Chapter 76 "The Little Taoist Priest": What exactly is the true form of the bell and tripod...?
The two of them really aren't suited to being alone.
Fifth Master was afraid that his eldest nephew would be provoked by him.
Jian Dieda had never dared to admit he lacked the ability, considering that Master Zhong's arm was thicker than his thigh. With such a vast difference in size, how could a man as tall as 179cm (without shoes) possibly act like a thug towards someone who was 191cm (with shoes)? Wasn't this a contest of strength between an ant and an elephant? Did Master Zhong's fifth uncle overestimate our modern-day Daoist Jian, this kind of talkative youth?
But now, the situation is different. Zhong Dingyan is alluring and charming, and looks like she's really easy to bully.
White smoke swirled within the vermilion-red, vine-patterned ancient bed curtains, floating and swaying before seeping into their burning desires. An indescribable fragrance aroused their passions, and the entire room resembled a Taoist lotus cauldron for cultivating elixirs.
Jane watched the domineering older man lying in bed, her eyelashes trembling, and she could already imagine how this adult would gradually melt into a garden of spring water, making him the most beautiful woman in the world...
"Bells and tripods".
Jane's empty heart suddenly pounded uncomfortably. He had never felt this strongly for anyone before. He was truly captivated here. He even muttered a truth that no one else knew. He had felt this way before in the dilapidated temple. He wasn't playing a role; he was himself.
"Bells and tripods".
“I told the elk, if anything happens to you, I will die with you. I meant it.”
"If you die, I will die with you."
Even after I finished speaking, the heavy feeling in my heart still wouldn't go away.
The screenwriter only sends razor blades; she never lies.
They turned a fake relationship into a real one.
Perhaps it really did happen between them.
If Zhong Ding breaks free from the script's constraints, wakes up, and discovers his thoughts, perhaps they could still change the ending.
However, our "vicious villainous male supporting character" Tongzi always has a lot of farts to say.
[“Hello host, you have a new task card waiting to be updated! Please check it; it will be automatically destroyed in 5 seconds!”]
Jane didn't say anything, nor did she click on the mini-drama in her mind.
This man, who had previously been playing the role of an "incompetent husband" through silence, suddenly gave his master a close-up, killer advertisement, just like the Taobao splash screens before and after Singles' Day.
Jane was getting impatient.
"You're so annoying."
Little System (hehe): [You're so annoying too.]
Jane looked at it coldly: "..."
The system has stopped its lighthearted approach and adopted a more honest one, attempting to use persuasive and emotional appeals to let players figure out the twists and turns in this plot summary themselves.
Most importantly, it warns the host not to use death as a guarantee.
Human promises are too light, far less significant than the weight of life and death themselves.
But it still misjudged something.
People who insist on staying up past 3 AM are people who are constantly on the verge of sudden death. Their souls are unstable, but they are not even afraid of sudden death. In addition, they are already a group of bald people who stay up too late, so it doesn't matter if they lose a few hairs after being scared a few times.
Jian Dieda is the champion of staying up all night among this group.
He's wanted to die for a long time. He doesn't care how he's poisoned, starved, frozen, scared, or dies of old age. What's the point of threatening him that he'll die a terrible death if he doesn't obey?
……oh.
Too.
The little system scratched its head, belatedly realizing how stupid it was. The hosts had already figured out a pattern to their deaths, so what did it matter to it?
It was at its wit's end, and turned to look at its colleague, the narrator, in the void with a look of utter despair. The narrator floated down, but this time it became the one playing the good cop.
"Playing is playing, joking is joking, but don't joke about life and death. Death may be a relief for you, but have you ever thought about how those who are left behind are the ones who suffer?"
"Yes, yes, yes." The little system gave a thumbs up.
Jane was distracted by their back-and-forth, and it was at this moment that the system took advantage of the loophole to control his retina.
Jane felt the snowflakes falling in large swaths.
The bells and tripods disappeared from the screen again.
"Hey, he's sick right now..."
Jane reached out but couldn't grasp a single image. He'd forgotten this was a game.
Zhong Ding's data vanished right before his eyes. Jian Dieda tumbled off the bed, his elbows hitting the ground as he lost his balance, his hands falling with them. Suddenly, he couldn't speak. His sweaty spine stiffened, and a familiar, sharp pain shot through his bones as fear gripped his mind. What was happening? His half-crippled hands from reality had somehow been brought into the game for the first time. He clenched his arms, writhing in pain like a shrimp!
This experience is very similar to being woken up from a deep sleep.
He suddenly lost the energy to dream.
He only saw a chair and a building resembling a central control room appear in the room, with countless broadcast screens floating in mid-air. Jian Dieda saw his legs being fixed to the chair legs.
The most insane thing is that the system put him in wooden shackles, and there was a whip next to him! An AI with the same voice as his executive editor, Fatty Ding, was calling him to urge him to finish his manuscript!
"Senior brother!!! Senior brother!! Update!! Update now!!! Is the script finished yet!! You said you'd submit the manuscript last time, but you were actually flirting with guys, weren't you!! A writer who abandons a story is destined to have no love! If you don't fill in the plot holes, you'll be a bottom forever!"
Jian Dieda: "..." Damn it.
...
The young Taoist priest had no choice but to comply for now.
But no one knows what he was really thinking about in retaliation; at the moment, he just seemed a little too calm.
Because this little system has been rambling on and on without answering its first question.
"Since you've taken over Zhongding Data directly, let's talk about your two lack of supervisory responsibility..."
Jian Dieda, sitting on the stool, raised his head in a less-than-friendly manner. His dark eyes, like those of a ghost, stared menacingly at the large screen.
"Let's be frank, no one has actually reached the ending of this game yet, right?"
"Therefore, none of the NPCs know their own fate. Even Xiaomei's storyline is something I write for you, and you just approve it."
"You two are using me as a screenwriter to continue your unfinished projects, aren't you?"
Clearly, the fact that the small system dared not speak about Jian Dieda's guess explained the reason. In the next minute, the entire system monitoring room was tormented by a sense of impending doom—until the narrator bowed his head and admitted his mistake for the first time.
"I'm sorry, this was our mistake."
Mistake.
hehe.
"I hate the mistake, and I hate even more the system error that didn't send a compensation email." Jian Dieda is now a gamer who has been ripped off by unscrupulous game companies. Do these trashy data engineers know that he would go crazy if he lost his game husband's original memory database? How dare they use such a terrible bug to harm him and Zhong Ding? The key is that Zhong Ding is the most miserable one! This idiot NPC doesn't even know that the game company exists. He still thinks he is a person, a good NPC who protects Qingyang Town...
Yes.
This is why Jian Dieda was so angry about ending this side quest, yet couldn't tell anyone. Ever since he completed Xiaomei's route and unlocked Zhong Ding's side quest, Jian Dieda had noticed the fourth strange, contradictory, and inexplicable problem in the game—Zhong Ding's stance.
The question provided by the system has always been "Strange Tales of Qingyang Town".
If a normal person becomes a "little Taoist priest" to solve this puzzle, they would subconsciously feel that their relationship with Zhong Ding should be tense, with the two protagonists forced to cooperate. This is how the background of the beginning of a detective story is written.
After all, all the clues in the case point to Zhong Ding as a guardian. Even if he is not one of the main characters, he is still carrying a mission. He is the successor of the previous guardian and also takes on the responsibility of eliminating demons and finding the second round of suppression treasures after the death of the previous generation.
But now things have reversed. Qingyang Town is not a place for humans to live. This special environment is the entrance to the ghost realm, a cursed land, not some village or town in the human world.
In a well-protected place, this person is called God.
Protecting the bad places, this person, no, no, is this person even human?
What exactly is the main body of the bell and tripod?
Are the Zhong family members really human?
Most importantly, why doesn't Zhong Ding himself know his identity? Oh, because it's all a bug in the system. It makes the boss believe he's a human, a kind and righteous being, and then gradually leads outside players to discover that the boss is the only one deceived by this world, thus ensuring that the game's biggest "villain" dies in absolute agony after the truth is finally revealed...
"Is this your goal?" Jane Dieda couldn't understand how there could be such a heartless game developer in the world. This was a twisted behavior that went against human nature. Did humans have to treat game characters so unfairly? Did they really want him, as the main player, to reveal the answer and finally force a man to his death to complete the ending?
The temperature in the small, dark room was frighteningly low, and the silence around him was eerily quiet. The flickering red dots on the computer network seemed to be monitoring him.
However, things weren't as simple as most people thought. After waiting for a while, Jian Dieda finally heard the narrator jump out, his detached, aloof voice sweeping across the dialing screen as he spoke.
“We did not maliciously deprive Zhong Ding of his basic human rights as an NPC; it’s just that his original data structure is different.”
This guy then revealed everything: "Player Jane Dieda, we sent you here to fix a big bug, but it's not a flaw in the script itself, it's a bug caused by the 'guests'."
Jian Dieda: "Renke?"
The little system is getting in the way again: "It refers to players who illegally team up in violation of the game rules."
Jane Dieda was completely unconvinced: "So, the fourth catastrophe is starting again? Aren't the players all chosen and deployed by you?"
The little system looked aggrieved: Colleague, look, this host is bullying them!
"No, the intruders are beyond our control, and their behavior is often unmanageable." The narrator was quite reliable at crucial moments. It typed a few lines of code on the host and projected a family genealogy sequence before introducing, "Look for yourself, how many 'outsiders' have fallen from the sky in the history of Qingyang Town? This is not an isolated case."
"Before the administrators restricted player levels and enforced real-name authentication, there were many women in Qingyang Town who were abandoned by players in the system. She and her children never knew that the men who disappeared never treated them as human beings."
“…What do you mean?” Jane Dieda began to feel that something was very wrong.
The narrator explains: "It means that they are just a string of codes in the eyes of the customers."
"So the so-called love and sex in the game are just a walkthrough designed by a group of humans after studying the strategy guide. Since these male players only see entering Qingyang Town as a thrill in the dungeon, in the end, only the women's memory codes, which can no longer be corrected, become ghosts rejected by other NPCs in the game."
"..."
"Zhong Ding, the tragic villain destined to be abandoned in this round of the game, is a virus code spawned by a player and the original NPC—the red-clothed demon, 'Wu Xiang Gui'."
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Author's Note: When everyone revealed the boss, the villain looked even more shocked, pained, and desperate than everyone else. Tell me, isn't the young master's life miserable...?
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