Chapter 30
Chapter 30
Suddenly, something occurred to Su Chen.
This was wrong. Why would “It” be kind enough to bring the visitors to the jellyfish and restore the missing parts of their bodies?
There had to be a scheme behind it.
Su Chen focused on the cross-eyed staff member.
The man was staring fixedly at the jellyfish with an entranced expression.
“Jellyfish are so beautiful, but I don’t think there are enough of them.”
He kept his eyes on the jellyfish as he spoke to the group from the side.
Su Chen frowned.
Sure enough, this bastard was up to no good.
The next moment, the cross-eyed staff member turned toward the nearest contestant, who came from Taowan Nation, and spoke softly.
“You’re a jellyfish too.”
Before the contestant could react,
his body abruptly vanished and reappeared among the jellyfish.
Terrified, he thrashed desperately through the water. But the more he struggled, the more jellyfish he touched,
and the more severely he was poisoned.
Before long, the Chosen One from Taowan Nation stopped moving and drowned.
His corpse floated among the jellyfish, their faint glow illuminating his twisted face and making the sight exceptionally eerie.
But contrary to what “It” had said, he did not turn into a jellyfish.
“Why haven’t you turned into a jellyfish yet?”
The man shrieked at the corpse
like an unreasonable child.
“There must be something wrong with you. I’ll try another one.”
He turned toward the other Chosen Ones.
Now everyone was terrified. When the contestant from Taowan Nation had been killed without warning, they had been too stunned to react.
But now the man had openly declared his intention to kill more people.
They instantly came to their senses and scattered with a roar, running desperately backward.
No one cared anymore whether their actions affected cognition.
The other party was killing people personally and ignoring the rules.
Only a complete fucking idiot would stay instead of running.
But before they had taken more than a few steps, they discovered in despair that their legs no longer obeyed them.
Anyone who violated the other party’s cognition would be noticed by it.
That rule still applied.
Everyone fell into complete despair.
Su Chen stood among them without attempting to flee.
Although he too was shocked, he knew running was useless.
He was considering the underlying logic.
The other party could not kill people arbitrarily according to its whims.
If it could, why would this world be called rule-based horror?
If the other party ignored every rule, the whole thing would be a joke.
Su Chen racked his brain.
Meanwhile, the cross-eyed staff member paid no attention to the group’s panic.
He frowned deeply as if pondering something himself.
Then he waved an arm. The Chosen One from Cannabis Nation vanished and likewise appeared inside the Jellyfish Exhibit.
The same struggle followed, then the same death by drowning.
The floating corpses filled everyone’s hearts with a growing chill.
The man stared at the two bodies, his frown deepening.
“Why? Why won’t you turn into jellyfish?”
He demanded an answer in exasperation.
“There must be something wrong with all of you. Remember this: you are jellyfish!”
At his shrill shout, a thought appeared in everyone’s mind, endlessly suggesting that they were jellyfish.
The man grew increasingly frantic and waved his arms repeatedly.
Five Chosen Ones were thrown into the water at once.
The result was unchanged. Before long, all five had drowned, and death announcements appeared before the survivors.
Sweat broke out across Su Chen’s forehead. He kept feeling that he had remembered something, yet could not quite grasp it.
As time passed, more and more Chosen Ones died.
The bodies floating inside the Jellyfish Exhibit gradually obscured the jellyfish’s glow.
Then the cross-eyed staff member walked up to Su Chen.
He glared at him furiously and ground out the words,
“You’re a jellyfish! You’re a jellyfish!”
The viewers in Longguo’s livestream fell into despair.
“Fuck this Horror World! It makes less sense by the minute. At least it used the rules before. Now it’s just flipping the whole damn table over!”
“If this is how it works, they might as well give everyone a Gatling gun spitting blue flames. Whoever gets selected can mow the monsters down!”
“Exactly. All fear comes from insufficient firepower!”
“It’s over. Su Chen is next. I’ve already closed my eyes; I can’t bear to watch! This is infuriating!”
The people of Longguo vented their outrage.
But facing “It,” Su Chen did not give up resisting.
At the most dangerous instant, inspiration flashed through his mind.
He finally understood
why the other party believed the Chosen Ones were jellyfish!
From the contestants who had drowned so far, Su Chen realized that every victim had previously been bitten by a white lion.
Not one of those who had never been purified by a white lion had died.
That was not normal!
When Su Chen combined that observation with the jellyfish theory he had formulated earlier,
he concluded that only when someone bitten by a white lion died would the portion of them left in the surface world transform into a jellyfish.
That meant this mentally incomplete “It,” which thought like a child, might understand the process as follows:
someone was bitten by a white lion, then died, and therefore became a jellyfish.
Everyone knew that jellyfish and rabbits comforted “It,” and “It” liked jellyfish very much.
But “It” feared white lions, which meant it had never witnessed how jellyfish were created.
Perhaps it had once obtained a written message from a staff member by chance.
But because “It” possessed only a child’s level of cognition, it had completely misunderstood the meaning.
The other party had already raised its hand and was about to throw Su Chen into the water.
Su Chen finally spoke.
“I’m not a jellyfish!”
His answer was crisp and decisive.