Chapter 399: The Fall of Jiangcheng

Midnight on May 3rd, or 12:00 AM on May 4th, downtown Jiangcheng.

It was the darkest time of day; streetlights at the corners cast sparse yellow-white halos, the thick darkness seemingly physical as it swallowed the scattered light sources, while long, narrow shadows flickered on the ground.

Since the curfew was implemented, the city’s lively nightlife had become a thing of the past; the bustling streets turned into a forbidden zone for Ghosts at night, with only the occasional Investigator passing through, appearing as tiny as ants in the monster-den-like metropolis.

“Area A-11 survey complete. No eerie pollution detected, no abnormalities.” Qin Liang finished reporting over the walkie-talkie and continued along the street with his companion.

Before joining the Investigation Bureau, he was a freelancer who usually stayed home playing games and made extra money as a game streamer.

When humans can’t see a future, they often consciously numb themselves with cheap pleasures; in an environment lacking hope, the entertainment industry always flourishes. With his talent for gaming, Qin Liang had more than enough to maintain a basic living, enough even to start a family and a career.

Thus, regarding the Federation—an entity many resented or even hated—he was generally satisfied. Even if he occasionally encountered some filthy matters that violated public order and good customs, he would at most vent his indignation online with a few words.

After entering the Eerie Game, his individual strength was decent and his actions were steady. He was recruited by the Jiuzhou Guild as soon as he became an official player, and subsequently became a member of the Eerie Investigation Bureau in reality.

As he experienced more and more horror instances, struggling to survive in environments devoid of order and morality, he realized more and more the preciousness of peace, naturally hoping that the Federation’s rule would last forever.

Right now, he only wished for the Final Dungeon to end as soon as possible, and for Fu Jue to win until the end as he had in countless previous instances, wiping out unstable elements like White Crow, the Puppeteer, and Si Qi’s lot to restore peace to the world.

“It looks like there’s nothing here… Then again, the eerie outbreak point is mainly near the Ruidan Deep Casino in the lower district, thousands of miles from here. How could it spread this quickly?” Qin Liang looked around and muttered softly, unsure if he was talking to himself or chatting with the teammate beside him.

“Hey, if you ask me, we should concentrate our forces in the lower district, just throw people at it like crazy to block the eeriness back. What’s that saying—to catch the bandits, catch the leader first; you have to grasp the main contradiction when doing things.”

Indeed, although Qin Liang wasn’t particularly ambitious or competitive, he was willing to face danger at the front lines out of a certain simple sense of justice and responsibility when disaster struck.

For this voluntary action against the eeriness, he was prepared to make a heroic sacrifice, even having seriously written a suicide note and set it to be published automatically.

Who would have thought that after walking all this way, he wouldn’t encounter a single ghost?

It was like starving oneself for three days only to walk into a buffet and find no food; it was simply a waste of emotion and life!

“Do you hope to encounter Ghosts?” his teammate asked abruptly.

This teammate was a girl who had just graduated from university. In Qin Liang’s memory, she was someone with severe social anxiety who could go half a day without saying a word, so it was rare for her to take the initiative to ask him something.

“I wouldn’t say I hope for it…” Qin Liang said, squinting. “It’s just that I’ve already prepared for a heroic end, yet at this critical moment, I’m sent to this godforsaken place for a stroll. It’ll sound too embarrassing if I tell anyone.”

As he rambled on, scenes of incredibly vivid phantoms surfaced before his eyes for no reason.

Like a key character in a game, he strode over mountains of corpses and seas of blood. Monsters scattered into a rain of blood the moment they met his gaze. He stood between heaven and earth like a king in charge of slaughter. After he fell, countless people wept for him. He was no longer a useless waste or an uneducated scoundrel in people’s eyes, but a true hero.

The rotten, moldy cubicle he lived in was brand new; he was buried with his deceased parents, with large patches of white flowers blooming on the grave… “Is this your wish?” his teammate asked.

Qin Liang opened his mouth to answer, but alarm bells suddenly rang in his heart.

Why would he think of death? How could anyone treat death as their wish?

No, something was wrong… Qin Liang inconspicuously reached for his waist to press the alarm button on the back of his walkie-talkie, but his limbs suddenly lost all strength.

A sweet, cloying floral scent filled the air, so thick it was almost fainting. He felt as if he were wandering through a sea of flowers after rain, with tiny petals blooming at the edges of his vision and fallen flowers covering the ground beneath his feet.

A dense itchiness rose in his chest. Qin Liang looked down and saw a rose drilling out of his flesh from where his heart was, blooming vigorously at a speed visible to the naked eye.

He turned his head with difficulty toward his teammate. But who was there? It was clearly a half-person-tall rose, its stamen spewing out an eerie human voice… Similar scenes were occurring in every corner of Jiangcheng. Rose roots spread silently to every part of the city, breaking through the soil and seeking prey without anyone noticing.

Humans’ tiny wishes were magnified in a distorted form, becoming beacons marking targets in the night. Hundreds of Investigators had their chests pierced by roses at the same time, standing fixed in various corners of the city like cruel and terrifying statues.

Bodies became nourishment for the roses, blood dripping in lines like the earth’s blood vessels flowing in all directions. A thin, pale-red film of blood gradually spread between heaven and earth. Newly dead Ghosts and those long dead were layered and crowded together, eerie smiles on their faces as if their long-cherished wishes had been fulfilled.

Amidst the thousands of miles of blood-red, a deity in a red suit descended from the sky, placing an index finger to his lips: “Believe in me, recite my name, and perhaps I shall grant your wishes.”

…Lower district, the area where Ruidan Deep Casino is located.

Bright red roses bloomed across the entire street. The ground, once covered in filthy phlegm and stinking putrid water, was completely hidden, leaving only a sea of flowers as vibrant as fire.

Large flower buds emerged one after another, fully blooming within seconds. Zhang Yiyu had originally thought describing flowers as a “sea” was an exaggeration, until she saw this scene and realized the expression was actually literal.

When flowers become abundant to a certain degree, they take on the texture of flowing water, filling every gap like a cold, invisible substance and flowing in every unobstructed direction.

Facing such a spectacle, humans inevitably feel a fear of being placed in the infinite while being finite, like a lower organism facing a higher-dimensional existence, where every move of the latter is an unknown disaster.

“Zhang Yiyu, can you deal with these roses?” Mu Dongxu asked.

Zhang Yiyu snapped out of it and swallowed. “I… I’ll try.”

After the Red Maple Boarding School instance ended, she had been contained for another period. The despair after her hopes were dashed had almost driven her mad, but fortunately, she had finally endured until this day.

Ning Xu, who was responsible for supervising her, had died outside. Various departments of the Bureau of Anomaly Affairs were overwhelmed by the Final Dungeon. An unknown eeriness had erupted in Jiangcheng without warning. In this time of need, some low-danger containment objects were temporarily released to fight fire with fire.

Zhang Yiyu kept in mind the promise Mu Dongxu had made to her: as long as she did her best to help handle this event, temporarily named the “Rose Calamity,” she would regain her freedom.

She had been locked up for four years. She didn’t know how worried her mother, who had been her only companion, would be. She had to seize this opportunity… Zhang Yiyu cautiously stepped into the alley filled with roses. The intoxicating floral scent flooded her nose, making her feel suffocated and nauseous. She suppressed her fear, muttering “I am a ghost, I’m not afraid of death,” and reached out to grab the stem of a rose.

As if a sleeping monster had been awakened, countless thorny vines wrapped around her body and dragged her toward the center of the sea of flowers. She was about to scream when a rose bloomed in her mouth just in time, blocking all noise.

Dragged by the roses, Zhang Yiyu passed through the alley and entered Ruidan Deep Casino.

This two-story building had completely become the domain of roses, with no trace of its original appearance.

Massive roses were scattered in corners and by tables. Through the petals, which were like thin red membranes, one could faintly see human faces embedded among the stamens.

Everyone was smiling contentedly, as if caught in a beautiful dream they would never wake from. As Zhang Yiyu drew closer, low whispers rose and fell in her ears.

“I won again! Give me the money, give me the money!”

“Hehe… I live in a big house now, I have a wife…”

“My leg is healed! A miracle, truly a miracle!”

They realized their wishes in the dream, living happy lives. They were no longer willing to wake up and return to this painful reality… “Drip-drop… drip-drop…” It was the sound of water droplets falling.

Zhang Yiyu looked up and saw a man hanging upside down from the ceiling. Vines cut into his flesh, creating deep gashes that exposed bone. Blood dripped down like a waterfall, making a sound like a water clock.

Zhang Yiyu saw the man’s face. It was Shao Qingmin. She had met him once during the brief swearing-in ceremony before the operation. She knew he was a director from the Northern Capital headquarters and the core figure of this operation.

Even… someone of this level had fallen?

“Run…” The man hanging upside down, his eyes blurred by blood, heard footsteps and called out with a faint breath.

Zhang Yiyu didn’t run; there was no way back. In the sea of roses before her, a crimson figure stepped out from the shadows and gave her a brilliant smile: “We meet again.”

It was a young man in a red suit and trousers. His face, pale as a ghost’s, was mottled with blood. A scene of roses bloomed in the depths of his crimson eyes, gorgeous and sinister.

He stepped onto the rose bushes to reach the height of the second floor, reaching out to pluck a rose from Shao Qingmin’s mangled body. A smile rippled with thick malice: “A fool who attempted to domesticate beasts and create a god—the most fitting end is to be devoured by the tiger he raised… I can feel your hatred. Do you want to kill him?”

The more Zhang Yiyu listened, the more familiar the young man’s voice sounded. It was that cold existence who had once deceived and controlled her in the Red Maple Boarding School instance, yet subsequently turned a deaf ear to her pleas.

Yet he also felt strange. The “Si Qi” in her memory was nowhere near as flamboyant as he was now, nor was his malice so hideously exposed.

“Do you want to kill him?” the young man asked, tilting his head like a curious child.

Zhang Yiyu breathed rapidly. Her past experiences of being imprisoned in the containment room flashed before her eyes: the dark environment, the lack of food, the painful experiments… Specific hatred blurred into a general one through the erosion of time. She hated everyone in the Bureau of Anomaly Affairs. She hated them for treating her like a monster, hated their indifference… If she had the chance, she truly would want to kill them.

Blood condensed into a long blade before Zhang Yiyu. She seemed to lose the ability to feel fear in an instant, blankly reaching out to grasp the hilt and stepping up the vine-covered stairs to the second floor.

Shao Qingmin had lost the ability to resist but was still alive, his eyes staring at Zhang Yiyu with unwilling resentment, his voice intermittent: “Don’t… don’t believe him… he’s lying to you…”

Zhang Yiyu walked to the railing of the second-floor platform, half a step away from Shao Qingmin, and said softly, “I don’t believe him. I’ve already been deceived by him once… But I want to kill you even more.”

The next second, she raised the long blade and stabbed it into the man’s heart. Her trembling hand churned the flesh in his chest into a pulp, and blood gushed out instantly.

Blood slid down the blade into her palm. Zhang Yiyu seemed to only then realize what had happened. Her shoulders trembled, and she began to sob softly.

But her hand was like a machine set to a repeating program, numbly pulling out the knife, stabbing it back in, pulling it out again… She cried as she stabbed the corpse, all her past frustrations and cowardice seemingly flowing out with the blood at this moment.

Never for a moment had she realized so clearly: she was a ghost, she could kill, and she didn’t need to fear them.

The young man smiled throughout the farce. Now, he suddenly pulled an Identity Card with a black background and red patterns from his breast pocket like a magic trick.

On the card’s surface, a figure in a red leather jacket held magic props like playing cards and small balls, carrying a cage containing a pigeon as he hurried across the back of a stage. Seemingly tripped by the uneven floor, he stumbled; the small balls scattered everywhere, and the pigeon flew out of the cage.

【Manipulating innocent decoys with strings, the lamb becomes an accomplice to sin.】

【Dance, the puppet trick that weaves the threads of fate in the shadows.】

【After all, every shell is but a vessel for lies.】

【Congratulations, you have unlocked the Identity Card “Assistant” (belonging to the “Jester Trickster” set).】

Zhang Yiyu reflexively took the card. Then she heard the young man’s smiling voice announce: “There will be a place for you in the Final Dungeon. But before stepping onto the stage for the final act, I need you to clear away those boring insects…”

In an instant, countless Ghosts controlled by roses raised their knives and stabbed the Investigators beside them who were still struggling to hold on.

Corpses littered the ground, and blood flowed like a river. Everything happened in silence… Eerie Investigation Bureau Jiangcheng Branch, basement level five.

On the 【Book of the Living】 filled with Investigators’ names, the originally vivid blood-red faded patch by patch, leaving behind black names marking the deaths of living people.

“Something happened to Qin Liang’s group. Didn’t they say there were no abnormalities?”

“Director Shao is dead? How can that be?”

“Old Liao from Office One as well…”

At first, people spoke up in surprise, but gradually they became speechless. Only the sound of rising and falling breaths remained in the space.

Lives were abstracted into names, and the passing of life was materialized as the fading of color. They watched the deaths of their comrades directly, as if attending a perpetual funeral, and involuntarily began to observe a moment of silence.

When the last trace of bright red was replaced by black characters, all walkie-talkies disconnected at the same time. Every Investigator witnessing this scene came to the same conclusion:

“Jiangcheng has fallen.”