Chapter 122: The Sea of Wandering 15
Although Huo Ting had notified Yi Ke in advance that he might be arranged to enter the Wandering Sea, the transition between “notification” and “actually entering” was still too sudden. Rewind time to two hours ago: the research team was conducting a replication experiment of the Rule Zone in Bluebird Pavilion 2801. Just as it succeeded, the signal transmitter at the headquarters building received an urgent message from Ye Jiaoyue right on the dot—SOS!
With no time for further consideration, the most suitable candidate on-site was only Yi Ke. During this period, He Mo had tried to persuade Zhuang Ningyu to stay outside the Rule Zone. But before he could even open his mouth, the person involved had already started rummaging through his pockets for his inhaler spray, waving his hands repeatedly to signal “no way,” while grabbing his operation backpack and bolting straight for the Rule Zone.
He Mo: “…Come back! Let’s discuss this!”
There was no room for discussion. Zhuang Ningyu couldn’t bring himself to let Yi Ke enter the Rule Zone alone, nor could he ignore the urgent call for help from his colleagues. And facts proved that not discussing or delaying was indeed the right choice. Judging from the situation just now, if he had been even five minutes late, Du Bai’s arm might have been lost to that mouth of jagged, interlocking teeth.
“I didn’t expect this poetry anthology to be so strong,” Alice exclaimed. “Watching it slowly tap mermaids one by one ‘bang bang bang’ over the past two days, I thought intellectuals were supposed to have this kind of elegant and refined fighting style.”
“Luckily you came,” Du Bai said with a bandage hanging from his mouth, not bothering to dress his wounds yet. He first tightly grasped Yi Ke’s hand, almost moved to tears and bowing on the spot. The top student descends from the sky to save the underachiever! I never enjoyed such super-standard treatment even when I was in school. Thanks, brother, thanks. Once we get out, I’ll treat you to roast duck!
Yi Ke patted his shoulder to comfort him, then took the bandage to help wrap it properly. Everyone found a somewhat clean round table to sit around. Zhuang Ningyu raised his eyes slightly, his gaze landing exactly on Fu Dong and Song Qiaowei opposite him. The King and Queen in this game were also, in real life, executioners whose hands were stained with the blood of innocents.
Fu Dong was also looking at him. Unlike the other masses trapped in the Rule Zone, he actually didn’t want to see Zhuang Ningyu and Yi Ke. Even though their appearance ended the violent tearing of the fish swarm and won everyone a brief safety, what about after the brief moment? For his own long-term interests, these two were definitely existences ten thousand times more troublesome than monsters.
He would rather continue facing the fish swarm.
The atmosphere became subtly quiet.
Seventeen role cards were laid back on the table. Zhuang Ningyu carefully read through them one by one, then casually handed them to Yi Ke beside him. Ye Jiaoyue introduced, “These are all the rules we currently have. Oh, right, there are two more sentences on the title pages of the poetry anthology and the excerpt notebook.”
Zhuang Ningyu opened his excerpt notebook, and sure enough, there was a paragraph on the title page—“If you can understand the poet’s words, then you will also become a poem he cherishes. Throw out the excerpt notebook when someone dares to harm your love and poetry!”
In the battle just now, because Yi Ke’s work efficiency was simply too high, Zhuang Ningyu didn’t get a chance to verify the excerpt notebook. Alice explained, “This notebook can be used to attack all monsters attempting to offend the Bard. Its lethality is directly proportional to the lethality of the poetry anthology.”
Yi Ke quickly treated Du Bai’s wounds and also opened the poetry anthology in front of him—“When the poetry anthology hits a target, the monster will briefly fall into a state of contemplation. And if it cannot understand the profound literature within the poem, it will die.”
This sentence was originally there, but after the title page, there was another newly appeared passage—
“The foundation of the kingdom has loosened,
The enraged mermaids are about to return,
So the noble King and Queen,
Decided to sail far away overnight!
The subjects followed closely behind,
Riding the star boat toward the vast white mist.
And that Bard,
Will use the sacred pen bestowed by fate,
To faithfully include all important events along the way into his chapters.”
The noble King and Queen decided to sail far away—in lay terms, they planned to run away.
The corner of Yi Ke’s mouth twitched. Frankly speaking, this bore a striking resemblance to Fu Dong abandoning the Fu Corporation and embarrassingly fleeing into the Rule Zone with his wife.
Fu Dong obviously realized this too, and his expression was very ugly. But the “subjects” in the banquet hall wouldn’t care whether their “King and Queen” looked good or not. Everyone only cared about when the mission would finally end so they could bring this fugitive couple back to the real world for trial.
Soon, the sound of a cruise ship’s whistle rang out from outside the window.
Everyone walked out of the castle, only to see a medium-sized cruise ship already docked under the blood-red moonlight. Dark waves were beating against the white hull. Pale lights emitted from the windows, like countless pairs of empty eyes watching everyone, looking indescribably eerie. Shadows moved on the deck, and a moment later, several monster crew members jumped down, making polite inviting gestures toward everyone.
Phase Two of the Game: The Voyage.
The cruise ship sailed very steadily.
The crew had assigned rooms for all passengers. Yi Ke and Zhuang Ningyu were in 101 and 102 respectively, but obviously, the two wouldn’t stay separately. At the moment, Zhuang Ningyu was leaning against the headboard studying the golden poetry anthology in his hand, while Yi Ke helped simply organize the luggage, waving his hand in front of Zhuang Ningyu’s eyes: “Spacing out again?”
Zhuang Ningyu snapped back to reality and wrote on his phone: This Rule Zone doesn’t look like a Rule Zone.
Yi Ke understood what he meant. The reason it didn’t look like one was that the “game feel” was a bit too heavy. One couldn’t find any trace of a realistic foundation; it was completely a thrilling adventure level-clearing game.
Rule Zones designed increasingly crudely would have this problem. Although you can discover its unreasonableness, you cannot judge in time whether this unreasonableness is a part of the puzzle the game requires you to solve, or simply a bug. It’s like a difficult problem versus a difficult problem that might have errors in the question itself; the latter is obviously more maddening.
They could only try to correct the question while solving it.
Zhuang Ningyu wrote down three keywords the mermaids had said on the paper: Princess, King, and Liar.
King, Liar.
Finding the King’s lie might be the key to this Rule Zone.
A lie related to the Princess.
A lie related to the Princess that also enraged the mermaid clan.
The Song Qiaowei in reality definitely wouldn’t protect Qing Gang, but the Queen in the role card was willing to sacrifice herself for the Princess. The villain seemed to be only the King alone.
Regarding the relationship between Fu Dong and Song Qiaowei, the files had already marked it very clearly. It was a marriage alliance between wealthy families; originally, the two families were of equal status. However, five years ago, the Song family went bankrupt due to mismanagement—some went to jail, some committed suicide, finishing overnight. Fu Dong, who couldn’t even clean up his own mess at the time, naturally didn’t have the spare energy to help his father-in-law. So in the end, he only smoothed things over a bit, whitewashed Song’s mother’s identity, and arranged for her to go to the US to take care of her grandson—Fu Dong and Song Qiaowei’s only son, Fu Siheng, who was eight years old this year.
For this kind of family, sending offspring abroad from a young age was standard operation. Yi Ke said, “Fu Dong and Song Qiaowei spoil this son very much. The environment provided for his growth can’t simply be described as wealthy; it’s practically extravagant to the extreme. Especially Song Qiaowei, her doting knows no bounds. If the Princess in the role card is replaced by Fu Siheng, she might indeed choose to sacrifice herself for the child.”
Loving one’s own child while killing others’ children. Zhuang Ningyu remembered Yue Lele, who died tragically in the storage room of 2801. Similar age to Fu Siheng on the screen, similarly healthy-looking, yet their fates were starkly different.
The Queen in the game was willing to sacrifice for the Princess.
The Song Qiaowei in reality was willing to sacrifice for Fu Siheng.
Zhuang Ningyu held a ballpoint pen between his fingers, twirling it skillfully, his brain rapidly pondering the relationship between the two. If his speculation held true and the game was really reflecting reality, could it mean that the child about to meet a tragic fate at midnight was actually Fu Siheng?
Yi Ke saw his thoughts and added a reminder from the side: “Song Qiaowei willing to sacrifice herself for Fu Siheng is just my casual guess because she does appear to love the child very much. But you know, the Fu family members all have somewhat of a histrionic personality.”
Zhuang Ningyu looked at him amusingly.
Yi Ke had a serious face. What? I’m analyzing clues very seriously!
Zhuang Ningyu dropped the pen, pinched his chin, and gave him a kiss. Nothing, you’re cute even when slipping in personal bias. However, realistically speaking, Fu Han really couldn’t be called a histrionic personality. In fact, most of the time he exhibited schizoid personality traits completely opposite to histrionic personality: emotional indifference, socializing only out of work necessity, loving solitude, indifferent to others’ evaluations, and rarely expressing feelings or experiencing pleasure.
However, schizoid personalities generally have little interest in having an intimate relationship based on romance with others. So Zhuang Ningyu had seriously considered before whether Fu Han’s inappropriate pursuit of him could essentially be classified as a kind of personality self-rescue rather than out of love. But before he could figure out the complex spiritual world of humans, his physical body was almost taken to the other side of the earth by a private jet. He instantly lost interest in further analysis. Only after landing in Jincheng, considering the other party wasn’t too heinous, did he casually pass over a business card of a psychologist he was familiar with.
Although Fu Han added the contact, he never consulted. Maybe because he felt he had no problem, or maybe because as soon as Dr. Zhang added him as a friend, he sent over a colorful, tacky poster saying “Every confiding is worth being heard, every change is worth being praised! Good Days Psychological Counseling Studio, journeying with you to a beautiful future! Double Eleven limited 11.2% off super value discount!”, which clashed horribly with the sexually frigid high-class style President Fu usually displayed. Anyway, the chat record between the two sides started with the poster and ended with the poster.
But this wasn’t something Zhuang Ningyu needed to consider. After all, he had neither the obligation nor the hobby to spread care all over the world; that job belonged to the Holy Mother. And the only bond between him and the Holy Mother might just be the song “Fourteenth Century Golden Spindle and the Mysterious Flawless Mirror,” which Yi Ke often ordered him not to listen to.
A quill pen was clipped inside the golden poetry anthology. Yi Ke tried writing a line of poetry on a blank page because the title page stated that the Bard must use the sacred pen bestowed by fate to faithfully include all important events along the way into his chapters. Now that the King and Queen were boarding the ship with their subjects, it could barely count as an “important event.”
The ink flow from the quill pen was smooth, but the golden handwriting only stayed on the anthology for a short five seconds before vanishing without a trace, leaving only faint pen indentations—
“The King and Queen, leading their subjects, stepped onto the boat of destiny, sailing together into the depths of the mist.”
A few seconds later, even the indentations disappeared.
Yi Ke asked, “Did I write poorly?”
Zhuang Ningyu shook his head. You wrote fine, but it might not be an ‘important event’.
The ship swayed gently back and forth with the waves.
The day passed quickly, and in the blink of an eye, the next “midnight” arrived.
Yi Ke felt the golden poetry anthology in his arms becoming slightly hot.
After opening it, he saw that on one of the pages, a new poem had indeed appeared—
“The King and Queen raised their wine glasses triumphantly,
Thinking the Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads had been severed.
Little did they know a larger net,
Was being woven in the dark,
Just tonight,
Just at the hour of the Rat.”
At the instant the poem appeared, the second hand of the wall clock covered the minute hand, and the minute hand covered the hour hand, stopping together at the number “12.”
“Ah!” A scream suddenly came from outside the window; it was Zhong Mu’s voice.
Simultaneously, the ship’s hull shook violently. Yi Ke grabbed Zhuang Ningyu; both clearly felt it—this ship was currently sinking toward the bottom of the sea
