Free Web NovelMeanwhile, in the underground parking lot.
The door of the car parked beside Tang Erda’s slowly opened.
Mu Shicheng and the other two, who had been waiting in the back seat, got out and quickly moved toward the elevator. They watched as the lift Tang Erda had entered descended rapidly before finally stopping at B4.
The three of them exchanged a look.
Liu Jiayi used Su Yang’s work ID to swipe the elevator sensor and pressed the button for B4.
Her gaze remained fixed on the red alarm light flashing endlessly inside the elevator.
Mu Shicheng’s face was so dark it looked as if soot could be scraped off it, while Mu Ke stayed silent.
“Tsk.”
Mu Shicheng exhaled the murky breath he had been holding in ever since listening to Tang Erda and Bai Liu’s conversation from inside the car.
“Can I punch that guy named Tang later?”
“Did he say anything wrong?” Liu Jiayi asked indifferently.
Mu Shicheng choked.
In a certain sense, that guy named Tang really hadn’t said anything wrong.
Bai Liu was, after all, the kind of person whose every strand of hair from head to toe seemed to exude malice.
But still...
It was just incredibly irritating.
“Even if what he said is true, I’m still annoyed,” Liu Jiayi said, looking away from the alarm light.
She wrinkled her nose, a rare trace of childishness appearing on her face.
“I’ll do my best to buy time for you. Punch him once for my share too.”
Mu Shicheng paused.
Then he curled his lips.
“Okay.”
—
On the fourth underground level, Bai Liu moved swiftly through one corridor after another.
On both sides of the passage stood oddly shaped metal rooms marked with serial numbers. They all shared a similar aesthetic, and from time to time, strange, eerie noises drifted out from within them.
After walking there for too long, one would feel as though they had entered a maze. Without a map, it would be difficult to find the way out.
Even more troublesome was that patrol officers were stationed at every corner.
There were not many of them, but their distribution was extremely precise. They prevented Bai Liu from smoothly entering the game, interrupting every attempt whenever a patrol officer suddenly appeared around a turn.
This made Bai Liu realize that the patrol arrangement had most likely been designed by Tang Erda specifically to target Players.
Under the watch of these ordinary people, it was very difficult for a Player to enter the game freely.
Tang Erda had first used Magic Space to create a small cage for Bai Liu.
Once Bai Liu escaped that small cage, he entered a larger, moving cage formed by the patrol layout.
Bai Liu leaned against the wall, adjusting his breathing as he prepared to try one last time.
He took out the coin hanging from his pendant, intending to enter the game.
But just as he was about to summon the system, a patrol officer turned the corner at the other end of the corridor.
Bai Liu had no choice but to put the coin away and turn into another passage.
As expected, these patrol officers stationed at the corners functioned as interruption devices.
While being pursued by the patrol officers behind him, Bai Liu jogged quickly and glanced at the room numbers on his left and right.
- The room Bai Liu had escaped from had been numbered 006.
Now the numbers had already reached the thousands, yet he had not seen all the rooms in between. It felt as though he was taking a shortcut that led directly toward a specific room.
No.
It was not an illusion.
These patrol officers were deliberately driving him toward a room with a specific number.
Bai Liu’s footsteps stopped at another corner.
His gaze fell on the end of the corridor.
He had been forced into a dead end.
The room number at the end of that dead end was 1087.
Watching everything through the surveillance monitors, Tang Erda held his communicator and issued the order coldly.
“All patrol officers, put on your breathing masks.”
“I am activating waterproof mode and opening the door to Heretic 1087, codename Devouring Spring.”
“Prepare to enter underwater mode. All team members, get ready—” fɾeeweɓnѳveɭ.com
“Three.”
“Two.”
One after another, the small windows on the surrounding metal doors clicked shut.
The doors of each room sank inward, then pushed outward, fitting tightly together to form smooth metal walls on both sides of the corridor.
The patrol officer in front of Bai Liu was putting on a transparent breathing mask.
The final count came through the communicator.
“One.”
The door of Room 1087 behind Bai Liu slowly opened.
Clear, endless spring water surged out.
The rushing current and spray reflected in Bai Liu’s eyes as he turned his head.
Then, in an instant, the water swallowed him whole.
—
The elevator area.
Mu Shicheng had smashed the surveillance camera inside the elevator the moment they entered.
He was a little tense.
“There should be cameras inside this base, right? Hey, do we need to dodge them or something?”
“No need. We’re already inside,” Liu Jiayi said coldly.
“Our goal is to infiltrate, finish this quickly, and take Bai Liu into the game. Avoiding cameras will only slow us down. Let them film if they want. I don’t care.”
Mu Ke immediately added, “I don’t care either.”
“...Damn it, but I still have final exams,” Mu Shicheng muttered gloomily. “If I get wanted, can I take the exam from prison? I don’t want to take a make-up exam...”
Liu Jiayi ignored his complaining and looked at the two of them.
“Let’s review the plan one more time.”
“We don’t know the situation inside, and we don’t have a map. To avoid being caught, we’ll use a coordinate-jumping mechanism.”
“In other words, if someone is about to catch you, enter the game.”
“After entering the game, you can obtain a twelve-digit login coordinate. Once the three of us enter the game and regroup, we’ll exchange dangerous coordinates, then switch coordinates to exit again, move toward our original coordinates, and regroup.”
“That way, we won’t get lost, and we can obtain a path curve.”
“The three of us will move in three mutually perpendicular directions, equivalent to the z-axis, y-axis, and x-axis of a three-dimensional coordinate system.”
“We’ll determine different coordinate points in different directions and connect them back to the original coordinate points. After repeating that a few times, we can reconstruct a complete path curve.”
Liu Jiayi gestured between the three of them with her hand.
“Buildings are regular structures. Once we have the general curve of this building, we can reconstruct a rough map.”
“Do you understand?”
“Understood,” Mu Ke said after thinking for a second or two. “My memory is very good. I can help reconstruct the entire map using the coordinate points.”
Mu Shicheng’s expression was blank.
What the hell was all that?
He hadn’t studied coordinate systems since graduating high school.
Liu Jiayi narrowed her eyes at him.
“You didn’t understand?”
Mu Shicheng lowered his head gloomily and admitted, “Yeah.”
The elevator let out a ding, signaling that it had arrived.
Liu Jiayi turned calmly toward the elevator doors.
“It’s fine if you don’t understand. Just follow my instructions.”
Then she faced the opening doors and lowered her voice.
“Prepare to attack. There are usually people guarding the elevator entrance.”
The elevator doors slowly opened.
Water came pouring in.
Liu Jiayi reacted quickly and climbed onto Mu Shicheng’s shoulder to avoid being submerged. She frowned as she looked at the rippling water flowing into the elevator.
Two patrol officers stationed outside the elevator looked in.
“Are you members of the second detachment urgently mobilized to capture Heretic 006? Remember to put on your breathing masks. We are currently using water to capture—”
Their gazes quickly landed on Liu Jiayi.
A child who clearly should not be there.
“You aren’t members—?!”
The two patrol officers were startled and suspicious. They raised their communicators to report.
“Report! Intruders have infiltrated—!”
Before they could finish, Mu Shicheng and Mu Ke, who had been hiding by the door, grabbed them by the necks and efficiently knocked them out.
Mu Shicheng stripped the two patrol officers of their uniforms, masks, and communicators, then handed them to Mu Ke.
Standing in the swaying water that had risen to their waists, they changed into the uniforms with some difficulty, then dressed the unconscious patrol officers in their own clothes and placed them back inside the elevator.
Mu Ke pressed the button for B1.
The two unconscious patrol officers, now wearing Mu Ke and Mu Shicheng’s clothes, leaned dizzily against the elevator wall as the doors closed and the lift began to ascend.
A questioning voice came from the communicator.
“Hello?! What’s the situation with the intruders?!”
Mu Ke took the communicator from Mu Shicheng and reported calmly,
“We found two unidentified intruders at the elevator entrance. We expelled them immediately. They are currently taking the elevator toward B1 to escape.”
After speaking, Mu Ke turned off the communicator.
Mu Shicheng carried Liu Jiayi out of the elevator.
He shook water from his hands and frowned at the flood that had nearly reached his shoulders.
“What’s going on with all this water?”
“The plan has to change,” Liu Jiayi said as she took off her goggles, her expression icy.
“Someone is using water to trap Bai Liu.”
“I played a game with Bai Liu before. He has a very specific aversion to water. I think it’s highly likely someone is using water to torture him into confessing something.”
“We have to hurry.”
Mu Shicheng’s expression changed as well.
He looked at Liu Jiayi sitting on his shoulder.
“How do we hurry?”
Liu Jiayi looked around, observing the seams where the sealed corridor doors met.
“Someone modified this entire floor into a sealed environment and then flooded it, intending to drown Bai Liu while he runs through it.”
“But that also makes these crisscrossing corridors very similar to a sewer system.”
Liu Jiayi lowered her head to “look” at the swaying water.
“Bai Liu should be near the water outlets of these pipes.”
“That makes finding him faster. We don’t need to use the more complicated coordinate-system method from before.”
“I see,” Mu Ke said quickly. “Use the current, right?”
Liu Jiayi nodded.
“Correct. Use the current.”
“Wait...”
Mu Shicheng interrupted their conversation with a wounded sense of dignity.
“Can you two occasionally say things that someone with an intelligence stat of 74 can understand?”
Liu Jiayi said expressionlessly,
“It means we can judge the location of the outlets through the direction and sound of the water flow, then use that to find Bai Liu.”
“How do you judge that?” Mu Shicheng still did not understand. “There’s no way to get an exact location, right? The current here looks so messy. It’s not like some single little stream...”
Liu Jiayi casually handed her goggles to Mu Shicheng, cutting him off.
“Hold these for me.”
Mu Shicheng was completely baffled.
Then Liu Jiayi took a deep breath and dove into the water.
Less than a second later, she surfaced again, pointed in one direction, and turned to “look” at Mu Shicheng with a trace of disdain, clearly unwilling to waste time explaining to this idiot.
“In the water, I can judge the position of the outlets through the sound and direction of the current.”
Liu Jiayi made a gesture for them to follow.
“Also, the water is obstructed where you’re standing, creating eddies around you that make sound. I can use that to determine whether there’s anyone ahead.”
Mu Ke looked at Mu Shicheng and, with some compassion, added an explanation for the still-confused Mu Shicheng.
“It’s like how fish use the lateral line along their bodies to sense the direction of water flow.”
Liu Jiayi nodded.
“Something like that.”
“How do you even know how to do that?!”
Mu Shicheng stared at Liu Jiayi bobbing in the water in shock.
“Hey! This is the real world! Are you human or a monster?! This counts as a superpower!”
Liu Jiayi did not answer him.
She only gave him a look, then turned and dove back into the water, swimming as freely as a fish.
She could do this partly because she had been blind since birth, so her other senses were several levels sharper than those of an ordinary person.
The other reason was that she was extremely used to surviving in water like a fish.
When she was a child, Liu Jiayi’s father would often throw her into a weir pond to catch fish.
In order to catch enough fish so that the man would show a little mercy and let her go, Liu Jiayi had gradually evolved a fish-like perception that allowed her to chase the clever fish darting through mud and silt.
She had always hated this ability.
But this moment was an exception.
“No matter who made the decision to release the water,” Liu Jiayi said calmly and coldly as she wiped her face, shaking droplets from her hands while her body rose and fell in the current, “by choosing to use water to torture Bai Liu, they made it easier for a blind person like me to find him through the water.”
