LWGP - Chapter 155
Chapter 155: Two Days
Once the two groups separated, they each began communicating within their own team channels.
On Tan Yingzhou's side.
A team member said, "Captain, this Wang Jiu is formidable. She'll be a strong opponent for us. Especially since it's clear she won't let things end amicably with us. Why don't we…"
Tan Yingzhou replied, "We've come this far. We're all respectable people, why stoop so low."
The team member added, "Bro, did you forget to place that little attraction array on her?"
Tan Yingzhou fell silent. He really had forgotten.
Even though the other party had just brought it up, he never remembered things like that.
On Wang Jiu's side.
Wang Shu said, "Master, that bastard tried to ambush you and now he dares to ask for an alliance? Something's fishy. These damn men."
It was unclear which one he was actually cursing.
Wang Jiu didn't respond. She just searched the third floor. During the search, Wang Jiu entered a room by herself, closed the door, and didn't let anyone else in.
No one dared to cross her, simply assuming she had discovered something.
They didn't know that after entering, she immediately used Flowing Light to destroy the security camera in the room.
This room had no mirror, so she used a puppet to substitute for her own eyes. She pulled her shirt out from her waistband and lifted it up. Through the puppet's eyes, she saw her own back.
At first glance, others might not have noticed anything, but she could faintly see fine blood vessels flowing beneath her skin.
These were not her blood vessels.
They were its.
Calculating the time, if she didn't "solve" it, it would only need two days to successfully awaken.
Two days.
Wang Jiu lowered her shirt, her face expressionless. As she walked out, she glanced at the broken camera again.
It seemed she didn't have much time left to play with this bastard.
Hopefully, the person behind the scenes would notice that her condition was off and make their move early.
Halfway through searching the third floor, the other teams arrived, including Luo Sheng and her group. She had already heard about the incident in the bathroom from others. She looked at Wang Jiu with a slightly resentful gaze, pretending to drink water while teasing, "So you like it that thrilling."
Wang Jiu shot her a sidelong glance. "Want a 3p?"
Cough!! The top socialite choked, her image completely shattered.
Wang Jiu walked past the disheveled woman and tossed a few words by her ear, "You can't handle it, yet you insist on acting tough. If you really dared to go for it, would I reject you?"
Mocked to the depths of her soul, Luo Sheng's face turned red with a mix of anger and vexation. "…"
But Xie Lu and the others, especially the two women Qiao Xuejing and Lin Guiwan, faintly sensed that Wang Jiu was not in a good mood.
A hidden, violent, and malevolent aura was beginning to rise from her.
From the third floor to the ninth, they searched everything, but found no clues and no monsters.
Until the tenth floor. They remembered that the tenth floor was where Zhang Shen's room was located.
Even at the stairwell, they could feel a wave of heat washing down from above.
Everyone raised their guard.
As soon as they reached the floor, the voices of Wang Shu and the others died away. Even Tan Yingzhou's group, who followed behind, stopped in their tracks, staring at the open area ahead.
The tenth floor was divided into three sections.
On the far right was a row of rooms. In the middle was a row of morgues. On the far left was a massive cremation furnace, with many openings for inserting bodies.
"It's so hot."
"It seems to be active."
"Strange, a furnace like this has no chimney for ventilation. Where does all the heat go?"
Since Zhang Shen had appeared here, and he was now the final BOSS of this Nightmare Dungeon, this floor was of extraordinary importance.
Most importantly—there was no way to the floors above.
The tenth floor was in the middle, but it was also the top.
"Be careful. Search as a group, don't split up."
At this point, the teams were roughly divided as follows:
1. The Cai Market team.
2. Tan Yingzhou's team.
3. Wang Jiu's team.
4. The two Shanghai teams of Jiang Bingze and Wen Shan.
5. The joint team of Yan Guanqi, Luo Sheng, and others.
A joint operation, swarming together, was impossible. There were disagreements and grudges among them; at best, they wouldn't attack each other for the time being.
However, they still split up to search the three sections. Interestingly, when Luo Sheng's group tried to follow behind Wang Jiu's, Tan Yingzhou's team got there first, and Xie Jiang raised a hand to block their path.
The two groups exchanged cold smiles, and in the end, neither followed.
It wasn't that they were particularly close to Wang Jiu; it boiled down to one reason.
"They think Wang Jiu is stronger than the two Shanghai teams, and they don't want her to side with their enemy. Just you watch, when the final fight comes, they'll turn on each other when they have to—I hear that bunch from the capital's Cai Market are all psychos."
Luo Sheng was quite certain of this.
Wang Jiu had already reached the room where Zhang Shen had previously been. She didn't let everyone rush in. Instead, she had a puppet break the door open with a single strike while they stood several meters away.
Boom!
In an instant, a terrifying wave of heat surged out from inside.
The heat was horrifying. It rushed out like a lion of fire, rolling down the corridors on both sides, straight towards Wang Jiu and the others.
Xie Lu proactively stepped forward and summoned an ice shield, but it shattered instantly. Fortunately, several frost mages and water-based spellcasters layered their abilities on top.
They held it back.
There was some truth to the saying "strength in numbers."
Only after the frost melted and the boiling water evaporated was the heatwave finally neutralized.
Everyone was still shaken.
"Forget roast duck, a duck would turn to charcoal in there."
Once the temperature dropped a bit, everyone looked inside and saw that there was nothing there.
It was a sea of blood-red, scorching hot. There were holes in the walls, releasing a terrifying heat.
"This heat must be piped in from the cremation furnace over there."
"I feel like something's strange…"
Luo Sheng also looked, frowning. "I remember someone went into this room before. If he died, his body isn't here. Given the temperature just now, even if it could incinerate a person to charcoal, it couldn't have destroyed the bones. There should at least be some ash, unless someone with protection against this high temperature went in and cleaned up the ashes."
Matter cannot simply vanish without a trace.
The current dungeons should still adhere to such laws of matter and energy. Was the man behind the scenes, Zhang Shen, that terrifyingly powerful, or…
"It's sealed, no windows, otherwise it couldn't contain such terrifyingly high temperatures. But the room we saw before had a window. If someone really broke in through a window… its environmental structure doesn't hold up. Perhaps what we saw before wasn't real to begin with."
"You mean it was a projection? Including those people who were chasing us?"
Qiao Xuejing's words were a wake-up call. Everyone suddenly realized that group of people had indeed vanished.
Were they all fake?
It was a trap. Fortunately, Wang Jiu had been cautious and hadn't fallen for it, which meant that Luo Sheng and the others following her hadn't rushed in either.
Otherwise, the moment the door opened, it could have incinerated a dozen or two people.
"It would be even more terrifying if those people were real—where did they go?"
Just as they were thinking this, they suddenly heard a cry of surprise from the morgue area.
The people from Cai Market had found a body.
"This little brother Zhang Jue isn't bad-looking," Lin Xiaoniang said, looking at the corpse revealed in the pulled-out drawer just as Wang Jiu and her group arrived.
Zhang Jue's body?
Wang Jiu stepped forward to examine it. It was a real corpse, and it indeed had Zhang Jue's appearance.
Her fingers brushed across his face.
Lin Xiaoniang looked thoughtful and smiled. "I touched it too. It's not plastic surgery, but I don't know if other parts of the body have been altered." Her hand slid down the body, about to pull at his waistband.
A young man from Cai Market stopped her, his lips twitching. "What are you doing? There are so many people here, have some decency."
"What? I'm just looking, not doing anything."
Wang Jiu withdrew her hand. "Indeed, no plastic surgery. It looks like it really is Zhang Jue."
The people from Cai Market exchanged glances.
Their assessment was roughly the same.
"Can you determine the time of death?"
Wang Jiu glanced at them. "I'm a doctor, not a forensic pathologist. Besides, being frozen for this long makes an accurate judgment basically impossible. But I'm curious why Zhang Shen would keep the body of someone who's been dead for so long instead of just burning it, and even leave…"
Wang Jiu suddenly lifted the corpse and took out a small notebook that was stuck to its back.
He even left a… diary?
It was Zhang Shen's diary, recording his life from childhood to adulthood.
At the beginning, the handwriting was childish and ugly, as if he was just learning to write. Later, it became proficient and neat, and increasingly elegant.
It recorded a person's mental journey from childhood to youth, and finally to adulthood.
1. As a child, Zhang Jue was unable to walk due to a congenital weakness, paralyzed in bed every day, which annoyed his parents. Later, a Daoist priest appeared and said he was a lone star of calamity who would bring misfortune. And so, one day he woke up to find he had been abandoned.
2. Zhang Shen saved him, treated his illness, and took him in. He was very sensitive and grateful, viewing the man as his own father. So when the former asked him to be a test subject for research, he was more than willing.
3. In the later stages of the experiments, he had to give his own flesh and blood and take many drugs. He was in great pain. What was more terrifying was his discovery that he wasn't the only test subject; the others were the missing children from the small town.
4. He finally couldn't bear it anymore. He was in agony.
5. He finally exposed everything his adoptive father had done, but he never intended for his adoptive father to die in such a way. He was filled with guilt.
After reading the diary, one could piece together the history of Mist Town.
There were no major twists.
Everyone suddenly saw Wang Jiu drag Zhang Jue's body out.
"Hey, what are you doing?"
"Burning it."
"…"
"The little brother is so pitiful, how can you bear to burn him?" Lin Xiaoniang said, but she nimbly helped lift one side.
Everyone: "…"
The young ladies these days, each one more ruthless than the last.
Xie Jiang touched his nose. "Burning it is good. Who knows if this stuff is real or fake. He's dead anyway, so burn it and be done with it. I'll do it."
He offered to help Wang Jiu, and she really did just toss the body onto him.
Xie Jiang: "???"
Seeing this, Lin Xiaoniang said cheerfully, "Then thank you, Darling Xie."
She also casually tossed her side of the body to Xie Jiang.
Then she wiped the hand that had touched the corpse on Wang Shu's clothes nearby.
Wang Shu: "!"
Xie Jiang had no choice but to carry the body to the cremation furnace by himself.
An opening was opened, and he unceremoniously shoved the body inside.
Then, the group of players watched as the corpse sizzled in the flames.
"Such a pitiful person."
"Sigh, if only he were alive, he could have given us some clues."
"Truly, Heaven is jealous of talent."
"He met the wrong person."
The group of people each played their roles, spouting moral platitudes. Even Luo Sheng put on a show and sighed.
Lin Xiaoniang even used her sleeve to mournfully wipe away tears, as if her own husband had died.
The atmosphere was originally quite good, very fitting for a cremation, but no one knew whose stomach it was that let out a rumbling sound.
That atmosphere was instantly twisted.
Everyone silently looked at one person—no, two people.
Wang Shu and that red-clothed fatty both clutched their stomachs, their expressions the epitome of embarrassment.
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