Chapter 120: The Sea of Wandering 13
Monsters within ordinary Rules Zones, no matter how outlandish their appearance, typically had a core based on reality. For example, the bloated and filthy husband in Taoli Community, You Hong who grew almost two stories tall at the Doll Party, the bad grandfather who embedded puzzle pieces into his face trying to lure Jiajia, or the pale researchers in Xinyin Biology. Even in the Zeus Hotel, which had been copied multiple times and completely collapsed, intending to marry Dou Dekai and Tang Xiaoyuan, the people and events that appeared could all find their original, normal shadows outside the Rules Zone.
But mermaids were clearly not a species that should exist on this planet. Or perhaps, the Rules Zone was using mermaids to represent some fierce maritime species, like… pirates?
“King plus pirates, isn’t the era of this Rules Zone a bit too ancient?” Alice questioned, her gaze still firmly locked on the door.
Ye Jiaoyue glanced at Fu Dong and Song Qiaowei in the corner and reminded her: “This is a modified artificial product. We can’t judge it based on past work experience. Adapt as soon as possible. In our future missions, unexpected new situations might appear every time.”
Clang! The heavy iron grate door emitted a terrifying loud noise. The mermaids gripped the iron bars with sharp claws and shook them back and forth. After just a few shakes, the rusty hinges detached completely from the wall. Immediately after, the iron door was lifted high and thrown into the sea.
“Princess—” A low roar emitted from the mermaids’ mouths.
Inside the room, Qing Gang casually spat out the empty nutrient pack he was holding in his mouth and raised his gun slightly. The sound of fish tails dragging in the courtyard carried a sticky, glue-like noise, like a group of giant mutated slugs. The “doom clad in scales” on the Princess card must refer to these things, no doubt. The castle’s final heavy wooden door was equally fragile under the sharp claws. It took almost less than a minute for the swarm of mermaids to break in!
The sea wind howled, pouring into the room along with the sudden rain, blowing the crystal chandelier on the ceiling to sway violently back and forth before crashing to the ground and shattering!
“Princess—” The mermaids’ target was clear.
Their slimy bodies moved rapidly on the smooth floor of the castle, as if frolicking in an ice rink. Their shells, wrapped in a foul, fishy stench, slammed aside everyone else, all fish eyes focused on Qing Gang! Excitement, greed, faintly trembling!
“Princess—”
A pair of blood-red pupils were pressed tightly in front of Qing Gang. He looked like the leader of the mermaids, his body clearly a size larger.
Mermaid and Princess, no matter how you think about it, should have something to do with romance. Don’t tell me I have to marry this guy! Thirty episodes of a short drama flashed through Qing Gang’s mind in five seconds, causing a sudden chill. He calmly retreated half a step to avoid being sprayed by the stinking saliva. Unexpectedly, the other party seemed enraged by this movement of less than five centimeters. He suddenly opened his mouth wide; dense rows of five or six teeth still hung with fresh flesh and blood—unknown if it came from the previous unlucky Princess. But right now, he clearly wanted to swallow Qing Gang whole!
The romance film instantly turned into a horror film, but no matter, it was all within Brother Gang’s scope of business. The gun barrel pressed against the soft upper palate with lightning speed. Bang! As the trigger was pulled, a puff of white smoke rose. The bullet penetrated the brain matter and pushed out a tiny, tiny bump on the scale-covered back of the head.
Just a tiny bump; not even a blood flower bloomed. The gun seemed to do extremely minimal damage to them.
The mermaid let out a terrifying roar. Sure enough, he didn’t fall from the gunshot; instead, the sudden attack sent him into a state of ultimate berserk fury! Seeing the sharp teeth approaching again, Qing Gang decisively put away the useless firearm and switched to smashing his sandbag-sized fist heavily into the opponent’s softest eye socket! Crack! Accompanied by the clearly audible sound of bone shattering, a huge depression appeared on that ugly face, but still, he didn’t die.
He stuffed his popped-out eye back in, supported his body with his fish tail, leaned his upper body forward, and slowly curved the corners of his mouth upward. Like a demon in a game, he was issuing the most malicious, mocking danger warning to the panicked passersby.
However, the next moment, with a thud, a huge, glittering gold poetry collection suddenly blasted over like a cannonball! The mermaid was completely defenseless. His head was smashed to spin three hundred and sixty degrees on the spot, finally twisting off and falling to the ground like a bottle cap. No blood flowed from the broken neck. The massive remnant body crashed to the ground, immediately turning into a puddle of salty water mixed with sand.
He died.
Like a boomerang, the poetry collection made a free turn in the air and fell back into Du Bai’s hands.
“—When the death knell tolls at the celebration, please recite a poem. Use it to trip Death’s ankle; perhaps that will delay the damned doom a little.”
So it was this kind of physical “recitation.”
Du Bai breathed a sigh of relief. How to put it? At least it’s much less humiliating than reading “Hoeing Millet at Noon” aloud in front of a dozen colleagues.
The poetry collection had appeared in his hands half a minute ago. The flyleaf contained the usage rules—”When the poetry collection hits the target, the monster will briefly enter a state of contemplation. If it cannot understand the profound literature within the poem, it will die.”
And Alice, the Bard’s Listener, also received a similarly sized excerpt book. The flyleaf read: “If you can understand the poet’s words, then you too shall become his beloved poem. Throw the excerpt book when someone dares to harm your love and poetry!”
A mermaid lunged at Du Bai but was chopped in half by the excerpt book flying from Alice’s hand.
The Bard and the Listener were the only two game characters on the scene with kill authority over the mermaids!
The other team members quickly and tacitly retreated to the rear, leaving them ample space. The golden poetry collection and the silver excerpt book drew dazzling lines of light in the air. Facts proved that not a single mermaid could understand those poems. They eventually chose to turn around, dragging their fish tails and scrambling to escape back to the sea.
“Princess—” The furious roar was swallowed by the wind.
The island returned to tranquility. The castle had lost Iron Grate Door *1, Wooden Door *1, Crystal Chandelier *1, and “Mermaid Remains” piled all over the floor. The butler led the maids to appear at the staircase in time. They used brooms and mops to shovel the sand into the flower beds, restoring the banquet hall to cleanliness.
Fu Dong and Song Qiaowei stayed in the farthest corner the entire time. The King did not become the executioner raising the butcher knife, nor did the Queen come to save her child. They looked completely like two indifferent, high-and-mighty bystanders, unwilling to participate.
Ye Jiaoyue took the poetry collection from Du Bai. Although the usage rules on the flyleaf were already very clear, she was still somewhat puzzled. She didn’t know where the “profound literature” was. Also, Alice needed to “understand the poet’s words” for the excerpt book to be aggressive, but these two big blank books currently showed no trace of use.
“There were, Captain Ye, there were,” Du Bai explained. “When it first appeared in my hand, there were indeed poems on it. But as written in the instructions, when attacking monsters, the poems become consumables similar to bullets. When the battle ends, all the poems disappear.”
“What poems were on it?”
“Just… poems I could understand.”
Poems you could understand, the colleagues on the scene thought in unison, could actually become profound literature in the eyes of mermaids?
It was evident that nine-year compulsory education had definitely not been popularized in the sea.
“Based on the current situation, the more poems you can control and the more profound their meaning, the stronger the lethality of this poetry collection,” Ye Jiaoyue said. “Little Ai’s excerpt book follows the same principle, but their attack ranges differ. The poetry collection can kill monsters without limit, while the excerpt book can only attack monsters attempting to harm the poet.”
Du Bai and Alice slapped their foreheads in perfect sync, both turning into popular internet reaction memes.
Literary attainment, like Rome, was truly not built in a day.
But, based on past mission experiences, there was a high probability the monsters would level up.
“Let’s report this to Minister Huo.”
“Okay.”
The frequent-urination signal transmitter got busy again, working itself to the bone.
In the small office building of the Jincheng Research Team, Zhuang Ningyu was staying alone in the laboratory—not entirely alone, because Yi Ke was in the lounge two floors away, precisely stuck at the critical point between separation anxiety and non-anxiety. So, although Zhuang Ningyu was occasionally a bit restless, he persisted until the end of the shift, and even through overtime.
He Mo said dizzily: “Stop messing around. The Rules Zone at Jade Bird Pavilion is fundamentally a tightly sealed sphere. Indeed, in the initial version, it definitely had a door for players to enter and exit. But after artificial modification, all its coding was destroyed. Hiss… how should I explain this to you? It’s roughly similar to when breached by external force, all sequence structures of the Rules Zone automatically reassemble into a super-dense form, so it only becomes safer. In other words, the disassembly process actually makes the ‘door’ and ‘wall’ fuse further, understand? ‘Aegis,’ the world’s number one safe company, uses similar encryption technology. You know this company, right?”
Zhuang Ningyu: Ha.
He Mo was puzzled: “What’s with that expression?”
Zhuang Ningyu waved his hand and gave him the empty thermos cup, signaling him to get some water. The research team boss instantly turned into a tea boy, but no one could disobey the only Emperor of the Order Maintenance Department. Not only did He Mo get the water, but he also carefully selected and brewed some Golden Silk Royal Chrysanthemum, bringing it back fragrantly for the big shot. However, upon entering, he saw green code flashing madly on three huge screens, scrolling at a speed of thousands of lines per second.
Looking closely, the ending was all [Code Accepted].
Zhuang Ningyu was indeed not good at copying Rules Zones, but he was really good at picking locks.
He Mo’s eyes widened, and the thermos cup in his hand nearly slipped due to shock. Zhuang Ningyu caught it calmly, picked up his bag coolly with the other hand, then nudged He Mo with his elbow: Get a few people to watch it; results should be out around the morning after tomorrow.
Yi Ke’s car was parked in the garage. Because Zhuang Ningyu refused to sit in the “Big Brother and Sister-in-law’s Hundred Years of Harmony” car and insisted on tinting the windows first, he temporarily switched to an SUV. The interior space was large, perfect for lifting someone completely from the passenger seat into his arms.
A full day of separation. Although the actual physical distance between the two wasn’t far, it was truly difficult for Zhuang Ningyu. In the past ten-plus hours, scenes of Yi Ke in the ICU flashed back in his mind at least seven or eight times, each requiring an inhalation spray to calm him down. It was hard, so Yi Ke deliberately hugged him tightly for a while longer, praising in his ear: “How is my wife so amazing!”
Zhuang Ningyu buried his face in his neck. Work was one kind of steadiness; this was another. It felt as if his suspended heart had suddenly landed on solid ground, so comfortable he didn’t know what to do. Yi Ke reached his hand under the T-shirt; his back was cool and slightly damp, so he stroked up and down to help him relax, asking softly: “Was work tiring today?”
Not tiring. Zhuang Ningyu shook his head. Drank tea all day, cracked two bags of melon seeds, and spent most of the remaining time thinking of you. Really.
Yi Ke chuckled and didn’t expose him, only holding his waist and leaning in for a kiss: “Let’s go, let’s go home.”
Ms. Deng had asked the butler to deliver stewed soup for the two in advance; it only needed slight heating. Zhuang Ningyu had been hot and stuffy in the laboratory, so he showered first upon returning home. While drying his hair, he picked up his phone. Just as he tapped open the notification bar, the battery heated up from a dozen photos flooding in at once.
He Mo: Photo *18
All screenshots from the unit’s surveillance video. In the images, Yi Ke looked like a kind old father sending his child to kindergarten for the first time—worried but forced to be firm. He stood in various hidden corners, stretching his neck to look toward the laboratory. In one photo, while Zhuang Ningyu was leaning on the table inhaling medicine, he looked about ready to break down the door, though he eventually braked a few steps away.
“…”
No tea drinking, no melon seed cracking. Zhuang Ningyu, who had worked all day, trotted downstairs, wanting to express that at least the “thinking of you” part was true. Yet he didn’t know how to start. He leaned against the dining table watching the busy Yi Ke. After watching for a long time, he finally seemed to make a decision, turned around, and ran toward the study.
Yi Ke: “Wifey, that’s enough, that’s enough! Spare my safe!”
The wearing activity of the ten-million-level emerald had far deviated from the channel Yi Ke initially set for it, appearing too frequently in this home. Zhuang Ningyu felt he could still make an effort, but he was forcefully pressed down at the dining table: “Sit well, eat.”
Alright then. Zhuang Ningyu proactively served him a bowl of rice to show his love.
Crisp salad burst between lips and teeth, the fish fillet soup was smooth and tender, and bowls and spoons clinked with subtle sounds. Halfway through the meal, Yi Ke patted his head and asked: “Should I go back to headquarters tomorrow, or continue accompanying you in the research team?”
Zhuang Ningyu crunched on the lettuce and waved his hand coolly: Headquarters, you go, I can do it.
Yi Ke gave a thumbs up: Impressive.
Then, when getting off work the next day, he picked up a somewhat disheveled wife in the parking lot. The dishevelment was mainly due to many coffee-colored medicinal spray stains on his shirt collar. When kissing, there was the same bitter taste in his mouth, probably because he uncontrollably pressed the spray many times, causing the medicine to flow everywhere.
“Not treating it anymore, not treating it anymore.” Yi Ke hugged him, humming in distress. “Resign, go home, I’ll support you.”
Still need to treat it. Zhuang Ningyu patted his back. Give me a little more time; this recovery speed is really okay already.
That was true, but before sleep that day, Yi Ke still held his hand for a face-to-face scientific analysis: Wifey, it’s like this. I think your insecurity mainly stems from distrust in my abilities. Of course, this isn’t your fault; purely because the previous me wasn’t good enough. But now I’ve evolved… mmh.
Zhuang Ningyu cut him off, patting his face to indicate he was fine, then reclaimed his familiar position in his arms. He fished out a copy of “Shakespeare’s Sonnets” bought yesterday from the nightstand and handed it over with one hand—
How to put it? He actually preferred reading it himself, but he couldn’t withstand Yi Ke’s extraordinary fondness for bedtime poetry reading. Although a large part of this fondness might stem from being able to slip in some personal remarks during the reading now and then—for example, “Thinking of your love, I have such wealth, mwah mwah mwah, that I scorn to change my state with kings,” or “Condemn the mint bud for stealing your soft hair’s scent, wifey wifey come let me smell”—often oscillating repeatedly between artistic and perverted. But overall, he could still hear quite a bit of serious content, so this segment became a fixed program for the two.
In the dead of night, the breathing of the person in his arms was long and steady.
Yi Ke finished reading the last line, closed the poetry collection, and planted a satisfied kiss on his forehead.
Goodnight.
