Chapter 192
Chapter 192
Liang Chen and Jiang Li opened the Note and glanced at it.
The first rule of the King:
[The King may not speak more than 50 characters, or the mad Queen will tear out your tongue.]
The moment Liang Chen and Jiang Li saw this rule, they understood what had happened.
Zhang Jiang could not speak too much.
Although in this round of the game, Zhang Jiang, as the King, possessed the privilege of “making others obey him unconditionally,” the number of characters the King could speak was strictly limited.
“Oh my god, that’s way too miserable, Zhang Jiang!” Liang Chen exclaimed. “Then how many characters do you have left right now?”
Zhang Jiang looked at Liang Chen, raised his fingers, and made a “four” and then an “eight,” indicating that he still had forty-eight characters left.
After Zhang Jiang arrived in this fairy-tale world, his first reaction upon seeing the first rule had been to directly order the execution of “the Queen who wanted to tear out his tongue.”
But the second rule restricted him.
Zhang Jiang could not order the death of any fairy-tale story “non-player characters,” so he could not kill the Queen.
To obey the rules, Zhang Jiang had stubbornly held to his principle no matter what happened at the time and refused to utter a sound.
Back then, Zhang Jiang had been caught by an Old Witch.
The Old Witch tied Zhang Jiang up, took off his shoes and socks, and used a raven feather to tickle the soles of his feet nonstop.
The Old Witch tried to use “hahahahaha” to burn through all of Zhang Jiang’s available characters.
Unfortunately for her, Zhang Jiang gritted his teeth and clenched his fists, enduring it for a long time without wasting a single character.
Later, the Old Witch found it boring and turned to leave, abandoning Zhang Jiang tied up inside the house.
At the time, Zhang Jiang was burdened with the task of “attending the banquet.”
As long as Zhang Jiang called the soldiers to save him, they could have untied the ropes binding him with ease.
But Zhang Jiang was remarkably tenacious and did not say a single word.
In the end, he only managed to loosen the ropes by rubbing his wrists raw, then made his way to the banquet hall.
Zhang Jiang had only just stepped into the banquet hall when he happened to hear the dispute between Liang Chen and the Queen.
Zhang Jiang guessed that the one bullying him and Liang Chen was probably the same Old Witch.
Thus, Zhang Jiang broke his principle of silence. In order to save his companion Liang Chen, he used up two characters.
Holding Zhang Jiang’s rule Note, Jiang Li and Liang Chen recalled the scene from earlier and suddenly understood the Queen’s crying, shouting, and hysterics.
Just now, the Queen had ranted endlessly in front of Zhang Jiang, flying into a terrible rage.
In truth, it was not simply because of “Liang Chen ‘stealing’ the Jade Necklace.”
Rather, the Queen had hoped to use her tantrum to lure Zhang Jiang into using up his speaking characters!
After all, whether Zhang Jiang wanted to comfort her or argue with the Queen, fifty characters would be nowhere near enough.
The Queen was setting a trap for Liang Chen, but at the same time, she was also tripping Zhang Jiang up. One move, two birds.
If Zhang Jiang had relaxed even a little, forgotten about the character limit, or failed to hold back his temper, his tongue definitely would not have survived.
“Fifty characters is nowhere near enough,” Liang Chen said, worried on Zhang Jiang’s behalf. “Zhang Jiang, you’re way too loyal. I swear I absolutely won’t make trouble for you again.”
Zhang Jiang looked at Liang Chen with smiling eyes and nodded.
“Tsk, tsk. What a clever trick! The people from the Ghost Face Organization could have just torn out Zhang Jiang’s tongue directly, but they insisted on setting up a rule like this instead!” A clear male voice came from behind them.
The three of them looked toward the sound.
They saw Xu Haoran dressed as a knight, clad in armor with a sword hanging at his waist.
At that moment, he had his arms crossed and was leaning against a large round pillar, shaking his head with a tsking sound.
Xu Haoran looked at the three of them, then walked over with a playful grin. He casually pulled out a chair and sat down at the table.
“Then if some chattering little kid became the King, wouldn’t they be doomed right from the start?”
“Exactly,” Liang Chen agreed. “The Ghost Face Organization is literally bullying children!”
While Liang Chen and Xu Haoran were discussing this, Jiang Li looked around the hall and noticed a strange problem.
The guests in the hall arrived one after another, but only six children had Health Points above their heads.
The other children all looked familiar. Their appearances hadn’t changed; they looked exactly like the players who had entered with Jiang Li.
But their faces were dull and wooden, and there were no Health Points numbers above their heads.
That meant most of the players had already been killed. They had been replaced by Aberration entities long ago.
Jiang Li stared at the remaining six children.
These six children had also eaten the chocolate candy, but none of them showed any signs of drowsiness.
In other words, making these players sleepy required more than just chocolate candy. There had to be some other condition.
Was it… moonlight?
Because these six children had been inside the castle the moment they arrived in the fairy-tale world, they hadn’t been exposed to the moonlight, so they hadn’t developed symptoms of drowsiness?
Jiang Li sank deep into thought.
“Right, have any of you seen Qingqing?” Xu Haoran suddenly asked, bringing up his girlfriend, Zhao Qingqing.
The banquet was about to begin, but Zhao Qingqing still hadn’t shown up.
Jiang Li explained, “Zhao Qingqing went to look for Meng Zihan.
“She said she’d arranged with Meng Zihan to pick up the human skin mask.
“The room with the chocolate candy wrapper on the door is the marker Meng Zihan left for her.”
“When did Qingqing go?” Xu Haoran asked.
“A while ago. Seven or eight minutes,” Jiang Li replied.
“Then why isn’t she back yet?” Xu Haoran said, puzzled. “It shouldn’t take that long just to get a mask, right?”
Jiang Li and the others didn’t have the Invisibility Cloak, nor did they have the privilege to move around freely.
So Liang Chen suggested that Zhang Jiang take everyone around the castle to look for that room.
Zhang Jiang nodded and readily agreed.
Thus, before the banquet began, Zhang Jiang led the group through the castle in search of it.
In the end, they stopped in front of a room on the Third Floor.
There was only one room with a chocolate candy wrapper stuck to the door.
“Zhang Jiang, this doesn’t seem right, does it? I remember the Queen went into this room just now,” Liang Chen was the first to voice her doubts.
Jiang Li also realized something was off.
Liang Chen was right. Not only had Liang Chen seen the Queen enter this room, Jiang Li had seen it with her own eyes as well.
This was indeed the Queen’s room.
Zhang Jiang hesitated for a moment, then brought everyone with him and knocked on the Queen’s door.
A maid opened it.
Inside, the Queen was sitting before the Dressing Mirror while two or three maids arranged her hair.
Seeing Zhang Jiang barge in with a group of people, the Queen glanced at them indifferently and said nothing to him.
Zhang Jiang searched the room, and Xu Haoran followed close behind, looking as well. But they did not see Zhao Qingqing anywhere.
“Release them,” Zhang Jiang said solemnly, giving the Queen a command.
When the Queen heard Zhang Jiang use up another two words for the sake of his friends, delight immediately spread across her face.
The Queen deliberately pretended not to understand. “Release who? A man or a woman? What’s their name? If you don’t explain it clearly, how am I supposed to release them?”
The Queen smiled in an irritatingly smug way, deliberately exploiting the loopholes in Zhang Jiang’s wording.
Before Zhang Jiang could answer, Jiang Li spoke up from the side.
“A girl. Little Red Riding Hood. She came to this room.”
Jiang Li wasn’t sure whether Meng Zihan had also been in the room at the time, so she only mentioned Zhao Qingqing.
Seeing that the speechless Zhang Jiang now had someone speaking for him, the Queen looked deeply displeased.
She rolled her eyes at Jiang Li, who was speaking for him, then walked over to the windowsill and picked up a black crow feather.
The Queen stuffed the feather into Zhang Jiang’s hand.
“The person you’re talking about isn’t here with me. I can’t release someone who isn’t here!
“This feather looks like something left behind by the Witch.
“Your Little Red Riding Hood may have been taken to the Misty Forest by the Witch. You might as well go look for her yourselves.”