Free Web NovelDu Sanying leapt into the carriage at the very last second.
The inside of the train was stifling, but not the unbearable inferno he had imagined. The corpses hanging from the hand straps and the charred passengers slumped throughout the carriage remained motionless, making no attempt to attack him. Flames brushed past Du Sanying’s hair, carrying heat but none of the substance of real fire.
Bai Liu smiled at him pleasantly.
“Hello. My name is Bai Liu. I’m one of the players in this game.”
Du Sanying awkwardly reached out a hand.
“Uh... hello. I’m Du Sanying...”
A trace of surprise flashed across Mu Shicheng’s face, as though he hadn’t expected Du Sanying to appear in this game as well. But the expression vanished almost immediately. He folded his arms, tilted his head away, and let out a cold snort in one fluid motion, acting as though Du Sanying didn’t exist.
Du Sanying seemed used to that reaction. The smile on his face grew even more strained as he quietly retreated into a corner without another word. After holding back for a while, he finally asked hesitantly,
“Bai Liu... how did you know boarding the train wouldn’t trigger an attack?”
“This is probably just a transition sequence,” Bai Liu replied calmly. “We still haven’t received the first point-earning mission, which means the game hasn’t officially begun yet. These things are most likely here to create atmosphere and establish the setting. They aren’t meant to kill players.”
After speaking, Bai Liu glanced between Mu Shicheng and Du Sanying with interest. The two clearly did not get along.
He turned toward Mu Shicheng, who had gone silent the moment Du Sanying boarded.
“What? You’ve got some kind of grudge against this kid?”
Mu Shicheng shot Du Sanying a cold, openly hostile look.
The glance made Du Sanying so uncomfortable he practically curled into himself, shrinking behind one of the burning corpses while cautiously peeking over at them.
He looked young—half a head shorter than even Bai Liu. Combined with his thick coke-bottle glasses and thin frame, he resembled the sort of overworked high school senior who had spent too many sleepless nights preparing for exams. He radiated an almost painfully harmless nerdy aura, which was exactly why someone like Bai Liu, already working in society, instinctively referred to him as a kid.
“You’ll understand after you’ve played a game with him,” Mu Shicheng said darkly.
He crunched down on the lollipop between his teeth as though recalling an especially unpleasant memory.
“This guy’s Luck stat is 100. No matter how hard anyone else works, he always ends up taking first place through some ridiculous chain of events no one could ever predict.”
The audience watching Du Sanying’s small television immediately exploded into laughter.
“God Mu’s definitely remembering that multiplayer match where Du Sanying stole first place from him!”
“That wasn’t stealing. That was heaven handing it to him on a silver platter. Du Sanying didn’t even need to bend down and pick it up—God Mu delivered it personally. Honestly, Mu Shicheng’s delivery service is first-rate.” freewēbnoveℓ.com
...
“That’s why, even though Du Sanying ranks third on the Rising Star Rankings, he doesn’t even know what a transition sequence is,” Mu Shicheng sneered. “He coasted his way to that position. He has zero game awareness.”
Mu Shicheng jerked his chin toward Bai Liu.
“So let me give you some advice—stay away from him. Otherwise, no matter what items or information you gather, they’ll somehow end up in his hands sooner or later.”
“He’s ★ 𝐍𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 ★ lucky, but everyone around him becomes unlucky. Anytime players enter a game with Du Sanying, their Luck stats drop to some extent.”
Though Mu Shicheng spoke with obvious disdain, the truth was that when Bai Liu had calmly dragged him onto the burning train earlier, even Mu Shicheng had been startled.
It was only after hearing Bai Liu explain that the game hadn’t officially started—and that the opening was probably just a scripted sequence—that he relaxed.
Most players never considered concepts like transition animations. And even if they did, they still wouldn’t dare board a flaming train with such confidence. ƒгeeweɓn૦vel.com
Only Bai Liu would.
Bai Liu possessed an absurdly strong gambler’s instinct. If gambling had been legal, he probably could have made a career out of it. As long as something had an eighty percent chance of success, Bai Liu would treat it as absolute certainty.
The Mu Shicheng of the future never would have followed Bai Liu onto that train so obediently.
But the current Mu Shicheng had yet to fully understand what kind of person Bai Liu was. Bai Liu’s calm certainty made it frighteningly easy to believe him.
“Look.”
Mu Shicheng opened his player panel and showed Bai Liu his Luck stat, his expression darkening.
“My Luck dropped from 56 to 43. Tsk. Du Sanying’s passive effect keeps getting worse. Bai Liu, your Luck should’ve dropped too—”
Bai Liu looked at him silently.
“...Can Luck stats in this game go into the negatives?”
Mu Shicheng: “...”
Right. He had forgotten Bai Liu’s Luck stat was already sitting at zero.
Seeing Mu Shicheng explain his ability to lower everyone else’s Luck, Du Sanying scratched awkwardly at his face and shrank even deeper into the corner.
Then the carriage doors slammed shut with a bang.
Every burning corpse in the carriage abruptly transformed into ordinary passengers. In perfect unison, they turned their heads toward Bai Liu and the others, smiling eerily—
Before crumbling into ash.
A sweet female voice echoed through the train speakers.
“Dear passengers, welcome aboard Line 4. Next stop: Mirror Museum.”
Bai Liu looked up at the LED countdown display inside the station.
The moment it reached zero, it reset to:
[60:00]
One hour.
Bai Liu narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. That was roughly the amount of time needed for a train to travel from the first station to the terminal stop.
In other words, the explosion would occur in exactly one hour.
“The Last Train to Blast Off” was clearly modeled after the Jingcheng Explosion Case.
The explosion in that incident had occurred at Mirror Museum Station.
Back then, Bai Liu had gotten off at the previous stop alongside Lu Yizhan.
In reality, however, the station before Mirror Museum hadn’t been Antique City, nor had the subway line formed a loop around the city like it did here.
Still, Bai Liu had indeed ridden that final train.
Together with Lu Yizhan.
Originally, Bai Liu had planned to ride several stops farther. But Lu Yizhan had suddenly needed to leave early and dragged Bai Liu off the train with him.
Otherwise, with Bai Liu’s terrible luck—both inside games and outside of them—he probably would have been blown apart in the Jingcheng Explosion Case long ago.
The case itself had begun with two thieves stealing a priceless antique mirror.
Posing as the mirror’s rightful owners, they contacted the Mirror Museum and claimed they wished to donate it. However, they insisted on personally escorting the mirror into the museum.
The mirror was supposedly worth over a hundred million.
Since donations of that magnitude were extraordinarily rare, the museum agreed to several of the pair’s more unreasonable demands.
The city Bai Liu lived in was called Jingcheng, and the museum involved had indeed been the Mirror Museum.
The thieves’ true objective, however, had been to smuggle a bomb hidden inside the antique mirror into the museum’s backstage area and use it to threaten the museum into surrendering its collection.
For reasons unknown, the two thieves absolutely refused to transport the mirror by car, insisting on taking the subway instead.
As a result, the museum arranged for specialists to accompany the transport.
But somewhere during the subway ride, something went wrong.
The bomb hidden inside the mirror detonated.
Nearly everyone in the carriage died instantly, including both thieves and the museum specialist escorting the artifact.
Not long afterward, the thieves’ crimes—including the original theft of the mirror and their attempted robbery of the museum—came to light.
After attracting massive public attention, the incident was ultimately concluded as a violent robbery case and quietly closed.
Later, Bai Liu and Lu Yizhan discussed the disaster they had narrowly escaped.
Both of them agreed the entire case was riddled with suspicious details, particularly two major questions.
First:
How had the thieves managed to conceal enough explosives to destroy an entire subway carriage inside a mirror, then successfully pass security and transport it onto public transit?
Second:
If their goal had been money, why donate a mirror worth over a hundred million to the Mirror Museum in the first place?
As far as Bai Liu knew, none of the museum’s other collections were worth more than the mirror itself.
If profit had truly been the objective, the thieves could have sold the mirror privately and disappeared. There was no reason to risk transporting it into the museum only to rob the remaining exhibits afterward.
The cost-benefit ratio made no sense.
And using explosives—a crude, reckless method with enormous risks—made even less sense. The moment a bomb became involved, escape became almost impossible.
At the time, Bai Liu had casually remarked to Lu Yizhan that if he were robbing the museum, he would simply sell the mirror, use a portion of the money to bribe a security guard into assisting him, then kill the guard afterward and pin everything on them.
If done cleanly enough, he could buy himself enough time to flee overseas and unload the stolen goods.
“Using a bomb is just stupid,” Bai Liu had concluded.
Lu Yizhan had been rendered utterly speechless by the analysis.
“Bai Liu,” he’d said helplessly, “I asked you to help solve the case, not optimize the criminals’ plan!”
Bai Liu had offered an insincere apology, explaining that he naturally tended to think from the perspective of whoever stood to gain the most.
Lu Yizhan had pointed at him furiously and declared that a mindset like that would get him into serious trouble one day.
And now, trouble had arrived.
Bai Liu stood inside “The Last Train to Blast Off,” forced to consider why those two thieves had committed something so irrational.
His eyes narrowed slightly as his thoughts accelerated.
The thieves had refused to travel by car—a confined, isolated space. They had refused to remain alone with the mirror.
Instead, they insisted on taking crowded public transportation.
They had even stuffed a priceless artifact with enough explosives to destroy an entire train carriage without caring whether the mirror itself would survive.
And rather than selling the mirror directly, they attempted to exchange it for the museum’s other collections instead.
That completely contradicted the greed-driven nature of ordinary thieves.
Which left only one conclusion.
They were afraid of the mirror.
They didn’t dare remain alone with it inside a car.
Perhaps they had already tried to sell it and failed for some reason, only for the mirror to somehow return to them.
Driven to desperation, they disguised themselves as donors and sought out the authority of the Mirror Museum, hoping to donate—
No.
To imprison it.
They had even packed the mirror with explosives in a desperate attempt to destroy it entirely.
Yet despite everything they tried, the tragedy still happened.
The mirror exploded aboard the subway.
Which meant that if Bai Liu’s deduction was correct, then the true key to this game was not the train about to explode, nor the burned passengers, nor the chaotic station names Du Sanying was currently studying nearby—
—but the mirror itself.
[Congratulations to player Bai Liu for being the first to trigger the main storyline mission—Collect the shattered mirror fragments aboard the last train (0/??)]
