Chapter 118: The Sea of Wandering 11
Apologies are typically divided into verbal and physical. Given Zhuang Ningyu’s current limitations, a verbal apology was impossible, leaving only the physical option. He decided to satisfy Yi Ke’s fervent desire for the emerald necklace by retrieving it from the safe and wearing it. As for whether he wore it correctly, that was another matter entirely.
Still fragrant with the scent of body wash, he kicked off his slippers and climbed onto the bed. Yi Ke didn’t even have time to consider his two-hour deadline before habitually reaching out to catch him. The belt was nudged open, and the bathrobe slipped loosely off his shoulders, revealing a pale, smooth back.
Yi Ke tilted his head up, reciting see no evil: “I’m telling you, seduction won’t work.”
But it worked a little. The soft fabric of the bathrobe clung to the curve of his waist, rising to outline a distinct arc. Zhuang Ningyu grabbed one of Yi Ke’s hands and placed it on his own back, settling into a comfortable position in his arms. Yi Ke’s palm slid down, fingers tightening forcefully, adding a flushed hue to the skin already slightly pink from the hot bath, even through the robe. After holding him for a while, Zhuang Ningyu looked up and whispered, word by word, I really know I was wrong—
Yi Ke let out a laugh, though it wasn’t entirely heartfelt. The terrifying memory of the Rules Zone attempting to swallow him again clashed sharply with the warm safety of their bedroom. Fear, relief, and a hint of grievance, emotions he had suppressed and planned to process slowly on his own, suddenly surged uncontrollably under his lover’s gaze. His nose stung, and instinctively, he sought more emotional comfort.
Zhuang Ningyu was startled by the sudden redness around Yi Ke’s eyes and immediately pulled him into a hug. Yi Ke wrapped his arms tightly around Zhuang Ningyu’s waist, his hot breath landing on his chest as he rubbed away the moisture brimming in his eyes. It took a full half-hour for his emotions to calm down. When he looked up, his eyes were bloodshot, his love profound and undisguised. Zhuang Ningyu’s heart trembled under that gaze. Just as he was contemplating where to begin his self-reflection, Yi Ke grabbed his hand and said hoarsely, “Wifey, you smell so good.”
Zhuang Ningyu: “?”
Yi Ke pulled the bathrobe to wipe his face, his slightly damp, cool hair rubbing everywhere like a mischievous puppy frolicking on the grass. When Zhuang Ningyu picked the lock, he had indeed come with intentions of adult activities. But now, confronted with such pure affection, he couldn’t bring himself to initiate anything. In the end, he resigned himself to lying on the bed, patting the whining person on top of him and reminding him to sleep early.
Yi Ke buried his face in his stomach: “Mmh.”
The night was quiet.
However, the Rules Zone on the sea in Country G was anything but quiet.
Ye Jiaoyue and her team searched the island for two hours but found no other players or monsters. Apart from the unusually retro and ornate castle, the place was completely deserted. Seeing night approaching, they had to return. The butler still stood at the door. Upon seeing them, he politely stepped aside and gestured for them to enter.
The large round table in the banquet hall remained as before, but a small table had been added nearby. Two newly appeared maids were distributing food—exactly fifteen portions. It seemed that until all players were assembled, everyone had to continue waiting here. Sure enough, after the meal, the maids led everyone to their respective bedrooms.
Aside from the bedrooms, opening any other door led right back to the banquet hall.
The night deepened, and the white mist outside grew thicker.
Fu Dong walked unsteadily. The hands of the mechanical watch on his wrist swayed left and right, as if interfered with by some magnetic field, and soon stopped completely. Song Qiaowei checked her phone; the time was chaotic, and there was no signal. This was clearly completely different from Liam’s previous description. Her cheeks stung from the freezing wind, and she stopped in frustration, asking her husband, “What exactly is going on?”
Fu Dong’s face was dark, and he remained silent. To create a Rules Zone at home that could be evacuated at any time, he had paid the Invisible Giant a sum reaching nine figures and allowed Liam to kill a child in his storage room. He didn’t know where the child came from or who he was; he only knew that after death, the child was supposed to become a monster in this Rules Zone for him to control.
Did it succeed? According to Liam’s promise, it was “one hundred percent” successful. The other party even gave him a thick stack of instructions, detailing how to use the child to travel from the Jade Bird Pavilion’s Rules Zone to another Rules Zone.
Yes, another Rules Zone. A large part of the nine-figure payment was for this. Although the Invisible Giant’s achievements in “accelerating” evolutionaries were lackluster, their technology in manufacturing Rules Zones was far ahead. It was said that in their latest research, they could connect two Rules Zones located in different spacetimes, essentially opening an arbitrary door for the user to escape at any time.
So according to the original plan, he should have successfully left the Rules Zone by now and be attending a party in a luxurious banquet hall set up by the Invisible Giant in Europe. But clearly, something had gone wrong, something major.
An ominous premonition welled up in his heart, not just because of the lost signal or the car they couldn’t find, but also because of the increasingly distinct, humid, salty smell in his nasal cavity.
It was the sea breeze.
Inside Jade Bird Pavilion, He Mo was still leading the research team in studying the “lock-picking” method. Massive data clusters were uploaded group by group to the cloud processor at high speed. Red and green lights flashed on site, beeping sounds merged into one, and programs were constantly revised and reorganized. Finally, after more than ten hours, when all screens turned green, the white mist filling Suite 2801 vanished completely as if blown away by a strong wind.
All researchers on site were stunned. No one expected this result, including Zhuang Ningyu and Yi Ke, who had just arrived with a large basket of buns, soy milk, rice balls, and dandan noodles to bring warmth to their colleagues.
“Why are you here again?” He Mo walked over.
What do you mean “again”? Zhuang Ningyu shoved the bamboo basket borrowed from the breakfast shop into his hands. He wanted to go forward and examine things closely but remembered last night’s reflection just in time. So, he first took the initiative to hold Yi Ke’s hand. Only after receiving a look of helpless permission did they walk into the room together.
The other colleagues, unaware of the truth: “…Lovey-dovey, too lovey-dovey!”
Suite 2801 was perfectly normal, and the Rules Zone had vanished without a trace. This was strange enough, but even stranger was that Fu Dong and Song Qiaowei had disappeared along with it.
“How is that possible?”
“Yeah, Boss, we just picked a lock. Why is the entire Rules Zone gone?”
“And where is Fu Dong?”
When the Rules Zone appeared last night, the police confirmed Fu Dong and his wife were one hundred percent at home. Logically, when the Rules Zone disappeared, they should have returned to this apartment. But now, both had vanished with the Rules Zone.
Zhuang Ningyu mouthed: Door.
He Mo nodded, understanding Zhuang Ningyu’s meaning. But the others didn’t and kept asking: “What door?”
Yi Ke explained: “Simply put, this Rules Zone in Jade Bird Pavilion isn’t actually a Rules Zone, but a ‘door’ leading to another Rules Zone. Precisely because it’s a door, it disappeared along with the removal of the ‘lock’.”
He Mo rubbed his temples and sighed from the bottom of his heart. The Capital was pushing similar experiments, and the department planned to arrange for him to take a team to learn next month. Before seeing the official version, the illegal institution version arrived first. Those bastards were fast.
“Is it feasible to use this to escape?” Yi Ke asked.
He Mo replied: “Not really. According to calculations from the Capital, if a person enters Rules Zone A from Location A, although they can indeed enter the interconnected Rules Zone B through Rules Zone A, if they want to return to the real world, their landing point will always be Location A. They cannot travel directly to Location B corresponding to Rules Zone B. In other words, even if he is in Rules Zone B now, when Rules Zone B is cracked, he will still reappear in this suite.”
“Then Fu Dong doing this… doesn’t seem to make much sense?” Yi Ke was puzzled. “Our people will definitely guard this place constantly. Unless he stays in the Rules Zone forever, he will be caught sooner or later. If Fu Dong was in a crisis like Shi Cheng from Xinyin Biology, where not entering the Rules Zone meant death, it would be understandable. But the reality is clearly not so. The investigation team and the police haven’t found concrete evidence of Fu Dong’s crimes yet. Logically, he should still have a chance to truly flee in reality, not rush into a Rules Zone in such a panic.”
Zhuang Ningyu tugged at his wrist and handed over his phone: Is it possible he was deceived? Thought the Rules Zone equals an “Arbitrary Door”?
The huge assets under Fu Dong’s name had already been transferred abroad. In the eyes of some people or organizations, he was definitely a tempting piece of meat. His value dead far exceeded his value alive.
Ten minutes later, the police arrived. Forensics quickly found a large amount of blood in the storage room. Under the luminol reaction, splatter and drag marks were visible everywhere. The scene had likely been treated with disinfectant once, but residual fluorescence still flowed from the center of the room to the corner.
Forensics extracted DNA samples from some items and completed a rapid comparison within four hours, finding the deceased’s information in the national DNA database—Yue Lele, male, six years old, from Mianshan Village, Jincheng, who went missing at a township market two months ago.
Looking at the photo of the sturdy little boy, all the adults present felt an overwhelming rage. Beyond the rage was a dark, terrifying realization. Lele’s murder signified to the Jincheng Order Maintenance Department that the theory of “those in power using ordinary people as cornerstones for Rules Zones for their own benefit” was no longer just a worst-case deduction based on human weakness. It was a bloody reality that had happened and would continue to happen.
Inside the Rules Zone, Fu Dong stopped for the umpteenth time. Song Qiaowei grabbed his arm, her fingertips trembling slightly. She could no longer ignore the roaring sound of waves crashing against her eardrums. Although the sea had not yet appeared and the white mist still clouded her vision, she knew what awaited them ahead.
“Liam was bought off, bought off by that bastard brother of yours.” She clenched her teeth, but they still chattered uncontrollably. “He took a hundred million from you, yet sent us to the sea to die!”
Fu Dong had no mind to pay attention to his wife’s curses. He just stared fixedly ahead at the sun about to burst forth. A bright red halo leaped over the horizon, then blossomed into ten thousand blinding rays of light!
The sea breeze howled, and the white mist dissipated! Cold, salty water crashed against the pitch-black reefs, creating a mist of rain that hit their faces wetly, blurring their vision. Not far away, an ancient castle bathed quietly in the sunlight.
“Is Fu Han inside?” Song Qiaowei tugged at her husband, reminding him in a low voice, “Don’t forget, his friend sent two whole rescue teams in, while the group from The Enigma you paid heavily for are still on the island.”
“Let’s go.” Fu Dong wasted no words and strode towards the castle.
Inside a Rules Zone, there was no second way to escape other than participating in the game.
“Captain Ye!” In the banquet hall, Zhong Mu, who was playing with a fork out of boredom, caught a glimpse of two figures outside the window from the corner of her eye. Her eyes lit up instantly!
“The King” and “The Queen” had appeared.
Ten minutes later, the signal transmitter that had nearly worked itself to death finally broke through the white mist barrier. Like a… uh, tenacious patient with frequent urination, it intermittently but successfully transmitted a few fragmented keywords to the Capital Headquarters—
“Game, King, Fu Dong, Song Qiaowei, LOC Island, Seventeen, APS, MTL.”
“Fu Dong and Song Qiaowei?” In the Jincheng Order Maintenance Department, no one expected this outcome. However, this further confirmed Zhuang Ningyu’s previous speculation: Fu Dong was likely tricked into the Rules Zone. Otherwise, unless his brain was flooded, he wouldn’t voluntarily enter the Wandering Sea, especially knowing that the Order Maintenance Department had already dispatched a transnational rescue team. It was practically running away into a dead end.
So who tricked him, and why?
Zhuang Ningyu scribbled an analysis on paper—
APS and MTL were common codes for the Order Maintenance Department, representing “All Personnel Safe” and “Key Target Lost,” respectively. “Game” and “King” were likely the game rules this time. “LOC Island” was the current location of the Action Team. As for “Seventeen,” fifteen action team members plus Fu Dong and Song Qiaowei made exactly seventeen.
“Key target lost.” Yi Ke leaned against the desk. “Fu Han isn’t in the Rules Zone?”
Zhuang Ningyu shook his head. Not necessarily. It’s also possible he’s just not in the rescue team’s line of sight.
Fu Dong’s appearance was too suspicious, and this matter must be highly related to Fu Han. The key question now was whether Fu Han was aware or unaware. But regardless, one thing was certain: the Wandering Sea wasn’t a randomly appearing Rules Zone, but a carefully planned copy, which was why it could connect to Jade Bird Pavilion.
Zhuang Ningyu looked thoughtful.
Yi Ke propped his head on one hand, sitting beside him. Suddenly, he clicked his tongue and spoke forcefully: “Previously, he left the cruise ship overnight and didn’t even attend his friend’s birthday party. I thought he was worried about my wife being trapped in Xinyin Biology, so he rushed back to the port in such a hurry!”
Zhuang Ningyu: “…”
Yi Ke’s mouth formed an “O” shape in realization: “So it wasn’t that!”
Isn’t it better that it wasn’t? If he really chartered a plane back for me, you’d be throwing a fit again. Zhuang Ningyu still couldn’t understand why, despite having a crowd of pursuers, Yi Ke fixated on Fu Han. He was quite tolerant of others, even happily using the high-end imported toilet in the office building without pressure. He dared not imagine if the toilet sponsor was Fu Han and Huo Ting explicitly forbade changing it… His gaze shifted down to the other’s kidneys, conducting a medical hypothesis: Would he really hold it in until he had problems?
Yi Ke: “Wifey, wifey, have some reserve. We’re still at work!”
