The Trial Game of Life – Chapter 146

Table of Contents | Character Guide

Chapter 146: Vaccine Research Institute 

After confirming that Chi Yan and Zheng Yingying were getting along well, Wen Xiaoming crouched in a hidden corner of the Ruby Bar near the dark alley, with an energy bar in one hand and a bottle of rum in the other, humming a joyful tune between his lips.

“Gulp gulp.” Very soon, half the bottle ended up in his stomach. Wen Xiaoming held up the fisherman hat on top of his head and said in a slightly raised tone: “Good evening, sir.” 

What was in his ears was the greetings that K gave to Scarlet. It was so clear that it seemed as if Wen Xiaoming was at the scene himself. This came from something called [Mechanical Bug] that Wen Xiaoming randomly invented. Even though the item functioned like a bug, it was really a mechanical device.

The machine was so small that it was almost impossible for the naked eye to see, unless one looked very closely. Wen Xiaoming had mixed it into Scarlet’s potion and injected it into her body through the drip; even Scarlet herself couldn’t detect it.

K was the owner of the Ruby Bar and a very cautious man. A ‘Silence Barrier’ could cut off all attempts to eavesdrop, but Wen Xiaoming’s [Mechanical Bug] was no ordinary transmitter. This device lurked in the player’s blood. The child bug was inside Scarlet, and the mother bug was with Wen Xiaoming. They communicated through energy without the need for any physical vibration.

Of course, Wen Xiaoming acted very carefully. He hid in the corner outside the bar to prevent K’s eyes and ears inside.

“I’m really a genius.” Wen Xiaoming couldn’t help but gloat to himself. But as he listened, the satisfaction on his face slowly turned into doubt.

K said to Scarlet: “I didn’t come to you to ask about the current situation. This information is already a waste to me. Even if you sell it, I won’t accept it.”

Scarlet didn’t respond.

K continued: “Why don’t we talk about you, where you came from, the story between you and Jiang He, and why you ended up this way.”

What is this?

An invitation to share her life story?

Wen Xiaoming grumbled in his heart but continued to listen.

Scarlet obviously had the same doubts as Wen Xiaoming. Wen Xiaoming secretly thought that she might be looking at K as though he was an idiot. With a coarse voice, she said: “Go away.”

K’s tone sounded like he was smiling: “Don’t turn me down so quickly. For us to meet here, it must be fate. I’ve never done anything to hurt you, and I don’t need you to pay any price. As long as you tell me your story, believe me, I will be the best listener in the entire Yong Ye City. “

For a long time, neither of them spoke again.

Wen Xiaoming was scratching both his head and his cheeks. He thought he would get to hear some shocking secret, but it was just some gossip about Yong Ye City? Okay, let gossip be gossip. You quickly tell me.

Perhaps the Heavens had finally heard Wen Xiaoming’s prayer, because Scarlet finally asked back: “What are you trying to achieve?”

K: “I said I only want your story, don’t you believe me? You’ll die soon, Scarlet. The moment you enter the karma-serving process, ‘Scarlet’ will no longer exist.”

Players in Yong Ye City, be they ordinary players or civil-servant players, were always so straightforward when it came to life and death. And K’s next words made both Scarlet and Wen Xiaoming fall into contemplation.

“The first thing we all hear when entering Yong Ye City is ‘Welcome back to Yong Ye City’. Day after day, year after year, some people might have lived in Ying Ye City for a longer period than the time they were alive. In Yong Ye City, the time scale is different. When we were still alive, ten years may pass by in the blink of an eye, but here, every day may feel like a year. After some time, who will remember who they were in the past? What do they look like? Doesn’t life seem more like a beautiful dream? When you wake up, the city of Yong Ye City is real.”

Scarlet: “What do you want to say?”

K: “What I want to say is, don’t you want to leave behind something in this ‘real’ world? Yong Ye Night City is a place without history. Everything in the past can’t be explored, and every player’s death is but foam on the sea. No trace ever gets left behind. Don’t you think it’s a pity?”

Scarlet let out a sneer: “Don’t tell me you want to compile a history book for Yong Ye City?”

K: “If I live long enough, that actually sounds like a good idea.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“Me? I’m just an intel dealer.”

In the corner, Wen Xiaoming was confused.

On the other side, Jin Cheng and Jiang He had finally reached Zone C. But as soon as they entered the area, their sharp sense instantly picked up the abnormality here. The closer they were to the Vaccine Research Institute, the stranger it became.

Zone C was empty. There were very few players here, while only a handful of living corpses were scattering on the street. The lack of players could mean that they were in hiding or had escaped to the dungeons, but what about the living corpses?

The living corpses should lay on the ground like dead bodies. If no one moved them, where did they go?

The two glanced at each other and immediately walked faster to the Vaccine Research Institute, only to find that the place was already emptied.

The Vaccine Research Institute was a small two-story building with a white cross sign on the outside. Despite its small size, it was divided into a dozen small laboratories, looking somewhat like a private research center. Jin Cheng and Jiang He headed in two different directions to quickly check through all the rooms. No living people were found, but a lot of living corpses remained here.

These living corpses all carried their own shapes, some of which had been disembowelled, and some had their brains split open.

Many half-used bottles of medicines were tossed inside the cabinets in the laboratories, while various liquids and unidentified medicinal materials were messily thrown on the ground.

Traces of a fight could be seen here.

Jin Cheng probed the mark of a blade on the test bench and squinted slightly, a cold light flashing in his eyes. Right at that moment, a ray of fireworks erupted outside the window.

The ray was so far away that its sound was almost inaudible, and it appeared as only a small point to the naked eye. However, Jin Cheng could clearly see that it was a message sent by Wen Xiaoming.

It’s Lilith!

“The central area.” Jiang He also spotted it and quickly determined the location of the fireworks.

“Let’s go.” Jin Cheng decided swiftly.

The two quickly left the Vaccine Research Institute and rushed to the central area. At the same time, the game hall in the central area, where the Scarlet incident just took place, welcomed chaos once again.

The players thought that Scarlet had been captured and that everything else was up to the veterans of Zone A. As the atmosphere came alive again, all sorts of information converged into the game hall and everyone tried to predict Scarlet’s eventual outcome. Someone even opened a bet on how long more she would live.

But no one expected that the shadow of death would fall onto their heads even before Scarlet met her end.

“You tricked me into this situation and just ran away? Have you asked for my permission?!” Like two crescent moons, the lights emitting from two swords slashed into each other as though drawing a cross. Riding along ear-screeching bellows, they headed straight to the corner of the game hall.

Amidts the rumbling sound of collapse, the steel frame outside the game hall heavily plummeted, almost hitting the two players who didn’t dodge in time. Lampooning with anger, the two raised their heads and saw a mesmerising figure with black hair and clad in a black dress. The words that were at their lips were swallowed back at once.

Black Loli of Zone A. Another savage star player.

“F**k, why is she here again!?”

“What happened to those people?”

“Isn’t Scarlet already caught?!”

The players had endless doubts and Lilith’s eyes were fixated on the words ‘those people’ in their mouths, her hands tightly gripping the handles of the blades.

‘Those people’ came from the Vaccine Research Institute of Zone C.

After Lilith heeded Tang Cuo’s arrangement and rushed to Zone C, the abnormality in Zone C hadn’t yet been so obvious. She didn’t take a mere vaccine research institute to heart and went straight for the main door. At first, when the person in charge greeted her, she didn’t catch anything out of the norm — until she detected the living corpse that was hidden under the table.

Even if the Vaccine Research Institute was keen to study a living corpse, they could just do it openly. Lilith would totally understand if a place like this institute wanted to look into a corpse to research a new vaccine.

But they tried to keep it a secret, which only made it suspicious.

Lilith wanted to take her leave to not stir any trouble, but the people in the research institute refused to let go and attacked her instead. They tricked Lilith into a laboratory, saying that they had some research results on the corpse poison to show her. Unbeknownst to Lilith, it was full of living corpses. If anyone was to enter this place, only death awaited them.

As a result, Lilith also became a member of the living corpses.

Or the people at the institute thought that should be the case.

They didn’t know that in the entire Yong Ye City, the one who researched the most on Scarlet’s necromancer skills was neither Lin Yandong nor Jin Cheng. It was Lilith, who was always ready to take vengeance on Scarlet.

Even if Scarlet was locked up in the deepest prison of Zone G, Lilith never forgot her revenge plan. If there was one person in Yong Ye City who was immune to Scarlet’s corpse poison, it could only be her.

It was because she had conducted a vampire ritual that she learnt from a Western fantasy dungeon to modify her own blood and forcibly stimulated a special physique in her own body. With her blood different from ordinary people, Lilith was a player who could no longer be considered a pure human. So naturally, she wouldn’t easily fall for this trick.

In a sense, she was immune to any poison.

Lilith had a hot temper, but after staying with Jin Cheng and Wen Xiaoming for a long time, she had learnt the art of acting. When she found out that they had tricked her, she wanted to slash them all to death, but she decided to roll her eyes for one exact round and pretended to have been tricked instead.

After activating her special physique, Lilith now looked like a vampire. Although she was a little different from other living corpses, she could blend in just as well.

She originally wanted to lurk in the shadows but later found out that she couldn’t carry out this plan, because the people in the institute had a brutal way of doing things. They wanted to directly stab Lilith and turn her into a living corpse.

In this way, Lilith wouldn’t be able to expose anything, and they wouldn’t have to worry about going to jail.

But by that point, Lilith still hadn’t even figured out the root of all these happenings, and neither had she picked up any useful information.

This made her very angry.

She was about to be stabbed to death here before she got to hear Jin Cheng and Tang Cuo’s love story. For this reason, she directly went berserk. 

As the research institute erupted into chaos, Lilith thought a fierce battle would take place. But she totally didn’t expect that after finding out that Lilith wasn’t infected by the corpse poison in the slightest, the eyes of these people who wanted to kill her just now beamed ever so brightly and they decided to not kill her anymore.

“Don’t kill her, catch her alive!”

Lilith’s heart was full of doubts when she heard these words. Pulling back the hand that was about to touch the flare gun, she pondered the idea carefully and, eventually taking the risk, she pretended to be seized.

These people quickly drew a few tubes of blood from her, and within an hour, they were so exhilarated that they screamed ‘It’s a success!’ before taking her straight to the game hall.

If this group of people broke into the dungeon, things would be completely out of control. By this point, there was no way Lilith wouldn’t see that something was wrong with the Vaccine Research Institute, and as such, she immediately burst. 

Firstly, she set off a flare signal. Secondly, she began to strike.