chapter 128
All the Players had left this floor.
The Rabbit lay flat on the ground, staring at her leg with anticipation, waiting for the pain to fully subside.
She had to climb up-fast.
A weight suddenly pressed down on her head.
A paw fussed curiously with the fluff on her ear, scratching and ruffling it.
The Rabbit reached up, felt around, and pulled down a Parrot.
The Parrot lay in her palm, plump and bright, like a little mango.
“Hello! Where did they go?”
“Who are you looking for?” the Rabbit asked, then immediately understood. “They went up! They just left!”
“I’m going too!” The Parrot beat its wings, wriggled out of her hand, and flew upward after them. “Anan doesn’t sleep anymore, and is super healthy now! I’m going up to see whether our neighbor has climbed to the top!”
–
Lu Li and Luo Jia Bai were the last to reach the top floor.
Up here, several other Players were already standing in place, their expressions dark and unpleasant.
One of them said, “The animals on the floors below said you can see the light if you look up. Could it be they were only seeing the light from this thing when it turns on?”
Another muttered, “Isn’t this the final floor? Why is it nothing but these things?”
Xia Le truly couldn’t endure the torment of his one injured leg any longer. He redeemed a Life-Saving Item-its price already stacked up to an outrageous level.
He glanced at the meager balance left and complained, “Can we hurry up and get out?”
Sun Hai stared at Xia Le’s Shop interface as well.
“You don’t even have fifty thousand Points left?” Sun Hai snapped. “I told you to endure it. It’s just a broken leg, not a fatal wound. And you’re using a Life-Saving Item to cover it? If you keep spending like this, won’t everything later come out of my Points?”
Xia Le shot back, “So what if I borrow a little? How many Points do you even have that are really yours? Most of them you stole from Yan Xuan and Jiang Changqing, didn’t you?”
He grew louder as he argued.
“And didn’t you get the Wristband notification? As long as we clear the Instance, once we get out, Points are settled at triple! My Live Stream Room has already accumulated a lot of Points. Once they triple, I can definitely pay you back.”
Sun Hai was furious, and his dejected negativity spilled out in every direction.
“You’re treating a Bug Instance like a normal Instance?” he said harshly. “This is my first time in a Bug Instance. Up to now I haven’t collected a single Key Item. Even if we could get triple Points, so what? We can’t get out at all!”
Lu Li stopped.
He swept his gaze across the surroundings.
This entire level was composed of screens and cameras-big and small-packed together.
As they moved, the cameras rotated, tracking them and locking onto their positions.
“Zzzzt-”
The screens flickered.
A crackling current hiss interrupted the two men’s argument.
On the largest screen in the center appeared a promotional flyer for the world of happiness.
Delicious pet food rained down from the sky, as if it would never be eaten up.
Clean running water flowed endlessly, as if it would never run dry.
Toys lay scattered everywhere.
The living space looked wide and spacious.
Then the image zoomed in again and again on the flyer, until it stopped on the stamp in the corner.
A Crown of Happiness stamp.
A stamp that promised it could grant any wish.
More screens began to stir.
From the outer edges inward, the displays lit up in columns, one after another.
On the first column at the edge, images appeared of the world of happiness they had once briefly visited.
Only, in the screens, the animals were no longer humans with animal ears.
They were fully animal.
Cats and dogs were the most numerous.
Rabbits were the fewest.
They were so alike that you couldn’t even tell male from female.
They were packed together, crowded at a health inspection checkpoint.
Two hands stroked over them from head to tail.
They picked out the best ones.
Those chosen were sent into the door everyone longed for-the door that promised a Crown of Happiness once you entered.
The second column of screens lit up.
Behind that door was a conveyor belt.
A cat that had passed inspection lay on it, curious.
The moment it was conveyed inside, an electric baton smashed down onto its head.
The cat convulsed and collapsed.
Another hand lifted it by the scruff.
Its paws drooped, powerless.
The flyer slipped free.
The flyer rocked back and forth in the air as it drifted.
It finally fell to the ground.
On the ground, filthy wastewater flowed everywhere.
Thick, grimy flyers lay layered over the floor in stacks upon stacks.
So many that you couldn’t see what the floor originally looked like.
The third column of screens lit up.
To the side were rows upon rows of pelts that had been peeled off and laid out.
The cat that had been dragged away on the previous screen was now having its head cut open.
A sharp blade slid through.
In no time, a complete piece of skin was peeled off.
Blood dripped continuously from between the person’s fingers.
It hit the floor and turned into a deep, dark red.
The fourth column of screens lit up.
A pair of hands tossed a lump of meat onto a chopping board.
It was blurred so badly you could no longer tell what creature it had once belonged to.
A knife came down.
Again.
And again.
With every new column that lit up, another scene appeared-one that made your scalp prickle and your whole body crawl.
So this was the real world behind the door to the world of happiness.
As the screens played, they also emitted sound.
“Those are humans on the screen, right?” someone said. “They’re clearly talking. Why can’t I understand them?”
“Can you understand them?”
“This voice… I can’t understand the words, but it feels kind of familiar.”
Lu Li took out the Glasses he had obtained on the second floor.
He looked at the screens through the Glasses.
The person who was peeling the cat’s skin finished the job.
They washed their hands clean.
Then they looked at their phone.
They also rinsed the intact cat pelt, dried it with air, took photos, and sent them out.
A transfer came in quickly.
So did a message.
[Lately there’s more demand for rabbits, and the price is high. Get more.]
Lu Li’s gaze shifted.
On another screen, the person chopping meat packed the minced chunks into a black plastic bag.
They stuffed it into a freezer to freeze.
Then they sent a text message out.
[All chopped up. You can’t tell what kind of meat it is at all. Don’t worry-last time a boss took some and sold it as chicken, and nobody noticed a thing!]
Lu Li took off his glasses.
The words on the screen instantly turned obscure and incomprehensible, as if they were written in another language.
Starting from the second floor, the Players had needed the Glasses just to read text.
At first, they couldn’t understand human writing.
Now, they couldn’t understand human speech.
Under what circumstances would something like this happen?
Screams rang in his ears. “I’m so itchy… Why is there fur growing on my arm?! It’s the same color as the Appearance I redeemed! I’ve exchanged Appearances in the Necromancer Game before, this has never happened!”
“It’s on my face too! There’s fur growing all over me.”
Xia Le was the first to notice. When he plucked out the Rabbit fur on his body, even longer, thicker fur grew out in its place.
The Instance was stripping the Players of their human identity step by step.
Turning them into animals.
If they couldn’t clear the Instance, their final fate would be to truly become the animals they’d entered as, assimilated by the Instance, then killed by it.
As all the display screens lit up, from the center screen Lu Li heard the voice he’d heard before: “Hate! I hate them so much!”
“Why are they liars? They’re all liars!”
The Wristbands on the Players’ wrists emitted a cold electronic tone:
[Warning! Abnormally frequent spikes in this Instance Boss’s hatred value detected. This Bug Instance’s difficulty is excessively high. The current segment will now be broken down for Players. Players who give priority answers will receive extra Points as a settlement reward.]
The Wristbands broke the problem into two questions.
Lu Li read out the words shown on his Wristband. “The first question is: Where are we right now?”
Xia Le felt like this was a freebie. He rushed to answer, unable to hold back: “In the Exile Land!”
He even added, “The Exile Land outside the world of happiness.”
The Wristband flashed red.
“[Incorrect answer]”
A wrong answer meant punishment.
“Ah-! My face!” Xia Le clutched his face as a sudden sharp pain stabbed through it. Under his palm he could feel that what he was touching was no longer smooth human skin, nor a sparse scattering of Rabbit fur, but a complete Rabbit face.
The punishment was accelerating his transformation into an animal.
Sun Hai had been itching to answer first as well. After Xia Le jumped in before him, he’d shot him a dark glare. Now, seeing what happened, he felt nothing but relief.
His answer would have been the same as Xia Le’s.
“We’re on a vehicle,” Lu Li said.
“A transfer truck, about to pass a toll station.”
The Wristband flashed green.
[Correct answer]
Xia Le was now half-man, half-Rabbit. His Rabbit head turned toward Lu Li, and he glared at him with blood-red eyes. “You knew the answer?! Why didn’t you say something earlier!”
He was worked up. As he stared at his own hands, he realized the punishment was still continuing.
The fur on his body was growing several times faster than on anyone else.
Luo Jia Bai was stunned by the sight. “You jumped in to answer yourself! Your human face turned into a Rabbit face, and your brain shrank down to a walnut with it-don’t you even want your face anymore?”
Lu Li focused on the problem. He looked at the second question. “What is Missing Leg’s real name?”
So Missing Leg was the sole Boss of this Instance.
But this question was almost unsolvable.
The top floor was extremely cramped.
Behind them was the route they’d crawled up.
In front of them they were surrounded by screens. They had already seen all the content on each of them earlier, and Lu Li had read the text on those screens as well. None of it had anything to do with Missing Leg.
They’d learned about Missing Leg from the fragments of speech from the animals on each floor, but none of the animals remembered his name.
Suddenly, there was the sound of wings beating behind them.
Mirella turned around. She thought it was Fenny, but instead saw a Parrot flying straight toward Luo Jia Bai’s shoulder.
“Hello!” Pingping nudged Luo Jia Bai’s cheek with his head, then looked at Lu Li and whistled like a person. “Choo-choo!”
Pingping blew a flying kiss at Lu Li.
Lu Li asked him, “Missing Leg was your and Anan’s neighbor. Do you remember what his name was?”
“How did Missing Leg’s owner usually call him?”
Pingping tilted his head and thought for a moment. Then a string of sounds came from his throat that none of them could understand-he was imitating a woman’s voice.
Lu Li closed his eyes and listened carefully. “That’s human language.”
Similar to the language that had just come from the display screens.
They couldn’t understand human speech anymore.
Pingping cleared his throat and spoke again. “Paopao!”
He called out in human language once more, then switched back to Parrot language: “Wang Paopao! Wang Paopao, come out and play!”
Lu Li looked at Luo Jia Bai. “Pingping came here to find you. You answer this one.”
Luo Jia Bai froze for a moment, then repeated the name Pingping had just said to his Wristband.
“Missing Leg’s name is Wang Paopao.”
The Wristband lit up green.
[Correct answer]
The display screens on the top floor turned into static, then merged one by one until only the middle one remained.
The center screen had originally been playing an advertisement for the world of happiness.
The image flickered and changed into a round-eyed cat sniffing at the screen, pressing its big face up against it, as if trying to peer through the screen to find someone.
Crack.
The screen shattered, and a three-legged tabby cat crawled out from inside.
There was a Collar around his neck.
Paopao came hopping over on three legs, bouncing and skipping until he reached the Players.
He ran a few circles around them.
In the end, he chose to rub himself against Lu Li’s pant leg.
Lu Li crouched down.
He let Paopao sniff the scent on his hand first.
Only then did he start to pet him.
His hand slid along the fur until it reached the Collar around Paopao’s neck.
Beneath the Collar hung a golden tag.
Two lines were written on it:
[My mom’s contact number is 18xxxxxxxxx]
[My mom has money, please don’t kill me]
Paopao lifted his head and looked at them.
“You’re here for the Crown of Happiness too?
“Don’t look for it.
“It doesn’t exist.
“Everything is fake.”
The display screen behind him slowly caved in.
It collapsed, revealing the wall behind it.
In that wall was a transparent glass door.
It was giving off a massive, blinding light.
The light that every animal on each lower floor had seen…
It all came from here.
“Behind that door really is a world of happiness.”
“And it’s a real world of happiness.”
“We were all tricked onto a meat truck.”
“In the end, we all died.”
“Every time I open the door, I can see everyone’s different endings.”
“Not a single ending is good.”
“I’ve already given up on opening that door again.”
“If only I hadn’t been tricked into coming here that day.”
Paopao licked the stump of his severed right hind leg.
“Actually, having three legs isn’t so bad.
“I was just too greedy.”
Lu Li said, “Can I see your flyer?”
Paopao nosed through the ruins of the display screen.
He grabbed his own flyer and a few sheets of paper in his mouth and brought them to Lu Li.
[?? Diary]
[I was wandering near a School. Students here always brought cat food and meat to feed me. There were just a lot of cars, and there were also a lot of stray cats fighting over food.]
[I used a little trick and won over a simple-minded human student. No matter the wind or rain, no matter thunder or lightning, she came every day with food to find me. Life as a stray was a bit cold. Every time, I took the initiative to show her affection, waiting for her to take me away and bring me home.]
[A few months passed. The more proactive I was, the less often she came. But every time she did come, she brought more food than the last time, and she even made me a cat bed. She said she had to prepare for exams and would come less in the future. Then she stroked the back of my neck and said she really wanted to adopt me, but she was still a student. If she didn’t do well on the exams, she would have to look for a job, and she might not stay in this city.]
[Sure enough, she rarely came after that. Once, when I went out to look for food, I was hit by a car and my leg was ruined. I passed out from the pain several times. The last time I woke up, I saw her holding me, and next to us someone in a white coat was cutting into my leg. After the surgery, the anesthesia wore off quickly. She asked carefully if it hurt. I licked her hand. Of course it hurt.]
[Then she took out a Collar and asked if I was willing to live with her, even if life might be very hard.]
[Of course I was willing.]
[I slipped my head into that Collar on my own.]
[She adopted me and gave me a name. She said that the first time she saw me, she wanted me to be called that. Then she gave me her surname too, calling me Wang Paopao. She said that way, no matter how many times we moved, I wouldn’t get lost. I’d always be able to find my way home.]
[I don’t know how her exams turned out, but she always seemed to be moving. Every place we lived was small. She still set aside a tiny corner for my things. After she bought me toys, whenever she saw how hard it was for me to run around, she would always look guilty.]
[She said, why did it have to be just one day late? In truth, she’d already wanted to adopt me for a long time. The exams had ended; she could have come to find me a day earlier. But it just had to be the day of the accident when she came. She believed that if she’d arrived earlier, she could have avoided the accident.]
[Sometimes I saw her late at night on the computer, calculating money. Getting me a prosthetic leg would cost tens of thousands. It was even more expensive than the rent she paid when she moved. She started eating cheap takeout. Sometimes she only ate once a day to save money. I followed her from the room to the living room, then from the living room to the sink, and I watched her clutch her stomach after being too hungry and vomit blood.]
[Was it because she was saving money that she ruined her health?]
[Mom, you don’t owe me anything.]
[I got a world of happiness flyer from my neighbor Anan. They say wishes can come true there. I’ll be back soon. I’ll come back to see you with four legs. When that happens, you have to order yourself a hearty lunch and eat it properly.]
Lu Li turned the flyer over.
He saw the wish Paopao had written:
[I want to get a prosthetic leg. Since wishes can be made here, I should be bolder. I want a real leg.]
Lu Li pushed open the glass door.
Behind it was a driver’s cab.
Ahead was the windshield.
Not far away was a toll station.
The vehicle was racing forward at a terrifying speed.
The cab was empty.
The steering wheel was rotating normally on its own.
The accelerator was pressed all the way down.
Paopao followed them in.
He looked bewildered.
“I’ve never seen this ending before,” he said.
“Where is this place?”
Lu Li exchanged Points for an attack Item.
He slammed it into the steering wheel.
He answered Paopao, “This is the place that can make the car stop.”
After the first hit, a line of red text slowly appeared on the steering wheel:
[Vehicle normal driving progress: 99.9%]
“Again!?”
Seeing that familiar, obnoxious line of text, Luo Jia Bai couldn’t help swearing.
“Everyone, hurry up and use Points to exchange for Items!
“We don’t have much time left!”
He pressed at his itching Arm through his clothes.
Rabbit fur had already grown long enough to stick out from the cuffs.
Xia Le’s beastification was the fastest. By now, he only had two human legs left, making him look like a rabbit balanced on two chopsticks.
Countless Items dropped onto the steering wheel at the same time, and the progress bar’s number shifted at a slow, stubborn pace.
[Vehicle normal driving progress: 94.6%]
Paopao shoved forward with all his strength, squeezing through every gap he could find. He turned to Lu Li to confirm it.
“As long as the truck stops, everyone can live, right?!”
When he said everyone, he didn’t just mean himself, the Player, Pingping, and Anan in the cab.
He meant every living creature on this truck.
Lu Li’s mind flashed back to the layer of frosted glass outside that lit up Exile Land.
Back then, something had been pounding on it, chasing after the vehicle.
Maybe it wasn’t a monster at all.
Maybe it was the countless owners whose pets had been swindled away-people desperate enough to intercept this transport truck.
As long as the progress bar dropped to 0, the truck would stop.
And once it stopped, the people blocking the road would be able to catch up.
Lu Li nodded to Paopao.
Paopao’s eyes went bright. “Then in this ending, everybody gets to live!”
He clambered onto the steering wheel too, tearing at it with his teeth.
In the empty driver’s cab, two furious hands appeared out of nowhere.
They grabbed Paopao and ripped him off the wheel.
Paopao twisted around and clamped his teeth down hard on the hand that was holding him.
A scream tore out-whoever that hand belonged to howled in pain.
The progress bar dropped by a huge chunk.
[Vehicle normal driving progress: 80%]
Paopao’s body was flung down onto the steering wheel with a heavy thud.
The pain made him release his bite, and he tumbled to the floor.
The other hand reached to grab him.
Pingping darted in and pecked viciously at the human hand, throwing the whole scene into chaos.
Taking advantage of the confusion, Paopao scrambled back up.
He hopped forward on three legs, bouncing and clawing his way back onto the steering wheel.
With Paopao helping, the Player was also racing against the clock, cashing in Items to yank the progress bar down.
Paopao kept asking how much was left.
When he learned his effort was the most effective, he puffed up with pride.
“Back when I was a stray, I was amazing at fighting,” he bragged.
“Other stray cats could never beat me when it came to stealing food.
“Later, if it hadn’t been because I wanted to go home with Mom, I wouldn’t have pretended to be so well-behaved!”
[Vehicle normal driving progress: 50%]
When the progress bar fell past halfway, they finally began to understand the two men’s voices in the cab.
“Damn it! Where did this cat come from?” one of them cursed.
“It’s even missing a leg. You can’t even skin something like that for a whole pelt. Who the hell smuggled it onto the truck?”
“Not me!” the other man snapped.
“It climbed on by itself!”
“And there’s a parrot too?!” the first man shouted.
“Where the hell did that come from? Grab it! Grab them all!
“Once we get past this toll station and out of the city, we’ll switch vehicles. The ones chasing us won’t be able to tell where we went.”
“Grabbing them is pointless,” the other man said coldly.
“I’ve got a knife. That’ll do.”
“There’s a rabbit too!”
A hand grabbed the parrot and threw it out the window.
Then, all of a sudden, it noticed Xia Le-mixed in among the Player, he had already fully turned into a rabbit.
It seemed to ignore the other Players completely.
It seized Xia Le by the ears, lifted him up, and looked him over from side to side.
“This fur’s good,” the man said, satisfied.
Sun Hai was the closest to Xia Le.
He reached out instinctively-
only to find his hand and his Items passed straight through the human hand, as if they existed in different layers of reality.
All he could do was watch.
Watch Xia Le get grabbed.
Watch him get smashed unconscious with an electric baton.
Watch a knife scrape open the back of his head.
Watch an entire sheet of skin and fur get cut away.
[Vehicle normal driving progress: 30%]
The hand held a knife that was still smeared with blood.
It turned the blade toward Paopao, who was still trying to climb back up.
Lu Li’s pupils contracted.
“Don’t go!” he shouted.
“Paopao! Wang Paopao! Get down!”
Lu Li lunged up onto the steering wheel as well.
He reached for the knife, trying to catch the blade before it fell on Paopao.
But the knife wasn’t in the same time and space as him.
It slipped through Lu Li’s hand.
And plunged precisely into Paopao.
Paopao let out a piercing scream.
Then, with the knife still in him, he forced his body forward.
He dug his teeth and claws into that human hand, raking out deep, bloody gashes.
The hand roared in rage.
“Fuck! He’s got a Collar on his neck!
“Who checked this one? How did you not cut the Collar off?!
“Collars from owned pets have tracking chips in them!
“I knew it-why else would we take a spill in the gutter this time?
“We haven’t even made it out of the city and someone’s already got their eyes on us, trying to block the truck-he’s got a tracker on him!”
The steering wheel jerked hard to the left.
The accelerator eased off.
There were only a few dozen meters left to the toll station.
With a deafening crash, the whole truck rolled onto its side.
[Vehicle normal driving progress: 0%]
The moment the progress hit zero, Lu Li heard the frosted glass behind them-the one that had been pounded on nonstop-finally shatter completely.
A lot of people forced their way in, frantic.
“It’s this truck!” someone shouted.
“It’s full of animals!”
“Why did it flip over by itself?”
“My pet is old and sick!” another voice cried, on the verge of hysteria.
“If he stays in a place like this too long, he’ll die!
“Please let me go in first to look!
“I brought my ID, and I’ve got this lost-dog flyer to prove he’s my dog!
“And the parrot you just threw out the window-that’s mine too!
“My dog is on this truck!”
“My daughter lost her rabbit and hasn’t eaten or drunk anything since!” someone else sobbed.
“In the last two days, this is the only large transport truck leaving the city.
“My daughter’s rabbit has to be on this truck!
“I printed the rabbit’s photos and all the details-right here on this paper.
“Can you help me look?”
“Paopao! Wang Paopao, hurry and come home with me!”
Amid the shrill, desperate cries, Lu Li reached out, trying to cover the blood that kept pouring out of Paopao.
But his hand passed through Paopao’s body again and again.
“I’ll do it!” Luo Jia Bai rushed forward, panicked.
Yet his Ability didn’t work at all.
Lu Li couldn’t touch Paopao.
“So much blood,” he whispered.
“Don’t die.”
He had longed for death for so long.
Yet now, it was happening to a Boss.
“Your mom is looking for you.”
Paopao spoke weakly. “Looking for me…”
His gaze fell on Lu Li. “I heard my mom’s voice, and the car stopped. Did we do it? Did we succeed?”
Lu Li lowered his eyes. “We did.”
The price of success was that Paopao’s body was turning transparent.
Paopao stared unblinkingly at his neck. “You have a Collar there too. Is that a gift from the human who loves you?”
“No.”
Lu Li said, “It’s something that causes pain.”
Paopao said, “How can you wear something painful every day? You should wear something that makes you feel happy.”
“I feel so light. I probably won’t get to see my mom. Honestly, if she hadn’t saved me in that car accident, if she hadn’t brought me back, with my leg ruined and no treatment, I should have died long ago. She doesn’t owe me anything. I’m the one who owes her too much. I’ve already been racing death and got to live this much longer, and I still wanted to get a fourth leg back-that was a dream from the start.”
“If you see my mom, can you give her this Collar for me?”
Paopao’s body became completely transparent.
True to his name, with just a light touch he burst and vanished.
In the end, the only thing left on the ground was a Collar with a golden tag hanging from it.
Lu Li reached out. He could touch the Collar.
He closed his hands around it, cupping the Collar.
A single tear fell onto it.
How am I supposed to pass it on to your mom for you?
Tell her that in this supposedly perfect ending, you’re the only one who died?
[Detecting that the Player has obtained the true Crown of Happiness.]
[Detecting that this Instance Boss’s hatred value is 0. Conditions to activate the Necromancer Game are not met. This Instance will now be permanently closed.]
[Goodbye, last batch of Players.]
[You all… huh, this time the damned lucky ones aren’t just one.]
Lu Li silently looked at the Wristband.
Once the settlement screen came up, the Bullet Comments once again went crazy complaining, because they still couldn’t see the visuals.
He sent Bosi a message, then looked up and saw Gu Yu Chu still standing there, not leaving.
Gu Yu Chu explained, “Instance settlement takes a long time, and it can stack with vacation time. I happen to be able to trade it for a 24‑hour holiday. In that time, no matter how complicated the lock is, I can crack it.”
“I asked you before if you wanted your Neck Collar removed, and you said no. If you regret that now, it’s not too late. I’m not going anywhere.”
Lu Li looked at Paopao’s Collar in his palm and spoke, his voice hoarse:
“Help me take it off. Thank you.”
–
The three of them stood around Lu Li.
Gu Yu Chu was wearing gloves; his palms were slick with cold sweat.
He hadn’t expected the lock to be this complicated, and on top of that, it was pieced together.
It took a long time to destroy the multiple chips buried inside the Neck Collar. To completely dismantle this Neck Collar, he would have to break it down into dozens of pieces.
He kept changing the lock structure inside the Neck Collar. With a crisp “click,” he finally found the position of the first segment of the lock and managed to remove one piece.
“Hiss!” Before Lu Li reacted at all, Luo Jia Bai sucked in a sharp breath. He quickly grabbed Lu Li’s hand as he instinctively reached up to touch. “Wait until Gu Yu Chu takes the whole thing off.”
Scanning the expressions on their faces, Lu Li had a bad feeling. “What does the skin under the Neck Collar look like?”
He picked from the cheap Items and exchanged for a small piece of glass, wanting to see for himself.
Mirella reached out to cover the reflective side of the glass, sighing. “Don’t look yet.”
Don’t look at that sunken patch of flesh, covered densely in black pinpricks.
They finally understood why Lu Li hadn’t wanted to take off the Neck Collar at the start.
Because the skin there was no longer anything a human should have.
Lu Li’s Resurrection ability-
When that patch of skin was exposed to sunlight-
Did not take effect at all.
Luo Jia Bai tried not to pay attention to that flesh, but his eyes kept drifting back, his heart aching as his gaze floated upward. He racked his brains. “Uh, I think it looks… pretty good. It’s just a bit different, yeah, just kind of special! Other people might get a scare at first glance, but if they look closely, they…”
He remembered how Lu Li didn’t need to do anything at all-just standing there was enough to earn shallow ridicule from other Players.
When perfection itself already invites jealousy-
Any tiny flaw will only draw even more vicious, gleeful attacks.
In the chaos of his thoughts, Luo Jia Bai suddenly came up with a good idea. “We can exchange for a pretty scarf for Lu Li to wear.”
Mirella said, “There are no scarves in the Shop.”
“There’s yarn,” Gu Yu Chu offered. “I can knit a scarf. No Points required. Add me as a friend, and we’ll trade online when it’s done.”
He’d been startled too by the patch of flesh on Lu Li’s neck, but he quickly calmed down and wiped the sweat off the tip of his nose. “We’ve already taken off one piece. This lock is too hard. I don’t know how to put it back on; I can only take the whole thing apart.”
——
Utopia
From the Greek: “ou” (no) and “topos” (place).
Meaning “no place.”
A place that does not exist; a wish people yearn for that does not fit reality.
An idle fantasy.
This Instance draws only on the pejorative sense of the term.