Chapter 56: The ABC Murders
"Congratulations to player Li Ziyue for completing the main quest. The completion settlement is now open."
"Since the time to clear this instance is too short, players are now allowed to settle their tasks on their own. They can move freely in the instance before settlement. At the same time, all backpack permissions have been opened, and players can arrange them freely."
"Huh..." Sun Yuancheng collapsed to the ground as if relieved. "I didn't expect that the dead were really hiding among the dead. But what about breathing?"
Li Ziyue sat under the tree, in a daze for a long time before answering Sun Yuancheng's question: "...were you divided into arts and science in high school?"
"Uh..." Sun Yuancheng scratched his head, "I didn't go to high school."
"……sorry."
"It's nothing. I don't like studying. Not going to high school will save me a few years of torture." Sun Yuancheng yawned.
"I did a biology question. The question said that the center of fresh vegetables piled together would generate heat. The question was, why would it generate heat?"
"The answer is that plant cells are performing anaerobic respiration, and most of the energy produced by anaerobic respiration is dissipated in the form of heat."
Li Ziyue sighed: "When I touched the inside of the zombie pile, I felt an abnormal warmth, and that's when I came up with this guess."
Sun Yuancheng suddenly realized: "But this is too targeted at players like us who haven't been to school. When a normal person sees the condition of 'breathing', he will touch his nose to test the breath."
Li Ziyue just nodded and said nothing.
Sun Yuancheng rubbed his eyes in confusion. His intuition told him that something was wrong with Li Ziyue.
However, the main mission was finally completed, and his tense nerves finally relaxed. The doubts in his heart could not suppress his overwhelming sleepiness, and his blinking frequency became lower and lower, but he fell asleep in the blink of an eye.
Come to think of it, he hadn't closed his eyes peacefully for two whole days.
Li Ziyue walked over and moved some space for him to prevent the dead branches from falling on Sun Yuancheng, then he looked up at the old woman they had brought along.
Now that the main quest has been completed, there is no point in keeping the old woman.
But Li Ziyue still had something to ask.
He walked over: "I know you are not dead."
The old woman said nothing.
"I don't want to ask why you want to frame me. I just want to ask," he paused for two seconds, "why you want to commit suicide."
"Don't your body functions and age no longer change after you reach 80? If you can't die, why commit suicide?"
The old woman still closed her eyes and did not answer.
Li Ziyue raised his eyes to look at the farmer next to him, only to see him sighing heavily.
Li Ziyue felt that he might understand something.
"I'm sorry," he pursed his lips, "I asked a very offensive question, I'm sorry."
Unexpectedly, the old woman, who had originally refused to speak, shed two lines of tears after hearing his words.
Li Ziyue was stunned: "Sorry, I didn't say this to make you..."
The old woman slowly opened her eyes and said kindly, "Child."
"Child...you don't understand..."
"Qian Wanlong and I are not biological mother and son," she said slowly, "Have you seen the basement where the child is kept?"
Li Ziyue nodded.
"This is all our fault..." Tears rolled down her cheeks. "We categorized the children from the beginning. The cowardly ones would be sent to be brides. If the players kill the brides, we can get food and new children given by the gods."
"Those who are cruel and merciless will be raised by us as new villagers..."
She looked down the mountain and said, "The weather here is bad, and normal plants cannot be grown at all. We borrowed the flesh and blood of dead children and buried them in the soil to make the land a little more fertile... But the crops grown are still not enough for everyone to eat, and the only other source of food we can control is God..."
"Only villagers who are completely self-serving can survive such a choice. They must induce, force, and kill players without guilt, and also use children mercilessly..."
The old woman seemed to be laughing: "The choice we made a long time ago determined our current situation. The cruel villagers will not let us old people with no ability eat for free. They will not kill us because God will not allow it, but they will hand us a knife."
"I raised Qian Wanlong. Even if a person is ruthless, he or she will still have some kindness towards the child he or she raised. But this kindness became the dagger that killed me."
"You know what? If I don't die, Qian Wanlong will be crushed to death by the gossip of the villagers. They will call him weak, incompetent, and timid... I can't stand it..." The old woman covered her face and cried bitterly, "I can't stand it, I would rather die myself, I can't stand the child I raised, he was so cute, so smart, and so brave when he was a child, but these people say this..."
"I can't stand it..."
Li Ziyue lowered his eyelashes, and from the side one could vaguely see his eyelashes shaking rapidly up and down, as if he was sighing.
The farmer standing nearby said: "It has become a custom for the elderly in the village to commit suicide. Many elderly people are conscious and will find a place to commit suicide when the time comes. A small number of those who are unwilling to do so will also be pressured by the villagers. These pressurers include not only strong young people... but also elderly people who are also facing the tragedy of suicide."
The old woman was so excited that she fainted again after uttering a miserable cry.
Li Ziyue kept silent, he seemed to be in a low mood, he just stood there and stretched his body, but did not leave.
Zhang Lian also leaned to one side in silence.
The farmer held the little god in his hand and waved to Li Ziyue and his group: "Thank you."
His weathered face was now full of smiles.
Li Ziyue raised his eyes and saw the two of them. The heaviness on his face eased a little.
"fine."
He shook his head slowly.
I saw an old man and a child turn around and walk into the depths of the forest.
The tall ones curled up, while the short ones straightened their backs.
The fog in the forest gradually dissipated, and the sun in the sky finally fell into the gloomy forest. The leaves were no longer dark green, but were tinged with the golden color of the sun.
Their figures slowly disappeared.
"Zhang Lian," Li Ziyue said suddenly, "Come with me to a place."
Zhang Lian seemed to have expected this. He did not ask any questions and just followed Li Ziyue.
On the way, Zhang Lian came closer. He lowered his eyes and saw a small part of Li Ziyue's white chin hidden under his hair.
His complexion was originally fair, and when the sunlight fell on the side of his face, it made that side as smooth and white as jade.
Zhang Lian was stunned for a moment, and then he spoke: "You are a sentimental person."
"no."
Li Ziyue answered quickly.
Zhang Lian's eyebrows softened: "Okay."
"You're not stupid, but why on the test paper..."
Zhang Lian has made progress now, so he only tells half of these things to prevent Li Zi from getting too angry.
But this time seems a little different.
Li Ziyue rarely lost his temper. Instead, he lowered his head and sighed dully, "I don't understand."
Zhang Lian stopped talking and just looked at him.
After going down the mountain road and turning a few times, Li Ziyue finally found another field.
This area is very small, with a few dilapidated thatched houses scattered around. In front of the houses, there is a half-acre field. The loess bulges and cracks upward, with a few green seedlings inserted in the cracks. A few young men with skin tanned and shiny by the sun are hunching over and weeding.
Through the house, I could hear the sound of a child crying, and several women trying to comfort the child.
They were the strange villagers who had previously flooded into the basement.
The atmosphere here is completely different from that of the old woman's group. Here there are running children, hardworking women, working men, and old people busy with housework.
The skinny little black dog rubbed against the withered tree trunk and stuck out its tongue to cool down.
It is hard to imagine that in such bad weather, there is still a village that insists on supporting itself through labor.
There is nothing wrong with persisting in labor, but it is obvious that their physical condition is very poor, far worse than that of the other group of villagers.
Li Ziyue subconsciously stretched out his hand, but found that his fingers were blocked by an invisible layer of mist.
It seemed like another world over there, and he could only stand there and watch, unable to cross over.
His fingers moved through the mist, and he saw the people's movements quicken. The moon rose and set, day and night changed, and the four seasons cycled.
I saw the golden wheat waves recede, the green leaves withered and fell, and the tall trees were finally left with only trunks. The river dried up, and the soft land became hard like a stone that could kill people.
The village was shrinking, and people waved to the elderly who stayed in the village, and then left with their bags on their backs.
The hoes fell to the ground, the sickles cut the dead grass, they chewed the tasteless coarse grains, and the straw hats on their heads fluttered in the wind.
Thin children ran around them, and they reached out to touch the children's heads with smiles on their skinny faces.
In this dungeon, Li Ziyue had only seen villagers crying while holding bowls, villagers saying harsh words while holding blood-stained iron buckets, and villagers mocking players with cold faces.
I've never seen anyone laugh like this...
He squinted his eyes and felt a slight pain in them.
He had seen too much evil, so when he saw goodness, he actually felt uncomfortable and awkward.
"Sometimes I dream about the past," Li Ziyue lowered his head, "In the dream, I was probably only a few years old, drooling at the child eating bread next to me."
His voice was very soft: "He stole the bread. Actually, I wanted to steal it at that time. When I was a child, I always picked up rotten vegetable leaves from the garbage dump to eat. I don't know what bread tastes like, but I think it's very soft and should be delicious."
"I was very thin and small at that time, hiding easily, which was very suitable for stealing. But when I grabbed the edge of the bread, I saw someone staring at me, and my heart beat suddenly became very fast. I felt that the bread was not soft or light."
"It was too heavy. I couldn't lift it at all." Li Ziyue turned his head to the side. "I ran out quickly and stuffed the bread into my mouth voraciously. I couldn't taste what it tasted like. I just remember choking. The bread without water was stuck in my throat. It hurt so much that tears came out of my eyes."
"Then I spit the stolen bread on the ground, and my throat tasted blood. For a long time afterwards, I felt that bread tasted like blood, and the thought of it made me sick."
"I crawled into the garbage dump and started chewing rotten vegetable leaves. At this time, I actually thought the leaves were sweet." Li Ziyue seemed to smile for a moment, "At that time, I was lying next to the garbage dump, looking at the gray sky, and I thought it would be a happy thing to eat these for the rest of my life."
"If you asked me at that time whether to eat vegetable leaves or bread, I would choose vegetable leaves."
He pulled his hand out of the mist.
"This choice was actually very stupid. I didn't get any reward for my morality, and the child who stole the bread didn't get punished either. He lived a good life later. Once he was caught stealing by a kind-hearted rich man, who adopted him as his son. At that time, I was still wandering in the garbage dump."
"At that time, I had a kind of foolish persistence. If the bread was earned by myself, I would think it was delicious. If I stole it, I would think it had an unbearable smell of blood."
Li Ziyue hooked his hand around Zhang Lian's sleeve and said, "From a profit perspective, framing the players and then getting delicious food from the gods is undoubtedly much better than farming with your own hands and working hard for a while but getting nothing in return."
"But why did they choose the second path?" Li Ziyue shook his head gently, "Zhang Lian, I don't understand."
"I read about Yugong moving mountains, Jingwei filling the sea, and Kuafu chasing the sun, and I just thought they were stupid. I don't understand."
"People are so complicated. An old woman who can be cruel to us players actually loves Qian Wanlong so much that she can't bear to see him get scolded. However, this love has become a knife that Qian Wanlong is using to kill her. I don't understand, Zhang Lian."
"In the main storyline, I tried to escape three times, but failed all three times. My father also said in the letter he wrote to me that the sky was broken and there was nowhere to escape. Everyone was trapped in the field."
"But if we stay stuck in the village at the foot of the mountain and don't go out, we won't be able to reach the woods, nor will we be able to complete the main quest."
"I don't understand, Zhang Lian." Li Ziyue turned around and walked back. "If you don't leave, you can't break the predicament, and when you take a step forward, it tells you that you can't escape."
Zhang Lian pursed his lips, reached out and held Li Ziyue's wrist.
The next moment he was stunned.
Li Ziyue's eyes had turned red without him noticing.
With tears in his eyes, he was still holding 'Dad's' hand and writing a letter.
The bright sunshine just fell on his face, making the tears in his eyes shine like beautiful diamonds.
His long eyelashes trembled in the air and the tip of his nose was slightly red, just like that winter night when he and Zhang Lian first met.
"Zhang Lian, I don't understand. I will never understand this."
"Zhang Lian, tell me, if it were you, in this environment where it's hard to survive without killing people, what would your choice be?"
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