Life Game In Other World
Chapter 685: Don’t Trust Them (Large - for Monthly Tickets)

Chapter 685: Chapter 685: Don’t Trust Them (Large Chapter for Monthly Tickets)

Click—

The old fingerprint lock slowly unlocked.

He Ao cradled Jia Xi with one arm, while his other hand held onto the cane and the carry-on case, gently pushing open the door.

The room was still shrouded in silence.

"The alarm system is operating normally."

The words of Eve ringing in his ears meant that the room had not been attacked during the time He Ao was away.

He Ao closed the door, walked toward the inner room previously occupied by his son, and laid the sleeping girl on the bed, covering her with a thin blanket.

He glanced at the familiar scenery inside the room, then sat beside his granddaughter, leaning against the wall.

He placed his cane in the corner between the bed and the wall, and set the carry-on case beside the bed.

He leaned against the wall like this, eyes slightly closed.

He Ao’s spirit was not tired, but his body was very worn out.

For an elderly man nearing seventy years old, going without rest for two consecutive days, fighting almost non-stop, and sustaining severe injuries, even with a strong physique and continuously absorbing energy around him for cultivation, it became somewhat unbearable.

As his field of vision gradually faded to darkness, his consciousness also slowly drifted into a calm slumber.

How long had passed—perhaps a few hours, or maybe just minutes—when his ears were suddenly filled with the raucous cacophony of a dance.

The obscure and dark world also began to brighten gradually.

Blurred, bizarre, and unpredictable rolling hills appeared before his eyes.

He stretched out his hand to touch the scenery before him, trying to move his legs forward, but his body did not respond at all.

A hazy plastic film seemed to hang before his eyes, separating him from those hills.

No matter how hard he tried, he could not break through this film.

The noisy dance music echoed in his ears, and the frustration of not being able to control his body gave rise to a furious restlessness in his heart.

This agitation urged him to destroy, to demolish, to slaughter.

The surging emotions continually brushed through his heart but were like violent waves crashing against a lofty mountain, unable to truly stir He Ao’s own feelings.

He Ao calmly observed the hills in his view; the hills almost never had a fixed shape, and with every blink of his eye, the landscape of the hills would be completely different from before.

Sometimes what changed was the number of hills, sometimes it was their position.

At times the hills were bare like a desert, with the wind blowing over decayed skulls; at other times, they were covered in lush greenery, with the sounds of beasts and birds echoing between them.

The only constant was the seemingly infinite expanse of hills.

Amidst these changes, the twisted hills in He Ao’s view gradually morphed into twisted lines,

Lines that meandered and rippled like strings touching the essence of the world, sketching out the melody of peering into the truth.

Under the influence of these twisted melodies, the chaotic dance music also seemed to become soft and melodious.

It was as if at this moment, he was peering into the truth of this world.

In that instant, he seemed to regain control of his body, and just by stepping forward, he could merge with this truth and glimpse the most fundamental knowledge of the world.

However, He Ao did not take that step.

He now understood that what he was seeing was not the actual Winding Hill but rather the reflection of Winding Hill left within his heart.

Or to be more precise, the contamination from Winding Hill lingering in his body.

The being that created Winding Hill had not left nothing behind. Onthe contrary, what it left was even more hidden and more capable of pulling one into hell.

He Ao slowly closed his eyes and began to search for the connection between his consciousness and his body.

"Grandpa?! Grandpa?!"

A soft, slightly crisp child’s voice kept ringing in his ears.

Accompanied by a sudden intense sensation of falling, He Ao abruptly opened his eyes.

At this moment, He Ao was no longer sitting on the bed, but standing in front of the wall, his hand resting on the pristine white surface.

The originally clean and tidy paint on the wall now bore a very short, winding trace, and some dry paint flakes appeared in He Ao’s fingernail crevices.

It seemed that he had just scribbled this mark in his sleep.

He Ao stepped back half a step, gazing at the mark on the wall.

The mark didn’t exhibit any strong particularities, but as He Ao stared at it, the image of its potential extension naturally completed itself in his mind.

At the same time, chaotic and noisy music echoed in his ears.

If he had chosen to "walk into" that winding pollution just now, a complete painting would probably be displayed on this wall at this moment.

"Grandpa?"

Jia Xi’s puzzled voice came from beside him again.

"It’s nothing, Grandpa is just very tired."

He Ao casually smoothed over the mark with his hand, turned his head to look at Jia Xi, who was sitting on the bed looking at him anxiously, and gave a slight smile, "I’ll be fine after some rest."

"Oh!"

Jia Xi nodded her head, seemingly grasping the concept, then as if she remembered something, she hopped down from the bed, put on her slippers, "Just wait for me a moment, Grandpa."

Her voice hadn’t entirely faded when her figure had already vanished outside the door.

"This child."

He Ao chuckled silently, shaking his head.

Then, he picked up a piece of blank paper and a pen, thinking deeply, and sat down at the desk.

Imitating the mark he had just made on the wall, he gently drew a winding line on the paper.

Following this, the image that extended from this line, twisted and distorted, reappeared in his mind.

The construction of this image was not completely static, but made of three-dimensional, twisted lines threading through.

And in He Ao’s ears, the echo of that loud and chaotic music seemed to be a part of the image itself.

He Ao’s pen tip moved quickly, as he relied on the artistic skills he had obtained from Vian to try and capture a fleeting ’sketch’ of the image in his mind.

As the sketching continued, the twisted image also seemed to become gradually easier to ’comprehend’.

But just as he was about to fully understand the image, He Ao stopped his pen.

All the commotion and chaos came to a halt at that moment, fading back into silence.

He Ao lowered his head, staring at the painting.

It was a work made up entirely of distorted lines and irregular patches, unfinished with a small empty space at the lower right corner.

This incompleteness significantly diminished the painting’s ’implication’, but even so, while gazing at it, He Ao felt the cacophonous whispering exploding in his ears.

According to the classification of the Evolution Acolytes, this incomplete painting should belong to the highest category, capable of helping C-level Polluted Monsters to merge.

And if He Ao were to complete this painting, he might obtain one of the same rank as the one on the Shadow Cutter’s ceiling, capable of directly leading people towards madness.

But that would mean, He Ao would need to fully immerse himself in that ’pollution’.

He put away the pen, folded the painting in his hands, picked up a lighter from the side, lit the painting, and placed it in the ashtray.

It appeared that the ’Listener’, perhaps, had once entered Winding Hill as well.

With the flames rising high, He Ao’s gaze also passed beyond the fire, to the books lined up behind it.

He gathered his thoughts, thoughtfully raising his hand bracelet and opening the photo sent to him by YiXiya, of his son discovered at the scene.

He stared at the social security number written on the ground.

Cito’s son Kavi’s social security number was 152-45-1351, and this nine-digit number was divided into two parts, written separately by Kavi and his wife.

Kavi wrote the numbers 1524, and his wife wrote the numbers 51351.

The numbers were not completely parallel, but rather crooked and staggered.

He Ao had realized early on that these numbers might not be correct, but it wasn’t until now that he had the time to carefully consider their meaning.

If the numbers written by Kavi are separated into upper and lower parts, the positions of 1 and 4 are quite close, at the top, and the positions of 5 and 2 are quite close, at the bottom.

In the numbers written by Kavi’s wife, the positions of 5 and 3 are quite close, at the top, while the positions of 1, 5, and 1 are quite close, at the bottom.

Looking at it this way, if the numbers of the four regions divided into top, bottom, left, and right are each considered a group, the two groups of numbers on top would be 14, 53, and the two groups of numbers on the bottom would be 52, 151.

The flame in the ashtray gradually burned out, and He Ao’s gaze fell on the books placed between bookends behind the flame.

When Kavi was very young, he once imitated the numbering method of libraries and numbered every shelf and every book on his small bookshelf.

But as his novelty wore off, he got too lazy to number each book anymore, though the numbering of each shelf remained because it was engraved on the bookshelf.

He Ao’s hand touched the books in the bookstand once again.

One place where Kavi’s numbering differed from common sense was that his first "shelf" was not actually on the bookshelf, but on the desk.

The books clamped in the bookstand on the desk were all classified as the first "shelf," and in Kavi’s system, the actual first shelf of the bookcase was numbered as 2.

At this moment, the fourth book from the left on the desk, precisely the book that recorded legends of ghosts and spirits, caught his attention.

He Ao paused his movement and pulled out the book, flipping to page fifty-three.

That familiar sentiment "The problem lies with this city" appeared before his eyes.

This was exactly the page where Kavi had recorded notes about the ’Pollution Cleaning Department.’

1-4, the fourth book on the first "shelf."

53, page fifty-three.

He Ao had an inkling,

If this logic held, then the second group of numbers would be 5-2, 151.

He quickly shifted his gaze to the fifth "shelf" numbered by Kavi, which was the fourth shelf of the actual bookcase, and the second book there.

This was another storybook; He Ao pulled out the book and quickly turned to page 151.

This page was easy to turn to because Kavi had clamped an airship ticket there.

The ticket was a memento from when Kavi first took the airship to Dawn City to attend university.

Nearly all airships of the Federation use electronic tickets, although physical tickets are also available for an additional ten federal coins.

Kavi would never willingly buy such a souvenir ticket for himself; it was Cito who bought it for him, knowing that his son preferred these physical tokens.

He Ao had also come across this airship ticket previously while browsing through the books on this shelf, but he hadn’t thought anything was amiss.

In Cito’s memory, it was natural that Kavi’s airship ticket was tucked within a book.

However, now the numbers left by Kavi pointing to the page with the airship ticket suggested he might have left some ’message’ for his father.

He Ao scrutinized the airship ticket.

It was a ticket from Saint Joen City to Dawn City, and at that time Cito had bought physical tickets for both the outbound and return trips for his son.

The other ticket from Dawn City back to Saint Joen City was placed inside another book.

Kavi had specifically directed attention to this ticket, combining it with the thoughts of leaving the city he had written in the ghost storybook, it was highly likely that he wanted Cito to take his daughter and leave the city.

But perhaps it wasn’t just that simple.

Page 151 of this book was on the left side.

He Ao placed the book on the desk and aligned the airship ticket clamped inside to face left.

At this moment, the arrow on the ticket pointing towards the destination was precisely aimed upwards.

He Ao looked at the top edge of the airship ticket, where at that moment like a line, it outlined a sentence.

"Do not trust them."

He Ao stared at this phrase, turned the pages back to find the beginning of the story.

He quickly read through the story from start to finish.

This is an ordinary short horror story.

The story features several main characters, including a solitary traveler, a couple, a boy and his father, and two agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation on a mission.

In this story, the characters accidentally wander into an abandoned grain factory, where they encounter the evil spirits that haunt the facility.

In the background of the story, these evil spirits were the managers of the factory who made a deal with the Evil God, sacrificing the entire factory in an attempt to gain wealth and power.

However, their actions were discovered by a passing wizard who thwarted their plans, killed them, and sealed their souls within the factory.

The main narrative describes the experiences of the various characters, with a rather uncomplicated background.

As the story unfolds, all the mysteries surrounding the characters are revealed. The solitary traveler is actually a survivor of the factory workers who were sacrificed; he has returned to blow up the factory and perish together with the evil spirits.

The couple, where the girl, having gained knowledge of the sacrificial method through certain channels, was actually luring her boyfriend there to offer him as a sacrifice using the factory’s damaged Array. He was not her first boyfriend to be sacrificed.

The identities of the boy and his father are the simplest; they are wanderers who entered the abandoned factory out of desperation due to the lack of a warmer place to stay.

As for the two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, they never existed in the first place.

They were evil spirits from the beginning.

The boy discovered the secret of these false agents and secretly approached his father, who had been kept in the dark, and told him these words,

"Don’t trust them."

The end of the story is the couple perishing together in a final struggle, the solitary traveler successfully destroying the factory, and the boy, along with his father, managing to kill the evil spirits and escape alive.

The story itself is just a very common horror tale, and its author is not aware of the Transcendent world; many of its segments are cobbled together from various legends.

However, this story conveys well what Kavi wanted to tell his father.

He truly knew some hidden secrets.

He Ao closed the book.

It seems that on the night when Night Hawk injured the investigative team, Kavi indeed had contact with Night Hawk and might even have saved the injured Night Hawk.

But this ’kindness’ brought disaster upon him.

The boy in the story had a happy ending, but reality always has some discrepancies with stories.

He Ao opened the suitcase beside him.

Between two urns, a photo frame lay quietly, the wedding photo frame from his son’s house that was not burned.

Night Hawk was not stupid; he surely knew the risk Kavi took to save him.

Thus, it’s highly likely that Night Hawk had left behind a way to get in touch with him, in case Kavi found himself in danger and needed to reach out to him.

But in Cito’s memory, that stubborn kid would definitely not betray Night Hawk to save himself if he knew the people who captured him were after Night Hawk; calling Night Hawk over would thus play right into the hands of the Evolution Acolytes.

After all, Night Hawk had once saved him.

He wouldn’t give up any way to contact Night Hawk either.

So, the means to contact Night Hawk must have always been in Kavi’s house from the beginning.

He Ao picked up the photo frame.

It was the most securely protected item in Kavi’s house, and it was also one of the things Kavi cherished most.

He Ao turned the photo frame around and removed its backing.

A thumb-sized, crystalline piece of seashell as beautiful as jade appeared before his eyes.

He picked up the shell piece.

The moment he touched the shell, He Ao understood how to use it,

’Crush it.’

He Ao gently pinched the shell piece between his forefinger and thumb, then slowly applied pressure.

As tiny cracks spread across the shell, a connection formed through the ethers, bridging the space between it and He Ao.