Chapter 104 Old School Days: He did indeed leave the players a way out...
Pu Fengchun secretly glanced at Xue Chao. The cage containing the butterflies was placed on the windowsill. Moonlight spilled over the metallic wings, like a will-o'-the-wisp lit in an abandoned old building. Under the lamp, unseen ghosts lingered, making the surroundings feel crowded and the air thin.
However, the dim light that frightened him made her a little scared as well. She couldn't see ghosts, but she could see people. But who would dare say that people are more merciful than ghosts?
She saw the camera in his hand, which recorded four deaths, one more to go, the one that was about to happen to her.
Downstairs, the "hyenas" that had come by the scent retreated back into the darkness, assuming she was dead. She stood alive beside Xue Chao, watching his deep, pale face, only half of which was visible in the moonlight, and her hand unconsciously reached for the cage.
The moment she moved, Xue Chao noticed. He could tell at a glance that she was nervous. Without saying anything, he walked deeper into the building.
Where to go?
"The place where butterflies are born."
Suddenly, a howling wind rose outside, like the first note of a terrifying melody. Pu Fengchun looked out and saw only a chaotic scene. Lights were on in every apartment building outside the school gate, stark white, with no furniture, curtains, or anything else in sight. It was like a vacuum shimmering with holy light, making one wonder if a human-shaped shadow might emerge at any moment.
Following the gate inwards, the grass was covered with golden sunflowers. The sunflower stems stretched downwards, almost touching the ground, and were inserted into the neck of a small child. The tender white flesh was like a soft flowerpot, and the body below the neck was all in the reddish soil.
Beside the lake on the grass, the open-air corridor has been transformed into an art gallery. Art lights ambiguously illuminate the lower half of each artwork. A piano is placed at intervals in the middle. A black cat steps across the black and white keys, making a little noise before jumping out of the corridor and disappearing into the adjacent No. 2 teaching building. As it enters, the overwhelming mirrors reflect light at subtly changing angles.
The melodious piano piece "Für Elise" played from the loudspeaker above her head, and the stairwell door opened by itself, with a red balloon with a lip print tied to the handle.
All five characters have died, all storylines are complete, and the sixth unit begins its transformation.
The main quest has concluded; all players who have survived to this point have failed. To continue surviving, they must escape the instance before the unit collapses.
The storyline ends, and the radio station turns white again, like the blank space before the story, or like the purest funeral. The butterfly bones of the missing humans are all here, forming a nest full of holes and layers, but the center is empty. Pu Fengchun tenses up, feeling that he should fill her in now, like the last offering in a religious ceremony.
She gripped the handle of the cat cage, her fingertips lightly tapping the wire mesh with a "click," which made Xue Chao glance at her again. This time, he chuckled softly, but the meaning was very subtle, so it seemed a little cold.
He removed the battery, took out the film, and recorded the deaths of several characters. In the white cocoon, the back of the butterfly wings became even clearer, with lines outlining the colors, winding and twisting, as if to steal one's soul at a glance.
Once placed into the hole in the nest, the film softly flowed towards the center, the riddled holes began to tighten, the protrusions of the human bones rubbed against each other, making a creaking sound, and finally formed a more rounded, yet angular, white cocoon of bones.
Pu Fengchun breathed a sigh of relief; it was good that she didn't have to fill it in. But what was she doing?
"Raising butterflies." Xue Chao said calmly, "One isn't enough, and two would require me to share, so let's make another one."
Pu Fengchun didn't ask what would happen if making another one wasn't enough; instead, she asked, "What do you need me to do?"
"Your special ability," Xue Chao said, "is impossible to materialize directly without the image of your death; it can only be activated by external forces."
"...At most, I can force the seedlings to grow faster; I can't let them live."
Xue Chao leaned back relaxed, glancing at her still slowly increasing stats. Instead of answering directly, he picked a pretext: "After going through this instance, do you still think plants are dead?"
Pu Fengchun was speechless when he thought of the flower-patterned heads on Jiang Ming and Sheng Hongren's necks. He stepped forward, placed his palm on hers, and felt the jagged human bones pressing against his palm like sharp mountain ranges rising from the ground. If he had been any faster, he could have sliced her flesh open.
[Superpower "Growth" in use]
At first there was no reaction, then there were small, crisp clicking sounds, like the cells inside the bone stretching. After one sound, there was silence, then another sound followed, intermittent, like a low sob, a growing pain.
Cold sweat dripped down Pu Fengchun's forehead, and her limbs began to tremble. Her superpower was not the type that could be completed instantly, like Sheng Hong's laser cannon, which was finished once it was fired. Instead, it was the type that required power input and maintenance, and how much it could "grow" depended on her abilities.
It felt very different. It was like a lung capacity test. Before, she could only blow a little air with all her might, and once it stopped, it was over. She couldn't squeeze out any more air. But now it felt like she was keeping a little air in, a continuous stream, not strong, but never-ending.
Xue Chao held the morpho butterfly's cage, trying to calm it down. He looked closer and saw that the cocoon seemed to be stuck at this stage, chirping mournfully but showing no signs of breaking free.
Pu Fengchun was too weak to speak, so he glared at him as if asking, "Is it really okay if the death fragments are not collected completely?"
So he placed his hands on it and walked around the huge bone cocoon. He used a little force and found that the bones had become thinner and softer. He nodded to Pu Fengchun. Pu Fengchun groaned inwardly, but knew it was useful, so he focused on it.
This was the first time she had used her superpower for such a long time. As the time went on, the sensations became clearer. Her body was like a patch of wild grass, the grass neither too tall nor too short. Usually, when the grass was huddled together, it would only sway in the wind like ripples. But now, it was like a rain of sparks falling from the sky, sweeping away everything from head to toe.
The smoke from the burning grass swirled into her brain, making her vision blur and her head spin.
The bones were getting thinner and thinner, and a brownish-red color could be faintly seen, like mud under a white mist, the color of the back of a butterfly's wings. He leaned closer and followed the branch-like patterns to trace the eyespots on the wings. Sure enough, he saw a row of circles, three on top and three on the bottom.
The trap has several layers. First, there is a white circle with blurred boundaries, like a base color. Then there is a narrow black circle, like a framed border. Then there is a bright yellow circle, like the outermost edge of an eye. Then there is a black circle in the middle, with a little white in the center of the black, accompanied by a little blood red.
They are stacked together, like a total solar eclipse overhead.
But he remembered that between the three above and the three below, there should be a larger circle, with the same shape. He moved closer, his curly hair leaning forward, hitting his skin, and his nose lightly touching it. Suddenly, he felt that the tip of his nose was hard.
Hard?
Suddenly, a circle opened up where the tip of his nose was touching.
Xue Chao suddenly stepped back and finally realized something was wrong—the three circles on the upper wing and the three circles on the lower wing were not on the same plane, but rather convex inward and folded outward, with the bulging point in the middle, where the large circle should be, right in front of him.
Unlike the eye spots of other total solar eclipses, this one was a brownish-red circle that moved with him as he moved.
Sheng Hong's body was inside.
Xue Chao immediately told Pu Fengchun to stop, but the cocoon was still "growing". He turned back and walked only two hours before Jiang Ming greeted him with a smile. Jiang Ming hugged him in a few steps, and his long hair rolled into his slightly open collar, making his chest itch.
Because he was still in the memoir, he was still a key character. Even though his main body was the head of a butterfly, and his appearance was the same as other players' heads, Jiang Ming's hand went up along his neck and stopped at the depression under the skull, stroking it as if he could touch the body of a butterfly.
"Butterflies can carry people over death, so why can't they bring people to my side? I've been looking for you for so long, I was afraid you'd forgotten me!" His first words upon meeting someone were always witty remarks.
Xue Chao grabbed Jiang Ming's smooth long hair and pressed his head onto the cocoon. His gaze, which had always followed Xue Chao's brown eye, immediately followed. Through a thin layer of bone skin, he blinked against Jiang Ming's face, and Jiang Ming's tender face could feel the opening and closing of that thing.
He didn't care, instead he smiled, glancing back with interest: "You also want to summon the boss, we're on the same page, why are you angry? Did you develop feelings for her while being chased by her? Then you should feel sorry for me, I think you'll die more often."
Xue Chao exerted more force, but before he could say anything, Pu Fengchun, who was almost exhausted, also came around. Upon hearing this, the smoke in her mind was poured with cold water, turning into a sticky, muddy substance that fell into her body, pressing down on her and making her unable to move.
She pointed at the enormous cocoon, unsure how to put on a face: "...This is the boss? You're going to release the boss?"
This question was posed to Xue Chao, but Jiang Ming picked up the conversation as if to say, "Otherwise, how would there be enough to go around? Should we make you kill each other? That's a good idea, but he's reluctant to do it... Isn't that quite fitting for the character?"
Pu Fengchun understood everything. There was only one official "passport," and in her hands, the other evil path was to cut off Xue Chao's head. Xue Chao would not let them succeed, but the unit was collapsing, and the remaining players had no way out and would do anything. Xue Chao either had to hide until the unit collapsed and he would settle the score directly when the dungeon ended, or he would have to point out a way to survive for the other players.
Creating one butterfly is definitely not enough... Pu Fengchun glanced at Xue Chao. He wouldn't lead the remaining players to fight each other to the death just because he could only create one butterfly. It wasn't that she trusted his morality, but rather that he would definitely think it would be better to kill them all, so there would be no need to create any butterflies. Why bother with just one more survivor?
At the time, I couldn't understand it. I just thought that Jiang Ming was too much of a threat, and he wanted to create another butterfly to divert these people's attention and stop bothering him. But if he created a boss... Although the main quest failed, the hidden boss battle was successful, and the dungeon could still be cleared.
He did leave the players a way out... but it's still a huge challenge where they could die at any moment.
But her heart leaned towards this approach; it was better than certain death. Pu Fengchun's gaze towards Xue Chao was momentarily conflicted: "Shall we continue?"
Despite being secretly called a "saint" by Jiang Ming, Xue Chao didn't waste any words. With a forceful push, he pressed Jiang Ming's head into the bone cocoon. With a "plop," the cocoon broke open, and the brown eye spots faded. Countless bone butterflies rushed out of the opening, like a white locust swarm sweeping across the land, screaming and wailing like ghosts. All three of them were knocked to the ground.
However, there was another crisp sound when it fell to the ground, like someone's bones had been broken. After a series of cracking sounds, it fell into a cold, sharp embrace—the ground had turned into bone, as if they had really crushed it!
The three of them fell into the room on the next floor. Xue Chao cut his hand on the broken bone, but he didn't care. He looked up and the bone cocoon didn't fall down. Instead, it supported itself against the bone wall, which was already made of bone, like a spider web growing in the corner. The hole it broke open didn't collapse. It calmly lowered a huge abyss mouth and "built a nest" downwards. Wherever it went, it was assimilated into another layer of skin of the bone cocoon.
He immediately leaned over the window, where the bone butterflies clustered into a pale white tornado, sweeping across every corner of the campus.
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