Life Game In Other World
Chapter 596: I think the world is crowded enough. (Extra long Chapter, asking for monthly passes)

Chapter 596: Chapter 596: I think the world is crowded enough. (Extra long Chapter, asking for monthly passes)

"Should I call you No. 01 Researcher, or the Mysterious Person, or perhaps Ved Weterlan’s most famous psychologist, Doctor Wells?"

He Ao gazed at the man in front of him, and under the scrutiny of his Divine Sense, there wasn’t a single thread of energy flowing within the figure before him. In fact, in the ’vision’ of the Divine Sense, no ’life’ existed at the place where the man stood.

The one standing before him was not an ’entity’ but rather seemed to be a hallucinatory clone.

He Ao slightly concentrated, feeling the fluctuations of his own consciousness.

This ability appeared similar to the power employed by Ved and the man in military uniform earlier, called ’Dreamweaver,’ creating a ’dreamscape’ that overlapped with reality, thus producing the effect of a hallucinatory clone.

From past experiences fighting Dreamweavers, this should only be effective within the range enveloped by the user’s power.

He Ao raised his head, and the power of Divine Sense pierced through the ceiling overhead. His penetrating gaze swiftly scanned the rooftop above the ceiling, where a being whose energy exceeded the C-level limits stood in the very center of the rooftop.

It seemed that there was the actual body of the Mysterious Person.

"Any would do. A name is but a code. Time has passed so much that I no longer remember my original name. If you prefer, you can also call me Doctor Wells. For quite some time, I actually believed that our last meeting was a final goodbye,"

’Doctor Wells’ glanced around at the photos on the walls, his gaze resting on He Ao’s upturned head, and softly chuckled, "It seems you truly have obtained some power that surpasses mere mortals from that ritual that is unknown to me to this day."

He turned and began to walk up the spiral staircase. "Although you now stand before me, I still find it hard to believe that you could find me. In fact, the last time I met you in this identity, it was already an event of eleven years past. Even for a Transcendent, that’s a distant memory. Not to mention, at that time, you weren’t a Transcendent."

He turned his head to look at He Ao. "Where did I slip up?"

"You did it perfectly."

He Ao’s expression remained calm as he stepped onto the spiral staircase, his figure swiftly overtaking the slowly ascending ’Wells’, and continued forward to ascend the rooftop. "In fact, my memory has indeed become somewhat blurred."

Above the staircase was a small sunroom made entirely of glass, with rows of bookshelves against the glass wall behind the staircase. A pair of open double glass doors connected this sunroom to the exterior patio—the sunroom was actually ’Doctor Wells’ office.

However, at this moment, Wells was not in this office, but rather on the rooftop outside the sunroom.

He stood under the patio light, his back to He Ao, gazing up at the stars in the sky.

Through the open glass doors, He Ao observed the figure standing in the center of the rooftop. Behind He Ao, the slowly ascending figure gradually dissipated, eventually returning to nothingness.

"Your words have piqued my curiosity."

The figure turned around to face He Ao. "What made you start to doubt?"

"Doctor Wells is different from the Mysterious Person. Doctor Wells has a clearly traceable history, a ’trustworthy’ social identity. I believe that’s also the identity you use openly after all, the Welme board wouldn’t trust a ’Mysterious Person’ of unknown origin."

He Ao glanced at his figure, gripping the bone axe, and stepped towards the rooftop. "Theoretically, unless it’s absolutely necessary, you wouldn’t mix your covert and overt identities, to avoid increasing the chances of being exposed.

"But the world can’t always be as one wishes. After you fell out with my father, the core information on the ritual arrays he researched was no longer accessible to you. Until you eventually killed my father, you never got that core information.

"My father was a family man; you knew him well. So, you guessed he might have shared some of that knowledge with his family—at least, my mother should know something.

"But evidently, you haven’t obtained the knowledge directly from my mother using transcendent powers, or there wouldn’t have been the events that followed."

"Your mother is a very determined person,"

Wells seemed to fall into some recollection, spreading his hands, "I can’t directly erode her soul or peek into her deepest thoughts with my master’s power from a distance."

He Ao looked up at him, his body now passing through the glass door, "So, you had to approach her under the guise of a psychologist, trying to coax information out of her."

"Indeed, this was a flaw. It effectively exposed both of my identities to you,"

Wells smiled slightly. "But I think I handled it well. Over decades, you never doubted me, did you?"

"The ability to make people ignore and forget,"

He Ao walked down the stairs in front of the door, "this ability is so useful that even when you were using the identity of Doctor Wells, you would subconsciously use this ability to cover your tracks."

He Ao watched him calmly, "In a comfortable environment, people always form inertial dependencies, don’t they?"

The smile on Wells’s face gradually faded, and he had realized where he had ’gone wrong’.

"You took the hard drive containing important research materials from my father, as well as the manuscript my mother hadn’t finished,"

"You, as the only person other than my mother, my wife, and myself who might have been in my house right before my mother’s suicide, had not been subjected to any suspicion."

He Ao walked towards him step by step, "Even the incident of my mother’s suicide, as the psychologist who was most likely to know the details of treating my mother, you were not subjected to any questioning or suspicion. Is that reasonable?"

At this point, He Ao paused, "Of course, under the influence of your ability to twist thinking, everything is reasonable. At that time, I wouldn’t have harbored any doubts about you, and you, fearing that your public identity would be exposed, used abilities that should not be used by your public identity."

"So, when did you start to suspect me?"

Wells looked at He Ao.

"In fact, I have not been certain about your identity for a long time,"

He Ao replied naturally, "After escaping your pursuit, I realized very soon that I did not remember your face in my memories, I couldn’t identify the ’Mysterious Person’s’ real identity, and of course, I still knew nothing about you at that time.

"The point that changed my thinking was that night when I returned to the old house, looking for the knowledge left by my father. There, I encountered the surveillance tentacles you had arranged, I saw the bookshelf that covered those tentacles, and I realized something then.

"—Why were you so familiar with my house? You even knew the exact location of the bookshelves.

"Of course, at that time, my suspicion was that you had somehow sneaked into my house, after all, for Transcendents, there are many methods to infiltrate a residence.

"Or maybe you directly used those surveillance tentacles to peep at my home’s layout. Those all make sense.

"However, these reasons don’t explain one thing, why did my mother ’commit suicide’?

"As you said, my mother was always an optimistic and cheerful person, even my father’s death caused her great pain, but she did not crumble. However, a year after my father died, she suddenly ’killed herself’.

"Although there were many abnormal behaviors that presaged her last actions, in my consciousness, she was not someone who would commit suicide so easily. At that time, I remembered the missing hard drive from the house, as well as the lost manuscript of my mother.

"Of course, I still did not suspect you at that time."

He Ao stopped walking, looking at the ordinary-looking, seemingly amiable psychologist before him, "Until I followed the vehicles of the Second Laboratory, I came to this vicinity, and saw the familiar Welme Weterlan Hospital.

"I think you should still remember when I tried to visit you several times and failed."

"Of course,"

Wells also looked at He Ao,

"There are many people looking for medical consultation, I couldn’t possibly provide you with a special fast track. Though I really wanted to ’treat’ your mother, I couldn’t make it so obvious. The harder it is to seek medical help, the more you would feel that the doctor was ’sought’ by you, and not coming with hidden motives."

"Yes, you are very good at manipulating people’s hearts."

He Ao turned to look at the night sky beside him, from where he was standing, he could perfectly see the building where the Second Laboratory was located, "And your desire for control is strong; you wouldn’t let important things get too far away from you."

Wells looked at the small building as well, falling silent.

The repeated frustrations in seeking medical help left Jess with a deep memory, and also made an impression of the ’Doctor Wells’ here quite memorable.

And when the memory of Doctor Wells emerged in He Ao’s mind, he keenly sensed that something was wrong.

Even though he could not point out what was wrong, he could feel that something was off.

In the strictest sense, under rational circumstances, He Ao’s soul was significantly stronger than Jess’s, making his perception of hidden powers much more acute.

Once he suspected there might be a problem, He Ao began to inventory the memories in his mind.

Although he couldn’t directly detect the problem through his memories, he used the power of Super Memory to etch all of his memories into his mind, then, like flipping through a book, he "flipped the pages" from an observer’s perspective to review those memories.

Over the past eleven years, there were many blurry scenes in Jess’s memory; He Ao was unclear where the actual problem lay since Super Memory could not record blurry scenes. Therefore, He Ao had to keep recalling, judging, and organizing his memories.

Although looking back now, identifying the Mysterious Person seemed straightforward, and the entire process seemed simple.

But to find these critical clues, He Ao had expended a great deal of effort; during that time, he was also inscribing the Array on the wooden box and making other preparations.

To eliminate the disruptive power of Wells’s thought interference, he compared his memories time and again, a process that persisted until this morning.

Only after determining that Doctor Wells was likely the person who took the hard drive and manuscripts and used the same power as the Mysterious Person to interfere with Jess and others’ thoughts did he dare to tentatively confirm Wells’s identity.

Of course, he also referred to some other information,

Like Wells’s Research Institute, which had hardly any academic achievements, yet it occupied the top three floors of the Welme Medical Consortium’s most important research building—this proved Wells’s high status within the Consortium.

And, for instance, the sudden "upgrade" of the research building in the last few days.

With these data-backed judgments, He Ao could finally confirm the identity of the Mysterious Person and the location, leading him to this research building.

Although He Ao had suspected Doctor Wells was the Mysterious Person early on, his suspicions at that time weren’t enough to support his making a decision.

After all, he didn’t have much time to act; if he made a wrong judgment and went to the wrong place, all his efforts would be in vain.

Even so, He Ao didn’t have full confidence that Wells was the Mysterious Person; his choice still contained an element of a gamble.

And the facts proved that his choice was right.

"Jess, you are indeed very smart. With such insignificant and severely disrupted details from eleven years ago, you managed to determine my identity,"

Wells withdrew his gaze and looked at He Ao, "Although I’ve always had faith in your intelligence, I am still amazed by your wisdom this time. If you were given more time, this time, it’s very likely that I would indeed fail."

"I think it’s premature to jump to conclusions now,"

He Ao ignored Wells’s praise; he was now very close to Wells, his gaze icily fixed on him, "I also have a question for you: my mother’s initial mental issues, were they truly caused by the shock of my father’s death?"

"I have already answered that question for you," Wells said, calmly looking at He Ao, "Your mother was a very optimistic and cheerful person, and a mentally healthy person doesn’t need a psychologist."

So it was necessary first to drive her mad with Transcendent powers so that she could then, as Doctor Wells, be approached and stand down her guard legitimately.

The countdown timer on the big screen below was ticking towards 00:02:47.

He Ao took a deep breath, "Was my mother’s suicide really a suicide?"

"She indeed committed suicide,"

Wells’s face showed a hint of regret, as if lost in some memory,

"She was as smart as you and also had strong willpower. She sensed that I was trying to control her, to peer into her memories. In fact, the manuscript of her unfinished new book already contained her speculation about my identity.

"Unfortunately, she wasn’t a powerful Transcendent, and she couldn’t resist my powers.

"In the end, before I could peer into all her memories, she took advantage of my absence and, with her last act of will, plunged a fountain pen into her throat."

His gaze returned to He Ao’s cheek, "She was smart; she knew she couldn’t resist my power, and neither could you, so she used her death to prove something to me: if I continued the attempts to forcibly control you, I might encounter the same consequence. This forced me to temporarily abandon my plans to control you directly."

Upon realizing the enemy was unstoppable, Jess’s mother used her own life to prevent Wells from further harming Jess.

That’s why, in that last letter, she urged Jess to give up the investigation and to avoid getting entangled in this affair any further.

It was the last thing she could do for her child.

"One last question,"

He Ao raised his bone axe, calmly staring at Wells in front of him, "Are you human?"

"Of course."

Wells extended his arm behind him.

"Actually, I had been hoping all along that you weren’t human."

He Ao activated Super Memory, leaped to the right, and violently threw the bone axe in his hand.

The sharp edge of the axe cut through the void, but it wasn’t aimed at Wells. Instead, it flew towards something Wells had been hiding behind his back.

In this instant, Wells swiftly twisted his body, and a sturdy bone armor covered him, brutally blocking the bone axe thrown by He Ao. Then he grabbed the item behind him and leaped to the side, widening the distance between him and He Ao.

At that moment, He Ao also saw the item that Wells had been shielding behind his back.

It was a small cylindrical console covered with purple lines that had ceased to shine.

At the center of these lines, on the console’s surface, stood an empty test tube rack.

He Ao’s gaze shifted to Wells, who had retreated. In Wells’s hand was a test tube containing purple potion that he was gripping tightly.

The potion was flickering with a faint purple glow.

He Ao directed his Divine Sense to the potion, but under the scrutiny of Divine Sense, the power in the potion was unstable and at risk of losing control at any moment.

The nineteen researchers below were originally intended to stabilize the potion. Now some of them were dead, and some were rescued by He Ao, and they were no longer able to provide the ’components’ necessary to maintain the potion’s stability.

Although the Mysterious Person seemed to have prepared a backup and still maintained the potion’s stability in the short term, according to He Ao’s understanding of Gene Potions, this caliber of Gene Potion still was a semi-finished product.

A semi-finished product that could barely reach C-level, it hadn’t achieved what Wells had initially designed it for.

"Is this what you wanted?"

He Ao retrieved the bone axe, and its hard handle struck his palm with a dull thud.

There was one minute left until the election ended.

He Ao swept his gaze across the surroundings, under the dim night sky, the surging thoughts of the people were being pushed to an extreme.

The vast expanse of thought was like an endless ocean, and these surging thoughts were like the gigantic waves that erupted from the sea.

He Ao watched Wells, "It seems like this is a ’ritual’,"

"You know a bit more than I expected, but to be precise, this is a ’welcome’,"

Wells corrected He Ao’s words, and a twisted fervor emerged on his indifferent face, "A ’welcome ceremony’ prepared for the return of the Great Being to this world."

"Return from where?"

He Ao reached for the wooden box on his back, "I think this world is crowded enough as it is."