Yunni nodded, stretched out her finger, and pressed it exactly where Cheng Shi had pointed.
And then…
With a swift motion that caught everyone off guard, she straightened up.
Nothing had happened to Wei Guan’s body.
“?”
Was it over already?
Did she even pierce it?
It all seed too fast.
The other players were stunned by Yunni’s speed. They were still trying to figure out if she had actually pierced Wei Guan’s heart at all—after all, his body showed no reaction.
Only Cheng Shi smiled, having deduced what Yunni had done.
In that split second, she had transford her finger into a thin line, stabbing it directly into Wei Guan’s heart.
This assassin’s ability to flatten parts of her body into two-dinsional shapes was even more powerful than Cheng Shi had imagined.
It seed the dagger was rely a disguise.
When it ca to killing, what weapon was more convenient than turning your entire body into one?
But the fact that the corpse showed no reaction was strange.
A dead heart would certainly not pump blood, but the absence of spurting blood didn’t an the lack of any bleeding. When external force breaches the heart chamber, dark red blood would inevitably ooze out.
Fang Jue seed to notice the sa inconsistency and asked uncertainly:
“Is there sothing wrong with the heart?”
Sharp!
Cheng Shi nodded, pulling out a surgical knife from his personal inventory and swiftly began the dissection.
Within seconds, Wei Guan’s chest was expertly opened up by Cheng Shi’s nimble hands.
The group gathered around, peering inside. Wei Guan’s chest cavity was full of intact flesh and muscle, but one vital organ was conspicuously missing.
“His… heart… is gone?!”
Du Xiguang stared at the empty space where the heart should have been, his brows furrowed as if deep in thought.
Cheng Shi nodded, offering an explanation:
“Using tactile perception, you can detect the direction and pressure gradients of muscles and fascia inside the body. While I was examining his chest, I noticed that the pressure in Wei Guan’s heart area was much lower than that of a typical corpse.
Now you see why—his heart was stolen.”
“Stolen? This doesn’t seem like a re theft. If part of soone’s body simply disappeared, doesn’t that sound more like the work of [Oblivion]?” Fang Jue asked.
As soon as he finished speaking, everyone turned their gaze toward Yunni.
Yunni raised her eyebrows but shrugged indifferently.
Her attitude was clear: “Not my doing.”
The group knew she wasn’t the culprit, but they were asking whether [Oblivion] had any similar techniques.
Even Cheng Shi wondered if he had overlooked the possibility that the killer might be a follower of [Oblivion].
But just as Yunni furrowed her brows in contemplation, Du Xiguang suddenly stood up, drawing a circle in the air before him with a serious expression.
Golden light ford a ring, and through it, the street they stood on transford into the view of… a library!
The ring looked as though it had pierced space and ti, connecting the present to a vision of the past.
The visual effect was srizing.
“Borrow the records of that ti.”
“Let
check… I rember there’s a divine relic that matches this situation.”
Du Xiguang reached through the ring into the library shelves, quickly searching for sothing. In no more than a few monts, he pulled a book’s shadow into the present world.
The ghostly pages of the book flipped under his fingers, and within a few breaths, he found what he was looking for.
“Found it!
I knew this death seed familiar: a terrified expression and a missing heart.
It’s When Fear Descends, an SSS-class subordinate divine dagger from the underground kingdom of Garuda, stained with the dual divinities of [Corruption] and [Death].”
“This dagger doesn’t need to pierce the body. It rely marks its target and waits. As soon as that unlucky soul feels fear, their heart is torn from them and offered to [Death].
They die quietly, without a sound.
You were right—it does feel like a curse, but it’s even more difficult to defend against.”
As Du Xiguang’s explanation sank in, everyone’s faces grew grim.
A semi-divine artifact!
Another semi-divine artifact.
In the face of such a weapon, whether you had 2400 points or 1400 made no difference. Everyone was just like a lamb to the slaughter.
“How could you forget about such an unusual death? Aren’t you supposed to be a follower of [mory]?” Yunni sneered at Du Xiguang, her suspicion clear in her eyes.
Unfazed, Du Xiguang adjusted his glasses and replied:
“Precisely because I’m a follower of [mory], I don’t need to rember.”
With that, he tossed the shadowy book back into the portal, and the golden ring vanished into thin air.
Cheng Shi’s expression grew thoughtful as he watched Du Xiguang.
He had lied.
It wasn’t that he didn’t need mories.
Perhaps he had already lost the right to retain his own mories.
It was said that followers of [mory] could trade their mories for additional powers from their god.
What kind of talent had Du Xiguang gained by sacrificing his mories?
Fang Jue, ever the no-nonsense type, didn’t join in the idle banter. His face was serious as he voiced his deduction:
“The killer is inside the inn.”
Exactly—the killer was in the inn.
The dagger was a mysterious weapon, but it still required a target to be marked beforehand.
Given Wei Guan’s skill—or rather, his hunter’s vigilance—he would’ve surely noticed soone following him after leaving the inn, or seen soone in the shadows at night.
This left only one possibility: he had already been marked before leaving the inn!
The good news was that Wei Guan and Fang Jue’s taunting had indeed provoked the killer into action.
The bad news was that they’d pushed too hard, and one of their actors had died.
Still, having a direction to investigate was far better than wandering aimlessly. At least now they could narrow down the search to soone inside the inn.
“But there’s still one more question…”
Cheng Shi frowned and added:
“Have any of you considered what could possibly make a person like Wei Guan feel fear?”
There was no doubt that the discovery of the dagger confird the thod of killing.
The killer only needed to mark their target from the shadows. After that…
The rest was up to the victim.
The fear of death would slowly creep through the area, causing the lone wanderer of the night to beco paranoid.
In that case, the killer didn’t need to do anything else. A single noise on the deserted street or a gust of wind on a moonless night could be enough to break the victim’s final nerve and end their life.
But Wei Guan wasn’t like that.
He was a follower of [Folly], an enemy of all ignorance!
This kind of cheap trick shouldn’t have phased him.
The closer soone got to the truth, the more detached they beca from human emotions.
Would soone like him really be susceptible to fear?
The answer was yes.
His death was proof enough.
But the question remained: what could have terrified a follower of [Folly]?
Could any of them confidently say they wouldn’t succumb to such fear?
Cheng Shi wasn’t sure.
And it was clear that none of the others were either.
Of course, there was also another, more pressing issue at hand.
That was:
Should they return to the inn tonight at all?
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