Doomsday Jigsaw Puzzle

Chapter 345: Chapter 149: The Intense Competition Among Strange Tales

(A meek but strangely assertive plea for a monthly pass)

There are beings that cannot see through the workings of causality, which means the success of the establishment of the refuge remains uncertain.

Jing Liu came here, perhaps everything was already arranged, or perhaps it was a risky gamble.

Thinking on this, Zero said:

"What kind of beings are you, really? Do you not have weaknesses? Who is the strongest among you? What is his stance?"

Zero fired off several questions in succession, but Jing Liu did not answer them all:

"We ourselves are not clear on what kind of beings we are, but perhaps, just like your name, we are Zero number infectees. Before the aberration arrived, when other forms of life were slowly accumulating the possibility for mutation, we had already completely mutated and possessed a power that would still be considered extremely formidable even seven hundred years later."

"The strongest among us is my older brother, who is far more powerful than the rest of us. Even I do not know how far he has gone."

Zero noticed Jing Liu used precise terms; others are ’elder brothers’, but the strongest is ’older brother’. fɾeeweɓnѳveɭ.com

Clearly, the status of this older brother was much higher than that of the other elder brothers.

"He has no stance, and we have no weaknesses, at most there are things we are not good at, like I am not skilled in combat. But that is relative only to you and my other brothers."

On Jing Liu’s always-calm face, there appeared a very subtle ripple:

"However, there were indeed three weaknesses later implanted in my brother. Back in Denglin City, in order to save the world, he offered himself for study to the scientists of Denglin City; indeed, the scientists planted three weaknesses within the body of the most powerful him."

This was news that made even Zero take notice, he had never faced Jing Liu’s older brother in battle. But intuitively, he understood that he was on an entirely different level compared to Jing Wu.

Such an existence, perhaps already conceptualized as a deity, yet even so, human scientists were able to implant three weaknesses into him...

"Are the weaknesses fatal?"

"Not fatal, but they indeed provide some means to oppose him."

"This is truly a great research achievement," Zero sincerely admired and yet felt regret.

Because of what happened afterward, even without Jing Liu saying it, he knew.

If there were such powerful scientists continuing their research under the protection of the Jing Family Siblings, the world might not be as it is now.

But this world is now left with all kinds of twisted creatures, all kinds of strange and contorted rules.

The scientists must be dead.

Since Jing Liu’s older brother’s stance is uncertain, it suggested that he, who once tried to save the world, also did things that led to its destruction, which made it impossible to define his actions as simply good or bad.

Moreover, because of some special reason, although Jing Liu once could glimpse certain causalities, he can no longer see them.

Zero could only be certain about one thing: this world contained an extremely powerful... indifferentist.

He had many more questions he wanted to ask Jing Liu, but Jing Liu had already fulfilled her obligation to inform him. She was preparing to leave.

As she was about to go, Zero finally asked:

"That most powerful being, has he disappeared?"

"Yes. My older brother has disappeared."

"Has he been found? Even if his stance is difficult to determine, I believe someone wielding such transcendent power would surely attract many covetous eyes. At the very least, I am quite interested in him."

Jing Liu did not answer this question; instead, she gave Zero an item.

"What is this?"

"A piece of the Doomsday Puzzle, the Causal Mirror. You, who lack the power of causality, can use this fragment only once."

Doomsday Puzzle pieces—Zero was not unfamiliar with these things.

"Why do these pieces exist?"

"They relate to the origin of the issue. You can understand them as a device to restore the world. Part of this device neutralizes distorted rules, while another part possesses equally distorted powers, using distortion to defeat distortion. The power they contain is of the same origin as the Sequences possessed by humans."

Jing Liu said,

"I should leave now."

"What about the function of the pieces?" Zero pressed.

"They will give you one chance to assimilate causality. However, you are not me, lacking the Power of Causality, and thus cannot unleash its full effect. But merely crossing a brief expanse of space-time to save the person you wish to rescue is not difficult."

Zero understood that as an Evil Fallen, he couldn’t overcome regional limitations. Although several members of the Jing Family were also Evil Fallen, they clearly possessed special abilities to suppress the rules.

Jing Liu turned and walked out of the Mechanical Temple.

The location of Jing Si is extremely valuable information for all Well Level beings, yet it remains an unsolvable question for everyone.

But for Jing Liu, everything in the world wasn’t really a question. Problems and answers were like two images that presented themselves before her eyes simultaneously.

Suddenly, Zero felt—perhaps the "strongest" mentioned by Jing Liu had already been found by her.

...

...

In Baichuan City, at the Supernatural Tale Apartment, on the seventh floor.

The time was deep into the night.

Laughter echoing through the heavens and earth faintly reached Bai Wu’s ears.

Not long before, he had turned a room on the seventh floor upside down, like a scavenger from seven hundred years ago when the apocalypse struck.

Listening to the distant, faint laughter, he felt nothing at all.

Laughter is meant to express negative emotions in a joyful manner. If one has no joy, they naturally won’t be affected.

But Bai Wu was devoid of negative emotions. He smiled, not because the laughter was infectious, but simply because he found the laughter... quite cheerful.

As night fell and Bai Wu pressed the light switch, there was no response; the rules didn’t allow electricity in this apartment, which was somewhat inconvenient. However, if the Evil Fallen from the prison were living here, they would adapt since they could endure the prison conditions.

Without light, the visibility was quite low, casting everything in Bai Wu’s vision with a shade of dark blue.

Thanks to his remarkable visual acuity, Bai Wu could still examine some documents. Especially since the "documents" in his hands were not on paper.

After leaving the fifth floor and bamboozling two tales, for the next hour or so, Bai Wu was sifting through various documents.

Because on the seventh floor, he found a particularly special room.

So far, he roughly understood what had happened on the seventh floor—numerous strange events, which were also competing against each other. Which one would ultimately breed the tale successfully and become the talk of the town, Bai Wu was still unsure.

The first strange event was about a middle-aged blind man who lived on the seventh floor; he always led a puppet, taking it out to beg every day.

Of course, compared to those who simply put out a bowl and asked for food, the blind man had some talent. In a sense, it was not begging but busking.

Under his manipulation, the puppet seemed alive, earning rounds of applause from the audience.

The audience discovered that the puppet could really perform many actions.

Some audience members would deliberately challenge him, but the blind man, listening to their descriptions, would twitch his fingers along the strings and soon replicate the requested actions, even the expressions.

With his craft, he could earn a considerable amount of food each day. People gradually realized that money had lost its value.

In Baichuan City, people began to use edible food as commodities in circulation.

Of course, such things couldn’t be recorded in the blind man’s house. His home was bare, with only some detachable puppet limbs—remarkably strange markings—

"They really are parts of a puppet."

The word "really" seemed to imply that something had happened. However, after looking around, Bai Wu still couldn’t find anything suspicious and so he went to the house across the street.

That is, the second candidate for Supernatural Tale potential—the Peeping Tom.

The Peeping Tom had recorded everything about the middle-aged blind man manipulating puppets in his vlog device,

with over five hundred categories in his vlog: different times, different events, different families... even different vantage points.

Like men, women, singles, married, kitchen, living room, bedroom, and even—the bathroom.

All sorts of surveillance videos were included; calling it a vlog really meant it was just his own voiceovers added to the edited footage of voyeurism.

He had nearly spied on half the occupants of the apartment building.

The reason Bai Wu thought the middle-aged blind man might be one of the Supernatural Tales was because of the way the Peeping Tom described him.

The video showed the blind man climbing the stairs; eerily, the blind man walked steadily, slowly, with each step measured with extreme precision, but he didn’t carry the puppet with him, instead his fingers kept trembling... controlling the puppet step by step up the stairs.

Making the puppet climb the stairs along with him looked like some sort of craft exercise, only the Peeping Tom obviously didn’t see it that way.

"I’ve been observing the blind man across from me for a long time. He always manages to barter for quite a lot of food, which is weird. Outside it’s all chaos, and yet people are willing to watch his performance, willing to trade food for a puppet show. Isn’t that absurd? I always feel there’s an evil secret hidden in this."

"Is it witchcraft or did he set up a stooge? But stranger still, every time he comes back, he keeps manipulating the puppets rather than just picking them up... His life is very regular, he goes to bed on time, but each time I monitor his house... I always feel my spine chilling."

There were many videos and Bai Wu stayed here for a while because the Peeping Tom’s voyeuristic desires had left a large number of files.

Some of them were also about the Supernatural Tale widow and her family of three downstairs.

There was even one about Zhao Cuican from the second floor.

He now knew that of the six Supernatural Tales, he had found two; one kept making people look up on their phones, the other was in the TV, watching everything.

The Peeping Tom was quite similar to the one in the TV; his name was Liu Yiyan.

Bai Wu, of course, didn’t judge by appearances, nor by names, but he had to admit—often people lived up to their names.

Liu Yiyan was half a hacker, with a severe surveillance obsession; it wasn’t so much that he liked to pry into others’ privacy as it was the fear of not having everything under control.

But this brought trouble.

Because the apartment itself had already started to distort, under many strange rules, some videos vanished.

One could only hear Liu Yiyan’s voice in them, while the screen was pitch black. These voices conveyed the terror Liu Yiyan felt.

He had obviously captured something that science couldn’t explain. These things didn’t want to be filmed by him, so the screen went dark.

Without visual clues, Bai Wu quickly filtered through several videos with black screens, guided by Liu Yiyan’s categorization habits, trying to pin down a few potential Supernatural Tales.

The voices inside went like this:

"The first day I moved into the apartment, I heard an old lady telling me not to go to the rooftop, because at two o’clock at midnight on the rooftop, an old man would appear with a thermos flask, asking people if they wanted some tea, going from door to door. Don’t respond, hold your breath, wait for him to leave."

"I was curious. How could there be such a person? So, I installed surveillance cameras. Okay, it was actually unrelated; I just like to monitor. Being alive means constantly spying on others; only this makes me feel alive!"

This was the first video, which should have been Liu Yiyan recording his own room, but the video screen had already gone black.

This made Bai Wu wonder... perhaps Liu Yiyan had become one of the Supernatural Tales himself. He continued to watch.

"Some rooms have already started engaging in criminal activities. I’ve seen it, a secret hidden inside a hollow TV set. How strange, doesn’t he mind the smell? Wait, that doesn’t seem to be the point... what am I overlooking?"

"The little girl on the second floor suddenly woke up again. Is she sleepwalking? Constantly knocking on the door, her brother sleeps like a dead pig. Hey, really interesting. Does he know about his sister’s terrifying behavior? Damn, damn! Is she a superhero? How did she do that?"

"The elevator stopped at the thirteenth floor. Nobody pressed the button, I should be able to see something in the elevator, but there’s no image, I know there’s something in this area that wants me to see it, I’ll be able to see it, if it doesn’t want me to, then I can’t... really annoying!"

"Hey... this little girl is really bad... tsk tsk tsk, I can’t mess with her... The people in this building have such diverse methods of hiding bodies."

There are many video records around midnight in the equipment, and Bai Wu paid attention to the intervals, finding out they are almost segment by segment every few minutes.

He instantly felt it was strange, and he imagined it.

A man, around midnight, occasionally switches the screen with extremely fast speech, continuously narrating his own opinions related to the images.

"This must be some kind of illness."

Many videos couldn’t be viewed, but there was a huge base of voyeuristic videos, and Bai Wu noticed that Liu Yiyan even specifically bought servers to store his surveillance.

It’s hard to imagine a person monitoring the whole apartment block.

In these videos, there are also many crimes worth mentioning; in short, in this apartment... a wealth of talented individuals.

To survive in the post-apocalyptic world, all sorts of stealing, robbery, and murder had become commonplace.

But in Bai Wu’s eyes, the true supernatural tales so far are just a few, and only these videos are black without images, only the voice of Liu Yiyan.

Someone hid a body inside a television. Only those old-fashioned large color TVs would have space to hide a person.

And this might have triggered the "I’m Watching You" ghost tale.

Secondly, there’s the small girl on the second floor who might be sleepwalking, and in her sleepwalking, she did something that even Liu Yiyan couldn’t understand. But Bai Wu found it strange, the second floor... wasn’t Zhao Cuican the one with a sister?

Then there was a middle-aged blind man, both he and his puppets were very suspicious.

Last was the granny who said, at midnight, an old man with a thermos would appear. freewebnøvel.coɱ

And this granny who was likely making things up, was actually identified by Bai Wu as one of the supernatural tales.

Because right in this room, Bai Wu saw a thermos. The note also confirmed one of his thoughts.

[People always challenge terrifying things to prove they are not superstitious, but isn’t this behavior confusing itself? Some things we truly know don’t exist, but still, that saying goes, you must respect the rules, my old pal.]

Clues slowly emerged, and obviously, this Liu Yiyan chose some kind of death-wishing act, responding to the old man holding a thermos asking if anyone wanted tea.

Just why would the thermos be left in Liu Yiyan’s room?

The night grew denser, laughter in the distance became more exaggerated, it seemed like the number of infected people was increasing, Bai Wu frowned and opened the window.

At this time, from the next room, the room with the puppets... a laugh echoed out.

This laugh was no different from the ones outside, Bai Wu also laughed, not because he was infected, but because he suddenly realized that this laugh seemed to have infected a supernatural tale... and assisted himself.

So Bai Wu quickly made his way to the room across, the middle-aged blind man’s room, which was very simple, with the bed just a straw mat.

Here lay many limbs of dolls, Bai Wu had been puzzled before, wondering why he hadn’t received any hints from the eyes.

Why he hadn’t seen that doll, now he understood.

"A blind man being able to precisely perform actions described by the onlookers is not difficult, but why could he even make the onlookers’ expressions? Either he is not blind... or, or... he himself is the puppet, and the puppet in his hands is the real manipulator."

In the darkness, it seemed as if threads connected those limbs; they started to link up continuously until they formed a complete puppet.

[Congratulations, you’ve found the third supernatural tale. Believe me, its ability will be useful to you. Even if your limbs are shattered, they can still be stitched together like unbroken lotus roots. But you know, there is a prerequisite for all this, let it attach to you, and take care of the other five supernatural tales.]

Bai Wu was ecstatic, isn’t this the Weakness Transfer ability of the mummy on the plane? Great stuff!

In the darkness, the puppet issued a creepy laugh, which initially terrified Liu Yiyan to the point of stupor, but in Bai Wu’s ears, it sounded like heavenly music.