WTNL Chapter 458

Thank you @pandorasproxy for the Kofi. (1/3)

Yuying University
Chapter 458: Shh

The sack was thin and made of white fabric, which by rights should have let light through. Yet, for some reason, the inside of the bag was pitch black.

The sack swayed, giving a disorienting sense that one’s feet couldn’t find solid ground.

Inside the bag, Wen Jianyan had no way to tell where he was or where he would be taken next.

“…”

Wen Jianyan wore a thoroughly deadpan, lifeless expression.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to run… he just couldn’t.

Beneath him was grave soil. He didn’t dare remove the badge; but if he didn’t remove it, he couldn’t use those methods only available to anchors.

So he couldn’t take it off, and couldn’t leave it on either.

Worse, judging from the conversation he’d just overheard, there were at least two “people” carrying the grave soil.

He definitely didn’t dare charge out and go head-to-head with them like this.

So, even if Wen Jianyan wanted to escape now, he had no choice but to stay put inside the bag and wait.

In the Integrity First live room chat:

[Hahahahahahaha!]
[Hahahaha, that’s what you get for conning other anchors into being your personal drivers—karma!]
[The anchor always triggers new side quests in the weirdest ways. I’m dying!]

Huddled in the sack, Wen Jianyan stared blankly into space, waiting for this “journey” to end.

The bag jolted and swayed. In the darkness, he could only hear the steady footfalls outside.

He could just barely guess that they seemed to be walking downward.

He didn’t know how long it had been when the footsteps suddenly stopped.

There was a creaking sound, like metal door hinges turning, and then the footsteps started again.

Wen Jianyan lifted his head.

He realized he must have been carried indoors.

But where exactly…

He couldn’t tell for now.

Soon after, Wen Jianyan felt a sudden, weightless lift, as if he were being hoisted up.

He tensed, instinctively grabbing at a fold in the sack, curling himself tighter.

In the Integrity First live room chat:

[…Ah, a little cute.]
[…Yeah, kind of cute.]
[Small and pocketable—want to stuff him in my pocket.]

The next moment, there was a thud. The sack seemed to have been set down on a flat surface.

Wen Jianyan released the fabric, held his breath, and listened.

The footsteps receded.

Then, with another creak, the iron hinges turned again—whoever it was seemed to have left. Through the iron door came a hollow, dull clang, like a latch being thrown shut from the outside.

Then nothing.

“…”

Wen Jianyan didn’t move rashly. He stayed curled in the sack, carefully waiting for a good while, and only when he was sure there were no sounds outside did he cautiously slip a hand out and pull open a small slit.

He poked his head out and glanced around.

The light outside was very dim; it was hard to make out anything clearly, just vague outlines of objects.

Even so, Wen Jianyan could at least confirm one thing:

There was no one else around.

He exhaled and crawled out of the bag on hands and knees.

The moment he left the grave soil, his body returned to normal human size. As his size changed, he staggered and pitched forward.

Thud!

A dull sound echoed in the darkness.

Flat on his back, stars bursting before his eyes, Wen Jianyan didn’t even have time to feel the pain. He jerked his head up, nervously looking around.

The echo of the fall seemed to ripple through the dark, but everything was deathly still—no other sounds at all.

After a tense minute of waiting, Wen Jianyan finally decided that the noise he’d made hadn’t caused any uncontrollable consequences.

“…”

He let out a long breath, his taut limbs finally relaxing.

Propping himself up with a grimace, Wen Jianyan stood and lifted the badge from his chest.

The instant the badge came off, that thick waxy film vanished. He officially reverted from “monster” to human, and his features returned to normal.

Then Wen Jianyan turned to look in the direction he’d fallen from.

The sack of grave soil had been placed on a shelf at least half a meter high, its mouth gaping. Yellow-brown, chillingly cold earth spilled from it, littering the surrounding floor with scattered traces.

…No wonder the fall hurt so much.

Wait.

Something occurred to Wen Jianyan.

He pulled out his phone, lowered the brightness, and turned on the flashlight.

The faint, wavering beam swept slowly across the wall, illuminating his surroundings bit by bit.

It seemed to be a warehouse.

Shelves lined all four walls, towering up to the ceiling. Neatly arranged upon them were one white sack after another, each exuding a cold, familiar chill.

At a glance, he couldn’t see the end of it.

Wen Jianyan stood still.

Staring at the scene before him, he felt a chill creep up his back.

He hadn’t opened any of the sacks, but even so, he knew very well what was inside.

—Grave soil.

All of it had been brought out from that land of death.

In Nightmare, there are two kinds of instances.

Most instances don’t retain progress: unless cleared with 100% perfection, they reset before the next stream, waiting for new challengers.

But some instances do retain progress.

For example, Xingwang Hotel.

These are often more closely tied to the real world. While some aspects reset after clearance, the truly critical parts—those linked to the core of the instance—are preserved.

Like Prosperity Hotel, the Yuying Comprehensive University instance also “retains progress.”

That’s how Wen Jianyan could find traces left by past anchors here, and in the “Film Appreciation” class, locate tasks that had been replaced by one anchor after another.

Like “Richard,” “Chuchu,” etc.

They had all been anchors who entered this instance—wearing their own faces, bearing someone else’s names, while their real, original lives were forever forgotten, until the next victim appeared to take their place.

Wen Jianyan lifted his gaze. In the dim beam of his phone, the pale irises reflected a whole wall of terrifying grave soil.

…So that’s it.

He slowly exhaled, a heavy pressure knotting in his chest.

The broken link in his earlier logic finally clicked into place.

He still didn’t know the exact relationship between Nightmare and that graveyard, but he had worked out how some instances related to the burial grounds.

Changsheng is a human creation—responsible for containing fierce ghosts and returning them to slumber in the burial grounds.

Xingwang Hotel is the work of other beings—responsible for containing fierce ghosts that left the burial grounds and releasing them back into the human world.

One link in between was what Wen Jianyan hadn’t figured out.

If the fierce ghosts are already buried in Changsheng Building, how do they break free from beneath the mounds and end up in Xingwang Hotel?

—Until now.

Back in the graveyard, Wen Jianyan had witnessed how the grave soil, suffused with chilling power, could lull fierce ghosts into sleep.

Meanwhile, Yuying Comprehensive University was using anchors as tools to remove that soil from where it belonged.

Because it’s connected to that land of death, each time the instance opens, its foundations don’t fully reset. Although each transport doesn’t move much soil, over time, the earth removed from atop the coffins accumulates…

And the originally slumbering fierce ghosts awaken one after another.

Upon waking, they leave the graveyard and return to the human world.

For the first time, Wen Jianyan glimpsed the whole picture through scattered fragments.

A shiver crawled up from the soles of his feet; before he knew it, his palms were damp with cold sweat.

To Nightmare, these instances are nothing but tools—and its true goal may only be one thing:

—To turn the human world into a ghostly warren.

“…”

Wen Jianyan lowered his eyes. His lashes cast a shadow over his pale face, veiling his expression.

He suddenly felt like laughing.

Isn’t this a world that should be saved by a noble, heroic knight in shining armor?

Not by a self-serving, silver-tongued liar?

How ironic.

Wen Jianyan had no desire to save the world.

From the beginning, he’d only wanted to escape this hellhole, take his 2 billion, and live free—he scoffed at longevity, and sneered at immortality.

He only wanted to squander wildly, indulge to his heart’s content, and smile as he met death.

The fate of others had nothing to do with him; he had no moral impulse for charity, was selfish by nature, and had no intention of sacrificing himself for humanity—too lazy to be an unappreciated savior.

…

Forget it.

Wen Jianyan turned his head and sighed helplessly.

If the world really became a playground for fierce ghosts, he wouldn’t be able to stay untouched even if he escaped Nightmare, right?

Anyway… it’s all just incidental.

To get out of here, he had to topple this colossal edifice of malice no matter what.

Besides, it was part of his wager with that inhuman deity.

Wen Jianyan didn’t like to lose.

Thinking that, he reflexively curled his hand and rubbed the cold ring at the base of his ring finger with his thumb.

The ouroboros’ metal outline was hard and unforgiving, pressing painfully into his skin.

He had to admit, he hadn’t expected that after the ouroboros’ restraint vanished, that guy would still be here—loitering, even. It was… highly unexpected. And he definitely hadn’t expected the other to demand “rent”—

“…Wait.”

Wen Jianyan froze as a thought struck him.

Rent?

He lowered his head to glance at the ring, suspicion flickering in his eyes.

How did Wu Zhu even know such a modern term?

In a flash, a flood of images burst into his mind.

Wait—last time in the administration building, when Wu Zhu appeared, wasn’t he wearing a dress shirt?

And this time, inside the ouroboros—what had he been wearing?

It seemed like a shirt again, but the style was subtly different from last time.

Wu Zhu was tall and long-limbed to begin with; put him in a human designer’s clothes, and he looked downright presentable—like he could walk a runway right now.

The more Wen Jianyan thought about it, the more familiar those clothes seemed.

Suddenly, inspiration struck.

Crap!

Isn’t that exactly the outfit from the fashion spread on the inside front page of the magazine he’d brought into the ouroboros?!!

“…Damn.”

Wen Jianyan’s vision went dark as he sucked in a sharp breath.

If he remembered correctly, that magazine contained more than just that.

Magazines in Nightmare didn’t have the strict reviews and ratings of the real world. Anything provocative or eye-catching was fair game—Entertainment to Death taken to every extreme.

That’s not the kind of thing a blank-slate monster should be learning!

—Damn Nightmare!

Grinding his teeth, Wen Jianyan glared at the ring, itching to rush in right now and confiscate everything.

Wu Zhu was already getting sharper and harder to fool. At this rate, he’d only become more unmanageable.

Wen Jianyan was kicking himself.

He never should have brought those issues inside—and then forgot to take them out… He’d dug his own pit!

But he was in an instance now.

To avoid wasting uses of the ouroboros item—and to avoid spooking Nightmare into sensing his intentions—he really couldn’t do anything yet.

“…”

Damn it.

Wen Jianyan’s expression darkened as he turned and walked deeper in.

All he could do now was clear the instance as fast as possible—and sincerely pray Wu Zhu couldn’t read.

Wen Jianyan made a quick circuit of the warehouse.

It was large, with many shelves, each one piled with grave soil.

There were also four rusted iron doors. All of them were bolted from the outside, impossible to open from within.

Since Wen Jianyan had been brought in inside a sack, he didn’t know which door he’d come through—let alone which one led out, or where the others led.

He frowned.

—Even though he’d figured out which link in Nightmare’s machinery Yuying Comprehensive University belonged to, he still didn’t know why the instance was transporting so much grave soil here.

His gut told him the answer might be tied to the instance’s core secret.

Just then, footsteps sounded outside one of the doors.

“!”

Wen Jianyan’s heart jumped. He hurriedly backed away.

He slipped behind one of the shelves and hid.

With a grating scrape of a latch, the iron door creaked open. The next second, a cold, shadowy figure appeared outside, seeming to be pushing a cart.

He came in, the cart wheels whispering against the floor.

“…”

Wen Jianyan braced one hand against the shelf, carefully craning for a better look.

The next instant, a hand reeking of blood shot from the darkness behind him.

“!!”

Wen Jianyan’s eyes widened. He swallowed his cry and choked it back down.

He whipped around, shaken.

In the darkness was a familiar face.

A tall frame, a pale, handsome visage, and slightly tired eyes.

Hugo looked at him, slowly shook his head, and raised a finger to his lips.

“Shh.”

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