Because this was only an NE ending, even though he had already come out, Jiang Xing still did not know very much.
“The reason I initially went to the village was because that place was suffering from a rat infestation and the person who posted the commission said that those rats were different from ordinary rats. They said the rats could walk through the walls and no matter what, they could never be caught. During my investigation, I did indeed find some traces left behind by rats but just as those people had said, I simply could not find the rats themselves.”
“The NE ending happened because I stayed in that village for a week and still failed to find out the detailed reason. When I was investigating around the village, the system automatically treated the fact that I left the village as an NE.”
“Did you find no trace of Du Yun either?” Xia Jienan asked him.
Jiang Xing replied with a message: “I heard someone say that they had seen her but when I went looking for her, I couldn’t find anyone.”
Xia Jienan thought for a moment before sending him another message: “Summarize everything properly and then send me the document.”
“Also, why do you think the card-breaking rate is extremely high?”
Jiang Xing first replied with an okay but after seeing the question that followed, he fell silent again. It took roughly five minutes before he finally replied to Xia Jienan: “What Du Yun is going to do should bring us a lot of danger.”
Generally speaking, their investigation missions would not truly involve the evil gods themselves. More often, they had to deal with people such as believers and dependents, or, at most, various mythical creatures.
But even those things alone were enough to leave many people with barely any chance of survival. In front of those existences, ordinary people were often completely powerless to resist. Things involving various rituals, sacrifices and natural disasters were even more difficult to contend with.
That mission had ended in an NE, which meant that there was very likely still some kind of ritual or something similar hidden within it, while Du Yun also intended to carry out such a dangerous act. When the two things were combined, the effect was certainly not as simple as one plus one equaling two.
From Jiang Xing’s words, Xia Jienan also confirmed that Du Yun truly intended to do something like that.
He did not say anything more but he sent Ye Yuzhi another message: “Sorry, something suddenly came up. Let’s talk again tomorrow at noon.”
When Ye Yuzhi received the message, he was in the small forest outside the library. When he saw Xia Jienan’s message, he could not help but let out a sigh of relief.
To be honest, Xia Jienan really did seem like someone who was very easy to get along with. He was also quite good at keeping the atmosphere lively, while his investigative abilities were even stronger. He would often help Ye Yuzhi out of awkward situations when it came to social interactions but Ye Yuzhi could frequently sense something from him that seemed to be hidden rather deeply.
Of course, he was not saying that he was afraid of Xia Jienan. It was simply that Xia Jienan sometimes gave him an indescribable sense of pressure.
He felt a little disappointed that he would not have to meet him in person but psychologically, he also felt considerably more relaxed.
Ye Yuzhi exhaled, looking at the notebook in front of him. After thinking for a moment, he got up and went back, intending to sleep for a while and try to enter the intermission.
There was no point in simply imagining things here. He still needed to return to that world and take an actual look for himself.
After packing up his things, Ye Yuzhi returned to the dormitory. The other two people in their room had already gone out. Ke Hu’s bed curtain, however, was still drawn. If he listened carefully, he could hear the sound of someone breathing inside.
Ye Yuzhi put his things away and climbed onto his own bed as well.
He pulled the blanket over himself, closed his eyes and gradually fell into a deep sleep.
The first thing to awaken his five senses was, as always, the familiar sound of a train moving along the tracks.
Perhaps because the module he had entered previously had also taken place aboard a train, this time, upon entering, Ye Yuzhi experienced an indescribable sense of familiarity.
He casually walked around the carriage in the intermission for a while and then immediately went toward the door at the back, where he looked at the optical discs placed on the shelf.
There was another optical disc on the shelf now. Printed on it was an image of a moving red train. At first glance, there did not seem to be anything strange about it. Instead, the Q-version little train looked rather cute.
Ye Yuzhi took the disc down and then inserted it into the door handle.
After the light and shadows outside the door came to a complete stop, he took a deep breath and pushed the door open.
The first thing that came into view was furniture and interior decoration with a distinctly Nordic style. Beyond the gray-white curtains, snow covered everything outside, stretching into a vast expanse of white.
Ye Yuzhi froze for a moment before realizing that he seemed to be sitting on a sofa.
He had left this card too quickly back then, so he had not waited in that world for the settlement to finish before arranging the life that belonged to his card. It was also because he had never really developed much of a habit of dealing with the aftermath.
But it seemed that even if he did not deal with it himself, this place would automatically arrange something for him?
This card had been designed by him and he had personally chosen its skills. It was completely different from someone like Xiao En Liqi. If it were Xiao En, Ye Yuzhi would actually be quite willing to believe that there might be some kind of “soul” existing within it but for this card, which had his own name written on it, he did not really believe that any kind of soul would appear.
He was just about to stand up when he suddenly felt that something was not quite right.
He did not want to stand up.
It was a deeply contradictory feeling yet it simultaneously existed inside Ye Yuzhi’s mind just like that.
He intended to stand up because he wanted to stand up yet he “didn’t want” to stand up. It was as though something was pressing down on his nerves, causing him to remain sitting there even when, quite naturally, his thoughts were telling him that he should get up.
Something was wrong.
Thinking this, Ye Yuzhi turned his head and looked around the house.
He was currently sitting on the sofa not far from the fireplace. Charcoal flames burned inside it, while snow was falling outside the window. Other than the crackling sound made by the burning charcoal, there was no other movement or sound anywhere around him.
Looking behind him, he could see the kitchen and the staircase leading upstairs, as well as two rooms with their doors closed.
This seemed to be someone’s home. Although there was not much of a sense of life here, everything was so new that it looked as though it had barely been used but judging from Ye Yuzhi’s instincts, this really should be someone’s home.
Why had his card later appeared in a place like this?
Just as Ye Yuzhi was thinking about this question, he heard the sound of someone coming downstairs.
He hurriedly leaned back against the sofa and twisted his head around to look behind him.
He saw a familiar figure slowly coming down the stairs. The person was wearing somewhat old-fashioned home cotton clothes and he walked slowly until he came to the stunned Ye Yuzhi’s side.
“Why are you so lively today?”
Ye Yuzhi: ……?
There was no doubt that the person standing in front of him was Xia Jienan but looking at his expression and listening to the things he was saying… Ye Yuzhi could not help feeling that something was strange.
Ye Yuzhi did not answer and that “Xia Jienan” did not seem to care much about it either. He reached out, took Ye Yuzhi’s hand into his own and carefully examined it. Then he smiled.
“That’s good; it seems you managed to follow my advice today and didn’t touch the hot coals”
“Be a good girl and listen to me, don’t hurt yourself.”
After saying that, he released Ye Yuzhi’s burned fingers, turned around and walked toward the kitchen.
“Let’s just have porridge for dinner. By the way, you still aren’t allowed to move around without my permission.”
Ye Yuzhi was completely stunned.
From the moment he saw Xia Jienan, he had already felt that something about this situation was not right but now, things had completely departed from anything he could have imagined or expected.
Yes, he knew that his willpower had been very low when he left. Beizhu had also mentioned that people with low willpower found it difficult to maintain their own thoughts but that did not mean he could have imagined that, while in the intermission, things could actually develop into something this bizarre and utterly surreal.
What exactly was the setting of Xia Jienan’s card?
And after he left, what kind of bizarre relationship had these two cards ended up having?
Ye Yuzhi did not really want to stay here any longer. He was afraid that if he remained here for too long, he would slowly return to the kind of feeling he had experienced aboard the train. By then, even trying to leave this place might become troublesome.
He practically fled from the place.
The moment he opened his eyes, Ye Yuzhi let out a breath and instinctively reached for his phone, wanting to ask Xia Jienan what was going on.
But once he picked up his phone, he suddenly felt that perhaps this matter was not actually that serious.
After all, his card really did have low willpower and Xia Jienan’s card had merely been taking care of his card. The way he spoke really did feel very… strange in terms of atmosphere but the things he had said were not completely incomprehensible. After all, it was only after Xia Jienan’s card had taken his hand that he discovered his fingers had been burned to that extent.
It was just that he did not know why his card had acted that way… or why it was so obedient to Xia Jienan.
Ye Yuzhi silently stared at his phone for quite some time before finally setting it down for the moment.
He would wait until tomorrow at noon and talk to him about this matter then.
He checked the time on his phone. He had only stayed in the intermission for a short while yet it was already six o’clock in the evening.
But the last time he had stayed in the intermission, he had been there for much longer and he had not slept for very long either. Could it be that the time consumed by the intermission was actually calculated according to the number of times he entered it, rather than according to how long he spent inside?
Ye Yuzhi had some guesses in his mind but he could not be certain. He picked up his phone and browsed through the forum for a while, then went downstairs to the cafeteria to take care of dinner.
He used his meal card to pay for a bowl of noodles, then carried the bowl over and found a corner where he could sit.
After quietly finishing his dinner without anyone disturbing him, Ye Yuzhi stood up again, preparing to carry his bowl over to the cart specifically meant for collecting used bowls.
But when he raised his head, he found himself making eye contact with someone.
Zhou Tian… in other words, his supervisor, Professor Zhou. He was sitting not far away, with a bowl of the same kind of noodles in front of him. He held his chopsticks in one hand and smiled as he nodded at Ye Yuzhi.
Ye Yuzhi immediately became extremely uncomfortable. No one wanted to run into their teacher outside of class, especially when they had not done their homework.
Because Xia Jienan had previously convinced him that he should first deal with the “survival crisis,” Ye Yuzhi had already gone several days without seriously thinking about his thesis.
He had clearly just reported his progress to his professor earlier, saying that he still needed to read more literature and yet so quickly he had lost even the motivation to write. Ye Yuzhi himself felt rather guilty about it.
He walked over and greeted him.
“Hello, Professor.”
“”Come over for dinner?” Zhou Tian asked.
“Um. ” Ye Yuzhi nodded. He glanced at the noodles in front of Zhou Tian. They had already become somewhat thick, as though they had been sitting there for a while without being eaten. He did not know whether Zhou Tian had become busy with something again and simply had not had the time to eat after buying his meal.
Zhou Tian asked, “What papers have you read these past few days?”
Ye Yuzhi hesitated and stammered for a moment. Before he could actually come up with anything to say, Zhou Tian gave him an easy way out.
“It doesn’t matter if you can’t remember the names; non-English sources are indeed harder to keep in mind.”
“It’s okay if you can’t remember the names; it’s just that non-English documents are indeed harder to remember.”
Ye Yuzhi hesitated before nodding.
“I understand, thank you, Professor.”
“”It’s nothing.” Zhou Tian waved his hand. “Alright, you should go and rest now. There’s no need to worry too much about the thesis.”
Hearing that, Ye Yuzhi felt even more guilty.
He had spent the entire afternoon resting and he really had not been busy with his thesis at all.
But he was too embarrassed to say so. He hurriedly nodded and answered,
“Thank you, Professor. I’ll head back now.”
After saying that, he quickly placed his bowl onto the cart by the entrance before leaving the cafeteria.
Ye Yuzhi did not hurry back to the dormitory. Instead, he first went to the supermarket beside the cafeteria and bought two purple-rice bread rolls that Ke Hu always liked, intending to bring them back for him.
Ke Hu had slept all day today. Once he woke up later, he would definitely be hungry. Ye Yuzhi was also doing this to return the favor for the breakfast the other had treated him to that morning.
He carried the bread out of the supermarket. From a distance, he saw Zhou Tian’s back. It seemed that the other had also come out not long after Ye Yuzhi left the cafeteria.
Had enough time really passed for Professor Zhou to finish that bowl of noodles?
This question inexplicably popped into Ye Yuzhi’s mind but it was also possible that someone else had needed to speak with Professor Zhou about something and leaving temporarily could not be helped. People with their status were naturally busy.
He returned to the dormitory, placed the purple-rice bread on Ke Hu’s desk and then turned on his computer. No matter what, he figured he should write his thesis for a while first.
After turning on the computer and logging into his social media account, a group-wide notification automatically appeared in the default message window.
It was the mutual-aid group that he and Xia Jienan had joined earlier.
Ye Yuzhi slightly frowned and clicked into the group. The moment he entered, he saw that the people inside were already arguing about something.
“……I already told you, someone like this can’t be saved. If she’s determined to die, there’s no need for you all to throw yourselves into it too.”
“That’s not how you should put it. Administrator Yundou has helped us a lot too. Now it’s our turn to help her.”
“I’m saying… at least half of the newcomers in this group were guided by her when they were still new, right? You can’t be that heartless.”
“What heartless or not heartless?! I’m telling you, just because you’ve survived until now doesn’t mean you can start thinking you’re such a big deal. You think going in there is to save her, to help her? You’re going in there to kill her!”
The entire group fell silent for a while after those words. Ye Yuzhi was completely baffled by what he was seeing, so he could only go and take a look at the contents of the new announcement.
“Forum Administrator 05, code name Yundou, has become trapped and gone missing inside the module. Volunteers are now being sought to re-enter the module and search for her in the intermission. Please note that the lost rate of this module’s intermission is extremely high.”
Ye Yuzhi had some impression of this Forum Administrator 05.
In the forum Zhong Liyu had previously taught him to study, quite a lot of the information and materials that had been compiled and summarized had been done by this person. It was obvious that the other party had learned a considerable amount of knowledge related to mythology in that kind of world but even so, she had still gone missing?
Ye Yuzhi closed the announcement and saw someone else say, “We can’t just let her turn into a monster in there, can we?”
For no apparent reason, Ye Yuzhi was reminded of what Beizhu had told him back when he had turned into a monster.
People like them seemed to have even normal death become something difficult to achieve. After reaching SAN 0, they would basically fall into madness and any kind of cause of death could occur. If their main body became trapped inside a module and died, then when that was reflected back into reality, the consequences would be even worse.
But killing a companion who had once helped them like this… for everyone involved, wouldn’t that be an unbearably painful thing to do?
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Nycreth
[Translator]
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ChaptersChapter 1 · Guerrero’s Lair (1)Chapter 2 · Guerrero’s Lair (2)Chapter 3 · Guerrero’s Lair (3)Chapter 4 · Guerrero’s Lair (4)Chapter 5 · Guerrero’s Lair (5)Chapter 6 · Guerrero’s Lair (6)Chapter 7 · Guerrero’s Lair (7)Chapter 8 · Guerrero’s Lair (8)Chapter 9 · Guerrero’s Lair (9)Chapter 10 · Guerrero’s Lair (10)Chapter 11 · Guerrero’s Lair (11)Chapter 12 · Guerrero’s Lair (12)Chapter 13 · Guerrero’s Lair (13)Chapter 14 · Guerrero’s Lair (14)Chapter 15 · Guerrero’s Lair (15)Chapter 16 · Guerrero’s Lair (16)Chapter 17 · Guerrero’s Lair (17)Chapter 18 · Guerrero’s Lair (18)Chapter 19 · Guerrero’s Lair (19)Chapter 20 · Guerrero’s Lair (20)Chapter 21 · Guerrero’s Lair (21)Chapter 22 · Guerrero’s Lair (22)Chapter 23 · Interlude (1)Chapter 24 · The interlude (2)Chapter 25 · The interlude (3)Chapter 26 Part 1 · Calling in the Wind (1)Chapter 26 Part 2 · Calling in the Wind (1)Chapter 27 · Calling in the Wind (2)Chapter 28 · Calling in the Wind (3)Chapter 29 · Calling in the Wind (4)Chapter 30 · Calling in the Wind (5)Chapter 31 · Calling in the Wind (6)Chapter 32 · Calling in the Wind (7)Chapter 33 · Calling in the Wind (8)Chapter 34 · Calling in the Wind (9)Chapter 35 · Calling in the Wind (10)Chapter 36 · Interlude (4)Chapter 37 · Interlude (5)Chapter 38 · Interlude (6)Chapter 39 · Interlude (7)Chapter 40 · Interlude (8)Chapter 41 · Interlude (9)Chapter 42 · Welcome to Doville (1)Chapter 43 · Welcome to Doville (2)Chapter 44 · Welcome to Doville (3)Chapter 45 · Welcome to Doville (4)Chapter 46 · Welcome to Doville (5)Chapter 47 · Welcome to Doville (6)Chapter 48 · Welcome to Doville (7)Chapter 49 · Welcome to Doville (8)Chapter 50 · Welcome to Doville (9)Chapter 51 · Welcome to Doville (10)Chapter 52 · Welcome to Doville (11)Chapter 53 · Welcome to Doville (12)Chapter 54 · Interlude (10)Chapter 55 · Interlude (11)Chapter 56 · Interlude (12)Chapter 57 · Interlude (13)Chapter 58 · Interlude (14)Chapter 59 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (1)Chapter 60 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (2)Chapter 61 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (3)Chapter 62 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (4)Chapter 63 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (5)Chapter 64 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (6)Chapter 65 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (7)Chapter 66 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (8)Chapter 67 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (9)Chapter 68 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (10)Chapter 69 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (11)Chapter 70 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (12)Chapter 71 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (13)Chapter 72 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (14)Chapter 73 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (15)Chapter 74 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (16)Chapter 75 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (17)Chapter 76 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (18)Chapter 77 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (19)Chapter 78 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (20)Chapter 79 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (21)Chapter 80 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (22)Chapter 81 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (23)Chapter 82 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (24)Chapter 83 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (25)Chapter 84 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (26)Chapter 85 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (27)Chapter 86 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (28)Chapter 87 · The Tunnel in the Dark Night (29)Chapter 88 · Tunnel in the Dark Night (30)Chapter 89 · Interlude (15)Chapter 90 · Interlude (16)Chapter 91 · Interlude (17)Chapter 92 · The Promise of Hamelin (1)Chapter 93 · The Promise of Hamelin (2)Chapter 94 · The Promise of Hamelin (3)Chapter 95 · The Promise of Hamelin (4)Chapter 96 · The Promise of Hamelin (5)Chapter 97 · The Promise of Hamelin (6)Chapter 98 · The Promise of Hamelin (7)Chapter 99 · The Promise of Hamelin (8)Chapter 100 · The Promise of Hamelin (9)Chapter 101 · The Promise of Hamelin (10)Chapter 102 · The Promise of Hamelin (11)Chapter 103 · The Promise of Hamelin (12)Chapter 104 · The Promise of Hamelin (13)Chapter 105 · The Promise of Hamelin (14)Chapter 106 · The Promise of Hamelin (15)Chapter 107 · The Promise of Hamelin (16)Chapter 109 · The Promise of Hamelin (18)Chapter 110 · The Promise of Hamelin (19)