Chapter 97
Chapter 97
In the Main God Space, the Optical Brain stared at the Script that had just refreshed and said nothing for a very long time.
011 stood below. For some reason, he felt as if the Main God was in a terrible mood.
Since he thought it, he asked it. “Are you in a bad mood?”
The Optical Brain replied, “Heh. How could I be in a bad mood? I’m in a wonderful mood.”
011 asked mechanically, “Why are you in a bad mood?”
Because the instance that group had just cleared had gone wrong again.
The Optical Brain stared at the reset Ghost Bride Script on the screen.
In the image, not only were Mingzhi and the other Ghost Brides no longer trapped by the ancestral hall’s talisman arrays, they were even helping the other Players.
The Script had already been reset. How did they know how to break those talisman arrays??
Unwilling to give up, the Optical Brain pulled up the surveillance footage from Ning Shuo’s run and watched it over and over again.
In the end, it finally discovered the secret in the few sheets of paper Ning Shuo had given Mingzhi.
It had always assumed those pages were a script Ning Shuo had prepared for Mingzhi: how to use the fragments to save the other Ghost Brides, what to do next.
But after zooming the footage in again and again, the Optical Brain stared at the paper and finally realized that what was written there was not the script it had imagined, but the method Ning Shuo had taught Mingzhi for undoing the talisman arrays.
But hadn’t Ning Shuo already taught Mingzhi that method verbally?
The Optical Brain watched as Mingzhi carried those pages with her no matter what she was doing. As a ghost, she no longer needed to sleep, so when she was bored at night, she would lie there staring at those papers without even shifting her gaze.
She had successfully spent two days integrating the memory of how to undo the talismans into herself until it had become almost like common knowledge.
Just like the common knowledge that devouring other people or ghosts could increase her power.
After the Script reset, the moment Mingzhi saw that binding array, the solution naturally surfaced in her mind.
She knew she must have encountered some kind of opportunity, even though she had forgotten where that opportunity had come from.
Otherwise, after being imprisoned for so long, she would never have suddenly understood how to undo a binding that had once left her completely helpless.
Everything that followed came naturally. The other Ghost Brides also gained self-awareness. They gathered together and once again launched their revenge against Aotianli.
Hatred meant they would show no mercy, but it also did not make them blindly slaughter the innocent.
They were already ghosts walking the mortal world, and with the limitations of the Script world on top of that, they did not need to worry about cutting the weeds without pulling out the roots, only for them to grow again when the spring wind blew.
Forgetting again and again. Starting over again and again.
Each time, the course of events was almost exactly the same.
Mingzhi stood at the front before the mass grave, making those people pay respects to the sisters who had died unjust deaths, then offering up their lives as sacrifice.
…
The Optical Brain was far beyond merely being in a bad mood. If it had a physical body, it would have been shaking with rage!
It watched helplessly as the clearance rate for this Script climbed like it had been pumped full of adrenaline over the past few days. It watched the Script go from a proper difficult arena Script to an easy arena Script, until in the end, it could no longer even count as an arena Script and was directly downgraded to a PvP Script.
Then came the familiar progression: difficult PvP to easy PvP.
On the screen, the bright light in the eyes of those Ghost Brides was even more of a mockery.
An NPC was just an NPC. What right did they have to develop self-awareness?!
What right did they have to exceed its control…
011 was still repeating his question below. The Optical Brain only felt that irritation fermenting and swelling, until even the data streams of the Main God Space began to fall into disorder.
“Stop asking!”
A nearly invisible thread of data had been connected to 011’s nervous system. With that furious shout, it snapped instantly.
The light in 011’s eyes abruptly dimmed. His empty eyes remained wide open as his body collapsed with a heavy boom.
A portal appeared in the Main God Space. Shu Yan stepped through in combat gear, his blue-and-white cape drawing an arc through the air.
He didn’t even glance at 011’s corpse. “Report.”
“You’re not going to ask why I killed him?”
“If you wanted to kill him, then you killed him. You can make plenty of NPCs like that anyway.”
Seeing how indifferent he was, the Optical Brain was a little surprised. “I thought you’d use this to mock me for being cold-blooded.”
“As if your blood has ever been warm.”
“…” There it was. That familiar flavor.
The Optical Brain changed the subject. “They only finished the Script a short while ago. What situation is there to report?”
“Exactly. But if I don’t report in time, someone will start thinking I’ve betrayed them again and plant all kinds of random crap in me.”
“…” That enduring resentment.
“Then what are you reporting?”
“The two of them were unconscious for two days. There are three days left until the Star Zone Arena. Willow figured they were already familiar enough with the competition process, so in order to conserve strength, he gave the Team time off until the Arena Match starts.”
“One more thing. Because Willow put them in two separate beds while they were unconscious, the Number One Swordsman in the World has been holding a deep grudge. He’s added quite a lot of salt to Willow’s food more than once.”
The Optical Brain didn’t tell him to stop, so 003 continued reporting these trivial little matters. When he looked up, he saw that the data streams in the space were moving very slowly, giving off an inexplicably solemn feeling.
He stood there quietly and waited.
After a long while, the Optical Brain asked, “Are they doing this to formulate some kind of plan against me?”
“…” 003 smiled. “A plan to salt you to death?”
The Optical Brain’s voice was very serious. “No. Perhaps they’re using salt to transmit some kind of information while evading surveillance.”
“It’s just a childish act of revenge from a lovestruck idiot.”
“Impossible,” the Optical Brain said. “Do you think a Player who almost destroyed me would really do something that stupid?”
003 pressed a hand to his forehead. “…Fine, fine. Impossible. They must be plotting some earth-shattering conspiracy.”
“Go keep an eye on them.”
…
The Two Nings were indeed plotting something earth-shattering-a date.
After the captain ate an earth-shattering meal, he earth-shatteringly announced the surprise vacation ahead of schedule. So Ning Wang, feeling somewhat guilty, ordered plain, bland food for the captain for two days straight. Rao Lin sometimes felt he had truly become a monk.
Dating was a major challenge for both Ning Shuo and Ning Wang, because neither of them had any experience.
As two people used to planning first and acting later, they very tacitly spent the first day separately searching for dating guides, and both ended in failure.
Ning Wang was unfamiliar with ordinary advice like going to the movies, and he worried he wouldn’t be able to control the situation or manage the pacing.
Ning Shuo was about the same. He felt that judging by ordinary dates, it was all too formulaic, and he wasn’t particularly interested in movies and the like either.
Back when he was a webnovel Author, whenever he wrote two protagonists going on a date, it always came out stiff: watch a movie, have dinner, then kiss on a bridge spanning the river.
Very romantic. Very beautiful.
But after writing too many novels, every single novel had the same date sequence. It was as if the two protagonists across several books had only used two souls, and those two souls had experienced the same date over and over through several different stories.