s sleep."
"After all, your dreams are currently the only way we can obtain information from the Art Department."
"Alright..." Lin Yi spread his hands, "So, did you all see anything?"
"We can see, but we can’t really see," Wei Shan said, "We can only pretend to sleep, sensing their positions and behaviors."
"If we notice them, it means they’ve also noticed us," Tian Bufan shrugged, "Force is mutual after all."
"So... what did you sense?" Lin Yi asked.
Tian Bufan said, "The three of us woke up at different times, let’s go in order, Wei Sang."
Wei Shan began, "I went to sleep at two-thirty."
"After the lights went out, I just lay in bed with my eyes closed, pretending to be asleep..."
"Nothing happened at first, but around 0:40... I felt the dormitory start to shake little by little."
Lin Yi felt a slight shock in his heart, the design of the dormitory beds had always seemed very interesting to him, and seismic avoidance alone didn’t fully reflect that design.
The connection between the mattress and the bedpost looked a bit like some kind of gyroscope, which meant no matter how the bed shook, the person sleeping on the mattress wouldn’t feel anything unusual, and would only feel as though they were lying flat.
That’s why when he woke up startled at one-thirty, he saw the ceiling, and that also meant that his bed had flipped a hundred and eighty degrees...
But if it was impossible to feel anything was amiss, then there hadn’t been any perceivable change, how could Wei Shan feel the shake?
"How did you feel it?" Lin Yi was very shocked, Wei Shan in his mind had always been the type to... not follow the path of intelligence.
Without much thought, Wei Shan replied somewhat sheepishly, "Old Lin, you know my sleeping habits aren’t great, I like to prop my feet on the bed edge... so I clearly felt the dorm shaking around midnight forty."
Wei Shan’s words hit Lin Yi like a cudgel, giving him an epiphany—the so-called "sensation" of Wei Shan was a literal feeling, not the ’induction’ he had been relying on all this while.
Indeed, what could be more profound than the feedback of direct physical contact?
"I see... Wei Sang, please continue," Lin Yi apologized for interrupting.
Wei Shan didn’t mind the small details and continued, "I felt the bed beneath me flip over like a bucket, turning a full one hundred and eighty degrees. I nearly got thrown off, but at the crucial moment, I firmly believed I was still sleeping in bed."
"After the flip, I knew we were all now facing the floor tiles, with our backs to the ceiling."
"At that time, I felt gravity was still downward, but I couldn’t tell which side was ’down.’ I couldn’t open my eyes, so I couldn’t judge whether the bed and the bed frame’s relationship had a problem, or the bed hadn’t changed, but the dorm had turned upside down..."
’Dormitory inversion!’ Lin Yi’s heart quieted, a vague structure appeared in his mind, but this fleeting inspiration was elusive, vanishing like trying to grasp smoke...
"Moreover, I felt maybe it wasn’t just the relationship between the dormitory’s ceiling and floor tiles that flipped, it was more like... the entire dormitory had been pulled up like a stick and inverted, then set back down upright," he said.
"Then our bed’s design must be to keep us unaffected by this... I don’t know if my guess is right, but that’s what it felt like."
Wei Shan touched his head and chuckled sheepishly, "I’m the dumbest, not good at thinking about these things... Old Lin, Young Master Tian, you two ponder this stuff and then tell me what’s going on."
"Hmm," Tian Bufan nodded, "Our default assumption is correct, continue with Old Lin and tell us what happened after the dorm flipped?"
"Alright, after the dorm flipped, it was very calm at first, but after about ten minutes, I heard some knocking sounds coming from outside the window..."
"The window is made of glass, the knocking sound was different from knocking on a door, and it came from the direction of the washstand, so it was easy to distinguish."
"But the thing outside the window knocked for a while then went silent again. I didn’t feel any changes in the airflow inside the dormitory, so I could tell that up until that point, nothing had entered the dormitory."
"Just after the knocking quieted down, I heard some noises coming from the bathroom, as if something had slipped and fallen in the shower, hitting some basins, knocking into something..."
"After that noise disappeared, some sounds of water started coming from the bathroom..."
"That sound, it kind of sounded like someone was taking a shower, but not quite. Anyway, it went ’whoosh, whoosh, whoosh,’ like the sound of water splashing against something..."
"That noise went on for quite a while, and later, I heard some knocking sounds."
"That knocking wasn’t from the dorm door, but from someone inside the bathroom knocking, as if trying to enter our dorm from there."
"Around twenty minutes later, at one something, the lock on the window by the washstand seemed to loosen, and then the window was opened by something from the outside..."