chapter 150
Lu Li stared at the few lines of text floating in front of him, his fingertips lightly tapping his coat hem as he thought.
Find the murderer
Find the innocent
Protect the innocent
This time the A Grade Instance really was harder than the previous ones. To clear it, they had to complete three tasks.
Gu Yu Chu was also reading the clearance guide and noticed another point.
His lips moved, but in the end he swallowed back what he’d wanted to share with the others.
Because of what had happened in the Original World.
He had formed a subconscious shadow and resistance toward the word “friend.”
The sentence carved into his body like a curse was:
[Always quick to trust the people around him, treats his friends too well and gets betrayed by them.]
Even though he had done his best through multiple rebirths to avoid getting close to anyone, he still couldn’t escape that key node.
So in the Necromancer Game, he never handed his back to anyone.
Going solo was better and faster.
As for Lu Li and the other two, they were just three Players he’d happened to meet in the Game.
In this Instance, they’d been matched together again by coincidence.
He owed Lu Li a big favor. Once he gave away the scarf tonight, their accounts should be squared.
“A serial murder case… a string of deaths.”
Another voice spoke by his ear, directly voicing the thought Gu Yu Chu had been repressing. “The three types of people mentioned in the clearance guide don’t have any numbers attached. There might be more than one of each.”
Gu Yu Chu looked up at Luo Jia Bai, then quietly observed Lu Li and Mirella’s reactions.
Lu Li praised, “Great catch.”
Mirella added, “This might be the key clue that lets us clear this Instance.”
Seeing the smile on Luo Jia Bai’s face that he couldn’t quite hide, and the obvious light in his eyes from being praised, Gu Yu Chu looked away.
One hand in his pocket, he turned to look at Cheng Liang’s group of four.
They were also a three-person team with one solo Player tacked on. The expressions on their faces were faintly distant, and when they looked at each other, an extra layer of suspicion and false friendliness appeared.
Gu Yu Chu thought that this was the most common “team spirit” he’d seen in the Necromancer Game.
His hand in his pocket suddenly bumped into two hard spheres.
He took them out and glanced at them.
It was the Candy Luo Jia Bai had stuffed into his pocket earlier.
–
The ground started trembling again.
The Players thought the five stone pillars were undergoing some new mutation and looked up warily.
Instead, the ground abruptly rose.
The full appearance of the five stone pillars was revealed to everyone.
A massive hand made of stone blocks.
When the Players had entered the Instance, they’d been standing in the center of this hand’s palm.
The five stone pillars that had bent down to attack were its fingers.
Now they’d escaped the grid marked out in the palm.
All the Players were standing at the base of the stone hand.
Lu Li looked up and examined it again.
The short black segment at the tip of each stone pillar looked a bit like a black fingernail.
Maybe this was…the hand of a witch?
The stone hand rotated in place, as if activating a special magic array that sent the Players somewhere else.
The previously blank surroundings turned into drifting white mist.
Within the mist, the scenery of the Instance gradually filled in and grew richer.
A towering spired castle-like teaching building, windows lighting up one by one, an iron gate, iron railings, a huge clock, and a road.
They were standing in front of a School’s main gate.
The School was wrapped in dense forest. The trees around it grew abnormally tall, twice the height of a five- or six-story building.
A long creak.
The gate swung open, as if welcoming the Players’ arrival.
Luo Jia Bai craned his neck to read the words on the iron gate. “Holy Witch Academy.”
Most of the white mist had already dissipated. A Player pointed by the gate. “There’s a man waving at us. He should be the NPC in charge of guiding us.”
Under their feet there was only one road, leading into Holy Witch Academy.
Several Players had already started toward the waving NPC.
Lu Li had just taken a step when he noticed Mirella looking back.
“What is it?”
Mirella took a step back toward the mist. “There’s a butterfly.”
She’d first heard the tiny rustling of its wings, then turned and spotted a white butterfly fluttering in the fog.
“What are you talking about?” Mirella moved closer to it, opening her palm to give the butterfly somewhere to land. “Can you come a little closer?”
The butterfly seemed to have something to say.
But with so little contact between them, she couldn’t sense it clearly.
“You’re the investigators, right?! Please don’t stay in the forest! It gets extremely dangerous here close to nightfall. We’re about to close the Academy gates! Please hurry inside!” The NPC’s sudden shout startled the butterfly just as it was about to land on Mirella’s hand.
It flapped its wings once more, turned into a puff of white mist, and, falling back, merged into the fog already curling around the forest.
Only after making sure all the Players had entered the Academy did the man finally lock the gate with Chains in relief. He turned back to them with a smile. “I’ve been standing at the gate all day, and finally, before nightfall, I’ve been able to wait for you.”
“Honorable investigators, it’s already late. The Academy has prepared rooms where you can rest.”
“Tomorrow morning, I’ll take you to see the principal first, then the teachers and students connected to the case.”
Because of the order the King had given, Fenny had been investigating Lu Li’s Original World for the past few days.
But the more he looked into that world, the stranger it became. He was an Evil God, yet he couldn’t enter it directly. He tried all kinds of methods, even jumping over from other Mini-Worlds, and still couldn’t get in.
So he first organized the scattered bits and pieces Lu Li had mentioned in the Necromancer Game, planning to report to the King first.
The strange thing was-
Today the Underworld King’s Palace had its doors and windows shut tight, pitch-black inside.
He knocked. No response.
He gingerly sent the King a message. No reply.
He was just about to go find a ghost to ask when he ran into the Horned Evil God.
Fenny asked, “E Rong, where’s the King?”
“The King got off work early today. He suddenly had some urgent matter just now and told me to pass along that you can hand in your report tomorrow morning.”
When E Rong said that terrifying phrase “got off work early,” the human half of his face actually tingled. He opened his mouth several times, then finally decided to call back the departing Fenny.
“Fenny, there’s something I want to ask you.”
E Rong glanced at the Underworld King’s Palace looming right next to them, tore open space, and pulled Fenny into his own space.
Then he lowered his voice. “You’re pretty well informed. I don’t know if you might know something… about the King-the root cause of his recent strange behavior…”
“I remember last time you came to us asking about the King’s Scale. Did you see it somewhere? On someone?”
Fenny processed the question E Rong had given him in his head:
E Rong was asking him for gossip about the King.
A melon he’d already been quietly chewing on alone for many days stuck in Fenny’s throat. For the sake of his job and his budding love life, he decided to swallow that melon back down whole.
Fenny said innocently, “No, I did not see a thing.”
E Rong stared into the two little black-bean eyes of Fenny’s Crow form, confirming the truth of those seven words, then said, “I’ve seen some things.”
“I’ll trade you one for one. How about it?”
Fenny gave his wings a dismissive shake like he wasn’t interested, but his ears swiveled toward E Rong’s mouth. “Who knows if what you say is true or not. I only like real stories.”
“Of course they’re real.” E Rong rubbed his forehead. “You know I basically serve as the King’s assistant. Everything I’m about to tell you really happened to me.”
After listening closely for five minutes-
Fenny sucked in a sharp breath.
“You’re saying: watching live streams, reporting inappropriate Bullet Comments, interfering with the Necromancer Game’s development and operations, holding a flower-vase beauty pageant, wanting to plant flowers in the Underworld, starting to gradually increase his vacation time, and even coming in late and leaving early?”
“That’s right.” E Rong nodded. “And there’s one more thing.”
“He’s been fixated on a bed that’s about to go live under Home Goods. From the blueprint down to the finalized product, he revised it eleven times and added a ton of functions. That’s what’s truly unbelievable!
Why is he so invested in a bed in the Necromancer Game? And isn’t the King always working? His true body… doesn’t even hibernate. Does the King need to sleep?”
Fenny agreed. “Yeah. Every time he shuts the Palace and forbids any ghost or Evil God from entering or leaving, I’m usually the one delivering messages, so I’ve happened to catch a few glimpses of the King’s true body. He definitely doesn’t need to hibernate.”
E Rong said, “I used to think the King had no emotions at all, like a machine that only processed official business. Lately, his emotional fluctuations have become very obvious.”
“He was even worried that the bed came out too well, that Players with a lot of Points would redeem it first, so he told the Development Department to upload a super blurry preview image, then redeemed it the moment it went live.”
“Who’s that bed for?”
E Rong fell into a deeper kind of confusion. “And how is that bed even supposed to be used?”
Fenny: …
He thought of the insanely expensive luxury bed that had sparked discussion among Players in the game today.
His stiff neck turned, vertebra by vertebra.
He’d thought what he’d personally seen and heard was already explosive enough, but it turned out that in the unseen side of “Game Night,” there was something even more explosive.
This was really hard to comment on.
“How about this,” Fenny said quietly, lowering his voice as well. “What you told me has a huge amount of information. To be fair, I’ll trade you a piece of gossip you definitely don’t know.”
“The King has formed a bond with a human in the Necromancer Game.”
“They’re together every day.”
Like him and Mirella-together every Game Night.
“I even personally saw the King holding him.”
On the sightseeing cart, he’d personally seen the King being affectionate with the human who’d already fallen asleep!
Touching the human’s hair! Maybe even his face!
He hadn’t seen clearly-and didn’t dare to look!
It was all too explosive. He was afraid if he told E Rong everything, the other wouldn’t be able to accept it.
After he finished, Fenny left the still-shell-shocked E Rong behind, tore open space, and flew off.
“I’ve got urgent business tonight too, so I’m going first! Don’t tell the other ghosts! You absolutely cannot tell anyone!”
–
[Game Night]
Lu Li was standing there, looking at the somewhat unfamiliar surroundings. He hesitated and asked, “Where’s the bed in the room?”
Bosi pointed downward. “Down here.”