Chapter 704: Blood and fire
An ominous red light fell from the dome, spilling onto “Gentleman’s” smiling face. His features were identical to their memories, but an intense, undeniable sense of abnormality seemed ready to burst through his skin.
It was hair-raising and chilling.
Impossible…
This is absolutely impossible.
For as long as anyone could remember, the founder of Oracle had almost never appeared in front of the public.
Even the guild’s higher-ups had never seen his true face.
But now, were they saying he had appeared inside this shell named “Gentleman”?
Even though the facts were clear and the logic made sense, a voice of sheer disbelief still subconsciously blurted out:
“Pre… President…?!”
The smile on “Gentleman’s” face deepened: “Yes, it’s me.”
Almost the instant his voice fell, in the broadcast plaza, a long-silent broadcast room opened with a ding! and shot upward like a rocket, claiming the absolute top spot on the broadcast rankings within seconds.
The “Immortality” live broadcast room has opened.
Even more eye-catching than the broadcast room ID was the total points ranking displayed below it:
No.1.
[Wait…?]
[Fuck, what does this mean? This is rank one?! The Oracle President?!!]
[Wait, what was the name of rank one again? Why do I have absolutely no memory of it…]
[I don’t remember either.]
[Strange, this shouldn’t be. With such a terrifying total points count, he must have cleared countless instances and broken countless records. Why can’t I remember him at all?]
No matter what kind of massive uproar the opening of this broadcast room caused among the viewers, to the anchors inside the train, it didn’t matter.
In the riddled, battered train car, a cold wind swept through, rattling the iron sheets above. Outside the half-missing windows was a pitch-black wilderness shrouded in red light.
“Is this your result?”
Zhang Yunsheng raised his head, sweeping his gaze around, and asked calmly.
Only then did the Oracle members finally snap back to reality from the shock. They steadied their minds and replied:
“Y-yes, President, we—”
The rest of their words were interrupted before they could finish.
“Truly terrible,” the other party evaluated with an emotionless voice.
What?
Having worked so hard and risked their lives for so long, only to receive such a merciless evaluation, the Oracle members couldn’t help but freeze. They couldn’t resist speaking up: “But, we followed the instructions and have already destroyed every destructible part on the train—”
Not to mention that death had been following them like a shadow.
“That… monster kept chasing us,” thinking of something, the person speaking couldn’t help but shudder. As if afraid of disturbing the entity in the darkness, he involuntarily lowered his voice, “Our power cannot contend with it.”
And the fate of those who had fallen behind was simply no different from a nightmare.
“Normal,” the other party was clearly using Gentleman’s voice, but the way he enunciated and paused was completely unfamiliar, giving off a distinct sense of weirdness. “Even if He is still incomplete right now, He was, after all, once a God.”
“If you guys had the upper hand, I wouldn’t have needed to show up.”
Looking at the Oracle President wearing the shell of “Gentleman” but exuding a bizarrely cold aura, and thinking of his unmatched ranking and previously unseen mysterious demeanor, a ray of hope suddenly lit up in the eyes of the Oracle members:
“Since that’s the case, then could you—”
“Me?”
He smiled slowly, but even that smile was cold and weird, like wind blowing into a pitch-black hole, producing an echo resembling laughter.
“Not right now.”
Having said that, he turned around, walked straight to the crooked cabin door at the back, and held out his hand:
“Where are the items Nightmare gave you?”
The Oracle member closest to him jolted and hurriedly stepped forward, handing over a strangely shaped, silver-gleaming knife into his hand—it was the exact weapon they had used earlier to dismantle the train.
They were currently in Carriage No. 5, and the spot Gentleman stood at was the junction between Carriages No. 5 and No. 4.
The cabin door clattered with the train’s movement. Through the opening and closing gap of the door, one could vaguely see the black shadows on the other side spreading toward them like a tide.
But the other party seemed completely oblivious.
He took the knife and leaned down.
With a sharp clang, the blade wedged precisely into the metal plates connecting the carriages. A red light flashed, the blade thrust downward viciously, and with just a light twist and turn, it sliced through the metal like tofu.
As if losing its balance, Carriage No. 4, shaking violently with the train’s movement, tilted toward the right—
However, the silent shadow had already approached.
“…”
The Oracle member closest to the door looked down in terror at his own body, half of which had already been swallowed. He finally seemed to realize the arrival of danger, “He’s here, He’s here, quick, step back quickly!!”
A shrill voice rang out, mixed with uncontrollable terror.
However, before he could finish his sentence, the other half of his body was caught by some invisible force. Without even a chance to utter a grunt, he was dragged into the darkness-covered carriage.
The next second, the world was left with nothing but dead silence.
Viscous bloody mud dripped down from the edge, falling deep into the tracks and disappearing.
The remaining survivors retreated in panic, terrified of becoming the next sacrifice.
But the Oracle President, who was at the very front, remained as steady as a mountain.
He didn’t look at the massive black tide that seemed ready to swallow him. He merely lowered his head very calmly, his hand holding the blade moving slowly forward, and gave it a sideways twist—
The Oracle crowd panicked and tried to stop him: “Wait, no—”
Screech—
The carriage in front emitted an agonizing grinding sound. The wheels below collided sharply with the tracks, bursting with blinding sparks. The next second, the already tilting carriage lost its final balance and, with a massive crash!, smashed heavily onto the tracks!!
In an instant, a gloomy wind swept in, howling and crashing against them.
Above, the blood-red opening in the sky was torn even wider. Countless eyeballs, large and small, drooped out like ripe grapes, rolling around, seemingly quivering in satisfaction.
In the fierce wind, the man slowly stood up.
Half of his body below the shoulder had disappeared—savagely bitten off by the shadow that had flooded the carriage during the lightning-fast clash just now. At the empty spot, blood-red fibers were slowly gathering bit by bit, regrowing the missing body parts.
“The train… snapped?” Only then did the Oracle members finally find their voices again, “But if that’s the case, won’t we…”
“No.”
The body belonging to “Gentleman” turned around.
Only then did the others finally see his face clearly.
The angle of the smile that had hung on his face since awakening hadn’t changed by a single fraction. A pair of terrifying, hair-raising eyes hid within their sockets, like two bottomless black holes. No light, no shadow, no emotion, only a profound, dark abyss—as if a layer of human skin was simply draped over a void.
To him, losing and regrowing half a body seemed as commonplace as changing clothes.
“Have you forgotten? While in motion, this train is a continuous loop.”
Precisely because of this, merely severing the connection between two of the carriages would not cause the train to completely fall apart.
“Your previous aimless, random destruction wouldn’t deal any real damage to it. You have to do what I just did, slice off its body section by section.”
The resurrected corpse stood under the eerie red light, wearing a smile that made one’s hair stand on end.
“Did you learn it?”
“Captain, look, this is my girlfriend. Isn’t she super pretty?”
Several heads eagerly crowded over, “Wow!”
“She’s pretty alright, but by the time you actually get out of this hellhole, she’ll probably be married to someone else, right?”
“Get lost, what do you guys know?” the broad-shouldered man scolded angrily. The surrounding teammates dispersed with laughter, leaving him to hang his head, staring dejectedly at the photo for a long time—it was a physical photo exchanged from the Nightmare Store, allowing those who didn’t know when they might die to retain a little attachment to the real world. Finally, he fumbled to smooth out the curled edges of the photo and carefully placed it in his breast pocket.
Then, he looked up, a bright light flickering in his eyes, and said solemnly and quietly,
“Captain, she will wait for me.”
Squelch—
The heavy black iron blade sank deep into his arm, and blood gurgled out.
Hugo staggered, taking a half-step back.
He raised his head.
Blood splashed onto the opponent’s chest, where the rigid outline of the photo pressing from inside the pocket could vaguely be seen.
Deep within those eyes that once flickered with bright hope, there was now only an endless, icy void.
“Captain, what are you waiting for?” He revealed an honest, good-natured smile, but the movement of pulling out the iron blade was ruthless and fierce. “You can’t beat us just by defending.”
“…”
Hugo panted as he retreated.
The next second, a sharp sound of something slicing through the air rang out from behind him without warning. His gaze focused, and he violently dodged sideways as the smoke shackles instantly tightened.
A silver-gleaming blade hovered right before his eyes, trembling slightly, reflecting the cold, sinister stare of its wielder.
“Before I came in here, my parents kept rushing me, urging me to hurry back to our hometown to stay by their side, find a job, get a local boyfriend, and settle down… Every time they called it was the same old tired speech, it’s so annoying,” the young girl rested her chin on her crossed arms, her brows furrowed, her tone gradually turning intense. “They completely don’t understand why I worked my ass off to test out of that impoverished backwater, or why I absolutely must make something of myself—”
She suddenly stopped talking, lowered her head, and secretly wiped away her tears, thinking no one saw.
“But.”
“Having not heard someone nagging in my ear for so long… why do I kind of miss it?”
The silver light on the blade tore through the memory.
In a split second of distraction, the blade pressed down hard, deviating a few inches from his throat and piercing straight through his shoulder.
“What are you thinking? Why urge him to fight back?” The girl’s voice didn’t tremble at all, leaving only a cold, indifferent statement of fact as she wiped the blood from the blade. “The sooner he dies, the sooner we can finish our mission. How many times have I said it? We need to focus on efficiency.”
“Haha, indeed!” the honest-looking man laughed heartily, “Sorry, I forgot.”
Hugo stumbled backward.
He looked extremely wretched.
Even when he was fighting the much stronger Dan Zhu earlier, he hadn’t looked this miserable.
Brand new wounds, some deep, some shallow, crisscrossed his body, spreading from his chest to his back, bleeding out patch after patch. Blood dripped incessantly from his trembling fingertips, turning into smoke and dust before hitting the ground.
The gray-white smoke, which should have been both tough and razor-sharp, drifted around him, seemingly struggling to converge in a vortex of turbulence. But as soon as it took shape, it was quickly torn apart and scattered by an invisible force, turning into aimless mist. Having lost all its offensive capability, he could only struggle to defend, retreating step by step.
He raised his head. Blood flowed down his forehead, rendering his right eye almost impossible to open.
His left eye, which could still focus, reflected the several familiar figures not far away.
“Captain, Captain… I don’t want to die,” the man’s hand was freezing, slipping continuously from his grasp due to the slickness of the blood. A pair of dilated pupils could no longer focus, and bloody bubbles coughed up from his throat, “Save me, save me, Captain…”
“Don’t leave me, I don’t want…”
The last light faded from the dilated pupils. This time, the powerless hand slipped from Hugo’s grip and landed in the pool of blood.
He had breathed his last.
That freezing hand that had fallen into the pool of blood raised once again, reaching toward him through the diffusing gray smoke, as if asking for help—
Hugo dodged just a beat too slow, and a new wound was immediately added to his right arm.
“Honestly, how much longer are we going to drag this out?” a hearty voice rang out, carrying a bit of impatience. “Let’s just gang up and kill him already, what are we standing around for?”
Hugo shook his head.
That voice overlapped with his memory, laughing wildly deep in his mind.
“Hahahaha! Is this all you garbage can do?” The man spread his arms wide to welcome his gloomy end, letting out a provocative laugh, “Come on, come at me! Come on!!!”
Surrounded by darkness, he turned around, raised an eyebrow, a smile still on his face.
“Seriously, what are you guys still standing there for?”
He waved dismissively:
“Go, hurry up and leave.”
A second cut.
A third cut.
…
Ten cuts.
Fifteen cuts.
Wounds appeared on his body one after another. Hugo retreated miserably. His face grew increasingly pale, and more and more blood poured from him.
Unknowingly, he had been forced back to the deepest point. The glint of a sharp blade swept from behind, piercing through the smoke screen that was too thin to take shape, and rushed impatiently straight for his unprotected throat—
Even though he was reduced to such a wretched state, the combat instincts tempered on the edge of death hadn’t vanished. Hugo abruptly spun around, the scattered smoke screen retracting and twisting. With a crisp clang, the sharp blade was disarmed. The next second, his arm passed through the smoke wall, the web of his hand pressing against the attacker’s throat.
“…Urgh!”
The opponent tilted his head back as if suffocating, clawing at Hugo’s arm.
Deep within those familiar eyes reflected the light from above.
“Don’t…”
“Don’t come over…” Deep in the darkness enveloped by cold rain, the youth was drenched. Countless freezing, pale arms wrapped around his body, yet a stubborn light still shone in his eyes as he stared dead in this direction, a heart-wrenching scream tearing from his throat, “Don’t worry about me, run… Captain, run away Captain!!!”
“…!”
As if burned, Hugo abruptly let go.
But the moment he regained his freedom, the opponent swiftly took a step forward.
Wearing a malicious smile, he used the weapon still held in his other hand to deeply pierce through Hugo’s abdomen.
“Cough… cough, cough…”
The tall man arched his back, struggling to clutch his abdomen. Blood gushed continuously from the wound, turning into smoke and scattering the moment it slipped through his fingers.
In the live broadcast room, the viewers who remained sighed endlessly.
[It’s over, it’s really over now. Even though Dan Zhu is definitely stronger, honestly, Hugo wouldn’t be this miserable even fighting her.]
[Has he even fought back once since this started?]
[I don’t think so… I’ve only seen him retreating. He hasn’t initiated an attack once.]
[If I remember correctly, the reason Hugo became an Executioner was for his teammates, right?]
[Using a person’s deepest obsession against them… I have to say, Nightmare really understands what true torture is.]
[Sigh, what a pity. When Hugo chose to become an Executioner for his teammates, it already determined that he would never attack them just to survive. He’s probably dead for sure this time.]
[Sigh, we can only wish him a good journey.]
However, just as words of mourning swept across the barrage, a flippant, devil-may-care voice sounded from off-screen without any warning.
“Hey, look over here.”
“???”
A string of question marks washed over the screen.
The next second, an unstoppable blade cleaved down from mid-air, forcefully hacking open a gap.
One person couldn’t dodge in time and was struck on the side of his body. Half his arm was instantly sent flying, but no blood spurted out. Instead, a viscous, pitch-black liquid slowly oozed from the wound.
Along this freshly cleaved gap, a figure silently leaped up and rushed forward.
Hugo clutched his waist, struggling to raise his eyes.
Through his blood-blurred vision, a wretched-looking young man stood before him. He was covered entirely in dried blood, carrying a pitch-black Tang Dao (a straight, single-edged Chinese sword) in his hand. His face was deathly pale from excessive blood loss, his brows furrowed tightly:
“Like, are you a fucking idiot? Just standing there letting them beat you up?”
Hugo was stunned: “…Chen Cheng?”
“That’s right, it’s me.”
Chen Cheng mocked Hugo’s earlier tone in a bizarre manner, as obnoxious as ever:
“‘Go in when the ship sails, it can save your life.'”
“Hah!”
Gloating over his misfortune, he bent down and hoisted Hugo’s arm over his own shoulder,
“Look who’s saving who now?”
“Wait,” Chen Mo forced himself to sit up. His deathly pale face was illuminated by the red light outside the window, and the fine, dense cracks under his skin were shocking to look at. “I’ll go with you…”
“No.”
Wen Jianyan flatly refused.
“You have to stay here.”
Chen Mo frowned tightly, shakily propping himself up: “I can’t let you act alone.”
The driver’s cabin they were in was a safe zone, but outside was different. Not to mention, if what Wen Jianyan said was true, then the situation inside the carriages had likely undergone unexpected changes that the others couldn’t immediately resolve. How could he possibly be at ease letting Wen Jianyan act alone?
“But with you going out in this state,” Wen Jianyan said tactfully, “if we really encounter danger, wouldn’t we just get wiped out together?”
Chen Mo laughed out of anger: “So letting you get wiped out alone is fine then?”
Right at this moment, Blond, who was standing to the side, suddenly spoke up:
“I’ll go with the President.”
Chen Mo froze, turned to look at him, and frowned: “But…”
After all, as a visual enhancement talent, Blond strictly speaking had no combat power either… Added with Wen Jianyan, the two of them were essentially a 0+0=0 effect.
“Don’t worry, even though I’m useless in a fight, I can see clearly,” Blond patted his chest. “If there’s any danger, the two of us will run as far and as fast as we can!”
Wen Jianyan: “Besides, someone must stay in the driver’s cabin, otherwise we might have a very hard time finding our way back.”
Only when the train was stopped would the driver’s cabin appear at the end of Carriage No. 1. But now that the train had restarted, it meant it had completely reverted to its previous loop shape, head connected to tail, with no beginning and no end.
If they didn’t leave someone inside the driver’s cabin, the only way they could find it again would be to wait for the next time the train stopped.
Chen Mo sighed, ultimately reluctantly agreeing to this plan.
Thus, Wen Jianyan and Chen Mo made an agreement—”just in case, open the door from the inside once every five minutes”—and then he and Blond left the driver’s cabin.
The driver’s cabin door closed behind them, and the familiar carriage appeared before the two of them.
The vast majority of the area was submerged in darkness, with only a little ominous red light filtering in through the windows, smeared like fresh blood across the pitch-black floor.
The clatter-clatter sound of the train’s operation echoed in their ears, monotonous and harsh.
Wen Jianyan turned around and looked behind him.
The driver’s cabin door that had existed just a second ago had disappeared at some unknown point. Replacing it was a rusted cabin door that couldn’t close completely, repeatedly swinging open and shut with the train’s movement. Through the gap in the cabin door, they could see another carriage exactly identical to the one they were in.
Just as he had guessed earlier, it was impossible to enter the driver’s cabin from the outside while the train was in motion.
Wen Jianyan withdrew his gaze: “Let’s go, we—”
Before he could finish, a deafening screech drowned out his voice.
Accompanied by the shrieking of wheels striking the rails, the train beneath their feet began to bump and shudder violently. Wen Jianyan stumbled; fortunately, he quickly grabbed the wall, barely managing not to fall.
Blond suddenly spoke, his terror clear and vivid:
“Quick, look outside—”
Wen Jianyan froze. Steadying his body, he turned his head to look out the window covered in spiderweb-like cracks.
Illuminated by the blood-colored light, he saw that the middle of the train had somehow snapped apart. One of the carriages leaned to the side due to inertia, seemingly about to drag the entire train down with it. But before it could cause irreversible consequences, the part connecting it to the rest of the train was forcibly twisted off by the darkness surging from within it—the next second, the twisted carriage, having lost connection on both ends, crashed heavily onto the tracks with a boom, bursting with blinding sparks.
And the instant that carriage completely detached, accompanied by a massive crash, the entire train shuddered again!
And this time, the shaking was far more severe than the last!
Wen Jianyan was violently thrown out like a cat tossed into a tumbling washing machine, his vision turning completely dizzy and dark.
From not far away came Blond’s panicked voice: “—”
He seemed to be shouting something, but amidst the chaos, Wen Jianyan couldn’t hear it clearly.
A buzzing roar echoed in his ears, and everything before his eyes seemed to shake along with it, blurring into blood-red double images.
The train’s violent shaking still hadn’t stopped.
Wen Jianyan supported himself against the wall and shakily stood up. He felt a bit of an itch on his forehead, so he raised his hand and wiped it. His fingertips came away warm and sticky, and a sting of pain immediately followed. He couldn’t help but hiss—in the process of being thrown just now, his head had hit the wall, and it looked like it was busted open.
However, this trivial pain couldn’t compare to even a tenth of the shock in his heart at this moment.
The train they were currently riding had seven carriages in total. While in motion, it connected head to tail like an Ouroboros, forming a self-contained, independent space that couldn’t be interfered with from the outside. Even when the train had sustained damage crashing into the cruise ship, Nightmare could only barely invade it by borrowing human strength. But from now on, the situation was likely going to change completely—this wasn’t just a matter of losing one or two carriages. From now on, the train’s internal balance would be utterly disrupted, and everything would spiral out of control—
Blond stumbled over from the other side of the carriage, desperately gripping Wen Jianyan’s arm so hard it almost hurt.
Through the buzzing roar, he couldn’t hear the other’s voice clearly, but he could see the direction his finger was pointing.
Outside the window, the train had somehow derailed from the tracks below, plunging forward at an astonishing speed.
And right in front of it was the scorched, ruined structure they had seen earlier from the driver’s cabin.
“—!!!”
Wen Jianyan abruptly stood up, not even caring about the injury on his head. He just grabbed Blond’s arm back and raised his voice: “Where are Wu Zhu and the others? I have to find them quickly…”
In his shaking field of vision, he saw Blond’s face suddenly drain of color.
He stood stiffly rooted to the spot, his gaze locked dead on a certain direction not far away. His expression was rigid, and deep within his widened eyes reflected the eerie, blood-red light from outside the window.
“…” Wen Jianyan seemed to realize something.
His movements paused slightly, slowly loosening his grip on Blond’s arm, and he turned his head to look behind him.
The twisted, misshapen cabin door repeatedly slammed against the doorframe with the train’s bumps. The next second, a pale, bloodless hand reached out from behind, pressing against the edge of the door and slowly pushing it to the side.
A face that was once handsome and upright, but was now cold and pale, appeared behind it.
Across his throat lay a bloody slash.
That was “Gentleman’s” face.
Oh no! It’s the Oracle gang!
Seeing this, Wen Jianyan’s heart violently jumped. While cursing his own luck in his heart, he raised his hand, grabbing Blond to pull him back. As he did so, his gaze remained firmly locked on that familiar figure. His brain worked at lightning speed, calculating how to escape as quickly as possible next—
Suddenly, “Gentleman’s” eyes moved. The next second, a hair-raising stare pierced the darkness, landing straight onto Wen Jianyan.
Wen Jianyan’s throat instantly tightened.
For some reason, he felt that something was very wrong.
According to Chen Mo and the others’ previous descriptions, hadn’t the current Gentleman already turned into a puppet without the ability to think? Why didn’t he look like one, and moreover…
“Ah, it’s you.”
“Gentleman” stared unblinkingly at the youth standing not far in front of him. The corners of his mouth stretched to the sides, revealing what should clearly have been a smile, but due to some indescribable reason, it appeared extremely eerie, making one’s hair stand on end. Pausing between every word, he said slowly:
“Wen Jianyan.”
Not Pinocchio, but Wen Jianyan.
Not the alias he always used to present himself in Nightmare, but his name, his true name.
Gentleman shouldn’t have known it.
“…”
Wrong, something is wrong.
Wrong wrong wrong.
Inexplicably, a feeling of horror slowly crept up his spine. Wen Jianyan only felt his heart pounding wildly in his chest. He wanted to escape, wanted to leave this place at top speed, but for some reason, his feet seemed to have taken root, planted firmly into the ground.
He stared dead at the other person’s face. His fingers hanging by his side trembled uncontrollably with a fine quiver due to some ominous premonition.
“It’s been so long,”
“Gentleman” smiled, sweeping his gaze slowly, inch by inch, from top to bottom over him, as if wanting to chew him up with that emotionless stare. With a bizarre tone that Wen Jianyan was extremely familiar with—one that occasionally even jerked him awake from nightmares in the middle of the night—he sighed softly and slowly,
“You’ve grown up.”
In an instant, Wen Jianyan’s pupils dilated.
Rumble, rumble.
The out-of-control train crashed into the scorched, blackened orphanage.
Past and present, memory and reality—it seemed everything aligned perfectly at this moment, matching one by one.
At this moment, he seemed to no longer be that glib, silver-tongued liar… that unflappable Pinocchio who always had a backup plan.
Instead, he once again became that skinny, trembling little child.
Beneath his feet was fresh blood.
Behind him was the blaze of fire.
