Xu Zisheng and Xiao Gui’an talked at length about the dungeons he had gone through.
Of course, he told them with human compassion—careful not to ruin the image Xiao Gui’an had of him—and tactfully omitted the bloodier parts.
After Xu Zisheng polished the stories, the versions he told were, in so ways, a mutually healing process; at the very least, they taught him not to self-destruct.
As for so other dungeons, Xu Zisheng had cleared them outright, and so of the monsters inside were able to be freed instead of being trapped in terrifying cycles forever.
“This is a world for monsters,” he said, “but not every place can form a dungeon.
When the ga isn’t running, monsters can exist in this world just like people.
Monsters that can’t break free, or lower-level monsters, get trapped in one place and repeat similar lives day after day.”
Take the true monster behind this round of hide and seek—the child. The agony and resentnt she felt before dying made her a powerful presence inside this ga dungeon.
But outside the dungeon, that didn’t necessarily hold true.
When she returned to the ho filled with her despair and suffering—the house that was her nightmare—if her father and sister were also shaped into monsters in that monster-world projection, there were only two possible outcos.
One: her power was greater than theirs, and she could take revenge and punish them.
Or two: she would be bound within the projection of the real world and suppressed by the rules.
Even if her father and sister beca monsters, they would still be her nightmares—bullying, or their mother being beaten by an alcoholic father—those horrors would still play out in that world.
In a previous dungeon Xu Zisheng had cleared, he’d encountered such a situation: a rundown, backward village dungeon.
The village was a projection from who-knows-where in the real world; everyone there was ignorant. That backward, feudal quality made you feel the villagers hardly deserved to live.
The boy who was sacrificed suffered anew every ti the dungeon opened—his heart ripped out, suffering the despair of being burned alive again and again.
And even when the dungeon wasn’t active, the village kept running as usual; yet it was still the sa hell for that boy who had no proper clothes and no ho.
One of the special abilities of the last Cursed Child is that after beating a ga dungeon with the highest rating and signing a contract with the Blood Book, he can completely eradicate monsters inside a horror ga world.
After restoring the dungeon’s entire truth, Xu Zisheng naturally turned things around and dealt with all the people in that village.
That boy also helped Xu Zisheng fulfill the final mission requirents, and Xu Zisheng helped him end that endless nightmare.
That dungeon was permanently closed.
Ti quietly passed; before they knew it, half an hour had gone by.
“Let’s go. We should scout around a bit,” Xu Zisheng said, standing up. But at that mont, a knocking sounded from outside the door.
The knocking was frantic—one, then another—like a heart pounding violently, as if sothing were chasing it from behind.
The door was already so decrepit; how could the person outside possibly make such a wooden-thunk sound when knocking?
There was only one explanation: whoever was knocking outside was not human.
When they realized there was no reply, the presence outside began tearing at the newspapers plastered to the door, little by little. Nails scraped; a rustle like paper scraps combining with wood chips fell down.
The two monsters inside the sacks, which had been quiet for a while, were suddenly stimulated by that sound and started to wriggle bit by bit.
The eyeballs sealed in a tin jar bounced and actually gouged through the can’s tal lid; four bloodshot pupils all fixed at once on Xiao Gui’an and Xu Zisheng in the living room.
“I see you, I see you—”
“I see—”
“Hehe…”
A hole was pricked through the newspaper by black-purple nails, and an eye, full of white, stared tightly at them through that small gap. Excited voices ca from outside the door: “I see you…”
It wasn’t clear whether there was only one monster outside.
They couldn’t head that way.
Xiao Gui’an and Xu Zisheng each kicked and toppled the two twisted monsters re-forming in the sacks, then ran into the kitchen and bolted the door.
The kitchen’s shutters and glass had already been smashed earlier by Xu Zisheng.
He kicked off the stove, then, with agile flexibility, bent in a stunt-like movent—like a circus trick—and was outside the kitchen in an instant.
He grabbed the warped chain on the outside window, swung lightly to the other side of the pipes, clutched the pipe, and then slid down the protruding pipe all the way to the first floor.
Xiao Gui’an watched his fluid movent with his mouth hanging open.
Not even a street perforr could be as nimble.
“Co down faster—” Xu Zisheng landed lightly and called to Xiao Gui’an, “just follow my moves.”
The kitchen door they had bolted was being pounded from the other side.
Xiao Gui’an gritted his teeth, clumsily climbed onto the stove, then bent down deeply; at that mont, he felt his waist snap painfully.
There was no ti to worry about it. He kicked outward with his foot and, by a hair’s breadth, grabbed the chain.
He glanced at the smoke-darkened pipe whose original color he could no longer make out.
No matter how much he disliked it, he had to go. He slid down inch by inch.
The pipe shook violently. Xiao Gui’an looked up and saw two bloody monsters—barely still human-shaped—crawling out the window.
The mother-and-child monsters hung their heads and twisted, clinging to the outer wall like spiders.
Their severed limbs had been crudely reattached, flesh and bone turned inside out; spiderweb-like strands stuck the blood clots together.
The eyeball Xu Zisheng had pulled out and reinserted was apparently put back in backwards, protruding outward, vessels barely attached in the socket, half hanging off.
Behind the two monsters stood the girl who had held the shards of glass earlier.
She grinned eerily—no pupils, only whites. Her purple-blue skin was marred by ugly, strange black veins.
Countless little hairy spiders crawled out from her eyes, into her nostrils, and finally spilled out of her mouth.
“I see you. Co play with us…”
This was a far cry from the first round’s appearance.
If they got caught by those monster Seekers in this second round, they might not be killed outright, but they’d certainly be skinned alive.
Xiao Gui’an dropped from the pipe, hit the ground with a roll, and sprinted after Xu Zisheng.
“This, this… their forms have changed way too much?!” Gui Yi was too terrified to look back, his face dazed with fright.
“That’s normal. The longer the dungeon runs, the more monstrous they beco,” Xu Zisheng said as he and Xiao Gui’an cut a corner and darted into the most secluded garage on the apartnt complex side.
After a quick look around, he pried open a sheet of tal with ease—soone had clearly been here before them.
The garage was even darker; they could barely make out a few ters ahead. From the distance, faint sounds ca.
They fell silent and crept forward. Not far ahead, behind a pillar, the Tang family twin sisters were hiding.
They peeked out, trying hard not to make a sound.
In front of them, pressing himself against another pillar and trying not to stick his belly out, was Fatty Chen Ze.
At the front corner of the garage, the sounds ca from the injured ex-soldier Liang Weiguo.
His luck seed miserable; he was being besieged by three Ghost Children and couldn’t break through.
He held a military folding knife in his hand. His right arm had been ripped terribly; only half a sleeve remained, stained with blood, swinging empty.
Seeing the scene, Xiao Gui’an twitched his mouth. What the hell was this?
All the players had gathered in one place. If they were discovered, it would be an easy trap—an inescapable jar—and they’d all be finished.
This damned tacit understanding—no one wanted it!
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