The Trial Game of Life – Chapter 149

Table of Contents | Character Guide

Chapter 149: There’s Someone Under The Bed (12)

By the time the system announced ‘Welcome back to Yong Ye City!’, Tang Cuo had strolled around the whole school. It was as though he was picking up items along the way to combine them with those obtained in the Fierce Ghosts Academy to gradually complete the school idol’s story.

This wasn’t a very complex story.

The school idol was poor and needed school subsidies to complete her studies, while the head of the security department was closely related to the school’s high-level officials. As soon as the incident between the two of them took place, the school chose to cover up the truth in order to protect its reputation.

Over time, the evidence was completely destroyed, and all kinds of rumours about the school idol started spreading, turning the story entirely upside down such that she went from being coerced to deliberately seducing him. She was kicked out of the dormitory by her roommates, while her desk was stuffed with insulting letters and all sorts of scary things.

Her original sin was only that she was poor.

Among students, the concept of rich and poor was sometimes crueller than it was in the society.

But even though Tang Cuo walked one full round, he still couldn’t find the person who was seeking revenge.

In the end, Tang Cuo returned to the peach blossom tree, and while resting, he recalled the various experiences he had gone through after entering Yong Ye City.

The title of Plot C was very straightforward. There’s karma for both good and evil. But such an evil incident might not be resolved so easily in reality. Many people, such as Li Haoshuai, would try to escape from the crime. For the most part, such characters would only receive some painless scolding. It was only in a dungeon that they were killed.

The players always said that Yong Ye City had immense malice towards them. It was certainly an exaggeration to call it ‘malice’, but if one thought about it carefully, this kind of malice was aimed at the ‘evilness’ of the players.

The core concept of the dungeons was to defeat evil with evil.

In [On A Snowy Night, He Returns], since people burned down forests, the woodcutter Li Ying Jun sought revenge on them.

In [Conquering Demon City], humans were being kept as pets by other races. This was a manifestation of the superiority that one group perceived over the other, and vice versa. This technique of role-swapping was to trigger empathy.

[Before Dawn], [Realm of Mortals] and [Kingdom Hidden In The Moonlight] had no obvious direction, but most of them couldn’t escape the category of human sins. Birth, old age, sickness and death. Greed, wrath, ignorance and grudge.

Yong Ye City was like a large-scale system of punishment.

The Trial Game of Life was like an assessment test. Yong Ye City graded everyone before deciding what kind of punishment they would receive based on their scores. After this, there was the karma-serving process. After clearing all karma, one could return to the mortal realm.

Survival is justice. It wasn’t so much the iron law of Yong Ye City as it was the core of all evil.

Then he thought of the song again. The [Song of God, Lambs and Crow]. Given that this song kept playing in Yong Ye City, it must be pointing them to something. If ‘Crow’ referred to Mr. Crow, ‘Lambs’ must refer to the players.

Since one lamb ate God’s flower, God let it die and the lambs all fell off the cliff, while the disobedient children also all died.

Could it be that, as the lyrics said, it was human beings who violated God’s will and were punished, thus giving birth to Yong Ye City?

Did God really exist?

What did the flower refer to?

Mr. Crow wasn’t the system; he was more like a high-level NPC, and he appeared in the song. What role did he play in this story?

The more Tang Cuo thought about it, the more he felt that he had a clue, but he couldn’t be quite sure either. It was as though his eyes were covered behind a thin white veil, and looming behind that veil was the truth that couldn’t be seen in its entirety.

At this moment, a flower spun across his eyelashes. Snapping out of his thoughts, he looked up and saw the moon rising through the gap between the petals.

The familiar announcement came again.

“[There’s Someone Under The Bed], Difficulty: Hard, Number of players: 1, Rating: A, Character points…” 

In Yong Ye City.

Jin Cheng, Jiang He and Yu Yiyi’s teammates had roughly understood the situation, but they couldn’t care less about the corpse poison antidote. Jin Cheng’s conclusion was to let the players fight for it. These men hid in the corner when there was trouble yet ran out so fast to grab their share when the least bit of benefit appeared. Can they not be so ‘convenient’?

Seeing his sarcastic smirk, Jiang He wisely chose to not say a word.

Yu Yiyi’s teammate was called Zhang San, who, as plainly as his name was, looked like any mere passerby. Now that Yu Yiyi was chasing Lilith into the dungeon, he obviously had to closely follow Jin Cheng to get first-hand information about the dungeon.

After returning to Zone E, Jin Cheng went straight to find K, and the first sentence he said was succinctly kept to three words: “Vaccine Research Institute.”

Leaning against the wall, K smiled, his hand holding on to a bottle of wine that was already half-empty: “I know about what happened central area. You won’t suspect that I have something to do with this research institute, will you? I’ve kindly pointed out a way for Tang Cuo to check the corpse poison at no charge.”

“Don’t you think you’re very suspicious?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Of course you don’t think so. No murderer would admit to being a murderer.”

“Remind me, have you put been putting so much on your tab that you’re going bankrupt soon?”

As K raised the wine bottle and was about to smash it, Jin Cheng grabbed his wrist and put up a sly smile: “Leave my tab be, this is a whole different business. Say, you don’t let me suspect you, but do you have information about the Vaccine Research Institute?”

K: “Where are the points? Where’s the money?”

Jin Cheng shrugged: “Didn’t you say I could put it on my tab?”

K: “Look at your debt first!”

K called the waiter over to calculate the intel fees Jin Cheng had owed up to now. When he learnt that Tang Cuo also owed K a lot, Jin Cheng raised an eyebrow and met K’s playful gaze.

“How now? How does it feel to have such a spendthrift for a disciple?” He asked.

“It’s okay.” Jin Cheng shook his head. “Who asks me to be so nice? There’s nothing else I can do except for pampering him.”

K neatly rolled his eyes and quietly raised the price by ten percent.

Jin Cheng didn’t say anything and called Wen Xiaoming, the logistics staff cum fund manager. This was because the big boss had run out of surplus points. They had three people in the team, but the extra points were always given to Wen Xiaoming so that he could engage in equipment research and development to his heart’s content. If he managed to produce a complete product, he could even sell it. Jin Cheng actually never knew how much money he had in his vault.

Wen Xiaoming disliked the fact that the big boss and Lilith, one only knew how to buy and buy and the other only knew how to make up and make up. They were both able to spend but not manage money, so he never told them the real amount.

At this moment, though Wen Xiaoming successfully asked K for a discount and agreed on a price for the research institute’s intel, it still felt painful to pay the bill. His heart was full of agony, because Tang Cuo also seemed to be an extravagant big boss himself. It was very difficult, okay? To run a small business to support the whole team was so hard that he felt tears escaping his eyes.

Even though his inner struggle was so apparent it was almost poking out of his face, Jin Cheng completely ignored him. He picked up the intel and flipped through it, then immediately turned to see Scarlet.

Scarlet sat against the wall with a drip hanging on her arm, eyes closed and shoulders slumped. Hearing the approaching footsteps, she didn’t respond. If it wasn’t for her breathing, she would look like a dead body.

“Ji Ning.” Jin Cheng flapped the intel before her eyes: “Do you know him?”

Finally raising her head, Scarlet chuckled: “You’ve already found out. Why do you even ask me?”

Jin Cheng didn’t answer and just watched her in complete silence, taking all the changes in her expressions into his eyes, as though he was contemplating something. With much struggle, Scarlet changed her pose and slightly shook the hands that had gone cold and stiff from the drip: “You haven’t caught him, have you?”

There was some sarcasm in this, but compared to before, she seemed to have become much more composed. It was the sort of calmness that carried with it a hint of mockery, as though she was sitting at the top of the mountain and watching the tigers fight below.

Jin Cheng: “Yong Ye City is full of talented people. If he can treat you as a pawn, he would have no issue playing with me too.”

“Ji Ning.” Scarlet whispered the name under her breath, then lifted her eyes to gaze at Jin Cheng. “You didn’t take him here for me to kill, so I’m not obliged to tell you everything. But there’s one thing I can tell you with certainty: it was indeed him who ordered Chong Yanzhang to set me free.”

Ji Ning, ranked 53rd on the Red List, was the director of the Vaccine Research Institute. This wasn’t an official organisation of Yong Ye City. Just like Yan Ye’s divination room, it was created by players.

The Vaccine Research Institute was well-known among players, but because it was located in Zone C, its members’ strengths were that of the intermediate zone, so everyone paid little attention to them. Few people would care to remember the players who ranked outside the Red List’s top 50. Since the chance of being displaced was high, the people ranking between 50 and 100 changed every so often.

“Does Jiang He know him?” Jin Cheng asked again.

“Why don’t you ask him yourself?” Scarlet put up a mysterious smile. She refused to let go of even one sentence. Jin Cheng knew that he would likely not be able to find anything, but still, he didn’t give up and asked one more question: “Where’s Lin Yandong?”

“I did kill him and send him to Zone. Compared with one year ago, Mr. Lin is still the same — gentle and respectful. Guess what he said to me? He said that as long as I’m willing to let go of the past, he’ll let go of the past too. What a great gentleman, isn’t he?”

The more Scarlet spoke, the softer her tone became: “So I killed him.”

Jin Cheng declined to comment.

Scarlet’s thought process was always beyond them. Since they were never on the same path, they didn’t have to understand each other anyway. He got up to leave, pondered for a moment, then turned around and asked: “Do you want to see Jiang He again?”

Scarlet closed her eyes and didn’t answer.

Jin Cheng didn’t ask any further. He ran into Wen Xiaoming, who was waiting outside when he walked out. Wen Xiaoming pulled him outside the bar and whispered to him about the meeting between K and Scarlet.

“It’s weird that he didn’t ask about today’s event. Instead, he inquired about her past affairs, as though he really wanted to publish a biography for her.”

“A biography?” Jin Cheng raised an eyebrow. That’s interesting.

Meanwhile, in Zone G.

In the same monitoring room, Xiao Tong looked at Lin Yandong on the screen and frowned deeply as his right hand clenched the coffee cup tightly. He slightly leaned forward, as if he wanted to really see all the details.

As the very last lotus sun passed, the bell chimed and the dungeon was cleared. The system began to calculate the rewards. But at this moment, a demon statue suddenly split open, and inch by inch, the rough stone cracked, plummeting from high above and shaking the land violently.

The golden sand flew up along with the strong wind that blew past Lin Yandong’s side, making a large cut on his face. But his eyes were fixated on the bottom of the demon statue, and when the entire statue ruptured, a person was eventually revealed in front of him.

With the same posture as the demon statue, the person looked as though he lived inside it. His eyes were tightly shut, his expression sorrowful yet carrying a tinge of hideosity.

Xiao Tong could tell that he was a player who had entered the karma-serving process. And so was every one of these demon statues.

The next second, the person opened his eyes.

Lin Yandong walked towards him, and at the same time, a bell appeared in his palm. Every time he took a step, the bell vibrated and made a crisp sound.

Attracted by the sound, the person inside the demon statue finally sensed Lin Yandong’s presence. At first, his gaze exuded sheer confusion, but along with the sound of the bell, some clarity returned to his eyes. When Lin Yandong stood in front of him, he asked at last: “Who are you?”

Looking at the person with such benign, sympathetic eyes, Lin Yandong raised one hand and gently placed it on top of his head. From the crown of the person’s head, a light as golden as the colour of the sand gathered in Lin Yandong’s palm.

“I’m the one who came to save you.” He said.

Xiao Tong vaguely felt that this person might have quite an interesting origin, but he totally couldn’t see what Lin Yandong was planning to do. At this juncture, Mr. Crow’s scream suddenly reverberated.

“Aaaaah how dares he!”

“Why is this person here? Why is he here?!!!”

“Damn it!”

“This damnable man who tried to kill God!”