Doomsday Jigsaw Puzzle

Chapter 550: Chapter 167: The Secret of the Farm Forbidden Area

The dark tunnel was long.

Bai Wu enshrouded the Number One Farm, and moonlight could not penetrate it.

The tunnel within the forbidden area was even darker, as if one were walking in some damp environment, occasionally hearing the subtle sound of water droplets hitting the rocks.

In a place where one could not see their hand before their face, Shen Shuyue and Dong Nianyu walked for a long time.

At first, the two of them didn’t mind, but as time ticked by, they felt as if they were walking in a void of space.

This silence instilled fear in them.

Instinctively, Shen Shuyue felt something was amiss:

"We’ve been walking for quite a while, but have you noticed that the sound of water dropping... it never changes, and it seems to be at the same distance from us."

"But if you look back, we can no longer see the entrance."

Dong Nianyu was used to this:

"With the concept of a forbidden land, you weren’t thinking it was some kind of underground chamber, were you?"

Shen Shuyue stopped talking, she simply moved closer to Dong Nianyu in the pitch black.

Recalling the past, Dong Nianyu said:

"You just need to keep walking. When I was a child, I’d been to the forbidden land. Though the entrances were different, the place they led to was the same."

"As a child, I tried to escape from here but fell into the same predicament, it seemed like I was marking time no matter which way I went."

"Don’t stop. This is a mysterious space, and its principle is the same as the farm itself. The farm only has one entrance, and so does this place, but the world within the entrance is another heaven and earth."

Shen Shuyue understood that in a place so twisted, one couldn’t speculate using common sense.

She continued walking in the darkness with Dong Nianyu.

From time to time, Shen Shuyue paid attention to the sensation under her feet.

Although Dong Nianyu’s explanation had reassured her somewhat, she remained vigilant about this place.

The two of them continued walking in the darkness, occasionally engaging in brief conversations.

But those ended after a couple of sentences, and soon both women would fall back into silence.

Only the sound of water drops and footsteps persisted.

The pitch-black world seemed like a long, silent passage with no end in sight.

After a long, long while, Shen Shuyue suddenly couldn’t remember how long she had been walking.

The concept of time seemed to have been disturbed by some force.

Not just time, even the sense of direction—north, south, east, and west—was gone.

What was meant to be a narrow path felt, at a certain moment, as if Shen Shuyue were in a vast expanse of darkness.

Dong Nianyu said:

"We’re close to the forbidden land now. This place is a prison created by Jing Yi, and it is also a museum."

"Here, the perception of space and time is greatly weakened... we’re losing our usual concepts of length and distance."

"A limited space can become profound here, and a finite time can extend for a long duration."

Dong Nianyu knew these things because her Split Body had been carried out in such a place when she was young.

Trying to escape from here, she could only feel the endless, deep darkness around her.

It seemed like just a short walk, but it gave rise to a feeling that one had walked for ages and ages.

Ultimately, she couldn’t escape from here.

Seven hundred years later, returning to this place, Dong Nianyu naturally would not be as easily trapped by it as she had been seven hundred years ago.

Especially since Shen Shuyue was with her, the two women together slowly made their way into the core of this area.

It felt like walking for several months, or was it several days?

Or perhaps it was several hundred miles, or just a dozen miles.

Shen Shuyue and Dong Nianyu finally saw light.

Two eternally burning torches hung on either side above the bronze gate.

The light from the flames dyed the darkness surrounding the gate yellow. Shen Shuyue said,

"This door... if we open it, it shouldn’t make any noise, right?"

"We are in a Different Space. If there were to be any disturbance, I would have been discovered much later than I actually was."

Shen Shuyue frowned and said,

"So, Lizhi couldn’t possibly have tipped us off?"

"Of course not," Dong Nianyu didn’t bother to conceal anything.

"Then why did you let Lizhi stay outside?"

"Her strength is not as great as yours. Once certain dangerous mechanisms are triggered in the forbidden land, you would be more useful than she. Plus, she could indeed hold Jing Yi back."

Shen Shuyue was not very satisfied with this answer, but it was too late for her to go back now.

"Push the door open. Beyond this door, we will pass through a corridor with two rows of secret chambers on each side."

"And within these chambers lie the records of many children from the farm. At the end of the corridor, there is a storage room. We need to search that room briefly."

"As for this door, I’ve forgotten how to open it. We can only rely on brute force."

Through multiple splits and fusions, Shen Shuyue had long possessed strength surpassing that of other ninth-level Evil Fallen.

She stopped caring about the trivial details and prepared to open the bronze gate as Dong Nianyu had instructed.

Although Jing Yi could have imposed numerous prohibitions, they could not even trap Bai Yuan back in the day, let alone stop Shen Shuyue now.

The bronze gate was forcibly pushed open by Shen Shuyue’s terrifying strength.

The torches on the door flickered continuously until eventually coming to a rest.

The scene within the gate was no longer shrouded in darkness.

The eternally burning torches were placed atop each secret chamber.

Everything was as Dong Nianyu had said; there were chamber after chamber.

The chambers contained records of many children from the past seven hundred years.

Dong Nianyu entered one chamber and casually flipped through a record from recent years.

She saw the information of a "Six of Hearts" from the number three farm these past few years.

The content was simple, relating the child’s potential prediction, where the child came from, personality flaws, and so on.

It also predicted the child’s ultimate fate: remaining on the farm, being arranged into the world of humans, or...

Sacrificed.

There were many, many records like this.

Besides the children’s records, there were also records of the "mothers."

Shen Shuyue flipped through several files as well.

She found these "mothers" were entirely different.

Some were girls from the farm. They behaved well and were of mediocre talent, not having discovered any problems with the farm.

In Jing Yi’s eyes, they didn’t even qualify for sacrifice; and arranging them into the world of humans might expose some secrets.

So they were arranged to work on the farm until death.

The rest were outsiders. The outsiders had their memories cleansed, believing that this place was truly the Land of Bliss, a paradise for children.

Shen Shuyue felt as though she had returned to the Color Domain.

In the past, Zhong Xu had also established a vast secret haven.

Only, Jing Yi had separated himself from lower tastes. Jing Yi did these things in part to observe humanity.

On the other hand, it was to arrange for some excellent pawns to be placed into the world of humans.

Finally, it was about cultivating "food," to be sacrificed to the twisted bodies beyond the Wall.

Dong Nianyu said,

"Let’s go, these are all the publicly known secrets of the farm, even if you don’t come here, you’d find out eventually."

"Aren’t you curious about Bai Yuan’s archives?" Shen Shuyue asked.

Dong Nianyu shook her head,

"Their generation, all kinds of evaluations are meaningless, so their archives aren’t in there."

Shen Shuyue thought about it and agreed, there wasn’t much to see in Bai Yuan’s archives, perhaps what was recorded were Jing Yi’s some misunderstandings about Bai Yuan. frёeweɓηovel.coɱ

The two walked along the corridor, moving so slowly that it took them quite a while to progress, as the hallway was very long.

They stopped in the room full of Spirit Possession items.

However, without Prayle’s Eye, they were unable to determine the purpose of the Spirit Possession items.

Shen Shuyue noticed that, despite appearing calm, Dong Nianyu’s excessively slow steps still betrayed her true inner thoughts.

They finally reached the secret chamber at the end of the corridor.

If Bai Wu were here, he would have found the secret chamber strikingly similar to the one in the Ninth Psychiatric Hospital, where Hong Yin was once tormented.

That "doctor" turned out to be from Jing Liu, but perhaps the "doctor" in the Ninth Psychiatric Hospital did have some connection to the farm owner.

Now that the doctor was dead, without Bai Wu, Shen Shuyue alone couldn’t uncover his secrets.

Jing Yi’s persona had always been the image of a doctor in a white coat, which also influenced Bai Yuan later on.

Shen Shuyue looked at the secret chamber with a strange expression.

The chamber contained cages that one couldn’t break free from and various scattered injection syringes.

Unlike the Ninth Psychiatric Hospital, this place was not actually part of the same space as the farm, so there were no surveillance cameras.

Because even if there were, the cameras wouldn’t be able to transmit anything.

"This is where I was held prisoner as a child. There’s also a door at the back of the secret chamber, but I don’t know what’s beyond that door."

"When I was a child, it was here that I... underwent splitting..."

Xiaoyugan, Dong Nianyu, they were both Split Bodies.

But they were the strongest among the Split Bodies.

So much so that for a while, both Xiaoyugan and Dong Nianyu thought they were the original body.

Since they considered themselves the original body, they naturally assumed the function of the original.

They also did the same things the original would do—splitting.

Unlike Shen Shuyue’s "physical splitting," the soul Split Bodies created by powerful spiritual power might give birth to different personalities.

While Dong Nianyu and Xiaoyugan indeed had different experiences, the vast differences in their personalities also had to do with the inconsistencies in personality after splitting.

Past memories stabbed like needles, leaving Dong Nianyu’s face deathly pale.

She said with some pain,

"Let’s go... Opening this secret chamber’s door, beyond lies a domain I have never ventured into. Maybe it’s where my original body... once stayed."

Jing Yi had once spoken to Dong Nianyu about the original body, highly praising it—

A walking "Well."

This kind of praise could be said to be the highest under the Twisted Master.

If even the Split Bodies, Xiaoyugan and herself, were powerful enough to change the world using their spiritual power, how terrifying would the original body be?

Perhaps that’s not important, what matters most is, what kind of personality does the original body have?

Did Bai Yuan take her away simply for the sake of "exploration and fun"?

Shen Shuyue didn’t need to expend much effort to open the door to the secret chamber.

A world hiding deeper secrets unfolded before her and Dong Nianyu.

The secret chamber was connected to another corridor.

It was just that compared to the previous corridor, this one was a bit more slender.

At the end of the corridor, a dim yellow light could be seen emanating from the entrance.

As the two approached the entrance... they heard the sound of water flowing.

It sounded like air was colliding into the water, creating bubbles that rose from the bottom to the surface.

The dim yellow light made the darkness a little lighter.

Outside the secret chamber, at the end of the corridor’s entrance, there was a much larger space.

And those dim yellow lights were due to the light shining through container after container.

Hundreds of containers appeared here—the dim yellow transparent walls of glass pods, the liquid inside occasionally bubbling, and—

People.

Dong Nianyu’s face turned pale, and her body began to tremble involuntarily.

Shen Shuyue had seen such a scene before; hadn’t her own Split Bodies been a bunch of people identical to herself?

But in such a forbidden place, to see such a group of "Split Bodies," a group that was ninety percent similar to Dong Nianyu, with slight differences among the female bodies, Shen Shuyue still felt shocked.

Hundreds of containers like these were laid out in the vast forbidden space.

In Dong Nianyu’s memory, she had never split so many times...

These Split Bodies clearly all came from one place—

The original body.

She couldn’t imagine that Jing Yi could do such cruel things to the original body.

Every split was a great torture for Dong Nianyu.

Tearing the soul in half was an abstract concept for most people, but for Dong Nianyu and Xiaoyugan—it was a very specific description.

They had truly experienced it.

It felt as if everything in the mind was being ripped apart, and the various people, objects, and scenes in the memories were all covered with cracks.

With each split, the inner world was undergoing a catastrophic disaster.

And what was presented here... were hundreds of Split Bodies.

Although these Split Bodies were all in slumber, Dong Nianyu could feel that all of their spiritual power was extremely strong.

The spiritual power of these Split Bodies, certainly not as strong as Xiaoyugan’s and Dong Nianyu’s, but any one of them could cause large-scale hypnosis or distort reality if they were taken out.

And the presence of hundreds of such entities was completely different.

Even Dong Nianyu had no way to confront hundreds of Split Bodies.

Fortunately, these Split Bodies seemed to lack their own consciousness.

Nonetheless, the other end of this space became distorted due to these spiritual powers.

At the end of this spiritually covered twisted space, Shen Shuyue and Dong Nianyu both saw a giant Hexagram Magic Circle.

The Array was covered in intricate lines. Under such visibility conditions, Shen Shuyue couldn’t make them out clearly.

Even if they could make them out, they would not recognize that those lines were composed of Sequence script.

"To walk this path, I might use up all of my strength... But perhaps, we’ve found something incredible."

Outside the Hexagram, five shadows appeared, distorted by spiritual power, and not clear to the eye. They seemed like five faces.

This did give Dong Nianyu some clues.

The road protected by countless Split Bodies with their spiritual power was clearly meant to protect that Array.

But strangely... within the Hexagram Magic Circle, the shadows should number six.

So why were there only five in sight?