Chapter 129
Chapter 129
“I’ll have someone investigate,” Ning Wang said.
Ning Shuo nodded. He was just about to leave when he suddenly stopped.
He turned his head and looked at Ning Wang’s collarbone. There was a mole there.
He thought about his own mole. It should have been slightly to the left of his collarbone.
…But strangely, Ning Wang’s was on the right.
Seeing that Ning Shuo wasn’t leaving, Ning Wang asked in confusion, “What’s wrong?”
Something was wrong.
Ning Shuo’s voice came out strained. “…What’s your real name?”
Noticing that something was off with him, Ning Wang immediately got up, helped him sit down, and whispered in his ear, “I’m Xie Ning. Ge, what’s wrong?”
Like a fish stranded on shore finally thrown back into the water, Ning Shuo managed to catch his breath. He pointed at the mole on Ning Wang’s collarbone. “Has your mole always been in that spot?”
Ning Wang frowned. “It was on the left, but yesterday, after I saw that the mole on your body was on the right, I went back and looked in the mirror. Turns out mine had originally been on the right too.”
And since everything else in their conversation had been normal, Ning Wang had only assumed he’d remembered it wrong.
Ning Shuo doubted his own ears. “My mole is on the right?”
Ning Wang nodded. “Even I think something’s off. A few days ago when we were intimate, your mole clearly wasn’t in that spot…”
“Wait, Ningning,” Ning Shuo said seriously. “We’re still livestreaming.”
[No, you aren’t livestreaming.]
[What!? Intimate!!!]
[As one of the few die-hard members of the Shuo Wang army still holding the line, I’m voting for Shuo Wang.]
[Oh, give it a rest.]
Ning Wang said lazily, “Ge, stop testing me. It’s only verbal anyway. Since when have we ever cared about the livestream? I’m Xie Ning, Ning Wang, the Number One Swordsman in the World,”
He paused, then smiled. “And Ge’s boyfriend.”
[Right, right, right. Please continue. Don’t mind us.]
[Verbal is fine? Really fine? I don’t mean anything else by it, I just want you two to verbally describe the details of how you were intimate.]
After confirming each other’s identities, Ning Shuo frowned. “How come you didn’t doubt me at all…?”
“Oh, when the Sea Healer was treating your injuries yesterday, I saw that the marks around your waist still hadn’t faded.”
“…So that’s why.”
So they both remembered what the other’s body should have looked like.
But in this Script, those features had inexplicably shifted position.
Or rather, visually, they appeared to have changed positions.
Left and right, no less.
A lens spun into Ning Shuo’s palm. “…Ningning, could this Script be the world inside the Water Moon Mirror?”
Whether that guess was right still needed to be verified. Ning Shuo got the Sea King to grant him the nominal status of recovering from his injuries in the palace, then used that as a pretext to go ashore.
Only after leaving that palace did Ning Shuo realize that this stretch of sea was completely different from what he’d imagined.
The closer he swam to shore, the more obvious it became that the environment here was terrible. Quite a bit of trash floated in the water, and much of it was clearly man-made.
So was the enmity between the Sea Clan and the Human Clan caused by environmental problems?
Not every creature on the seafloor recognized the Sea Queen. That was probably because, ever since Ning Banxian became the Sea Queen, he’d stayed in the palace writing his Lovesick Diary and occasionally fighting for favor.
Ning Shuo swam to shore, and as he came out of the water, he clearly felt the change in his legs.
Did this count as evolving from a non-mammal into a mammal?
Ning Shuo’s focus was a little strange: in this Script, when his tail turned into legs, it had even thoughtfully given him pants.
There weren’t many zombies near this stretch of coastline, and the place seemed to have once been a tourist attraction. Ning Shuo climbed into a shop and locked eyes with the zombie trapped inside.
Ning Shuo: “…”
He casually flipped out a playing card and sliced off the shop owner’s head with it, then gave him two respectful bows. “May you rest in peace. May you rest in peace.”
He found a tourist map and tried to locate Zone X on it, but it wasn’t there.
Ning Shuo silently cursed himself for being stupid. This was a pre-apocalypse map. Zone X had been built after the apocalypse. Of course it wouldn’t be on there.
Places with fewer zombies might still have living people. Ning Shuo searched for a full day and finally found a team out scavenging in an abandoned warehouse.
After hearing why he had come, the man leading the team said in confusion, “Were you tricked by someone? There is no Base X in our country.”
The initial information given by the Script shouldn’t be wrong, unless there had already been a problem when the Script was loaded.
Ning Shuo thanked him and headed for the sea.
The inexplicably reversed left and right. The Base X that clearly should have existed, yet didn’t.
If it were just some small base, that still wouldn’t make sense. A small base might not even be able to maintain its own supply chain, let alone think about cooperating with the Sea Clan to ensure humanity’s continued survival.
There was no information on shore, no teammates, and therefore no reason to stay any longer.
After all, the world he could see right now was only the world inside the Water Moon Mirror.
The deep sea was quiet and still. He was clearly swimming back along the route he had come from.
But even after swimming for so long, the once-conspicuous palace was nowhere to be seen.
Instead, all around him, coral, seaweed, and the metal and garbage lying on the seabed surged toward him from every direction, as if they meant to swallow him whole.
—
In the Main God Space, the image had split into three sections.
One showed Ning Wang in the Sea Palace inside the Water Moon Mirror, studying the Murderer’s method of clearing the stage.
Another showed the Water Moon Mirror, under interference from the Script Effect of the World-Descent Rule, closing in and attacking Ning Shuo.
The last showed the three remaining Players from Zone F after they had regrouped. They had been sent out by Base X to search for supplies, only to run into a zombie horde for no apparent reason.
The Main God’s finger tapped on Ning Shuo’s initial System message.
This information was half true and half false. Who knew?
He had even been ready to pop champagne and celebrate, when his wrist suddenly throbbed with pain.
The Main God looked irritably at the thread connected to his wrist. If there had been any other Players here who could see that thread, they would have discovered that it ran directly beneath the System.
Originally, the World-Descent Rule had been a tool he could use.
During the second Internal Upheaval a year and a half ago, he had finally managed to stabilize the World-Descent Rule so it could keep operating. But after regaining consciousness, he discovered that he had become almost fused with it.
So every time he used the World-Descent Rule, he could no longer simply make use of the tool’s calculating functions.
Because his own emotions would always bleed into it.
The Main God pulled up a Virtual Screen. It showed the Notary Office inside the Script, and inside it was Shu Yan, currently spacing out.
His fingers lightly touched Shu Yan’s face in the image.
003, my child… was this your doing?
There really wasn’t anyone usable left in the System. For now, 003 remained only a provisional suspect. In any case, he had already planted an anchor point on 003. Whether 003 had been loyal before or not, from now on he could only behave.
After a while, the Main God closed the Notary Office display and was just about to continue watching Ning Shuo’s side.
Then he discovered that Ning Shuo and Ning Wang’s surveillance feeds had somehow become identical.
And moreover… they weren’t in the sea.
They were both on land.
The background was almost exactly the same as Rao Lin and the others’ in the third surveillance feed.
…They got out of the Water Moon Mirror that fast???