Chapter 399: The Fall of Jiang City |
At the stroke of midnight on May 3rd, or perhaps the very first moment of May 4th, in the heart of Jiang City.
It was the darkest hour of the day. Streetlights at the corners cast scattered halos of yellow-white light, but the thick, almost tangible darkness swallowed the sporadic sources of illumination, making the long shadows of people on the ground flicker and dance.
Since the curfew had been imposed, the city's once-vibrant nightlife had vanished. By night, the bustling streets transformed into a forbidden domain for ghosts and monsters. The few investigators who dared to patrol its shadowy corners were like ants scurrying through a colossal beast's lair.
"Area A-11 survey complete. No signs of weird contamination. All clear," Qin Liang reported into his walkie-talkie before continuing his patrol with his partner.
Before joining the Weird Investigation Bureau, he had been a freelancer, mostly staying home playing video games and streaming to make some extra cash.
When humanity sees no future, it tends to numb itself with cheap pleasures. In an environment devoid of hope, the entertainment industry always thrives. With his talent for gaming, Qin Liang had managed to not only make ends meet but also have enough to start a family.
Thus, he was generally satisfied with the Federation, an entity many others resented or even hated. Even when he encountered some sordid affair that violated public decency, he’d at most vent his righteous indignation with a few angry posts online.
After entering the Weird Game, his individual strength proved decent, and his cautious approach earned him a spot in the Kyushu Guild as soon as he became an official player. This, in turn, led to his recruitment into the Weird Investigation Bureau in the real world.
The more terrifying instances he survived, struggling in environments devoid of order and morality, the more he came to appreciate the value of peace. It was only natural that he hoped the Federation's rule would last forever.
"Doesn't look like there's anything here... Makes sense, I guess. The main outbreak is near the Redemption Casino in the lower district, a world away from here. No way it could spread this fast," Qin Liang murmured, glancing around. It was hard to tell if he was talking to himself or just trying to break the silence with his partner.
"Hey, if you ask me, we should be concentrating our forces in the lower district. Just throw bodies at the problem until we push the weirdness back. What's that saying—to catch bandits, first catch their king. You have to tackle the main problem."
Indeed, while Qin Liang wasn't some outstanding, ambitious individual, he was willing to stand on the front lines in the face of disaster, driven by a simple sense of justice and responsibility.
Volunteering for this operation to combat the weirdness, he had prepared himself for a heroic sacrifice. He'd even written a heartfelt last will and testament, scheduled to be posted at a set time.
Who would have thought that after all this walking, he wouldn't encounter a single ghost?
It was like starving yourself for three days only to walk into an all-you-can-eat buffet and find it empty. A total waste of time and emotion!
"Do you hope to encounter ghosts?" his partner asked suddenly.
His partner was a young woman, a recent college graduate. In Qin Liang's memory, she was severely socially anxious, barely able to string a sentence together. For her to initiate a conversation was rare.
"Well, I wouldn't say 'hope'..." Qin Liang squinted. "It's just that I've steeled myself for a glorious end, but at this critical moment, I get sent to this godforsaken place for a stroll. It's just embarrassing, you know?"
As he rambled, incredibly vivid illusions flickered before his eyes.
He saw himself as a key character in a game, striding across a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood. Demons and monsters dissolved into a shower of blood the moment they met his gaze. He stood between heaven and earth like a king of slaughter. After his fall, countless people wept for him. He was no longer the useless good-for-nothing his family saw him as, but a true hero.
The moldy, decaying cubicle he lived in was pristine; he was buried beside his deceased parents, his grave adorned with vast fields of white flowers...
"Is this your wish?" his partner asked.
Qin Liang opened his mouth to answer, but a sudden alarm bell went off in his mind.
Why was he thinking about death? Who would ever wish for their own death?
Something was wrong, very wrong... Qin Liang discreetly moved his hand toward his waist, about to press the alarm button on the back of his walkie-talkie, but his limbs suddenly went limp.
A cloying floral scent filled the air, so potent it was almost dizzying. He felt as if he were wading through a sea of flowers after a spring rain. Petals bloomed at the edges of his vision, and the ground beneath him was carpeted with fallen blossoms.
A dense, itching sensation spread from his chest. Qin Liang looked down and saw a rose push through the flesh over his heart, blooming vigorously before his very eyes.
He struggled to turn his head toward his partner. But there was no one there—only a rose, half as tall as a person, its pistil quivering as it emitted a strange, human-like voice...
Similar scenes were unfolding in every corner of Jiang City. The roots of the roses spread silently to every part of the metropolis, breaking through the soil unnoticed, searching for prey.
Humanity's smallest wishes were magnified in twisted forms, becoming beacons that marked targets in the night. In the same moment, hundreds of investigators were pierced through the chest by roses, frozen in place in various corners of the city, transformed into cruel and grotesque statues.
Their bodies became nutrients for the roses. Blood trickled down in thin lines, spreading out like the earth's own veins. A crimson film slowly coated the world. Ghosts, both new and old, piled up in dense, overlapping layers, their faces fixed in eerie smiles as if their deepest desires had finally been granted.
Amidst the miles of blood, a god in a red suit descended from the sky. He pressed a finger to his lips. "Believe in me. Speak my name. And perhaps, I will grant your wishes."
...
The lower district, near the Redemption Casino.
Crimson roses bloomed across the entire street, completely covering the ground once stained with filthy phlegm and foul, stagnant water. All that remained was a sea of flowers, blazing like a wildfire.
Large buds emerged one after another, unfurling completely in mere seconds. Zhang Yiyu had always thought describing flowers as a sea was just an exaggeration, but seeing this scene, she realized it was a literal depiction.
When the flowers reached a certain density, they took on the quality of a liquid tide, a cold, formless entity that filled every crevice and surged into any open space.
Faced with such a spectacle, a human would inevitably feel the terror of the finite confronting the infinite, like a lower-dimensional being facing a higher one, where every action of the latter is an unknowable catastrophe.
"Zhang Yiyu, can you handle these roses?" Mu Dongxu asked.
Zhang Yiyu snapped out of her trance and swallowed hard. "I... I'll try."
After the *Red Maple Boarding School* instance, she had been contained again for some time. The despair of her shattered hopes had nearly driven her mad, but she had finally endured until this day.
Ning Xu, the one supervising her, had died on a mission. Every department in the Weird Investigation Bureau was swamped with preparations for the Final Instance. When an unknown weirdness suddenly erupted in Jiang City, they were desperate for manpower. Some of the lower-risk contained subjects were temporarily released to fight fire with fire.
Zhang Yiyu clung to the promise Mu Dongxu had made her: if she did everything in her power to help resolve this incident, temporarily dubbed the "Rose Calamity," she would regain her freedom.
She had been locked away for four years. She couldn't imagine how worried her mother, her only family, must be. She had to seize this chance...
Zhang Yiyu cautiously stepped into the alleyway overflowing with roses. The intoxicating floral scent flooded her nostrils, making her feel sick and suffocated. Suppressing her fear, she repeated a mantra to herself—*I'm a ghost, I can't die*—and reached out to grasp the stem of a rose.
It was as if she had awakened a slumbering monster. Countless thorny vines wrapped around her body, dragging her toward the center of the floral sea. She was about to scream when a rose bloomed in her mouth, stifling any sound.
Dragged by the roses, Zhang Yiyu passed through the alley and entered the Redemption Casino.
The two-story building had been completely consumed by roses, its original form unrecognizable. Enormous roses were scattered in corners and on tables. Through their thin, membrane-like crimson petals, she could faintly see human faces embedded among the pistils.
Every face wore a smile of pure contentment, as if lost in a beautiful dream from which they would never wake. As Zhang Yiyu drew closer, soft whispers rose and fell around her.
"I won again! Gimme the money, the money!"
"Hehe... I've got a big house now, and a wife..."
"My leg is healed! It's a miracle, a real miracle!"
In their dreams, they had achieved their wishes. In their dreams, they lived happy lives. They no longer wanted to wake up and return to this painful reality...
"Drip... drip... drip..." The sound of water falling.
Zhang Yiyu looked up and saw a man hanging upside down from the ceiling. Vines cut deep into his flesh, creating wounds that exposed bone. Blood cascaded down like a waterfall, making a sound like a water clock.
Zhang Yiyu saw the man's face. It was Shao Qingmin. She had briefly met him at the short rally before the operation and knew he was a director from the headquarters in the northern capital, a key figure in this mission.
Even... even someone of his level had fallen?
"Run..." The hanging man's eyes were blurred with blood. Hearing footsteps, he gasped out a warning.
Zhang Yiyu didn't run. There was no path behind her. Before her, in the sea of roses, a scarlet figure emerged 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 was pale as a ghost's, spattered with blood. His crimson eyes held the image of blooming roses, beautiful and sinister.
He stepped onto the roses, ascending to the height of the second floor, and reached out to pluck a rose from Shao Qingmin's mangled body. His smile widened with a thick, malicious intent. "A fool who dreamed of taming beasts and creating gods. The most fitting end is to be devoured by the tiger you 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 the same cold presence from *Red Maple Boarding School* who had deceived and controlled her, then ignored her pleas.
And yet, he felt like a stranger. The "Si Qi" she remembered was never this flamboyant, his malice never so nakedly displayed.
"Do you want to kill him?" the young man asked, tilting his head like a curious child.
Zhang Yiyu's breathing grew ragged. The memories of her confinement flashed before her eyes: the darkness, the meager food, the painful experiments...
Over time, her specific hatred had corroded into something more general. She hated everyone in the Weird Investigation Bureau. She hated them for treating her like a monster, hated them for their indifference... If she had the chance, she really would want to kill them.
A long blade condensed from the blood in front of Zhang Yiyu. For a moment, she seemed to lose the capacity for fear. She stared blankly, reaching out to grasp the hilt and stepping onto the root-covered stairs to the second floor.
Shao Qingmin was powerless to resist, but he was still alive. His defiant eyes stared straight at Zhang Yiyu as he spoke in a broken voice, "Don't... don't believe him... he's lying to you..."
Zhang Yiyu walked to the railing of the second-floor platform, stopping half a step from Shao Qingmin. "I don't believe him," she whispered. "He's already tricked me once... But I want to kill you more."
The next second, she raised the long blade and plunged it into the man's heart. Her trembling hand churned the flesh and blood in his chest into a pulp. Blood gushed out in a torrent.
The blood slid down the blade and onto her palm. It was as if Zhang Yiyu only then realized what had happened. Her shoulders shook as she began to sob quietly.
But her hand moved as if programmed, mechanically pulling the blade out, plunging it back in, pulling it out again...
She cried as she stabbed the corpse, all her past frustrations and fears seeming to drain away with the blood.
Never before had she realized it so clearly: she was a ghost. She could kill. She didn't need to be afraid of them.
The young man had been smiling as he watched the farce unfold. Now, as if performing a magic trick, he produced a black card with red patterns from his coat.
On the card's face, a figure in a red leather suit held props like playing cards and small balls, carrying a cage with a pigeon inside as he hurried across a stage. He seemed to trip on the uneven floor, stumbling as the balls scattered and the pigeon flew from its cage.
[Pulling the strings of an innocent lure, the lamb becomes an accomplice to evil.]
[Let the dance begin, a puppet's trick weaving the threads of fate from the shadows.]
[For every body is but a vessel for lies.]
[Congratulations, you have unlocked the Identity Card: "Assistant" (part of the "Foolish Trickster" set).]
Zhang Yiyu instinctively took the card. Then she heard the young man's smiling voice declare, "You will have a place in the Final Instance. But before you step onto the final stage, I need you to sweep away these tedious insects..."
In that instant, countless ghosts controlled by the roses raised their blades, stabbing the investigators who were still fighting desperately beside them.
Bodies littered the ground, and rivers of blood flowed. It all happened in silence.
...
Weird Investigation Bureau, Jiang City Branch, fifth basement level.
On the Living Book, where the names of the investigators were written, the vibrant red faded, one name after another, leaving behind black text that marked the death of each living person.
"Qin Liang's team is gone! Didn't they say everything was normal?"
"Director Shao is dead? How is that possible?"
"Director Mu and Old Liao, too..."
At first, people cried out in shock, but soon they fell silent. The only sound in the room was the ragged rise and fall of breathing.
Countless lives were abstracted into names on a page, their deaths visualized by the draining of color. They were witnessing the demise of their comrades in real-time, as if attending a funeral that was perpetually in progress. Involuntarily, they began to mourn in silence.
When the last splash of red was replaced by black text and all the walkie-talkies went dead at the same moment, every person watching came to the same conclusion:
"Jiang City has fallen."
(End of this chapter)