Author: 木尺素 / Mu Chisu

Translator: Kinky || https://kinkytranslations.com/

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Chapter 146

A beam of heavenly light broke through the gloomy clouds and fell, illuminating a bright halo.

As Zhou Qian walked step by step toward that halo together with Bai Zhou, he heard He Xiaowei’s question and felt him tug his arm. Stopping in his tracks, he turned around and gave him a rather baffling look.

He Xiaowei’s face went pale. “Oh no, do you think he turned into a skeleton? He’s trapped in the ‘past’!”

Zhou Qian said solemnly, “If that really happened, and you’re only remembering him now, then it’s too late.”

He Xiaowei: “…”

Zhou Qian narrowed his eyes, then suddenly broke into a rather pleased smile. “Still, I’m quite happy. This means your master isn’t so important in your heart. Now if it were me and—”

He Xiaowei: “…………”

After a few seconds of silence, a flash of insight struck He Xiaowei. He immediately said, “If both you and my master fell into the water at the same time, the two of us would definitely rescue you together! So, Qian’er, what’s really going on with him?”

Zhou Qian sized him up and asked, “Remember that person who was taken away by the police in our last instance?”

“I do!” He Xiaowei’s eyes went wide. “He managed to cling to life! His completion rate was just limited, so he missed out on the later rewards… but he survived!”

“Exactly. This game loves toying with players, but it never says you’re forced to die. A lot of people just keep doing instance runs, and once they do enough, they can still reach S-level. If you want rare achievements or rewards and want to gradually get closer to the truth of the game, that’s when you need to risk your life.

“The game’s designers give players options. Those who don’t want to take risks are given a way to leave the instance safely, which is the standard method of clearing it.” Zhou Qian glanced at him. “When we triggered the clearance condition near the Red God’s inn, do you still remember what the system said?”

He Xiaowei smacked his forehead. “I got it! The system said that if we didn’t step into the red circle, we’d trigger the standard clearance mode. If those players withstood Amei’s attack and found a way back to the timeline with the deserters, they’d be able to clear the instance. We chose to step into the red circle, and that’s how we triggered the hidden storyline!”

“Right,” Zhou Qian said. “So if you were Ke Yuxiao, and you saw that message, would you stay in the instance, run off to the temple to curse the other players, or would you take the standard route out right away?”

He Xiaowei let out a breath. “I get it. Going to the temple to curse us might work, but after all, Difu’s intention is to incite everyone’s mutual hatred. If Ke Yuxiao really tried that, he’d be in danger too. Nobody knows what the price would be if you curse so many people to death…

“Not to mention how many villagers are guarding that place, so going to the temple itself would be a huge hassle! He wouldn’t make such a reckless move!

“If he had time, maybe he’d slowly think of a way, but if he learned he could leave the instance, there’d be no need to waste any more time!”

The more He Xiaowei thought about it, the more confident he became. “Besides, he killed Xiao Qi—he absolutely wouldn’t come see us. He won’t come to this timeline. The hidden mission is bound to fail. He’ll definitely escape as soon as possible via the standard clearance method!”

“Right. As for Hidden Blade, on the one hand he probably didn’t have time to get to where the red circle was and then follow us into this timeline; on the other hand, he might be trying to pursue Ke Yuxiao.

“Your master is still a god-level player, so there’s no way he wouldn’t be able to leave by the standard method. That means he and Ke Yuxiao must both be out of the instance by now. But once you leave an instance, the other forces of the Peach Blossom Legion can get involved. So, tsk—”

Zhou Qian looked at He Xiaowei. “What we need to do now is hurry and get out ourselves. The real danger for him isn’t inside the instance; it’s outside.”

He Xiaowei: !!!

“I’m going first!”

With that shout, He Xiaowei quickly sidestepped Zhou Qian and charged into the halo ahead of him.

Zhou Qian watched him run off, smiling, then looked at Qi Liuxing behind him.

In that instant, the smile on Zhou Qian’s face disappeared.

Right now, Qi Liuxing had his head bowed in silence.

From the moment he’d been revived, it seemed he’d been holding something in. He couldn’t allow himself to be overwhelmed by emotions or pain, because he had to look at the bigger picture—everyone being in such a dangerous place was partly his fault, so of course he couldn’t drag them down and compromise their clearance.

Now that the danger had been resolved and they were about to clear the instance—his concerns for his teammates’ safety also fading—he’d inevitably returned to that same feeling of agony at being betrayed by someone he had deeply trusted.

Zhou Qian asked him, “After you get out, do you want to take care of him yourself?”

After a brief silence, Qi Liuxing looked at him and answered, “I do. But there’s more to this… there’s something behind all of it that I want to figure out before I kill him.

“For example, back in Flower of Evil, why did his thinking end up the way it did…

“I definitely want revenge, but I’m worried there’s more to all of this.”

Hearing that, Zhou Qian suddenly laughed.

Qi Liuxing asked him, “Why… are you laughing?”

Zhou Qian replied, “It’s a gratified smile. I think you’ve grown a lot. Today, you and Xiaowei Ge both make me feel very gratified.”

Qi Liuxing: “…”

Frowning slightly, Qi Liuxing glanced off to the side, then glanced at Bai Zhou out of reflex.

Looking back at him, Bai Zhou must have understood what was on his mind, because he reached over and took Zhou Qian’s hand, leading him onward. “Zhou Qian, let’s go.”

Zhou Qian withdrew his gaze and looked at Bai Zhou, blinking once. “Oh, okay.”

A moment later, Zhou Qian, Bai Zhou, He Xiaowei, Qi Liuxing, Yun Xiangrong, and Yin Jiujiu all stepped into the halo, waiting to be sent back to Blue Harbor City.

During that process, Qi Liuxing suddenly thought of something, straightened, and turned to look at Zhou Qian. “I just remembered—before Ke Yuxiao killed me, he said Blue Harbor City would be wiped out together with someone named Shao Chuan. Under those circumstances… might we be walking into an ambush once we leave?”

Zhou Qian replied, “Yes, they’ll definitely make a move. Things got weird starting from that bounty in ‘Murder Exhibition’. Also don’t forget, there’s still plenty of unexplored info left in that instance.”

Qi Liuxing said, “You mean… the way that exhibition hall displayed corpses from different times all in one space—there’s more to it than meets the eye?”

“Right. Fortunately, Blue Harbor City is a semi-open instance like the real world, so once we’re back, we can fully recover HP and MP. At that point…” Zhou Qian paused briefly, then said, “If we run into ghosts, we’ll kill ghosts.”

……

On the other side. 

In the “past” timeline, not long ago.

After temporarily shaking off the villagers who were hunting him, Ke Yuxiao hid in a tree on the mid-slope of a hill.

He had no clue how to clear the instance right now.

It felt like only the tip of the iceberg had been shown to the players, and he had zero knowledge of the real story underneath.

He came here for one purpose: to kill Qi Liuxing. He didn’t care about any hidden achievements; all he was waiting for was for Priest on his side to give him the method for standard clearance.

If the situation got too dire, Priest should still have a special item that could take him away.

Since he currently had no leads on how to clear the instance, Ke Yuxiao set his sights on the Goddess’s temple, thinking about first diverting the villagers’ attention, then sneaking in somehow.

—If he could curse the other players to death there, that would naturally be best.

At that moment, he spotted Hidden Blade not far away.

Unexpectedly, Hidden Blade was dressed like a villager and was even following Alayne’s mother. It looked like that group had already earned Alayne’s full trust.

As for Hidden Blade, his five senses were sharp, and his sixth sense was extremely keen.

Following a gut feeling, he looked toward the slope and sensed someone’s presence. With Alayne’s mother covering for him, he immediately dashed toward that slope. By the time he got in front of Ke Yuxiao, he’d already summoned a curved blade.

Faced with Hidden Blade’s approach, Ke Yuxiao backed away step by step.

“There’s no need, really no need. We god-level players are already so few—why do we have to kill each other? It’s not right.”

His words sounded fearful and placating, but on his face there was only limitless mockery and malice.

Hidden Blade kept silent, simply raising the blade and pointing it at him.

“You see… it’s really unnecessary. Because—” Ke Yuxiao continued to smirk, his voice suddenly turning menacing. “I don’t even take you seriously at all!”

Faced with such open scorn, Hidden Blade didn’t show a hint of anger.

He continued advancing toward Ke Yuxiao, studying him carefully up and down, trying to gauge his fighting capacity.

Noting Hidden Blade’s scrutinizing gaze, Ke Yuxiao added, “And why don’t I take you seriously? Because someone like you—another god-level player—could just about be considered a failed product! Everything you’re doing right now is just giving them more experimental data… You’re both pitiful and laughable.

“Look at yourself and compare: after you were successfully created, I followed my master, and Bai Zhou ended up chosen by Shao Chuan… But you?

“None of the top legions even gave you a second thought. What does that tell you?

“Hidden Blade, I actually know you well. You’ve been pursuing the way of the blade for a long time. You started playing this game even earlier than Bai Zhou. But so what? Talent is everything—”

“I just realized something. I never noticed how talkative you are,” Hidden Blade finally cut him off. “When Zhou Qian is about to kill someone, he likes chatting with his enemies. It’s his little hobby—he doesn’t just want his opponents dead; he wants them to die with full comprehension and deep regret. He wants to savor toying with people, watching them die of sheer frustration.

“But you’re different. You never expected me to show up, so there was no way you had a trap ready for me. So all your talking now is just bluffing.

“Your talent might have something to do with identity concealment or hiding your intentions, but either way, you’ve just exposed one thing… you can’t fight.”

Ke Yuxiao still had plenty of mysteries about him—like how he avoided everyone’s notice back in Flower of Evil despite the shared thoughts, preventing Zhou Qian and the others from discovering his real motive. That was crucial.

So Hidden Blade wouldn’t kill him so easily.

He’d just come over to keep Ke Yuxiao from heading to the temple. Now that he’d found him, and while there was still time, Hidden Blade’s only goal was to test Ke Yuxiao’s true abilities and see what skills he had.

Once he finished speaking, Hidden Blade’s body vanished from its spot and reappeared right in front of Ke Yuxiao, attacking with lightning speed.

In a flash, his curved blade swept through the air, its arc forming a ring of light that slammed down at Ke Yuxiao.

Ke Yuxiao made no attempt to counterattack, only pulled out a small pearl and squeezed it. Instantly, he retreated precisely 112 meters away, narrowly avoiding that strike.

When he landed, stray hairs fell across his forehead. Ke Yuxiao looked at Hidden Blade and smiled. “See? You can’t kill me.”

“Hmm, a Ground Shield Pearl with a range of 112 meters—exactly the distance of my attack. So you were prepared for all of us in advance.”

Hidden Blade recalled that once, after leaving an instance with Bai Zhou, Bai Zhou had offered him a heads-up: There’s an item called a Ground Shield Pearl that lets you dodge attacks within 112 meters. That’s the same max range as your move. You’d better train that move again. Otherwise, at a critical moment, a little pearl could cost you your life.

Ground Shield Pearls weren’t exactly common.

Clearly, Ke Yuxiao brought one specifically for this, ready to counter Hidden Blade’s move.

Right after he spoke, Hidden Blade darted close to Ke Yuxiao again. This time, he dispensed with flashy long-range attacks and simply relied on his most direct blade technique—each strike fierce and ruthless.

Though Ke Yuxiao was a god-level player, he was extremely quick at evading rather than meeting force with force.

Seeing this, Hidden Blade changed his blade work again and again, chasing Ke Yuxiao in a close-quarters fight while watching for how he dodged, continuing the conversation. “To counter my attacks, you prepared the Ground Shield Pearl. So it’s not entirely true that you don’t take me seriously. Obviously you do.”

Hidden Blade’s comeback took Ke Yuxiao a bit by surprise, but after a moment, he sidestepped another flash of the blade and sneered, “You’ve lived in someone else’s shadow this whole time—can you really be okay with that?”

“Not everyone wants to rule the world. If someone appears with better skill at the blade than me, and I can follow him to improve further, why not? Besides, I could throw the same question back at you—aren’t you all listening to Priest? So do you really want to be controlled by him, living under his shadow?”

When the last word fell, Hidden Blade, in an unbelievably quick burst of movement, stepped on multiple points around Ke Yuxiao.

In a split second, a giant net of blade light surrounded Ke Yuxiao.

At that very same moment, a system prompt about clearing the instance appeared—that was triggered because Zhou Qian’s group activated both the standard and non-standard clearance conditions simultaneously.

A set of wings abruptly flew out and draped over Ke Yuxiao, blocking most of the damage for him. However, part of the blade light got through and stabbed directly into his body. As several wounds appeared, Ke Yuxiao coughed up a huge mouthful of blood, and his HP instantly dropped by 40%.

“40% in exchange for blocking your finishing move. That’ll do.” Ke Yuxiao said this to Hidden Blade, then gazed into the distance. “But really, instead of the two of us fighting pointlessly here, we might as well conserve our strength and clear the instance.

“Clearly we can’t get into that red circle now, so our only choice is the standard way out… Next, we’ll have to fight Amei and a bunch of ghosts from another world, then figure out how to return to the timeline that’s ‘normal’ for us.”

After that brief probe, Hidden Blade didn’t keep pressing the attack.

Amei was formidable, and those otherworldly ghosts felt no fear. Hidden Blade needed to save his mana to face her.

Plus, Ke Yuxiao had clearly planned all kinds of highly targeted items for this trip, whereas Hidden Blade’s own inventory was more limited.

As for why Ke Yuxiao wanted to kill Qi Liuxing, that motive was worth investigating—maybe the real fight would only begin once they left the instance. If Hidden Blade could save items, he would.

Thus, what followed was simple: Hidden Blade stuck to Ke Yuxiao, preventing him from going to the temple to cast a curse, while keeping an eye on what he did.

In mutual vigilance, they moved to lie in wait around the area near the Tarar Inn.

Amei, after all, was the inn’s proprietor. The ghosts from another world traveled to various timelines through her artifact. Before Samhain ended, she needed to bring them all back, returning everyone to the underworld.

But that small artifact Amei had used to travel between different timelines was already in Zhou Qian’s possession. If she wanted to move between timelines, the only thing she could rely on now was the three-headed statue in front of the inn.

The system’s explanation for the standard clearance condition was: [You must survive and find a way to return to the timeline of the deserters, which is your true timeline.]

Regarding the full storyline, in truth, there were no “deserters”.

In that sense, it might look like there’s a bug in the game design—yet actually, it was a deliberate loophole, allowing players who chose the standard clearance route a way to leave.

Because Hidden Blade and Ke Yuxiao hadn’t triggered the hidden storyline, nor activated the doomsday or Trinity or Heaven’s Mandate segments, as far as they were concerned, they were still “deserters”.

To avoid capture by the villagers, they had to lie in wait for Amei, find a way to defeat her, and force her to take them back to the real world. This was what both Hidden Blade and Ke Yuxiao had in mind.

Even though this Amei was still stuck in the “past” and, with her memory lost, believed that timeline to be the real one, it was still treated as a valid “clear” in the system’s eyes.

Around daybreak, Hidden Blade and Ke Yuxiao finally cleared the instance.

Upon seeing the evaluation that they only reached 25% completion, the pitifully meager rewards, and the negligible experience, Hidden Blade didn’t care in the slightest.

He was only curious about one thing—whether it was during his own probing attacks or their final battle with Amei, Ke Yuxiao had never once used his flute. Why had he never played it?

At first glance, that detail meant nothing. But if he thought about it deeper, there might be more to it.

The instant he left Banquet of the Red God, Hidden Blade had a strong intuition that things were about to go south. His heart, rarely so uneasy, pounded violently, and the veins at his temples throbbed so hard it almost hurt.

A rare sense of danger made him grip his blade tightly.

But the enemy lurking in the shadows was impossible to guard against—someone had set a trap right outside the instance portal.

The moment Hidden Blade was transported out of Banquet of the Red God, the surface of a mirror beneath his feet flashed. The next moment, he found himself in a room resembling a study.

Ahead of him sat a man in a suit, quietly writing at a desk.

Hidden Blade frowned. “You’re Priest?”

Finishing a line of text, Priest finally raised his head to look at him. “Nice to meet you.”

……

Real world. Unit 1007, Building 17 at Yuanlai Complex.

This was Wu Ren’s home.

While Zhou Qian and the others were in Banquet of the Red God, Wu Ren had gone off to solo a trial instance, choosing a difficulty level he could handle this time.

He cleared it successfully, and after leaving the instance, he got to work on forming Zhou Qian’s legion.

Before Zhou Qian left, he hadn’t decided on a legion name, so Wu Ren decided to exercise his power as the “king” by naming it himself.

He was the nominal head of the legion but, in truth, was just a puppet under Zhou Qian’s control. He couldn’t make any major decisions, and he was well aware of that—but he figured naming the legion was something he could do.

Thus, once he finished gathering a few members and even paid out of his own pocket to purchase a virtual base, Wu Ren left Zhou Qian a message and returned to the real world.

He wanted to check on his younger sister, Wu Nianrou.

Leaving Blue Harbor City in the game, Wu Ren returned to the recliner in his real-world apartment.

The moment he came back, all color left his vision, replaced by darkness.

He was so addicted to the game world because there he could see color, and he had extraordinary eyesight for throwing hidden weapons as an assassin. Even so, he had to return to reality for the sake of his family.

Not long after he returned, he heard Wu Nianrou’s voice.

“Brother, is there something weird about your room? Every time I come in, it feels like I get dizzy for a long, long time. But when I check the clock… it really only shows a few minutes passing…”

The reason Wu Nianrou experienced this phenomenon was, of course, the game’s system at work.

In order to keep outsiders from noticing anything unusual while a player was logged in, the system would, as needed, apply various measures to anyone who entered the player’s space—so that the game proceeded quietly, without attracting attention.

“What’s going on? Could you have low blood sugar?” Wu Ren, who couldn’t see his sister, turned his face generally in her direction. “Come on, I’ll take you out for a bite.”

“Sure, but wow, Brother, you’ve been acting like a big spender lately. What’s up with that?” Wu Nianrou walked over to help Wu Ren stand and guided him to the living room.

Wu Nianrou had been tall and strong since she was a kid, so helping Wu Ren was never difficult. Wu Ren was used to it and let her lead.

Faced with Wu Nianrou’s question, Wu Ren of course couldn’t say the money came from his gaming.

He simply smiled. “I’m blind—where would I earn money? That’s the dowry Mom and Dad left for you. I was afraid you might get tricked by some guy, so I never gave it to you.

“Listen, a man can seem great, but you can’t tell for sure until after you’re actually married. If he treats you well even after marriage, I’ll hand over all that money to you both!”

“Mm, my brother’s the best.” Wu Nianrou smiled, letting him rest on the sofa, then headed toward her own room. “Just wait a minute while I do my makeup, then we’ll head out.”

“Alright, you go ahead.” Wu Ren leaned back on the sofa with a smile.

He very much hoped to meet a true god in the game soon, someone who could cure his blindness.

Out of Wu Ren’s sight, Wu Nianrou went into her bedroom and stood before her vanity.

Reflected in the mirror was clearly a man’s chiseled face—he even had a bit of stubble on his chin.

Yet the expression was soft, and there was a gentle affection in his eyes. He picked up an eyebrow pencil with casual ease, an action oddly captivating in contrast to his masculine features.

This was yet another personality of Ke Yuxiao.

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The author has something to say:

Wu Ren: I thought I had a younger sister, but it turns out I have a younger brother. He can even do a fake voice.

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