Qi Yifang heard Liu Jiayi’s sudden sentence and looked confused. “W-What time?”
Liu Jiayi grabbed Qi Yifang’s wrist and started running. “Based on your intelligence value, you won’t be able to understand it for a while. If you want to pass the instance, just come with me and help.”
Qi Yifang who was forced to run with her, “???”
I really don’t understand it but it is too shocking if you speak so bluntly, Little Witch!
Liu Jiayi’s eyes were extremely determined as she ran and she was a bit annoyed. It was such a simple mystery but she didn’t think about it until she was reminded by Bai Liu!
She should’ve realized it was a collection game when she saw the keyword ‘dismemberment’ in the true ending line of this game. It was just like Exploding Last Train. The game of Rose Factory was simple. There was a mystery solving branch buried under the simple upgrade plot. The clue to this mystery solving branch was the clue to collect Tawil’s body parts!
The tip she got was: Before the real death comes, the time on you is unique and irreversible…
There was only one thing in this game that reminded her of true death and a time that couldn’t be reversed. It was the thing that she and Bai Liu saw when they first entered the factory, the newspaper display that talked about the major events of the Rose Factory over the years!
Every expansion of the Rose Factory was accompanied by the death of countless people. It was literally a bloody development path. For people in this game world, this was the real death, the irreversible time.
For outsiders like her and Bai Liu, this time was illusory and could be reversed. However, if they died in this game, the time on them would also be frozen. They would become one of the dead in the Rose Factory, recorded in the newspaper and posted on the wall—this was the key point!
The breathless Liu Jiayi found the display case she had seen at the main entrance of the Rose Factory.
Newspapers were pasted neatly in the display cabinet. Liu Jiayi stared at the newspaper wall and squinted as she started to count softly from top to bottom. At the same time, she used a marker pen to mark the date and time of death.
Once Liu Jiayi marked all the numbers, Qi Yifang couldn’t help feeling numb when he saw the densely packed numbers that represented death.
He didn’t think about it before but once it was screened out and sorted by Liu Jiayi, Qi Yifang found that something was wrong. The numbers representing time looked particularly neat in a horizontal and vertical pattern. The shape was faintly similar to a square.
“Sure enough, the range of the number of rows and columns where the date of death appears is 400*400.” Liu Jiayi took a step back. She gazed at the wall she had drawn and exhaled solemnly. “It is exactly the number of acres of the flower fields in the Rose factory, 16,000.”
At this point in the mystery solving, everything was clear. Tawil’s dismembered body was buried under the flower fields. Every number on the newspaper wall corresponded to a flower field. The question now was under which number would Tawil’s body parts be buried?
There were ten numbers from 0-9. Which number would the madman who buried Tawil choose or how many numbers would be chosen?
Was it his birthday? The day he acquired the legacy of his adoptive parents or his wife? Or perhaps the day he bought the statue?
What number had a special meaning to him?
No! There were too many numbers! There were no special marks or typical numbers in the diary that showed over and over again! She couldn’t judge!
Liu Jiayi frowned as she gritted her teeth to re-examine the entire wall again.
There was the deafening sound of fighting outside the window. The display cabinet on the first floor where Liu Jiayi was located was very close to the place where Bai Liu and Tang Erda were fighting. The fierce fighting made the place where Liu Jiayi was located crumble. The lights and walls were shaking violently and dust fell.
Rubble slipped from the wall. It seemed like it would completely collapse in the next second.
It obviously wasn’t easy to think in such an environment, especially after knowing that her teammate Bai Liu was fighting against a person whose panel value was several times higher than his.
Even Qi Yifang, an outsider who knew nothing about who was fighting, couldn’t help being on alert. He took out his weather vane and looked around. “What is that movement?”
Liu Jiayi took a deep breath and abandoned all her complicated thoughts. She closed her eyes with the violently shaking place as the background.
No, her thinking was wrong.
She shouldn’t think from the perspective of the crazy game boss. This was a conventional mystery solving idea but it didn’t apply in Rose Factory.
It was because this game wasn’t a simple game. Rose Factory was a game specially prepared for Bai Liu by someone or something. Bai Liu had already told her that all the designs in the game, including this crazy factory manager, were in order to stimulate Bai Liu to achieve a certain purpose of the game designer.
Thinking about it from this perspective, what number would the person behind the scenes choose to bury the body of the person who had a special meaning for Bai Liu?
Gravel fell onto Liu Jiayi’s face and Qi Yifang anxiously called out to her. “Little Witch! This room won’t last!”
Liu Jiayi opened her eyes. “It is six!”
Bai Liu’s former name was Bai Liu (6)!
“Qi Yifang, help me write down the coordinates of the number six on the left!” Liu Jiayi yelled to Qi Yifang in the chaos. “I will write down the ones on the right!”
Qi Yifang coughed and covered his mouth while making an ‘okay’ gesture. He covered the top of his head with the weather vane to block the sand and gravel and approached the display cabinet to quickly memorize it.
On the right, Liu Jiayi’s eyes were moving quickly as she whispered silently. She was also memorizing it.
At the end of their memorization, there was an earth-shattering bang from the adjacent corridor. A twisted human figure smashed through the wall of the corridor into the ground of the open square, creating a huge pit.
There was the sound of limbs breaking and the person who smashed into the ground let out a heart-piercing cry of pain.
Soon after smashing into the pit, the man’s seven orifices started bleeding. His chest cavity sank and the pupils slowly dilated as he died.
Liu Jiayi’s pupils shrank and she turned back. She saw that the person who died in the pit had a familiar face.
He wore the uniform of the Dangerous Heretics Bureau while his light-colored eyes were dead and bloodless. His limbs were twisted and broken in a strange posture and the badge on his chest was soaked with blood, but Liu Jiayi still recognized him.
This man was Su Yang.
***
15 minutes ago, in another corridor separated by the open-air square. Bai Liu leaned against the wall and weakly raised his hands to surrender. He faced Tang Erda, who was raising his gun.
“I admit defeat. How about a halftime break? Captain Tang, can you take a break before killing me?” Bai Liu leaned idly against the wall. He seemed to be smiling as he watched the gun pointed at him. Then he reached out and turned Tang Erda’s gun away. “You can’t use this gun for the time being. How about putting it away?”
Bai Liu’s body was badly injured. Blood was oozing from the corners of his mouth due to his badly beaten internal organs and there were abrasions on his face, but there were no gunshot wounds. They were all injuries from limb collisions. Tang Erda didn’t want to kill him with one shot so easily.
Perhaps this former captain of the third team didn’t expect that he would choose the method he had once hated from the enemy he hated the most.
Yet no matter how he tortured Bai Liu, he couldn’t see the same pain as his on Bai Liu’s face.
Bai Liu was always calm and even looked at him with a smile. It was obviously Bai Liu that was the one being tortured but every time Tang Erda punched Bai Liu’s abdomen and heard a muffled groan of pain, he seemed to be in a million times more pain than Bai Liu.
Tang Erda felt pain because he was torturing others and anger because innocent people were inexplicably tortured. This was his original intention behind choosing to be a member of the Dangerous Heretics Bureau. Even if he went crazy, there was no way to change that.
Now anger and pain were indistinguishably intertwined on his face. In the blue eyes of Tang Erda, who was staring directly at Bai Liu, there lived a monster called Bai Liu (6).
Even a bad person needed talent to be bad. Unfortunately, Tang Erda didn’t have this talent.
Bai Liu leaned against the wall and looked down while breathing heavily. He glanced at the vicious looking Tang Erda with pitying eyes. “Captain Tang, let go. You aren’t good at doing such things.”
The expression on Tang Erda’s face disappeared in an instant.
He raised his head indifferently, squeezed Bai Liu’s wrist with his left hand and forced Bai Liu to the side. Bai Liu landed on the ground and was turned over. Then he was stepped on. Tang Erda condescendingly knelt on Bai Liu’s broken calf bone and raised Bai Liu’s chin with his left hand. “It hurts, right?”
Bai Liu’s face was covered with sweat but his expression was calm. “Yes, it hurts. It doesn’t seem like something you can do.”
Tang Erda once again couldn’t help becoming angry. “This is the torture method you once used on Su Yang!”
“Almost every bone in his body was broken when he was transported back. You left a tape in his stomach and told me—”
The rose in his eyes became more and more intense while his tone carried bitter hatred and tears. “You said that everything I did to you was just petty tricks. You said that you personally came to teach me what is called torture!”
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