Chapter 219: Transforming Community Experience (Twenty-Eight)
When he woke up from the illusion, Tang Xinjue noticed that there was an extra person nearby.
If that were all, it would be fine, but the fact that this person tried to sneak away while they were attacking made things interesting.
"I……"
Awan opened her mouth and forced a smile so that she couldn't even see.
She not only wanted to run away now, in fact, from the moment Guo Guo howled into the illusion, a surge of regret surged in her brain, and she immediately calculated an escape route.
Because it was not until this moment that she realized which dormitory the two candidates in front of her belonged to - and she had never taken seriously the other party's roommate who was trapped in the illusion and unconscious, who the hell was he?
Tang Xin Jue, 606...
It really must be a ghost.
After a brief moment of distraction, the girl adjusted herself and repeated the same words she had said to Zheng Wanqing.
...It doesn't matter. At least Tang Xinjue doesn't know who she is now, and may even know nothing about everything. As long as she takes advantage of the information gap, she can get away safely.
Just as she expected, Tang Xinjue only thought for two seconds before calmly saying:
"The teammate you want to save is called Bai Zhi. He was trapped here to save you, right?"
Awan breathed a sigh of relief, then nodded with tears in her eyes. "Yes, I can't be ungrateful, so no matter how dangerous it is, I will come down, as long as I can..."
"What about the others?"
"……Um?"
Awan was startled, then heard Tang Xinjue continue to ask, "Your batch is a multi-dormitory copy. How many dormitories are there in total, and how many people entered? Where are the others besides you two now?"
In the darkness, Awan was silent for a long time before she spoke:
"They're all dead."
She seemed reluctant to recall too much, and simply recounted the number of people and the dungeon's outline. The gist was that they had entered a dungeon that was far more difficult than they had imagined, and all their teammates had perished under the attacks of ghosts. Only she, relying on her life-saving items, became the sole survivor.
If Bai Zhi didn't survive.
"Of course, I know it's dangerous here, so it's normal for you to have doubts about me. I just mistakenly thought that Bai was here, but I didn't expect to meet a new classmate. I'm very happy to be able to help you."
Awan said sincerely, "Now that the illusionary monster is dead, I think it's a good time to rescue Bai. I should be leaving too. I wish you success in completing the game!"
After she had thoroughly explained everything, the air fell silent for a moment. The girl raised her lips silently, seizing the opportunity to push the door open.
The door still doesn't move?
Tang Xin Jue kept his arm on it, with no intention of putting it down:
"Since we've met, it's fate. Besides, you helped me. I should repay a drop of kindness with a spring. We will go with you to save people."
Awan: “…”
Forced to walk on the road with the three people from 606, Awan took stiff steps and tried to persuade them to give up on her:
"You must have your own mission. Going with me will only delay your work. I don't have much else to live for, and you have a bright future ahead of you. Why waste your precious time on a stranger?"
"That's a coincidence."
Tang Xin Jue smiled and said, "The mission we received this time is to rescue the candidates who are stranded in this instance."
Awan: “?”
"How is that possible? You are healers??"
Guo Guo pricked up his ears and caught the key words: "Hey, do you know this kind of mission?"
Before Tang Xin Jue made it up just now, she had never heard of the existence of such a copy mission.
Zheng Wanqing frowned: "How can you be sure that we are not healers?"
"No, I mean..."
Awan was about to explain, but Tang Xinjue interrupted her:
"Yes, I am the healer."
“…”
In this underground house, everyone was deprived of their special abilities. Even if Awan was skeptical, she had no reason to verify it and could only reluctantly follow her thoughts:
"So that's how it is. That's really unexpected. Can you tell me what the mission is about?"
Tang Xin Jue naturally replied, "Yeah, I was also surprised to receive such a mission. However, dungeons are inherently fluid, and it's not uncommon for candidates to be trapped in dungeons for various reasons. I guess the game doesn't want too many of us to die, so it's quite humane."
Awan's eyes widened. "Humanized? This game??"
For a moment, her face grew extremely ferocious, but she quickly suppressed it. She took a deep breath and said, "You actually think... I don't mean any other things. I simply want to remind you that games are not kind to candidates. They are the culprit behind all the tragedies. Holding out hope in them is a betrayal of our past pain!"
In contrast to her previous gentle and cautious tone, she stopped talking coldly, "...Forget it, maybe you have roommates and are capable, so you won't understand the situation of ordinary candidates like us."
After saying this, she strode forward without looking back, leaving Tang Xinjue and the other two behind.
Then it was pulled back.
Tang Xin Jue was still very gentle: "Thank you for the reminder, but even if you are in a bad mood now, you can't leave alone."
Awan: “…”
Failed again.
The other party refused to listen to any of her threats, and Awan was completely at her wit's end and could only accept her fate for the time being.
Under the guidance of Zheng Wanqing and Guo Guo, the four of them quickly left the cubicle where their vision needed to be blocked, came to a safe place and took off their blindfolds. The long-lost light finally returned to their vision.
The three of them looked at Awan at the same time.
An extremely thin and pale figure came into their sight.
The other person didn't even look like an adult - even Guo Guo, who was the shortest, had to lower his head when looking at her. If they didn't already know the other person's identity, they might have believed it even if they said she was an elementary school student.
Is this the Awan among the first batch ?
The one who should have died by self-destruction, but was proved to be still alive by the office, and strangely got together with the second batch of candidates, and seemed to be related to the upgrade of the difficulty of the copy, and may even have experienced a similar "nightmare" with Tang Xinjue - by some mysterious coincidence, he met them here.
It was no wonder that Zhou Ao had never doubted anything. Even from their current perspective, Awan didn't look dangerous at all: the girl's pale face was embedded with a pair of eyes that habitually drooped and avoided, and she looked timid and very weak.
As soon as she and Tang Xinjue locked eyes, she immediately dropped her gaze, her hands subconsciously twisting the corners of her clothes. "Where should we go next?"
"You should have come in earlier than us. You even know the rule about not opening your eyes in that corridor. Don't you know the terrain?"
After Tang Xin Jue suddenly became a person with healing abilities, Zheng Wanqing became like a nitpicker. If she didn't speak, it would be fine, but when she did, she would ask rhetorical questions.
Awan didn't react in any special way, as if she was already used to this sharp attitude, and explained obediently:
"I followed a big ghost in by accident and have been hiding near the cubicle. My understanding of the outside world is also very limited."
This time no one raised any objections.
Judging from Awan's previous answers, her statements were a mixture of truth and falsehood. If the candidate named Bai Zhi had truly been her rescuer, then based on the information they had gathered, Bai Zhi should have been among the second group of candidates to arrive. However, Awan had simply erased the existence of the second group, making the rest of her story equally unreliable.
If she was determined not to give any information, the three of them would not have that much time to waste dealing with her.
Tang Xinjue glanced at her without saying a word, but took out a piece of worn paper from his pocket.
This was a crude version of the map they had bought from Granny Wang, who was setting up a stall, for 20 kilograms. It could only be marked with buildings, and it became useless once they entered the entertainment venue.
But now, Tang Xinjue directly found the location of the entertainment venue on the map and circled all the buildings within a straight line to the west.
Guo Guo didn't understand: "Aren't we in a casino?"
To be more precise, their current location should be in an unidentified house under the [Food Street]. Judging from the geographical location, it may not be in the same parallel world dimension as the transformation community.
"That's true, but the casino connects all parts of the university town. In a sense, it's like a passage with countless exits. Who says we can't be inside and outside at the same time?"
Tang Xinjue put forward a purely speculative argument, but had no intention of further explanation.
Her true explanation came when she exchanged glances with Guo Guo and Zheng Wanqing. They both immediately understood that she had a hidden meaning.
——This was indeed the case. When Mr. Bu's identity was exposed in the food street, in order to reach a settlement, Mr. Bu had provided Tang Xinjue with a piece of information: the person they were looking for was outside the food street on the west side, and they had to walk all the way to the west end.
Awan is the person they are looking for, but when they meet, they find themselves in the "sewer" of the food court, which is obviously different from the clue.
If Mr. Bu did not lie and the Awan in front of him was not fake, then it meant that these two completely different locations happened to overlap in the strange house they were in at the moment.
This place is most likely right outside the food court, or even outside the entertainment venue!
Taking the food street as the starting point for "going west," there was naturally no way to find the answer on the map. However, considering some of the special features of the entertainment venue, Tang Xinjue simply expanded the hypothesis further:
What if we start from the casino and then go west?
Then when this direction reaches the end of the map, the building shown is...
"Residential villa?"
Several people looked at each other. Looking at the location marked on the map, Guo Guo suddenly felt very familiar:
"Wait, when we first entered Street 1, didn't we seem to pass by that place?"
The reason why Guo Guo had this impression was because there were strange noises coming from the villa area at that time, but when the four people in 606 heard them, they were combined into different sounds.
…And what she heard at that time were shrill and desperate screams that seemed endless.
