Chapter 98.1: Xishan Residential Area (18)

  After Su Zhen’s words fell, everyone present, including the Dark Shadow and the Blood Shadow, came to a halt.

All of them stared fixedly at Su Zhen, and the murderous intent in their eyes was almost tangible, as if they were about to shatter him in the next second.

However, they remained rooted in place, likely due to their apprehension of the knife in his hand.

Evidently, threatening with this NPC was effective, even more so than Su Zhen had anticipated. It was rather perplexing.

Su Zhen glanced at Lu Rufeng, who had a similar reaction to the others, raising an eyebrow with a disdainful and contemptuous look, as if he held the other in low regard.

Lu Rufeng, on the other hand, continued to gaze at him with a dark and inscrutable expression and said coldly, “Let him go.”

Su Zhen completely ignored Lu Rufeng and instead looked towards the slowly moving Dark Shadow and Blood Shadow.

The Dark Shadow seemed to multiply like countless strands of hair, creeping slowly upwards from the wall behind Su Zhen. The entire process was soundless.

Even the ceiling above Su Zhen began to ooze bloodstains.

Su Zhen glanced indifferently, and the knife in his hand moved closer to Ruan Qing’s neck, almost cutting into the young man’s fair skin.

“Is it you who’s faster, or is my knife a bit quicker? Want to give it a try?” Su Zhen said, looking down on everyone on the ground with a self-assured and powerful demeanor.

As if he was reigning over his own kingdom.

The Dark Shadow and the Blood Shadow both froze, with no further movement.

Although Su Zhen’s knife did not cut Ruan Qing’s neck, its temperature was extremely cold, almost as cold as that Blood Shadow.

Even though Ruan Qing was still unconscious, his subconscious mind might have thought he was still in the clutches of the dreadful Blood Shadow, causing a trace of pain to appear on his delicate face, and his body trembled slightly.

He looked pitiful.

This made the others even more reluctant to act recklessly, and they could only stare at Su Zhen, their murderous intent almost materializing, wishing to dismember him.

Su Zhen, seeing the Dark Shadow and the Blood Shadow stop, felt highly satisfied, but the disdain in his eyes deepened a bit more.

Xia Wuyan looked at Su Zhen coldly and asked, “What do you want?”

“Me? I don’t want anything,” Su Zhen replied with a light smile, and his figure slightly elevated.

Then he directly released Ruan Qing’s hand.

And because he let go of his hand, Ruan Qing, like a butterfly with broken wings, fell straight down from the air.

In reality, the height inside the room was only about three to four meters, so the fall wouldn’t be too serious. However, everyone else widened their eyes, anxiously rushing to catch the falling person.

While everyone’s attention was on catching the falling person, Su Zhen activated the reset item.

【Welcome, players, to the “Xishan Residential Area” instance.】

Mission【Instance Mission: Survive for five days or find the murderer.】

Instance resets, unless specified by the instance itself, were extremely rare.

In most cases, they hardly ever occurred.

Moreover, a reset generally restored everything to its initial state, but it didn’t reset time back to the past.

So, even if everything in the instance was restored, time continued to march forward.

Blindly believing in instance resets would undoubtedly come at a painful cost.

This was the afternoon of the second day in the instance, and in reality, players only needed to stay for three more days to clear it, not five.

But these final three days were bound to be extremely dangerous. The instance’s rules and restrictions might no longer apply, including the prohibition on killing within the instance.

Although the players’ memories had returned to when they first entered the instance, the livestream and its audience remained unaffected.

So when the livestream audience saw their streamer suddenly return to the starting point, seemingly without remembering what had happened before, they were shocked.

[What’s going on!? Why does it seem like everything’s back to when they first entered the instance? Did I not wake up today? (Confused.jpg)]

[Help, what’s happening again?! Didn’t an accident just occur a moment ago? How can there be another change? I don’t understand this instance at all!]

[Is it that crazy Lu again doing some strange operation!? Can’t he just livestream normally?! (Flipping table.jpg)]

[He’s gone beyond just killing players; he’s turning us, the viewers, in circles. This is outrageous!]

Ruan Qing didn’t start a livestream, so he had no idea about the audience’s confusion.

At this moment, he was holding vegetables, standing somewhat dazed in the Xishan vegetable market, surrounded by darkness.

His character this time was set up as someone who had a self-deprecating and reclusive personality, and he just had temporarily lost his sight.

Apart from being blind, there didn’t seem to be anything particularly special.

But Ruan Qing felt something was amiss.

The speed at which he calculated new mathematical formulas in his mind was a bit faster, not because he suddenly became smarter, but as if he had calculated them before.

Someone had tampered with his memory.

In just a short minute, Ruan Qing was sure of this. Because of his unique constitution, there were deviant thoughts about tampering with his memory.

This situation was hard to guard against, and he didn’t know when it might happen.

So, every time Ruan Qing woke up, the first thing he did was to calculate something new to ensure that his thinking and memory were fine.

If it was the first calculation, the time and speed were the slowest.

But if he had calculated it once, even if the memory was gone, his brain would have formed fixed thoughts and memories, and the calculation speed would definitely be faster than the first time.

But now, it was clearly faster than he had expected.

When could it have happened?

After his last instance ended, he only stayed in the temporary space of the system for a while before entering this instance directly.

The system also said that the temporary space of the system was absolutely safe.

It was obviously impossible to tamper with his memory there.

So, it could only have happened in the instance.

But he had just entered the instance, and the voice announcement of the game system about the instance had just started.

Even if someone wanted to tamper with his memory, wouldn’t there be no time?

It’s too strange.

The ringtone of his mobile phone suddenly rang unexpectedly, interrupting Ruan Qing’s contemplation.

Based on the voice prompt of the mobile phone, Ruan Qing opened the text message he had just received.

[Hurry back.]

When the mobile phone announced the content of the text message, it also announced the sender.

And the sender of this text message was—husband.

The tone of this message...

Ruan Qing listened to the text messages he had received earlier. Although they were all emotionless smartphone voice messages, he could still discern the differences.

In the past, the other party wouldn’t usually urge the original owner.

Even if there was a need for urgency, they would explain the reason and add a caring and gentle “be safe on the road.”

This perfectly matched Ruan Qing’s memory of Yang Tianhao.

But this text message had only these few short words, which didn’t sound like something a considerate ‘husband’ would say to his visually impaired wife.

This was too abnormal.

Just like this text message, it wasn’t from the same person as the previous messages.

Ruan Qing paused with his phone, then calmly picked up the groceries, navigating his way out of the market, heading towards home.

***

Xishan Residential Area, Building E, Fourth Floor, Apartment 406.

After sending the text message, Su Zhen threw the phone directly on the sofa, waiting for the NPC that had caused the abnormality in the scenario to walk into his trap.

And lying at his feet were two corpses, one belonging to Yang Tianhao, and the other to the murderer.

Su Zhen took the murderer’s knife and replaced it with his own.

The murderer might have a soft heart, but he certainly didn’t.

He had never liked the weak and fragile, those who clung to a few big trees like parasitic vines. Only these useless wretches liked such things.

They were really embarrassing.

Su Zhen toyed with the murderer’s knife with his fingertips, waiting for the arrival of the NPC named Zhou Qing.

He just needed to kill Zhou Qing, then destroy both his and Yang Tianhao’s bodies.

As for the clues to the scenario, the murderer dying here would still attract players to come investigate. Whether it was Zhou Qing or Yang Tianhao, it didn’t make much of a difference.

Even if players were misled by him, what did it matter to him?

After all, he didn’t need to clear the level.

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