CH 144

Time reversed to the morning of that day.

In an underground location, Zhong Chengshuo held onto the front of the human guard’s clothing tightly.

The zombie guard lay on the side, watching helplessly. Zhong Chengshuo couldn’t use magic, but he was skilled at tearing off the corpse talisman with his nails, just like King Yama, the King of Hell.

With its movement and vocal nodes destroyed, the zombie guard turned into a crude humanoid canvas, lying on the wall corner, at Zhong Chengshuo’s mercy.

The human guard, who was caught by the collar, was anxious. Zhong Chengshuo didn’t care about his thoughts. He tightened his fingers, and asked again, “Where are the personal items of the corpses stored?”

Dead people always hated having their things taken away, and this was a universal truth.

The human guard closed his mouth, having given up on running away. He would occasionally glance at the door, hoping someone would notice the broken light—

This thing, which he didn’t know what it was, only used physical attacks and Sunken Society certainly had the numbers to overwhelm it!

But the hands of this thing were so cold, it made him uneasy.

After asking his question, Zhong Chengshuo froze in place like a statue, silently waiting for thirty seconds. Just as the thirty-second mark passed, he extended his other hand and began to remove the human guard’s uniform.

The human guard instinctively protected his chest and exclaimed, “What the fuck are you doing?!”

“Otherwise, it will be stained with blood later,” Zhong Chengshuo replied calmly, slowly unbuttoning the uniform as if he were skinning an animal.

The human guard: “……”

The human guard: “Your personal belongings will be classified and stored in the relic warehouse for seven days and nights. After confirming that there are no problems, they will be packaged and sent to the research department outside for identification. Do you need me to guide you to the relic warehouse?”

He didn’t even dare to take a breath halfway through, and by the end of his sentence, he barely had a whistle in his voice.

Zhong Chengshuo stopped unbuttoning the uniform.

“Okay.”

He stared at the human guard with Minister Zou’s dull eyes.

“Then give me the personal belongings of this person first.”

The human guard tremblingly took out Minister Zou’s phone and then nervously handed over his own phone. Zhong Chengshuo put both phones in his pocket and lifted the zombie guard with one hand, placing it back at the entrance to the underground corpse vault while it was still dark.

The zombie guard let out a sigh of relief. It dutifully stood in place, decorating the area with the original “peace” that was there before. Before the corpse talisman was repaired, it couldn’t speak or move, which meant it would be mostly his unlucky colleague who would be held accountable.

It looked at Zhong Chengshuo and the human guard walking away with an almost sympathetic look.

Hopefully, this guy was just a lonely ghost who wanted to retrieve his private belongings, or else this matter wouldn’t end well.

The pale lamps gradually retreated. Zhong Chengshuo and the guard walked shoulder-to-shoulder through the dim corridor that was similar to a tomb due to the low ceilings towards the underground corpse vault exit. The nearby corridors were complicated like a spider’s web, and the guard deliberately chose the “proper” main roads.

Zhong Chengshuo could see the desire in his eyes. The guard most likely wanted to trigger an alarm to notify Sunken Society, so he followed quietly, noting all the scenes along the way. Whenever this guard wanted to walk the same path again, he would stop quietly and stare at the uniform buttons of the guards without expression, causing the guard to almost stumble over his own feet.

Click clack.

The sound of two pairs of footsteps, one light and one heavy, echoed in the corridor. Zhong Chengshuo kept puffing his chest, but he didn’t really breathe. In contrast, the guard’s breathing became increasingly heavy and rapid.

“How much further is it to the relic warehouse?” Zhong Chengshuo asked as if chatting.

“We have to change zones,” the guard said hoarsely. “This area only stores individual bodies and specimens. I’m not lying to you…”

“I know, some practitioners’ personal belongings may react with their bodies and cause problems,” Zhong Chengshuo continued to answer with a leaky throat yet his tone was calm enough to make one’s hair stand on end. “But considering convenience, the warehouse and the morgue can’t be too far apart. At least not more than thirty minutes of a straight-line distance.”

The guard hung his head and dared not say a word.

This evil thing that came out was not only strong but also very difficult to fool.

It had decisively killed Minister Zou and disabled the zombie guard. The guard thought it would create a commotion at the entrance of the underground corpse vault, relying on its strength, but who knew this evil thing was exceptionally calm and completely untrickable…

Making a big fuss was certainly cool, but Sunken Society could easily block it using crowd tactics.

This guy not only wanted to retrieve his own belongings but also wanted to escape.

The guard’s plan to escape in the chaos was ruined, and he didn’t dare to intentionally provoke this evil thing. At this point, he could only hope that the people of Sunken Society would discover that something was wrong on their own.

Perhaps some strange god heard the guard’s thoughts, as the next moment, Minister Zou’s phone rang.

Zhong Chengshuo slowly took it out and was relieved to find the face recognition unlock option.

He declined the call directly and quickly replied with one hand.

It was an internal communication group called “Technical Department Two~Five”.

[Technical Department Two—Zou: I’m caught up with something. It’s not convenient to talk.]

[Technical Department Two—Han: The boss is coming for a meeting this morning. Hurry up. It’s important.]

[Technical Department Two—Zou: Okay.]

‘Time’s running out,’ Zhong Chengshuo thought.

According to the guard, after the items here were confirmed to be okay, they would be “transported out”.

He had been here for less than seven days, so the hamster phone charm must still be here. But the fact that they had to pack and transport it was enough to make him smell that something was off.

Sunken Society could easily take defensive and protective measures and build a separate laboratory near the corpse vault. Insisting on building the laboratory outside could only mean that there was something fishy about this place.

In other words, it was hard to escape from here.

He couldn’t go to the so-called boss meeting. At most, his colleagues would notice something was wrong with Mr. Zou after half a day.

Zhong Chengshuo’s footsteps became heavier, causing the guard to jump in place. He led Zhong Chengshuo up and down, turning probably eighteen corners, until they finally arrived at a new area.

Compared to the dim and gloomy corpse vault, the walls here were painted  light green, giving it a somewhat hospital-like feeling, and there were fewer messy fork roads.

There was a fenced wall with an open gate between the two areas, and a detector beside the gate flickered with a bright green light.

Zhong Chengshuo stopped cautiously.

“This is the storage area, and we guards have permission to be here.” Seeing Zhong Chengshuo’s gaze, the guard quickly explained his necessity, “The relic warehouse is as big as a maze, and it’s hidden deep. It’s hard for you to find it alone.”

Zhong Chengshuo supported Minister Zou’s heavy head and said, “Let’s go.”

Just as the two of them passed through the narrow gate of the fence and stepped into the storage area, the bright green lights in the corners they couldn’t see suddenly went out.

This scene was being projected in real-time on a display screen in another underground building. Perhaps due to poor signal, the image flickered and blurred.

Wei Huaqian sat at the end of a long table with three other people sitting sparsely around it.

One of them was thin and sweating, wiping his face with a tissue over and over again.

“Minister Han, is this what you called ‘no problem’?” A woman with round and gentle features spoke. Her voice was strangely mixed with coquettishness and contempt. “The meeting is about to start, and he followed a guard to the storage area?”

“He said he…was caught up in something. Maybe he’s just looking for something.” Minister Han was like a fish out of water. His mouth opened and closed, unable to suppress the guilt in his voice.

“Come on, isn’t he still walking? Is the situation that urgent that he’s using Sunken Society’s property for private use?” The woman sneered.

“Boss Qu is so sharp. You’re able to guess there might be something wrong right away.” The only old man at the table didn’t forget to flatter.

Wei Huaqian didn’t even look at the old man. His eyes were fixed on the bloated figure on the screen.

The other three ministers didn’t know that Minister Zou had begged and pleaded to get into this meeting. The mistake during the Gengsheng Town incident was too big, and before they could fix it, Mr. Qiu caused a disturbance that disrupted Shian, indirectly dragging Sunken Society into trouble.

At this critical juncture, Minister Zou planned to use Zhong Chengshuo’s corpse to make a comeback and present an important plan—there was no time to waste, so they were counting on him.

The meeting had just started for half a minute when Wei Huaqian immediately ordered surveillance near the corpse vault to be accessed.

“Evil things don’t just appear out of thin air. Perhaps the employees under Lao Zou’s command made an operational mistake.” The middle-aged woman was the first to react. “There are two dangerous corpses stored there for over three hundred years. I remember their characteristics…”

Wei Huaqian: “The night is long and full of dreams. Isolate the storage area and use magic to destroy it.”

The other three fell silent instantly.

“That’s… quite severe.” Minister Han was the first to react.

Valuables had long been transferred to the closed area, so the items sent in the past seven days were all low-value personal items. The value of the corpse vault was much higher than that of the storage area, so the urgent matter was to eliminate any anomaly as soon as possible.

He quickly pulled out his phone and gave instructions.

Wei Huaqian had been staring at Minister Zou on the screen the entire time, tapping his fingers on the desk from time to time.

Less than ten seconds after Minister Han hung up the phone, the screen suddenly switched. Thick metal plates dropped on both sides of the gate, completely separating the relic warehouse from the corpse vault.

On the other side of those flashing, blurry colored blocks, Zhong Chengshuo and the guard stopped in their tracks.

The guard let out a sob.

As a guard at the Sunken Society Haigu Branch, he had at least figured out the various hidden rules of the organization. Now that all escape routes had been completely blocked, Sunken Society had no intention of letting him go back alive.

Next, there would definitely be a “great purge”.

Zhong Chengshuo sighed. “Faster than I thought.”

As he spoke, the pale green walls around them suddenly lit up, casting an ominous glow that made the hallway look like day time. Zhong Chengshuo kicked the guard, who was as still as a statue, and pounced on him.

The green light covered both of them from head to toe, shining brightly and continuously.

Even though Zhong Chengshuo managed to block most of the light, the guard’s limbs were still exposed to the green light. He made an inhuman groaning sound, and when he moved slightly, his limbs were left behind like decorations made of sand, instantly turning into flesh-colored powder.

There was no blood from the cut. The guard twisted his body in confusion, as if commanding his now disappeared limbs.

He didn’t even realize that half of his head had been cut off, leaving only a fragmented wound covered in powder.

“Ah… Ah…” the guard murmured. “Why… I’m only half a cultivator… Why is it so serious…”

He turned his remaining eye around in desperation. “Why… are you fine… Why…”

Before he could finish speaking, the guard began to cough violently. Flesh-colored powder mixed with blood splattered on the ground.

Zhong Chengshuo was like a dead umbrella, silently propping himself up on the guard’s body, creating a small patch of shade in the green light.

“I’m leaving,” Zhong Chengshuo said calmly. “You can tell me the direction of the relic warehouse or you can remain silent.”

The guard looked at him in fear and despair with tears overflowing from his remaining eye.

“The guards of Sunken Society’s corpse vault are usually ordinary cultivators who have been in the organization for at least ten years. You know they experiment on people, but you still want to help guard it. A miserable death is a common outcome.”

Zhong Chengshuo lowered his eyes, looking directly at the muddy pupils of the corpse, revealing a thick darkness. His voice was becoming softer, with a sound like liquid seepage, almost as if he was trying to soothe a crying baby to sleep.

The guard shook his head desperately, like a leaf in the wind, causing the missing pieces of his head to fall like sand.

Fear.

Zhong Chengshuo quietly chewed on his fear, frozen in place like a plant. Time ticked by slowly until he finally bent down and whispered something into the guard’s ear.

The guard’s tears gushed down as he too muttered a response. After speaking, a miracle-like calmness washed over the guard’s once hopeless face.

……

Outside the screen, Wei Huaqian narrowed his eyes and stopped tapping his fingers on the table. They could only see Minister Zou slowly standing up, but he didn’t leave immediately. Instead, he stood there silently. The guard, now without limbs and only part of his head, was completely exposed to the light. He writhed like a salted slug, and in less than a minute, a living person was turned to dust amidst the magical radiance.

Only then did Minister Zou straighten his clothes and walk in a certain direction.

“The spell was ineffective. Isn’t that an evil thing?” Minister Han was shocked to see Minister Zou not reacting to the green light. “How is that possible?”

“That must be Minister Zou himself. Strange. Is his faith so firm? This is the guy that hangs a safety talisman in his car on purpose.” The middle-aged woman frowned. “But he specially protected that guard… The guard only has limited clearance and can’t go to high-level places.”

The old man hastily nodded in agreement.

The woman turned to Wei Huaqian carefully. “Boss, do we continue to monitor his actions? Maybe there will be more…”

“Stop the spell and let the cleanup crew in.” Wei Huaqian interrupted flatly.

The woman gasped in shock.

Clearly, there was no intention of leaving any survivors.

The cleanup crew was a group of fugitives that Sunken Society kept in its branches. They generally had little education and didn’t leave the branch much. In a sense, these villains were regarded as twisted science posts—they neither believed nor disbelieved in science and only cared about money and face.

They couldn’t achieve complete immunity to magic, but they were tough-skinned and could deal with weak cultivators.

Wei Huaqian seemed to ignore the gasp of his subordinate. He turned his head, propped his hands on his forehead, and stared intently at the screen.

Minister Han cleared his throat with difficulty. “How much can we adjust?”

“As much as we can.” There was a hint of amusement in Wei Huaqian’s voice.

He wanted to see how much this unknown thing was capable of. After all, as long as he obtained the remains of the body, he could hand it over to the research team—it would be interesting to have the technicians in Department 2 study the remains of their former boss.

In the video, Zhong Chengshuo started to jog. He tried to keep his head stable as he ran towards the location the guard had pointed out—the relics warehouse, just like the underground corpse vault, was also located on the bottom floor. This wasn’t because it was super important, but simply because Sunken Society had killed too many “human guinea pigs” and accumulated too many relics.

This was his only chance.

Zhong Chengshuo had not run for long when he heard hurried and chaotic footsteps behind him. The once silent corridor suddenly became chaotic, and the overlapping echoes made the space crowded.

Conversations and running sounds came at him from several directions at the same time, full of hostility.

Without hesitation, Zhong Chengshuo instantly accelerated and rushed towards his destination. He jumped down each flight of stairs at an almost falling speed that the soles of his shoes barely scraped against the ground. He focused intensely on the small cellphone charm laying somewhere underground, as if it was the most important thing in the world.

Unfortunately, he was one step too late.

Just when he was one floor away from his destination, he was blocked by the chasing soldiers who had caught up to him.

The elevator in the storage area could go straight to the deepest level, and a group of them had even come up from underground to block him. Zhong Chengshuo was trapped at the corner of the staircase.

This group of people approached from all sides, looking down on “Minister Zou” with contempt, as if they were looking at a piece of meat on a cutting board.

“It’s a fat pig that runs fast.” One of them taunted, causing a few scattered laughs.

Zhong Chengshuo quickly scanned all the unexpected guests. The people sent by Sunken Society this time had nothing to do with cultivators.

As far as Zhong Chengshuo could see, there were at least twenty people, and there were even more outside the corridor. These people were strong, wore “cloth armor” made of fiber with hard protective parts on key areas, and wore protective helmets similar to football helmets on their heads.

Pairs of eyes peered out from the helmets, and Zhong Chengshuo was familiar with that look and those eyes—they had all appeared on the A-level wanted list.

Murderers.

Apparently, Sunken Society allowed its lackeys to have a little personality. The criminals had clubs, butterfly knives, and triangular blades, and the most extreme ones had shovels and machetes.

Perhaps considering the problem of accidental injury in a small space, there were no weapons of mass destruction such as shotguns.

Zhong Chengshuo quickly scanned the nearby lighting and cameras, moved his joints, and silently lowered his center of gravity. If he still had a heart, his heart rate at this moment would definitely shatter his ribs.

Half a second.

With these big executioners crowding together, and the originally cramped corridor seemed even more suffocating. The gaps between them weren’t even big enough for a child to stand in, so it was hard to find even a glimmer of life among them.

One second.

As long as he made a tiny mistake, this group of people could hold him down with their weight alone.

The next moment.

“Yo, this idiot still wants to move…” A thin man with a butterfly knife hadn’t finished his sentence when his tongue froze in his mouth.

The butterfly knife in his hand disappeared.

With a few light cracks, the butterfly knife was dismantled into three pieces in Zhong Chengshuo’s hand. Before the others could react, Zhong Chengshuo had flung the handle and the blade of the disassembled knife, instantly shattering the nearest three lighting fixtures.

This time, the darkness was even more complete than in the corpse vault.

The criminals on the cleanup crew weren’t stupid. The ones in front relied on their position to shout and charge directly at Zhong Chengshuo, trying to suppress him with a sea of people. But that bloated “Minister Zou ” was like a phantom, evaporating on the spot.

What followed was a warm and sticky liquid.

It sprayed everywhere, splattering everyone’s faces and bodies. When the criminals reacted and turned on their emergency lights, five seconds had already passed.

The surroundings were dark and blood-red.

The people in front had become headless bodies—the sturdy cloth armor and hard helmets couldn’t withstand the swift and precise knife strikes on their necks.

The heads had rolled on the ground with their helmets still on, while the bodies had collapsed with a dull thud. The ground was wet and slippery with blood. These people all had sharp weapons in their hands, but their movements had slowed down unconsciously.

“It’s a machete! My brother has lost his machete!”

“Fuck! That guy ran down. Chase him!”

At the same time, Zhong Chengshuo picked up a spare head with one arm, and with a machete in one hand, he came to a sudden stop at the bottom of the stairs.

As fate would have it, he didn’t have time to run far. The unfortunate end of the stairs had no elevator or transitional hall; only a plain metal door stood in the open. Next to it was the damn facial recognition device—this time, Minister Zou no longer had authority to open it.

He was just a door away from his hamster pendant.

Dozens of people had swarmed down the stairs behind him; their footsteps sounding like torrential rain. There was only a dead end in front of him, but even though his heart no longer existed, Zhong Chengshuo still felt a suffocating squeeze in his chest.

The familiar fear hit him again like a shot of adrenaline.

He didn’t want it to end.

Instead of the bank-style “vault” doors like the underground corpse vault, it was an ordinary metal door.

He held a thick-backed machete in his hand and a hard helmet that still had a head attached to it.

He didn’t want it to end.

Two seconds later, Zhong Chengshuo kicked hard at the door lock. He paid no attention to the dangerous cracking sound of the bones in his leg and kicked again. After four or five kicks, there was a slight deformation on the door.

Zhong Chengshuo raised the machete and precisely inserted the blade into a small gap. Then he jammed the head into the door frame and used all his strength to pry it open.

Crack.

The deformation of the door wasn’t significant, but the gap had widened a lot.

Time seemed to slow down, and countless equations floated through Zhong Chengshuo’s mind. He kicked his battered legs repeatedly, creating several gaps in different positions.

Just as he lifted his foot again, a dozen gunshots rang out. A wave of heat hit his back, and his left eye instantly lost sensation.

His back was riddled with bullets, and his left eye was probably shot through.

He had felt pain, but not much. It was more like a numb, dull ache, accompanied by the subtle sensation of foreign objects entering his body.

Compared to the sniper’s explosive bomb, this level of power was nothing.

Zhong Chengshuo used a flying kick, causing the metal door to shake unbearably and then collapse. There was no sound behind him. Zhong Chengshuo didn’t know if the criminals were scared by him, an “undead zombie”, or if they had other thoughts. He simply lifted his bent right leg and limped into the relic warehouse.

The hamster pendant Yin Ren gave him was there.

He remembered it clearly. It was a little hamster with “Wealth and Prosperity” attached to it.

However, the moment he saw the large relic warehouse clearly, another kind of fear crawled up and plunged into his back like a knife.

This was indeed a “large” warehouse for relics.

This underground warehouse was so big that he couldn’t see the end at a glance. The shelves led directly into the ceilings and were about six meters high, full of messy objects: common clothing, suitcases, handbags, and other casual items. Some damaged cameras lay quietly in the dust, and the cleaning tools used by the cleaners were also dumped in the gaps in the shelves. The skin of various balls was old and damaged, and most of them were deflated.

Stationery, books, bows…

Water cups, sneakers, remote controls…

The metal shelves used bones bonded together by glue and were piled high, making an extremely colorful but bleak maze.

His hamster pendant was just a drop of water in this sea of objects.

Zhong Chengshuo shook his head and forced himself to remain calm.

His task was still here, and theoretically, the possibility of completion wasn’t zero.

This wasn’t the end.

……

“He has been on the run for how long?” Minister Han asked cautiously.

“Fifteen hours and twenty-eight minutes.” The middle-aged woman rotated the steel pen in her hand. There were two empty lunch boxes by her side. “The boss instructed that if we can’t solve it in 24 hours, we have to consider a full lockdown of the relic warehouse. If he wanted to create a scene, I suspect he would have done it from the start.”

Since Minister Zou’s destination was the dull “relic warehouse”, Wei Huaqian was too lazy to watch a bunch of people play hide-and-seek and left before noon.

He ordered his people to completely seal off the underground corpse vault, wait until they knew the situation of the “evil being” that escaped before continuing further inventory work.

Once they entered the relic warehouse, there was no turning back—

The relic warehouse, internally referred to as the “dead man’s dump” contained “material items” that were tasteless to eat, a waste to discard, and could be completely sealed off.

Full lockdown meant they would lower the separators and fix the suspicious intruder in place. Then, they would completely seal off several divided spaces, pour in liquid nitrogen, and destroy all the physical things inside.

Now it was already late at night, and in the picture, “Minister Zou” was still limping and running away. In the vast “garbage dump”, that guy was dragging his broken body, painfully and awkwardly fleeing.

After taking so many bullets and still being able to move, he could only be a dead man. As for why this thing could evade magic, they would soon have an answer—

“Minister Zou” was already on his last breath.

He killed more than a dozen criminals, but they were all tough guys in the cleanup crew. Even if the crazy Minister Zou cut them down, they could still tear off one or two pieces of flesh in return. In contrast, Minister Zou could only strip the corpses and get some clothes to block his wounds.

He was like a small animal that knew it was about to be slaughtered, fleeing with a desperate and sad momentum.

What a pitiful guy. The middle-aged woman yawned.

“Minister Han, you continue to watch. I’ll go back first.” She stretched her neck.

The picture was too blurry, and there were too many obstacles in that ghostly place. It wouldn’t matter if they didn’t watch for a while. After all, the end was about to come, she thought.

Minister Han nodded obediently.

In a place they couldn’t see, Zhong Chengshuo used the cover of miscellaneous objects and gradually changed his blood-stained clothes, becoming more and more similar to the appearance of the criminals.

Half an hour later, a criminal bent down and sewed Minister Zou’s head onto another corpse. Then, he stood up unsteadily, covering his neck with the shadow of the helmet.

He played with the bayonet in his hand for a while as his bloodshot eyes scanned the dusty shelves. Slow motion covered the stiffness of his movements. This silent criminal, together with his other “companions,” continued to roam and explore.

But what others saw were just suspicious figures, and what he saw was the thickness of the accumulated dust.

At the same time.

“I know where our battlefield should be,” Yin Ren said.

“Wait, hold on. Don’t get excited yet. Even if the data is correct, I don’t know what this coordinate means!” Lu Xiaohe wiped the sweat from her face. “I need to study it. I have to wait until tomorrow when Fu Tianyi wakes up…”

Without hesitation, Yin Ren took out his phone and searched for Fu Tianyi’s phone number.

Lu Xiaohe: “…”

One day apart felt like three autumns have passed*, and this guy was becoming more and more ruthless.

*(一日不见如隔三秋) Idiom referring to the feeling of missing someone very much, as if even a short period of time apart feels like an eternity. It emphasizes one’s emotions when separated from a loved one or close friend.

“He must have gone to sleep as soon as he got back, so it makes no difference,” Yin Ren said while flipping through his contacts.

“I’m here.” A head with dark circles under his eyes stretched in from behind the door, sounding a bit resentful. “Miss Lu ran so loudly that it woke me up.”

“You came at the right time.”

“Also, do we need the assistance of Da Huang and Xiao Ge?” Lu Xiaohe tried to pull back the unrestrained Yin Ren. “You also need to rest…”

She hadn’t finished speaking when she saw the gap suddenly widen, like an eye suddenly opening.

This time, Yin Ren held on longer than any previous time.

In the darkness of the gap, various chaotic spatial bubbles were stacked, shimmering with strange textures of light.

“Fu Tianyi, I need more data,” Yin Ren said hoarsely.

“I just need to figure out one coordinate… Just one coordinate.”

Fu Tianyi was exhausted, as if his whole body had been run over by a car. “Breaking through the limit” was a training method, but he couldn’t help but mutter a few words of complaint. It was just that, when he saw Yin Ren’s expression clearly, he didn’t dare say anything.

In the dark waiting room, Yin Ren’s eyes were red as if a sharp blade had been unsheathed. He deliberately restrained his aura, but the oppressive feeling was still like a knife cutting through skin.

Fu Tianyi reached out with his sore and weak hand and tried to activate his power again.

He felt all the muscles in his body crushed into meat sauce. Even the most dangerous missions before weren’t as relentless as this endless night and day of feeling like his flesh was cut with a blunt knife.

Even though he grumbled in his heart, he didn’t hold back his power. Lu Xiaohe didn’t say anything more, and quickly started typing on the keyboard.

“Xiao Fu, be steady… I’ll adjust the space folding parameters…”

She didn’t even have time to wipe the sweat from her nose.

“Yin Ren, tonight I can only try to build a computational model as much as possible. I don’t have any equipment to simulate the signal right now, so I have to use the detection device from the Shian to adjust the gap. Promise me that when I finish the model, you’ll rest… Yin Ren?!”

Lu Xiaohe screamed, and Fu Tianyi was so scared that he lost his strength.

Without hesitation, Yin Ren tore off the hamster pendant from his phone and put his hand into the gap, then pulled it out. “The signal source is exactly the same. Is this okay?”

“It—it’s possible.” Lu Xiaohe swallowed hard.

It was possible, but she was afraid that if Yin Ren made a mistake, the gap would swallow his arm and the hamster pendant whole.

“Just in time.” Yin Ren’s hair tips couldn’t help but move as if to calm himself. “Trust me.”

Lu Xiaohe had just planned to get up from the chair, but then sat back down. She let out a deep sigh and said, “Anyway, I’ll take a break after I finish perfecting the algorithm. I won’t care about you anymore!”

“Thank you,” Yin Ren replied indifferently.

For the first time in his life, he was holding the hamster pendant in his hand that was full of sweat.

Finally, there was a turning point.

When he found the possible location of the hamster pendant, he used the opportunity to break through the “interstitial space” over there. The sniper had no reason to throw a phone pendant there, so Zhong Chengshuo must be nearby.

The answer he wanted was within reach, and after days of darkness, a glimmer of light finally appeared.

Yin Ren adjusted his breathing and was about to tear open the gap again when suddenly his hair stood on end—

A feeling of being watched.

Yin Ren’s black hair shot straight up and instantly passed over Lu Xiaohe and Fu Tianyi, who were both dumbfounded. Sure enough, the next moment, a bullet pierced through the window and directly hit where Lu Xiaohe was originally located.

The blinking machine was blown black, and the squeaking sounds of machinery stopping sounded one after another.

“Don’t worry!” Lu Xiaohe’s face was whiter than a corpse. She hugged her remaining laptop tightly, and her voice barely sounded calm. “My data is all in a private cloud, which he can’t destroy!”

As she spoke, she glanced at Yin Ren’s hair with the corner of her eye.

“You can always start over,” Yin Ren said. “As long as you find the way, you can always start over.”

The answer was another round of firepower suppression. Pure physical bullets poured in from the doors and windows, causing the floor of the waiting room to shatter, and sharp fragments flew everywhere. If it were a human, this situation would be enough to turn them into minced meat.

This time, Yin Ren didn’t hide his skills.

In the darkness, one protective spell after another lit up. They had obviously been modified—the surrounding space appeared to be distorted like water waves. They emitted a faint fluorescent light, cutting the view outside the protective shield like a mirage.

The protection gradually narrowed and stopped near the coffin where the corpse was located, just enough for three people to stand.

“Can we keep going?” Yin Ren asked Lu Xiaohe.

“Must be able to.” Lu Xiaohe smiled bitterly. “Unless you can throw me out of the country in one shot, I doubt he will keep sniping at me.”

“I can keep going too.” Fu Tianyi stared blankly at the protective spells around him. “I can do whatever you want me to do.”

“Very good.” Yin Ren clenched the hamster pendant in his hand.

He maintained the sturdy protective spell while reaching out his right hand. Yin Ren opened the gap again and used the hamster pendant to touch the interstitial space.

This time, just as he reached into those illusory spaces, a cold hand suddenly grabbed his wrist.

An unfamiliar hand.

Yin Ren instantly retracted his hand, and the gap quickly closed again. Just before it closed—

Bang!!!

A bullet flew out of the gap, grazing his tightly clenched right hand.

The bullet was off target.

Because the moment it touched him, Yin Ren’s right hand, along with the chubby hamster pendant, exploded into powder.