Global Collapse

Chapter 403 Gugu's Trick

“My brother’s skull is round and pretty,” Gu Mian said, looking at the beautiful skull that had been pried out of the ground. “He must have looked good when he was alive, but it’s a pity that he turned into bones.”

Then he noticed that the character on the screen was moving uncontrollably.

The screen kept zooming in on the skull, the beautiful head magnifying until it filled his entire field of vision.

Immediately afterwards, Gu Mian saw a pair of withered hands appear on the screen. The character herself reached out her hands and carefully picked up the somewhat dirty skull, gently holding it in her arms.

The screen changed again, the perspective shifted directly from the bottom of the well to a room, the same room Gu Mian had seen in the closet. The floor had been replaced with a new one, and there were traces of repainting on the wall where the woman had been hung, but the marks of the iron hook nailed to the wall could not be completely erased, so they could only cover it up with a layer of white discarded paint.

The skull that had almost filled the entire screen has now become a real head.

This is a young man with gray hair and brown eyes, somewhat thin. He is wearing a worn-out coat, bends down, and smiles gently at the screen, probably even reaching out to pat the character's head.

Gu Mian looked at the face that almost took up half the screen: "It should be my brother."

The older brother's mouth opened and closed, and his voice seemed quite gentle: "Stay home obediently. I'm going out to work and will be back before tonight."

Then he straightened up, and from his perspective, his tall figure walked out of the door and closed it, leaving his sister alone in the room filled with a sense of dread.

Then the screen perspective started moving, and as expected, the younger sister followed suit.

It turned out that the group's terrorist attacks on the saintess were far from over. In just a few frames, Gu Mian saw various assassination methods, including "oil-pouring fire attack", "homemade bomb attack", and "pretending to be asleep to lure the enemy", which shocked the entire Gu Mian community.

Although Gu Mian had been targeted by assassins since childhood, the variety of assassination attempts still dazzled him.

But compared to Gu Mian, the Holy Maiden is still lucky because she has a perfect older brother.

He watched as the terrifying flames finally engulfed the person who had tried to set the fire, while his brother, who had taken off his coat, watched quietly until the person in front of him was reduced to charred remains.

A deafening explosion echoed through the abandoned house, and when others arrived, they only saw human bodies blown to pieces.

Even if he fights two people, he can win, but the process is more brutal, and he has several bleeding wounds on his body.

The sun was setting in the west, and evening was approaching. Her perspective followed her brother to a riverbank. She saw him wash his bleeding wounds, roughly wrap them with a few strips of cloth, and finally put on a tattered coat to cover his wounds.

"I'm back." When her brother's figure reappeared at the door, the last rays of the sun were completely obscured by the horizon. Gu Mian looked outside and saw only boundless darkness.

Then the scene shifts to the brother's bloodless face, a memory from the bottom of the well, before he turned to bones; the messy scratch marks on the well wall are still clearly visible, and the strange symbol is painted on the side, seemingly hinting at something; the brother's fingertips, which haven't yet rotted, are almost worn down to bone, as he desperately climbed upwards.

Just then, Gu Mian suddenly saw the pale head on the ground stiffly twist, and then the face turned ninety degrees to the right in the dark and damp well, facing the screen and then suddenly opened its mouth wide.

"What happened?" Gu Mian frowned. "He should have been dead by now. Do you remember this part?"

The corpse, which should have been resting peacefully, seemed to be screaming something, but the subtitles disappeared again, and Gu Mian couldn't understand what it was shouting.

The screen suddenly shattered like glass that had been struck, and Gu Mian finally understood the two last words the corpse uttered—

"Run quickly"

In that instant, the screen returned to normal, and in front of him was still the dark bottom of the well and the white bones he was holding in his arms.

Something just seems a little off...

And this eerie feeling seems to be coming from...the top of my head?
Gu Mian seemed to sense something and looked up, only to see half a face had somehow appeared in the well, staring intently at her.

It's a little bird.

Unfortunately, the little bird and the two men who went out to carry the body returned.

"Gu Mian can't hear us, which is very likely a tactic the game uses to prevent him from discovering that we are the save point. But Gu Mian has a keen intuition and noticed this almost from the beginning."

The fat man nodded as he listened to Chu Changge's words: "So the doctor can't hear us because this game is trying to mislead him into killing us?"

“It’s like this,” Chu Changge’s voice continued through the microphone, “but…”

He suddenly stopped talking at this point.

The fat man scratched his head and waited for a few seconds, but when the other party didn't continue, he asked impatiently, "But what?"

Chu Changge then spoke again: "But if Gu Mian can't hear our voices, and if he can't hear any other voices either, then things might not be so simple; and judging from the state of the character he's controlling, it seems that he really can't hear any voices."

As I just mentioned, if Gu Mian hears anything, a secret might be exposed. I suspect this secret is related to him personally. However, he shouldn't be in danger until the save data is completely used up. But if the save data is used up and the character controlled by Gu Mian dies again... In short, don't destroy the save data.

The fat man quickly agreed, and the call ended there. He sat down in the chair at the table and pondered.

“Sound and secrets…” The fat man frowned; he couldn’t figure out what the connection could be between the two.

He went through all the books in the room, and almost dismantled the bookshelves. Thinking that a lighter could be hidden in the chandelier, the fat man even turned the clock on the wall upside down to see if there was anything hidden on the back, but still found nothing.

The fat man slumped to the ground, staring at the dark street outside: "It seems the doctor can only solve this problem himself, but I wonder if he's even aware that there's something wrong with the game's sound."

Just as the fat man had searched the entire house again, considering whether to pry open the floorboards to take a look, the phone on the table behind him suddenly rang.

"Is that Brother Chu? What has he discovered this time?"

The fat man muttered to himself as he reached for the phone, but the moment he put the receiver to his ear, a sudden chill ran down his spine.

"Click"

That's the sound of a lighter being turned on.

Immediately afterwards, 007's calm voice came through the microphone:
"I just found a lighter."

Moonlight shone on the abandoned village nestled in the mountain ravine. Gu Mian stood on the ground, looking at the three corpses at her feet; her health bar was down to one-quarter.

These people seemed to have been mentally prepared, but they did not expect the saintess to become so fierce, so in the end they still fell to the ground with a look of horror on their faces.

Gu Mian shifted her gaze: "They finally stopped looking at me like that, staring at food. It was kind of creepy to be stared at like that in the middle of the night."

If it were on flat ground, dealing with two men and a woman might not have resulted in such a significant loss of health. Unfortunately, Gu Mian had to climb upwards while dealing with the attacks, otherwise the people above would have sealed the well opening and waited for the others to return so they could trap her like a turtle in a jar.

"Speaking of which..." Gu Mian turned her gaze back to the well. The round skull was still at the bottom of the well, its face up, as if it were looking at her. The moonlight shone on the skull, and it seemed to be opening its mouth to say something, but Gu Mian couldn't hear anything, and the subtitle team wasn't working either.

"Was the 'run fast' that my brother said in that memory fragment directed at me?" Gu Mian stroked her chin. "Could it be that he saw the little birds coming back and that's why he warned me?"

If that's true, then he's a really heartwarming older brother. It's a pity that Gu Mian isn't his real sister.

"The mission of this instance is to complete the game. Putting aside the matter of becoming stronger, watching these memories should also be beneficial to the development of the plot," Gu Mian said, as she controlled her character to walk quickly. "The last memory should be at the gallows, but I walked around here a few times before and didn't find any gallows."

Gu Mian recalled the contents of the village chief's notes, which described the gallows as being located "at the far east end," and that the group of people who had killed the saintess's parents and brother had eventually settled there.

...If we're lucky, we might run into them again?

"I remember when I first entered the game, I was at the far east of the village, but there was almost nothing there, just cliffs and a large open space."

Gu Mian had made a point of looking over there when she was wandering around the village, but no matter how she looked at it, it was just an empty space, with no gallows or crusades.

"Let's go over there and take another look. Although we might run into that monster with the leg chain at any time, I still don't understand where that monster came from, nor do I understand why the village chief would go out through the secret passage in the middle of the night. Isn't he afraid of running into that monster?"

As Gu Mian headed east, he made a point of passing by his three friends. He glanced at each of them and, apart from the fact that the save point where 007 was located was smoking, there was nothing else unusual.

As the gaunt woman passed the fat man's save point, the fat man was on the phone with Chu Changge: "Brother Chu, 007 found the lighter too... no, she wanted to see if there was anything under the floor, so she used the books on the bookshelf as kindling to set the wooden floor on fire... um, she found something under the floor, hard and reflective, probably some kind of stone foundation? And she said she almost got turned into a kebab in the bookstore by the smoke..."

Just then, the fat man noticed a figure appear in his peripheral vision.

He turned his head and saw the tall, thin woman. He wondered if it was just his imagination, but the fat man felt that the woman's appearance seemed a bit more fierce than before... probably because there was some blood on her white clothes.

"Doctor! The doctor is back!" The fat man immediately dropped the microphone and ran to the door. He pressed his head against the door and looked the woman up and down, only relaxing when he was sure the blood wasn't on the character.

Then he remembered Chu Changge, whom he had neglected, and he jogged over to pick up the microphone that was hanging from the table: "The doctor is back, he came to my place."

Soon after, Chu Changge saw Gu Mian reappear with his own eyes.

The tall, thin woman being manipulated stood at the door for a while, dressed in blood-stained white clothes, before turning around and walking eastward.

Chu Changge stood at the doorway, looking in the direction the woman had left. From his perspective, there was a sheer cliff.

Gu Mian quickly arrived at her spawn point. The steep cliff was overgrown with weeds, high enough to bury a person. Apart from the weeds and the cliff, the place was empty, without even ruins. Gu Mian couldn't help but wonder if the people who settled here in the village chief's notes had also settled underground.

Looking up into the darkness, the towering cliff face was over ten meters high, eventually merging into the darkness.

Just as he was about to walk along the steep cliff to see if there were any clues, a huge shadow suddenly appeared in his line of sight.

He saw the monster with chains around its feet strutting out of the darkness. Gu Mian immediately put away the conspicuous shovel and quietly retreated a few steps, hiding in the haystack behind him before he was discovered.

The enormous monster didn't see him. Gu Mian watched from the grass as the monster walked forward step by step, as if it were on patrol. But it didn't patrol for long before turning around and standing in front of a stone wall for a while, before leaving after five or six seconds.

Is there something there?
Once the thing had completely left, Gu Mian immediately controlled her character to lift her foot and walk outside.

Some withered grass was trampled underfoot, making a rustling sound.

Suddenly, Gu Mian stopped what she was doing.

He heard the sound.

He had been the only one making noise in the room until now, but just now, the crunching sound of the dry grass being trampled underfoot was clearly audible.

He tried to control the character to take a few more steps, and all around him were the sounds of dry grass being trampled.

What's going on? This game suddenly has sound?
As Gu Mian pondered this, she controlled her character to take a few steps forward, but she only heard footsteps when she took the first two steps; the next few steps were almost silent.

"The sound doesn't seem to be coming from the computer, but from... above."

As Gu Mian spoke, she looked up and saw a gray ceiling above her.

After thinking for a few seconds, he quickly controlled his character to return to the haystack and turned the view to look at the ground. The ground was already covered by messy weeds. Gu Mian quickly took out a shovel and saw that the digging option appeared on the ground. He immediately controlled his character to start digging. At the same time, Gu Mian heard digging sounds from above, as if someone was driving a bulldozer and digging soil above him. Gu Mian felt that the ceiling was about to be dug through at any time.

"Could it be that I'm also in this game, and the character I control can help me leave this place?"

But Gu Mian, who was intently watching the screen, immediately dismissed this naive idea.

With a few shovelfuls, a black book cover came into view.

The moment Gu Mian saw the book cover, she abruptly stopped what she was doing.

He got it.

"I can't leave here."

"So I was also a save point... the very first save point..."

Votes! [Loudly]

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(End of this chapter)