Chapter 163
There were quite a few Yus in the organization, and Guan Suiyue recognized many of them. She pressed for a specific name, or at least which of their descendants it might be. Under her relentless questioning, No. 51 finally lost patience: "I told you, I don't know! Why don't you ask your friend—she's the one who brought this on herself!"
"Brought it on herself? Someone surnamed Yu?" Outside the screen, Lin Tu mulled over the name.
When it came to people surnamed Yu, she did actually know one. Lin Tu opened her phone; her chat history with Yu Liu was still frozen in the distant past—Yu Liu had asked her if she had any information about the [God's Nightmare Space] and warned her to be careful.
"Could it be you?" Lin Tu's finger traced across the phone screen, her lowered gaze dark and unreadable.
The scene on the screen continued.
"That's right," No. 51 sneered. "You won't get another chance to see your friend! So, how about you tell me the names of your other 'friends'? I'll find an opportunity—maybe I can still manage to rescue your current friend."
"What do you mean?" His words made Guan Suiyue tense up.
"Can you really steal something all by yourself?"
Guan Suiyue's tense body relaxed again: "So you people don't even know that yet... Well, since I'm doomed anyway, I suppose I could let a little information slip."
Unexpectedly agreeable, No. 51 felt the anxious thrill of a deal about to close. He quickly asked, "What?"
"I'm the first, but I definitely won't be the last." Guan Suiyue tilted her head slightly, her eyes seeming to look at someone beyond the screen, as if the words were not meant for No. 51 at all. "I'm a selfish person, and so is everyone else—but we can be selfless for others."
Her rambling left No. 51 stunned. Just as he was about to burst into curses, the screen cut off abruptly.
Lin Tu silently put the pen back into her bag. After a moment's hesitation, she took it out again, replayed the latter half, recorded it with her phone, and sent it to Guan Suixing. These matters clearly involved internal Temple affairs—she didn't want to get involved, but she couldn't bring herself to hide it either.
After sending it to Guan Suixing, Lin Tu transferred a batch of points to Dong Huadan and asked her to look into whether there was someone named Yu Liu among the Temple's people surnamed Yu.
Only after all that did Lin Tu reopen her chat window with Yu Liu. She thought for a moment, then composed a message in a relaxed tone: "How have you been lately? The [God's Nightmare Space] is about to begin."
.
Receiving a message from Lin Tu out of nowhere caught Guan Suixing off guard.
When she saw that head of long golden hair on her phone screen, against a backdrop of snowy plains, her palms grew sweaty. She had the feeling that a naked truth was about to be exposed, and she didn't dare tap to open it.
Just as she hesitated, the door suddenly slammed open with a thunderous bang—someone had barged in!
Guan Suixing was about to hide when a furious shout came from behind her: "Guan Suiyue!"
She recognized the voice's owner, and turned around to see Tang Haitang glaring at her in rage.
But that fury, upon realizing the person before her was Guan Suixing and not Guan Suiyue, shifted into something more complicated.
"She..." Tang Haitang opened her mouth slightly, but asked nothing. She gently tossed an envelope to Guan Suixing. "She left this for you."
Her expression was a mixture of regret and nostalgia, of anger and release. Guan Suixing had a gut feeling—Tang Haitang knew that Guan Suiyue was dead. Which meant her sister's death wasn't an accident, but something that had been anticipated to happen.
The drive to uncover the truth of her sister's death momentarily outweighed her grief. Guan Suixing grabbed Tang Haitang's arm: "Haitang-jie, tell me what happened!"
But Tang Haitang had no intention of answering her question.
"Dye this hair back," she said in the tone of an elder giving advice. "It'll cause trouble." She continued, "The things in this envelope are precious—don't use them carelessly. Your sister got them back... through great hardship. Whether or not you plan to follow her plan, don't let her efforts go to waste."
After that, no matter how Guan Suixing begged, she refused to say another word. The rest were things Guan Suixing didn't want to hear—
"Remember to pay the utility bills every month. If people from the Temple come looking for you, just plead total ignorance. If they insist on bothering you, come find me..."
Knowing she'd get nothing more out of her, Guan Suixing saw Tang Haitang out, then sat blankly on the edge of her bed and opened the envelope first. A prop ticket slipped out. It was gold, which meant it was at least S-rank—
[A Blank Fairy Tale Book: After a disaster, reconstruction laboratory research found that people faced an increased risk of psychological conditions like depression and anxiety, so a fairy-tale world was created as a refuge.
For absorbing objects into the fairy-tale world, creating a beautiful fairy-tale world. When you absorb intelligent beings (including yourself) into the fairy-tale world, they will act autonomously and you cannot interfere. When they realize they are in a fairy-tale world, they can leave it. When their destruction of the world reaches 60%, they will automatically leave the fairy-tale world.]
[Note: The owner of the fairy-tale book can also enter the fairy-tale world themselves and live out their life peacefully. So far, two hundred and thirty-eight lives have been lived out in the fairy-tale world, and their stories have been recorded in the book—you can read them by flipping through it.]
Guan Suixing's hands trembled as she read the prop's description.
So what did Guan Suiyue mean by leaving this prop to her? What freedom was Guan Suiyue still talking about until the very end? Was Guan Suixing really such a coward that her sister wanted her to bury her head in her own world like an ostrich, fooling herself with some fake fairy tale?
Her pale fingers nearly tore the ticket apart, but as the only thing Guan Suiyue had left behind, she couldn't bring herself to do it.
Tears welled up in her eyes. Guan Suixing whispered "I'm sorry" and finally crouched by the foot of the bed, sobbing openly.
It was a long while before she wiped her tears away. No matter what, she had to find out the truth about her sister's death.
Guan Suixing opened her phone and pulled up the video clip Lin Tu had sent her.
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Lin Tu slept soundly through the night. The next day, she learned from Kang Lina that Professor Lü had been temporarily invited to a closed laboratory. He'd had no way to send news because Zhang Bao had promised to handle the remaining miscellaneous affairs. No one had expected Zhang Bao to do all those things and then die horribly in his own home, sending the Black Factory scrambling to find him.
With the truth out, Lin Tu no longer needed to hide in Doomsday Town. Still, given the recent chaos in Doomsday Town, she disguised herself when she went to Dong Huadan's place the next day to look up information on the [God's Nightmare Space].
The [God's Nightmare Space] was a series of disasters; the [Demon's Suffocating Ship] was just one of them. Many of these disasters had claimed dozens, even hundreds, of groups who entered and never cleared them, sending out final messages before dying inside. As a result, there was no shortage of information about this series of disasters.
Logically, a disaster with so much available intel would be easier to prepare for and increase one's chances of clearing it. But the name alone destined this series to be no easy feat. People still regarded it as an urban legend, something that made their faces turn pale at the mere mention.