Changsheng Building
Chapter 656: Finally
Through the dusty glass door, Gentleman looked outside the shop.
In the bottomless darkness, only a cluster of cold red light flickered, like an ominous eye silently staring at them from deep within the abyss.
Suddenly, the red light outside the glass door disappeared abruptly.
Seeing this, everyone’s spirits lifted involuntarily.
Success!
Half a minute later, accompanied by a burst of hurried footsteps, with a “bang,” the glass door was violently pushed open. The brass bell above shook, and a figure stumbled in.
It was precisely the anchor sent out just now to check the situation.
His face was pale, breathing rapid, looking completely shaken.
“How is it?” People nearby hurriedly stepped forward to support him. “Are you okay? Did you encounter any danger?”
“So,” Gentleman parted the crowd and walked forward.
He lowered his eyes, asking steadily, “What was that red light?”
“It, it was a candle,” the man caught his breath and said, “You guessed right, it was indeed attracting the surrounding ghosts.”
Gentleman listened quietly. After the other finished, he asked again: “And then? What did you do?”
The anchor seemed not to expect Gentleman to ask this question. After a momentary daze, he stammered in reply: “I… of course I extinguished it…”
“Didn’t you think about bringing it back?” Gentleman asked.
Admittedly, a candle capable of attracting ghosts was very dangerous.
Ordinary people might avoid it like the plague, but Gentleman saw more. Regardless of what this candle represented, its underlying value was greater than imagined.
“S-sorry…” Under Gentleman’s pressing question, the anchor appeared somewhat pathetic. “I was being chased by a ghost at the time, really, really had no way…”
Before he could finish, he was coldly interrupted by Gentleman: “Besides that, anything else?”
“N-no,” the anchor murmured.
“So, you went outside and saw a candle capable of attracting ghosts. After extinguishing it, you came directly back. Besides that, you saw nothing else, and nothing happened. Is that right?”
The anchor’s face paled slightly under his questioning, but he still gritted his teeth and nodded:
“Y-yes.”
Gentleman stared at him fixedly, making him sweat profusely and fidget uneasily. After several seconds, he finally withdrew his gaze: “Alright, I understand.”
“Still according to the original plan.” Gentleman roughly calculated the number of red coins in his hand and said, “Wait for three more customers, then we leave this floor for the third floor.”
Outside the shop, in the darkness.
“He didn’t agree to cooperate with you.” Wu Zhu lowered his eyes, looking at Wen Jianyan standing beside him.
Wen Jianyan played with the extinguished red candle in his hand idly. Hearing this, he shrugged:
“That’s only natural.”
“My fierce reputation isn’t that much after all, at least far inferior compared to Gentleman,” Wen Jianyan said, showing no surprise in his expression. “And he is an Oracle anchor. In such an environment, he would definitely fear Gentleman more, not me.”
After speaking, he glanced lazily at Wu Zhu and laughed: “Besides, you don’t think I really need his cooperation, do you?”
His tone could even be considered gentle, but carried undisguised contempt.
In the contest between him and Gentleman, the other party wasn’t worthy of occupying a place in his plan.
Even if he really gave him some task or order, under the insight and high pressure of a anchor of Gentleman’s level, he probably wouldn’t last a few rounds of interrogation before revealing everything.
“He didn’t tell Gentleman about my existence. Rather than saying he fears me, it’s better to say he fears Gentleman more,” Wen Jianyan said. “He knows that once Gentleman finds out he had contact with me outside and was let back alive, everything would be over—given Gentleman’s suspicious nature, it’s impossible for him to believe this is the whole truth. So, even just to save his life, he would insist to death that he hadn’t seen me, nor had anything happened.”
“This kind of person is like this,” Wen Jianyan said nonchalantly. “Not loyal enough, nor mercenary enough; not smart enough, nor decisive enough; neither bad enough nor good enough. Only swinging repeatedly between fear and hesitation. His sole purpose is self-preservation.”
“So, no need to trust, and no need to be hostile.”
He chuckled softly.
“Just use him.”
Just as he finished speaking, Wen Jianyan suddenly noticed Wu Zhu’s extremely strong gaze. He paused and turned to look: “What…”
However, before he could finish, he felt a shadow press down very quickly. The next second, his lower lip was bitten heavily.
“Ouch!”
Wen Jianyan cried out, caught off guard.
He licked the place just bitten, looking at Wu Zhu with disbelief: “What are you doing?”
“Couldn’t hold back.” Wu Zhu said honestly.
Wen Jianyan: “…”
Wu Zhu paused, seemingly thinking of something unknown, and shut his mouth.
“?” Wen Jianyan noticed his hesitation to speak and finally couldn’t resist his curiosity. “…What exactly do you want to say?”
Wu Zhu: “You told me to watch the occasion last time.”
Wen Jianyan was stunned: “When did I…”
He stopped suddenly. The memory of saying that sentence suddenly revived in his mind.
“…”
Wen Jianyan closed his mouth expressionlessly.
He shouldn’t have asked.
The Gentleman really felt his luck was bad this year.
Originally planned to wait for three more customers before going to the third floor, but after losing the ghost-attracting item, no next customer arrived. Gentleman had to use items, but the shop immediately faced a crisis too. It seemed no matter what they planned, it couldn’t be implemented smoothly. Finally, after waiting for a customer with great difficulty, the prophecy item reminded him that if he didn’t act, he would never be able to leave this floor. They had to abandon the shop completely occupied by terror and flee to the third floor in a sorry state.
And their bad luck didn’t seem to stop there.
Just arriving on the third floor, they encountered other anchors ambushing at the stairwell, trying to snatch lamp oil.
They ran right into the Gentleman’s gunpoint.
“No… no no no—” The anchor’s wide eyes were full of horror. He watched helplessly as his hand raised uncontrollably, then bit by bit used a blade to slit his own throat. Large amounts of fresh blood gushed from the severed windpipe. The head, connected only by the cervical vertebrae, tilted down.
“Thud.”
Like a heavy sack of flour, the still-warm corpse fell to the ground.
With a cold expression, the Gentleman stepped over the pool of blood on the ground.
Seeming to sense his terrible mood, all other team members behind him were silent as cicadas in winter.
Thick blood spread on the ground like a mirror, reflecting panicked pale faces and unbearable mutilated limbs.
It was getting late.
The countdown on the clock was turning uncontrollably.
Due to the accident at the stairwell, the Gentleman and his team rushed desperately, only managing to rush into a shop and light the oil lamp one second before the corridor went dark.
The oil lamp emitted weak light behind the counter. Gloomy oil paintings hung on the walls, the images inside weird, cold, and unsettling.
Before they had time to investigate the shop’s situation, the copper bell hanging on the door rang.
Everyone’s expression was grave, complaining incessantly in their hearts.
As members of the Oracle Guild monopolizing prophets, they had cleared however terrifying instances. Even if there were crises, they could often turn danger into safety. But a situation like now where everything went wrong and no plan could be implemented, they had almost never seen—and this was under the leadership of a Nightmare Top Ten!
This building seemed naturally opposed to them.
This was a instance of unsolvable ghosts. They couldn’t confront them head-on with talents and items or check and balance with force. And in the process of confronting ghosts, dismantling and researching rules became even more difficult. Not to mention wave after wave of non-stop attacks leaving them breathless, even if they touched some clues slightly, they would always prove to have thought in the wrong direction in the end. Clearly every clue was right, but their brains would always be inexplicably guided in the wrong direction.
One customer left, and the terrifying curse descended again.
In the cold air, another corpse was quietly left behind.
“…”
Gentleman’s face was livid, but his brain was spinning madly.
Every single thing that happened since entering this instance circled non-stop in his mind—every practice seemed not to exceed common sense, every danger seemed to have a very reasonable explanation behind it. But, for some reason, he just felt something was wrong.
And that feeling of being targeted and monitored constantly since entering this instance…
Wrong, very wrong.
“You guys hold them off.” Gentleman dropped a sentence and walked quickly to behind the counter in the safe area. He took a deep breath, lowered his head, and by the faint light released by the oil lamp, an old, yellowed piece of human skin paper appeared in his palm.
Not far away.
“He took it out.” Wu Zhu looked at Wen Jianyan. A pair of pale golden eyes immersed in darkness had a shocking sense of danger. “Act now?”
“No.”
Wen Jianyan gazed at the closed shop not far away.
However, his gaze wasn’t given to Gentleman behind the counter at all, but fixed on those anchors left outside the counter—his gaze slowly swept over those pale, nervous, fearful faces, taking in every subtle expression change on their faces.
“Not time yet.”
He said softly.
“Wait a bit longer.”
Unless absolutely necessary, Gentleman really didn’t want to use this item.
With the increase in usage count, it became increasingly insatiable.
At first, it was one human life for three questions, then became one human life for two questions. After the Lucky Cruise instance, it became one human life for one question. —Its appetite grew larger and larger, while the amount of information given began to decrease. Originally, every question would be answered in detail, but later, even spending a more expensive price, the answers given were succinct, haggling over every bit. Even though Gentleman had items transformed from humans in his hand, it was hard to satisfy its increasingly terrifying appetite.
Gentleman’s face was gloomy. He gritted his teeth and placed the turtle shell with more cracks on the human skin paper. However, blood words didn’t appear as expected.
This only represented one meaning.
Not enough.
“……”
Gentleman took a deep breath, reached out and took another item not used many times yet, sacrificing it to the human skin paper in the same way.
The item disappeared.
Replacing it was a line of piercing blood-red small characters.
“Human calamity, not natural disaster.”
Seeing these six characters, Gentleman’s fingers convulsed and tightened, veins popping on the back of his hand—although he knew the information given by the human skin paper was less each time than the last, after he sacrificed two items, it actually only gave these six characters?!
However, no matter how suffocated he was, he could only forcefully swallow the blood back down his throat.
His gaze fell on that line of text, expression slowly becoming solemn.
…Human calamity?
What does it mean?
Could it be that the difficulty he was experiencing now wasn’t what he should have experienced, but came from someone’s calculation?
But the problem is, who could…
Gentleman jerked his head up, pupils contracting sharply under the swaying oil lamp light. The guess emerging in his heart was too shocking, making his breathing almost stop.
“…Pi-noc-chio?!”
Not far away, the young man whose name was called narrowed his eyes, corners of his mouth lifting to reveal a cheerful smile.
Finally.
