Doomsday Jigsaw Puzzle

Chapter 594: Chapter 211: Making an Enemy of the Well

The scorching ground compelled Bai Wu to open his eyes.

The fierce sunlight was blinding, forcing him to squint.

Coughing from the captain rang in his ears, leaving Bai Wu utterly astonished.

Captain...What’s going on?

"Cough cough cough... Where is this?" Wu Jiu evidently hadn’t realized the change that had befallen him.

The yellowed paper above seemed to weaken some of the sunlight, and the words written on the ancient-feeling paper began to shake Bai Wu’s will once more.

[At this moment, Bai Wu heard the coughing sound of his close friend by his ear, his gaze revealing a look of astonishment. How had he... turned into a human?]

The writing on the paper seemed to predate Bai Wu’s actual reaction.

As Bai Wu heard the coughing, the words had already been completed. fгeewebnovёl.com

And as Bai Wu had another thought and was about to speak, the content on the paper began to grow:

[He spoke in amazement, saying, "Captain, you... Are you really the captain?"]

"Captain... you..."

Bai Wu abruptly stopped himself. He intended to make his actions deviate from the prophecy written on the paper.

Yet Wu Jiu seemingly heard Bai Wu’s entire dialogue, as if it were complete:

"What’s wrong? Why do you ask that? Is this place... the fifth layer of the Well World?"

Before Wu Jiu had even spoken, Bai Wu saw what Wu Jiu was about to say.

Everything was written on that yellowed piece of paper as though it was all a part of history.

Wu Jiu and he were both historical figures whose courses couldn’t be altered, already recorded in the annals of history.

But just moments ago, he had indeed changed what he was saying.

[At this time, Bai Wu was very confused. It seemed that the will of this world was influencing his actions, but was it predicting his actions, or was it creating them?

Hmm, that’s a question. If it’s the latter, that would be quite dangerous.]

The yellowed paper, as always, elucidated Bai Wu’s concerns very clearly.

Bai Wu decided to say something, first making out his surroundings.

He realized that this place... looked incredibly familiar.

[He recognized this place; it was where he had first arrived. The day before, he had been a lowly beggar.

Lilith from the third level, that is, the Tower God Sect that hadn’t stirred up any turmoil, had brought him to this place, locking him in shackles to perform survival outside the tower for the nobles of the third and fourth layers.]

In reality, Bai Wu had not recognized it, but the remarks on the yellowed paper helped Bai Wu to recall it.

[This is actually the place I first came to when I crossed over to this world?]

"This place..."

As the yellowed paper surfaced the words he was about to utter, Bai Wu forced himself to stop again.

He suddenly thought, just now he’d also stopped his words, but the captain seemed to have heard everything nonetheless.

Maybe it’s not enough to just stop, but to also change what is being said?

His thoughts were swift, everything occurring in the blink of an eye, as if he were competing with some powerful entity in a race of speed.

"I’m not sure where this is either, Captain, haven’t you realized you’ve turned human?" Bai Wu changed the content of his words.

He was capable of multitasking, keeping an eye on the text on the paper while thinking about how to make his actions differ from the description.

But what happened next wrapped Bai Wu’s heart in a layer of "fate’s fear."

He seemed to have changed nothing.

"The place you first crossed over to? But isn’t this... supposed to be a world completely different from reality?" Wu Jiu wore an astonished expression.

The answer from his dear friend made Bai Wu feel a sense of powerlessness. It turned out that no matter what he did... apart from his first thought, any subsequent changes had no effect?

Such an adventure he had never experienced before, since everything was devoid of uncertainties...

Without uncertainties, it was as if all paths were predetermined.

He was merely a program in execution.

It was as if the master called the Will of the Well World was opening a program named "Bai Wu.exe" on a computer called the world.

The program might present many complex algorithms, but everything... had been set by someone else.

"Captain, you are no longer in the Evil Fallen Body."

Without looking at the paper, without letting it disrupt his inner peace, Bai Wu thought this way, as if by not looking, by being ignorant of fate, all his actions were still under his control.

The contents of the paper kept displaying, and Bai Wu found it hard not to look.

As long as he did not deliberately contradict the content on the paper, everything was the content of his first thought, and then the captain would receive it correctly.

This idea must be correct. Surely enough, after hearing his words, his dear friend showed a contemplative expression: I hadn’t noticed until you mentioned it...

"I hadn’t noticed until you mentioned it, hahaha, how strange, it seems that subconsciously, I am still used to you being a bit taller than me."

Wu Jiu had long been accustomed to jokes about his height, and even now, he was smiling.

Being able to return to human form, could it be some special feature of the fifth layer of the Well World?

Before he became an Evil Fallen, he was used to slightly looking up at others, especially people like Nie Chongshan, Jiang Zhu, and Wen Hao, who were tall and big.

But after becoming an Evil Fallen, he started to look down on these people.

However, deep down, Wu Jiu still felt... that he seemed to have long grown accustomed to the identity of a human.

"Maybe everything in this scenario is fake?"

Wu Jiu seriously spoke as he looked around.

Bai Wu was not sure, he recalled the past...

After arriving at this place back then, he made judgments based on the remarks given by the Sequence.

His gaze turned towards a dilapidated building not far in the distance.

Memories seemed to evoke cheeky texts.

A public restroom that hadn’t been used in seven hundred years, with a danger rating of three and a half stars. The Evil Fallen inside are moderately distorted, and the flush toilets have long since ceased to function. I suggest not going in. Hold it or take care of it on the spot.

When he first saw this note, Bai Wu had a lot of information in his mind.

Seven hundred years untouched, moderately distorted, Evil Fallen...

Now he knew all this information, but the note did not appear in his sight.

When he looked up at the ancient pages overhead again—only visible to him—the content had changed.

A public restroom that hadn’t been used in seven hundred years, with a danger rating of five stars. The Evil Fallen inside are extremely distorted. The flushing toilet has long since lost function. I suggest... run fast!

Some kind of evil creature seemed to have sensed Bai Wu and Wu Jiu.

Giant tentacles, like octopus legs, pierced through the ground.

Dozens of massive tentacles, hundreds of meters long, suddenly pierced through the ground, turning the once familiar scene bizarre.

It was as if this place was the dwelling of an ancient evil deity.

The tentacles, as if smelling their prey, were incessantly searching for their quarry.

The immense tentacles caused the ground of the city to crack and rupture.

The collapsing ground led Wu Jiu and Bai Wu to fall into the sewer below.

In the sewer, on the pipes that had been unused for seven hundred years, were entwined dense blood vessels and unknown worms.

The worms crawled on the surface of the blood vessels, which sometimes contracted, sometimes expanded.

"What kind of Evil Fallen is this? It looks quite dangerous," Wu Jiu frowned.

The fifth level of Well World is where we’ve only encountered a passing glimpse thus far.

He and Bai Wu had already attained a power level that made the Evil Fallen of the real world pale in comparison.

However, that massive tentacled Evil Fallen from just now might not be a match for him and Bai Wu, but it seemed as if quite a bit of effort would still be required to take it down.

By now, Bai Wu and Wu Jiu no longer needed to tread cautiously, nor constantly gather clues to unravel a region.

But now... it felt as though they had once again returned to a world surrounded by dangers.

"I don’t know, but it seems that our emotional fluctuations are minimal, and as an Evil Fallen devoid of intelligence, it seems incapable of precisely sensing us," Wu Jiu mused.

In his heart, Bai Wu was gradually becoming calm.

[The two were no longer the novices they had once been, and they were both individuals who could remain calm in crisis. After so many adventures, they could now face any danger with a Heart Like Still Water.

But what exactly was this world? Bai Wu might temper his emotions, but he could not suppress his thirst for knowledge.

He looked up at the ancient pages, thinking uneasily about the displeasure of being anticipated.]

The feeling of one’s inner thoughts being known by someone else was indeed disagreeable.

Bai Wu indeed thought so.

In this moment, in the pitch-black sewer, the ground collapsed due to the activity of the enormous tentacles, and the harsh sunlight shone into the sewers.

At the edge of the water channel, a small object shone in the sunlight, immediately catching Bai Wu’s attention.

He saw a pair of handcuffs.

[Some handcuffs are questionable, appearing as mere restraints on the surface, but behind the scenes, they are surveillance devices used by the nobility of the fourth sequence.]

Notes from Prayle’s Eye came to mind again.

Once, Bai Wu had snapped the handcuffs here, then returned to the High Tower.

Without these handcuffs, Bai Wu would suspect that this world was merely a test and not reality...

But now, seeing the handcuffs, a sudden thought emerged: perhaps this world really was an illusion, but under the influence of the Will of the Well World...

This world, to the current selves of him and the captain, was indeed real.

[And this world, perhaps, was built on the foundation of his own failure? The Dragon Slayer felt it—the world had undergone serious distortion. Even Laoba, who was moderately deformed and hiding in the toilet, had become severely deformed...

So he fell into contemplation, near these handcuffs... there should be another monster!]

Actually, Bai Wu hadn’t thought that far ahead, but the content on the yellowed pages indeed reminded him.

Originally, when Bai Wu was here, he had encountered an assassin from the third level and had lured an Evil Fallen from the sewer.

That Evil Fallen, in the blink of an eye during a brief encounter, had killed General Pan Feng mentioned by Prayle’s Eye.

"Captain, we must be more cautious from now on," Wu Jiu cautioned.

Wu Jiu nodded; he could also feel another powerful creature slowly approaching.

The blood vessels winding through the sewer pipes were contracting and expanding faster and faster as if conveying the excitement of some monster.

"If I remember correctly, this place is Food City..."

Through the television program in Violet Manor, Bai Wu recalled that his first appearance had been in Food City.

If this were the real world, that would indeed be the case.

But this place was not reality; this was the fifth level of Well World.

"The sewers of Food City have repeatedly been reported to harbor many bizarre creatures, causing a mass exodus of rats from the sewers, and even triggering a rodent infestation."

"Also... in the sewers of Food City, there was once a woman, a woman whose back had been almost hollowed out."

This woman had appeared in the mine where the former Traveler’s meeting was held.

Bai Wu held his breath; he did not know if this world had any connection to the world he knew.

But clearly, the real world seemed more like a frontier version.

Now it appeared to be a hellishly difficult second playthrough.

There must be some purpose of the "Well World Will" hidden in this second cycle.

Bai Wu closed his eyes, not looking at the yellowed pages. His innermost thoughts began to stir.

"Combining my memories from before, I find myself in a world that is heavily twisted and aberrant."

"But if the World Will wanted to kill me, that should be easy."

"Yet it didn’t kill me, instead presenting me with a strange world."

"Those ancient pages that have replaced Prayle’s Eye seem more like something meant to disturb my mind."

"I must have overlooked some clue."

What did he overlook?

Bai Wu furrowed his brow.

Once his power reached a certain level, although he would explore some regions and might take action, he certainly wouldn’t use his brain.

In this world, under the influence of the Well World Will, he and his Captain might still be powerful beings, but they are definitely no longer transcendent as they were in the real world.

Moreover, if the foes they’ve encountered so far are just the small fry, and even these small fry have been enhanced to a severely twisted state, it’s difficult to imagine just how powerful a regional guardian of a place could be...

"We cannot brute force our way through, and that might be a strategy, but the Captain and I need to conserve our strength. We should only use violence when it is absolutely necessary."

Wu Jiu listened to Bai Wu’s soliloquy as though he was witnessing the Bai Wu of bygone days.

He always felt that Bai Wu was suited to venture outside the tower, not because of his terrifying combat ability, but because Bai Wu possessed a cold intellect.

Thus, Wu Jiu guarded silently, listening to the approach of Evil Fallen footsteps around them.

There were sounds of a monstrous, sticky body writhing, and the cries of women.

Wu Jiu was on full alert, ready to draw his weapon at any moment to confront these twisted monsters.

Ironically, the equipment for Spirit Possession, crafted by Bai Wu, was originally made to fit Crimson’s size.

But now that he himself had become human, the equipment seemed to have altered as well.

Evil Fallen had to be gripped tightly in hand, and suddenly Wu Jiu felt as if he had grasped some kind of power.

At this moment, Bai Wu suddenly caught the key information.

"In the past when encountering problems, Prayle’s Eye would provide hints... although they were riddles in sequence, they could still lead to useful information."

"Now Prayle’s Eye, purportedly under the control of the Well World Will, but before it came under control... it seems to have also mentioned a piece of information."

Bai Wu suddenly looked up; the yellowed page bore no trace of his recent mental activity.

[Alright, you’ve found the blind spot, that cheating eye, indeed gave you a tip that disrupts the game’s rules, but it didn’t finish speaking, and the story must go on, mustn’t it?]

This time, the yellowed page was no longer just an objective description.

It was more like an embodiment of will, conversing with Bai Wu.

Bai Wu smiled; the last hint from the Poet Yan—

Remember what I’ve said—will can destroy will, but cannot kill...

At this point, the eye was controlled by the will, and the sentence was left unfinished.

Clearly, the latter half of this sentence was crucial.

"Will can destroy will... this might very well be the danger that the Captain and I are about to face. But the key to breaking through, which is also the Well World Will’s vulnerability... lies in the second half of the sentence."

Bai Wu did not know what this vulnerability was.

But as long as the will had a vulnerability...

The yellowed page seemed to revert to an objective recorder, but this time, it was tinged with a personal touch:

[But as long as the will has a vulnerability, he is confident that he can find it. Can the naive Dragon Slayer truly defeat the formidable Well World Will?

Or will he soon die in a twisted land that only seems to be his homeland?]