Chapter 700: Die
Screech—
The tip of the crescent blade scraped across the floor, leaving a massive, arc-shaped scratch on the ground.
Figaro landed nimbly, taking a few steps back to retreat to the group’s side.
“It’s done.”
Everything had aligned perfectly with Pinocchio’s prediction.
The bloody maw on Ye Lin’s chest was his most terrifying method of attack; similarly, the throat protected by those sharp teeth was the greatest weakness on his body. Ji Guan feigned an attack, Figaro provided cover, and Chen Mo launched a sneak attack—exploiting Ye Lin’s subconscious love and urge to protect Dan Zhu to create an opening—before Figaro delivered the final, most fatal blow.
Figaro turned his head, looking thoughtfully at Wen Jianyan.
Even though he had dealt with this person many times before, he had to admit how terrifying this guy was. His true horror never lay in invincible combat power, but in his flawless calculations, his absolute control over situations and human hearts, and those fiercely loyal followers who allowed themselves to be commanded…
And this time, through a bizarre combination of circumstances, Figaro had inadvertently become one of them.
He could acutely feel the influence radiating from the young man—a kind of gravity that made people willingly, consciously or unconsciously, obey his orders.
“So, how was that? Didn’t I do pretty well?” Figaro narrowed his long, slender eyes, half-joking. “Want to consider continuing our partnership after this? We might actually make a great team.”
Wen Jianyan didn’t answer his question.
He merely raised his head, staring fixedly at the end of the corridor.
The shadows in front of them retreated bit by bit, dissipating slowly like mist.
As their field of vision cleared once again, everyone’s eyes locked onto Ye Lin at the end of the hall.
Not far away, that massive body swayed slightly. The once indestructible high wall was now crumbling, looking as if it would topple over in the very next second.
Everyone subconsciously held their breath. The air seemed to solidify in this moment.
The chaotic barrage of comments across all the live broadcast rooms also plunged into a deathly silence.
They watched as he stood frozen for a split second, and then—
Bang!
With a massive crash, the giant fell. The fortress collapsed.
Dark red blood slowly pooled out from beneath his body.
For the first time, the light from behind shone through unobstructed, and the suffocating, immense pressure that had enveloped the entire corridor vanished into thin air.
In that instant, a wave of frenzy swept through. All the live broadcast rooms boiled over.
[Holy shit!]
[HOLY!! SHIT!!!]
[Ye Lin lost? …Ye Lin actually lost???!]
[This is the high-end gameplay of top-tier players. Victory and defeat decided in split seconds. One slight error and you lose the whole board. I literally didn’t dare to breathe watching this.]
[Alright, can the people above stop popping champagne prematurely? Haven’t you noticed?]
[Noticed what?]
[Ye Lin’s live broadcast room hasn’t completely closed yet.]
In the corridor.
Suddenly, Bai Xue lifted his bloodless face. His pitch-black pupils stared into the air. Having seen something unknown, his expression drastically changed:
“Let’s go.” The boy’s voice was slightly hoarse, carrying undisguised gravity.
The moment his voice fell, the entire world seemed to shake violently!
Wen Jianyan only felt a pull at his waist before his entire body was enveloped in shadows and yanked backward. Ji Guan, who hadn’t yet reverted to his human form, leaped through the air in his green-faced, fanged ghost physique, his speed barely second to the shadow’s.
The shadows in the corridor surged like dark storm clouds whipped up by a violent gale, grabbing the others and dragging them away from where they stood.
Crack— CRACK—
Accompanied by a teeth-aching sound of shattering, interlocking fissures appeared one after another.
The floor of the corridor broke apart and disintegrated like fragile ice. If they had retreated even a step later, they would have plummeted into the depths.
With a heavy thud, Figaro was thrown onto the ground, rolling miserably several times before coming to a stop.
Covered in dirt and dust, he staggered to his feet, only to realize that aside from him, everyone else had been set down securely—especially Wen Jianyan, who had been handled with extreme care, as lightly as a fragile, precious artifact.
“???”
Figaro looked suspiciously at the side of Wu Zhu’s face.
The entity stared straight ahead, his profile cold and stern, golden eyes locked forward without sparing a single glance in his direction.
…No, this guy did that on purpose, didn’t he?
However, Figaro quickly lost the luxury to dwell on this.
Accompanied by a rumbling roar, blood-red thorns grew frantically from the fissures in the ground before them. The solid floor was snapped as easily as a cracker, turning into tiny fragments in the blink of an eye.
The red vines shot violently upwards as if alive, blotting out the sky within seconds.
The already dim lights flickered madly.
Between the flashes of light and dark, a silhouette emerged from the distance.
“…” Everyone’s expressions hardened simultaneously, their bodies tensing like drawn bowstrings.
“Honestly, I was originally planning to finish the matters over there before dealing with you guys…” A woman’s voice, devoid of discernible anger or joy, drifted over from the distance.
One step, two steps, three steps.
A demonic, rotting floral scent exploded in the narrow space like a bomb, carrying the cloying sweetness of overripe fruit, recklessly devouring the surrounding air.
“But I ended up coming back early.”
Dan Zhu stopped walking. She lowered her eyes, her gaze falling by her feet—Ye Lin, his chest and abdomen pierced through, lay on the ground. Pitch-black blood flowed continuously from his chest, soaking the carpet beneath him and causing the flowers below to bloom even more vibrantly.
“I truly didn’t expect you all to be able to push it to this extent—” She let out a light, airy laugh, the emotion behind it impossible to distinguish. “Impressive.”
The corridor was frighteningly quiet, as suffocating as a tomb. It was so silent they could practically hear the rushing of each other’s blood.
Suddenly, the tall body lying on the ground twitched.
Even after sustaining such a severe injury, his superhuman physical endurance kept Ye Lin from dying outright. His chest let out death-rattle-like gasps, wheezing like a broken bellows.
The man struggled to raise his eyes. His slightly unfocused gaze landed on Dan Zhu. He breathed heavily, saying nothing.
Looking down from above, Dan Zhu placed her foot on his dazed face, gently turning his head.
“…Tsk, how pathetic.”
The next second, her foot abruptly applied force, ruthlessly grinding Ye Lin’s face into the carpet. Her tone turned ice-cold.
“Trash.”
“Cough, cough…” Ye Lin’s voice was muffled deep within the carpet. More dark-red blood overflowed from beneath Dan Zhu’s foot, slowly staining the surroundings.
“Sigh, there’s no helping it.”
Dan Zhu’s emotions were like a sudden summer downpour—coming fast and leaving even faster.
She unhurriedly withdrew her foot and stepped forward again, her tone returning to a soft, slow cadence. “Something this important really can’t be left to others. I have to do it myself—”
Her bare feet stepped on the floor, and blood-red flowers bloomed wherever she tread.
Unknowingly, the temperature in the corridor had plummeted to the freezing point.
It was intensely oppressive, intensely murderous.
Ji Guan took a step forward, the green-faced, fanged malicious ghost seemingly trying to rip its way out of his skin. His gloomy eyes locked onto the opposite side, the muscles on his shoulders bulging as if ready to pounce in the next second.
Chen Mo’s face was deathly pale, his gaze focused. The side effects brought about by Ye Lin’s talent clearly hadn’t dissipated. The crack-covered chains coiled around his right arm and hung by his side, emitting faint metallic clinks.
“Sigh…” Figaro let out a long sigh.
His face was full of gloom, looking highly reluctant to be here, but he never put away the crescent scythe in his hand. He knew he had no way out now; playing the fence-sitter at this point was meaningless. Aside from helping Wen Jianyan succeed, he had no other choice.
Massive shadows surrounded them, cleanly dividing the corridor into two distinct zones.
Dan Zhu smiled brightly, seemingly not feeling any substantial threat.
With her every step, the entire cruise ship seemed to tremble, buzzing as if it had come alive. The floors and walls wailed, screamed, and moaned together—deadly flowers bloomed rapidly, covering every visible inch of the area in an instant.
Suddenly, her footsteps paused.
Sensing something, Dan Zhu turned her head toward the other side of the corridor, a cryptic smile slowly blooming on her face:
“But then again…”
“If I have a helper, I naturally won’t refuse.”
The group froze, following Dan Zhu’s gaze toward the other end of the hall.
The moment they saw the newcomer, their hearts sank heavily.
Under the intermittently flickering lights stood a tall, upright man. His clothes were soaked with large patches of blood. His expression was unfathomable as he stood firmly not far away, having been there for an unknown amount of time.
A cigarette, still burning, was pinched between his hanging fingers, a thin line of ashen smoke curling upwards.
…It was Hugo.
The solitary lone wolf, Nightmare’s executioner, a terrifying rival standing on the opposing side.
“Not bad,” Dan Zhu giggled. “It seems you arrived just in time.”
Witnessing this scene, the viewers—who were already incredibly tense—felt their hearts leap into their throats.
[Holy shit, holy shit! The tide of the battle just got confusing again.]
[I thought once Ye Lin wasn’t a threat, the outcome would be clear. I didn’t expect a Dan Zhu plus a Hugo! Now I really can’t say who’s going to win.]
[I’m betting on Pinocchio! With his brain, Figaro’s combat power, and that non-human’s help, I feel like they can crush anything.]
[Right, on Dan Zhu’s side, even though Ye Lin isn’t dead, he’s lost his mobility. But on Pinocchio’s side, no one has died yet.]
[Give it a rest, it’s absolutely impossible. Don’t forget whose home turf this is. Even if Pinocchio’s team hasn’t suffered casualties yet, and even if they seemingly hold the upper hand, it’s only temporary. Think about it: this floor is sealed off. They have nowhere to run. But Dan Zhu’s power is endless. As long as she wants to, she can just wear them down until they die here!]
In this oppressive, suffocating standoff, only one person appeared absentminded.
Deepest within the shadows, the young man lowered his eyes, seemingly zoning out at the worst possible time.
Or rather, he was thinking.
Yes, Wen Jianyan was thinking… mobilizing everything he could mobilize, using everything he could use, racking his brains with all his might.
Unlike the others, his gaze was never confined solely to the present. No matter the environment or the threat, he possessed the ability to step back from it all, examining everything happening before him from the calm perspective of a bystander.
Wen Jianyan never forgot who his true enemy was, what his true objective was.
And…
How he was going to achieve it.
Regardless, one thing was certain:
Fighting a bloody battle to the last man here was absolutely the worst plan.
He had to find a way to truly break this deadlock.
Wen Jianyan thought intently, searching and retrieving through his memories over and over again—contrary to his seemingly absentminded exterior, he was actually pushed to his absolute limit. His fingers hanging by his side twitched nervously, cold sweat seeping from his palms, rendering them icy and slick—his intuition told him the answer was hidden right here, tucked away in some corner he had overlooked. As long as he had enough time, he could find it—
“Go.”
A soft voice, like a lover’s murmur, sounded.
Even though the voice was gentle, in this dead-silent environment, it exploded like muffled thunder.
The ground closest to them was violently ripped open!
A thick vine, as wide as two people hugging, burst from the floor like a gargantuan monster, roaring as it charged right at them—
It was actually twisted together from thousands upon thousands of blood-red flower branches. Perhaps since the moment Dan Zhu appeared, it had been silently slithering, lying in wait beneath the floor… only revealing its overwhelming terror at the exact moment of its strike.
The tip of the vines violently smashed into the shadow barrier.
Amidst the surging darkness below, a pair of icy golden eyes faintly appeared—not dodging, not hiding, not yielding an inch.
Not far away, Dan Zhu casually observed this scene, the curve of her lips deepening slightly.
What looked like an evenly matched stalemate to others was an entirely different story in her eyes.
Within the seemingly dense shadows were countless actual cracks—the traces of Ye Lin’s ruthless bites. Although they inexplicably showed signs of mending, it was nowhere near enough to fully recover. Inside this cruise ship controlled and occupied by Nightmare, His power had been drastically weakened. Right now, it was nothing more than an arrow at the end of its flight.
Besides, that had never been her true goal.
Suddenly, Blond’s sharp eyes caught faint, writhing bulges on the walls. Instantly panicked, he screamed: “Watch out—!!”
Unfortunately, his warning came too late.
Before his voice even dropped, countless hair-thin flower branches shot out from beneath the wall surfaces. As fine as strands of hair and as sharp as needles, they wormed their way perfectly through the unhealed cracks in the darkness, aiming straight for everyone’s throats!
“Fuck!” Even someone as composed as Figaro couldn’t help but curse at this sight. He leaped backward, raising his arm, his crescent scythe carving an arc through the air, accurately blocking the vines shooting toward him.
Ji Guan didn’t dodge; instead, he spun around and threw himself over Blond, the most defenseless of them all. His ghost-like skin, tough as iron, forcefully tanked almost all the attacks. Amidst a dense barrage of clinking sounds like iron nails raining down, he gritted his teeth, forcing all grunts of pain back down his throat.
Bai Xue raised his eyes, standing rooted to the spot without moving. His pitch-black, tranquil eyes reflected all the attacks flying toward him—and bizarrely, they all altered their trajectories, contorting themselves to bypass his body.
Dan Zhu narrowed her eyes. This time, her smile carried a hint of bloodlust.
Unlike Ye Lin’s wide-open, overpowering brawler style—where absolute power subdued all tricks—her combat system was far colder and more treacherous…
And similarly, much harder to predict and defend against.
The vines affected by Bai Xue’s talent hadn’t disappeared; on the contrary, they naturally altered their course, even utilizing the amplification of Bai Xue’s causality laws to unexpectedly redirect themselves with unstoppable force straight toward the person beside him.
Chen Mo.
Chen Mo, who was deeply eroded by Ye Lin’s talent, his chains on the verge of shattering.
That’s right, the goal of Dan Zhu’s attack wasn’t to wipe them all out at once; she knew that was too difficult and nearly impossible to achieve in a short time.
But she had patience.
Very, very much patience.
She would patiently kill every single person inside, one by one—and the first step, naturally, was to strike at their weakest point, their most fragile link.
Chen Mo blocked reflexively. Accompanied by the clang of metal, the chains twisted into a wall, barely stopping the strike in the nick of time. Unfortunately, no matter how fast his reaction was, it couldn’t compete with Dan Zhu’s calculated scheme.
Crack… crack, crack…
The fissures on the chains deepened rapidly, and then—with a loud clang, they shattered into pieces!!
Chen Mo’s pupils dilated as he choked up a mouthful of thick, dark-red blood. He staggered half a step back, the vines mere inches away reflecting in his dimming eyes. Just one last inch, and they would slit his throat.
Everything happened in the span of a lightning flash. Everyone was tied up dealing with their own attacks.
No one could make a move.
No one could save him.
But then, a miracle occurred.
The sharp vines stopped exactly one inch from Chen Mo’s throat. They trembled slightly, but no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t advance a single millimeter.
A thin strand of gray-white cigarette smoke had wrapped around them, forcefully halting all their movements, forcing them to freeze in mid-air, trembling lightly.
In a battle of this caliber, a difference of a millimeter or a split second meant everything.
It was only a momentary stall, but for them, it was enough.
Chen Mo was snatched back to safety, and the shadows snapped back to defend, reinforcing the previous cracks layer by layer, denying any similar tricks another opportunity.
“…”
Dan Zhu’s expression abruptly turned freezing cold.
She turned her head, looking at Hugo standing not far away.
“What is the meaning of this?”
Hugo lowered his eyes, taking another deep drag of the cigarette in his hand. Then, he tossed the burnt-out butt to the floor and crushed it under the sole of his leather shoe.
At his feet lay a pile of three or four similarly crushed cigarette butts.
“Darling… you’d better give me a reasonable explanation,” Dan Zhu’s face bloomed into an incredibly brilliant yet incomparably icy smile. The blood-red vines gathered behind her once more, swelling slowly, baring their fangs and brandishing their claws like countless hideous, squirming tentacles. “Okay?”
“…”
Hugo raised his eyes, looking straight at Dan Zhu.
He didn’t answer her question directly, but spoke slowly.
“Before that, answer a question for me first.”
“What, exactly, is Ye Lin to you?” Hugo took a slow step forward, asking a question that seemed utterly irrelevant to everything happening right now.
Dan Zhu sneered, “Have you still not grasped the situation? I have no obligation to answer any of your—”
“Tell me the answer.” Hugo took another step forward. Deep within those aloof, gray eyes, there seemed to hide emotions other than focus—paranoia, madness, complexity, sharpness— “Tell. Me.”
“…”
Dan Zhu fell silent for a moment.
This brief, silent second seemed to stretch into an eternity.
Then, she began to giggle, as sweet as a little girl.
“What could he be?”
Dan Zhu burst into unbridled, raucous laughter:
“Naturally, he is my most loyal, most attentive, most useful—one who never hits back or talks back—”
Smiling, she lightly spat out a word as sharp as a knife:
“A dog.”
“……………………”
It was dead silent all around.
Hugo stared at her unblinkingly, seemingly trying to find even the slightest trace of a lie on her face. But… he failed.
Thus, he slowly closed his eyes.
A gray shadow named despair descended at this moment.
The tall man stood silently in the darkness. For the first time, his shoulders slumped, overwhelmed by the burden, as if completely crushed by some invisible existence.
From this moment on, it was as if something inside his heart had completely died.
Never to be resurrected.
