Chapter 119: The Producer |
Gin stood outside the courtyard gate. He crouched down to inspect the ground for a moment, a knowing sneer creeping onto his face as if he had seen through every trick. Then, he forced the door open and stepped into the yard.
Bai Mu had no idea what the man was smirking about. He had vaulted over the wall to get inside, yet Gin was busy searching for clues at the main gate. The assassin's investigative skills were utterly abysmal—he was clearly just acting out his own dramatic fantasies.
The moment he pulled the gate fully open, he triggered the explosive trap Bai Mu had rigged beforehand.
Boom!
The wooden door was blasted to splinters. Even from the second floor, Bai Mu felt the violent tremors rattling the floorboards. Any normal person would have been blown to pieces by the blast, but as the smoke cleared, Gin had somehow teleported to the far corner of the courtyard wall.
He was covered in a layer of dust, but remained completely unscathed.
"Rat, I know you are hiding in there," Gin muttered, his voice cold. "I have good news and bad news for you. The bad news is that your partner is already dead. The good news is that I am about to send you straight to hell to keep her company."
'A real assassin wouldn't be this talkative,' Bai Mu mocked internally. 'Only in cheap television shows would you find someone walking around with the words "I am an assassin" figuratively plastered across their forehead.'
Bai Mu swallowed another health-recovery pill. His Stamina had burned down to a meager thirty percent, dropping his strength attribute by five points and his agility by four.
It was a pitched, triangular roof. If he had climbed up any earlier, Gin would have spotted him instantly.
Fortunately, Gin was now inside the house. Though Bai Mu couldn't see what was happening below, he figured the assassin's attention would inevitably be drawn to the corpse.
Serving as a plot hook to set up this special episode, Gin would inevitably have to investigate the body. After all, eight or nine days had passed in the narrative's timeline, yet the corpse hadn't decomposed at all. The script needed to fabricate some sort of excuse for that.
Bai Mu waited in silence for Ever-Changing to take effect. He noticed his hands beginning to shrink, while his hair and bone structure simultaneously underwent a drastic transformation.
Gin finally made his way up to the second floor, but Bai Mu had stalled just long enough. Ever-Changing had successfully transformed him into an elementary schooler.
Reaching the second landing, Gin froze, staring blankly at the tiny silhouette huddled inside an oversized white lab coat.
Time seemed to freeze in that moment. Gin halted his movements completely, while Bai Mu raised his revolver with both hands, aimed straight at the assassin, and pulled the trigger.
Naturally, the shot missed. However, Gin remained rooted to the spot as if his brain had crashed, entirely unresponsive to the deafening crack of the gunshot.
Bai Mu stood up. Logically, the massive lab coat should have slipped right off his shrunken frame, but it clung to his body as if fixed in place by superglue.
He walked right up to Gin and fired at point-blank range, yet the bullet somehow ricocheted harmlessly into the concrete floor.
Gin finally snapped back to reality. He grabbed Bai Mu by the collar and pressed the muzzle of his own gun squarely against the boy's forehead.
"Don't think I'll show mercy just because you're a brat," Gin hissed.
"Then pull the trigger," Bai Mu challenged.
Gin squeezed the trigger, but the handgun merely responded with a hollow click.
"Forget to reload?" Bai Mu taunted. "Why don't you swap out the magazine and try again?"
"What kind of trick is that rat playing?" Gin muttered to himself, acting as if he hadn't heard Bai Mu speak at all.
"Drop the act. I know you can hear and see me," Bai Mu declared. "You only pay attention to us when we show up at a Crime Scene. That proves you can perceive us, but only within the confines of the narrative setting you designed."
"Am I right, Mr. Screenwriter? Or, to use a broader title—Mr. Producer?"
The moment Bai Mu uttered those words, the standardized, unfeeling expression of a cold-blooded assassin vanished from Gin's face. In its place was a look of pure confusion and shock.
"You... how could a fictional creation like you possibly know that I am The Producer?" he stammered. "What exactly are you?"
Bai Mu knew that he was no longer talking to the fictional assassin. He was now speaking to a genuine, living person with independent thoughts.
"Even if I told you, your system probably wouldn't let you process the information. We might as well discuss something more practical," Bai Mu replied. "For instance, what is it going to take for you to call off this hunt and let me go?"
"Let you go? Hmph, impossible! If Gin can't do the job, then I'll do it myself! Be erased, you anomaly!" The Producer had completely lost his mind. He forcefully slammed a fresh magazine into the handgun and opened fire on Bai Mu.
This time, the gun didn't just click empty. However, just like when Bai Mu had fired at Gin earlier, every single bullet curved off its trajectory, sparking harmlessly against the walls and floor.
"Why... why can't I eliminate you?! You bastard!" The Producer roared in fury, throwing a heavy punch at Bai Mu.
The physical capabilities of this body were unimaginably powerful. That single punch shattered the concrete structure overhead. Debris rained down, caving in the wooden floorboards of the second floor and sending both of them crashing down to the first floor. Despite the devastating collapse, Bai Mu's Health barely dipped by a negligible fraction.
Over the next few minutes, The Producer tried every method conceivable. He hoisted an entire sofa and hurled it at Bai Mu, then tore a steel water pipe from the wall and swung it viciously at the boy's head. He fought like a madman, desperate to murder the elementary schooler standing before him. Yet, a series of bizarre "coincidences" consistently allowed Bai Mu to narrowly escape death.
When the dust settled, the sofa had inexplicably landed harmlessly behind Bai Mu. When the steel pipe was inches away from caving his skull in, a joint snapped abruptly, causing the pipe to break into two useless pieces.
"Why?! Why won't you just die?!" The Producer shrieked in impotent rage.
"I think you might have forgotten something crucial. This is a Detective anime geared toward children," Bai Mu stated calmly. "You might barely get away with writing underage victims into the background lore, but if a scene of an elementary schooler getting brutally murdered actually aired in the main broadcast, this show would be permanently canceled."
"That's..." The Producer suddenly came to a horrifying realization.
"Exactly. By turning into an elementary schooler, I am now completely invincible," Bai Mu said, a victorious smile spreading across his face. "It is literally impossible for you to kill me."
"Impossible to kill... hahaha... impossible?!" The Producer let out a manic laugh, his expression suddenly twisting into a cold sneer. "You're nothing but a background extra! How could I possibly fail to kill you?!"
"I have plenty of other methods! If this Script doesn't allow it, I'll just write a new scene! Yes, I just need to make you swallow the antidote! Once you transform back into an adult, I can slaughter you without any issues!"
"I will never yield! I will force this world back onto its proper track!"
Right then, the sharp crack of a slap echoed through the room.
Bai Mu had viciously slapped The Producer across the face. Though he was trapped in an elementary schooler's body, the strength-boosting effects of his piggy doll made the blow incredibly forceful.
"Have you still not woken up?!" Bai Mu roared. "Do you even know what kind of garbage you've been writing?!"
"It has zero logic! It's riddled with plot holes! Every single case relies on tired tropes that readers can predict from a mile away! We aren't the ones who disrupted your precious world—this world was a complete mess from the very beginning!"
"The timeline is incomprehensible, the murder methods are absurd, and the motives are completely nonsensical! If you writers had actually put any real effort into this, how would we have found so many glaring flaws to exploit?!"
"You... what do you know about our suffering?!" The Producer instantly screamed back, bellowing as if venting years of buried resentment. "Beika Town is no longer the product of just one person!"
"Do you have any idea how many people rely on this franchise to put food on the table?! Do you know how many corporate executives are scrutinizing every single Script?! Do you seriously think we don't want to be original? That we don't want to write better stories?!"
"If you don't stick to the established formula, your scripts will never get approved! We're forced to manufacture episodes using the exact same assembly-line process! No one can afford to take risks, so we just churn out the exact same garbage week after week! How do you think I made it to this position?! I got here because I know how to guarantee the baseline quota!"
"Would you dare say that to your audience?" Bai Mu asked coldly.
At those words, The Producer fell into a dead silence, all of his previous bluster and aggressive momentum completely shattered.