Strange game designer.

Chapter 846 Guidance
The morning sunlight shone on Dr. Gao's mocking lips. He could actually hear the word "protect" coming from Xue Se's mouth. That guy would do anything to investigate the case and didn't care about his own life or death at all.

Now that two groups of police officers are missing, while Dr. Gao has returned home unharmed, Xue Se is naturally not going to let this go.

"I also have something I want to report to you." Dr. Gao hung up the phone, told his family to remember what he said, walked to the window and looked outside. There were no police cars, only two black sedans parked at the entrance of the community.

"Hurry up and treat Old Ma." Dr. Gao fed Old Ma a few pills, and then footsteps could be heard in the hallway.

Before the community security guards even started their shifts, Xue Se and her men barged in and led Dr. Gao to the car, one on each side.

"drive!"

Without a word or greeting, Xue Se sat in the passenger seat with a gloomy expression, while two burly men squeezed Dr. Gao into the middle of the back seat.

Smelling the faint medicinal scent emanating from the burly man, Dr. Gao shifted his gaze and noticed that the other passengers on the bus had small snakes made up of human heads tattooed on their necks and metal rings with flashing yellow lights on their ankles. They were not police officers, but patients who should have been detained in a social disorder supervision center.

Unlike most patients, these guys were detained not because they were sick, but because they had severe violent tendencies, extreme personalities, and were extremely aggressive.

"Stop looking around." Xue Se stared at the rearview mirror. "Aren't you curious where I'm taking you?"

"Of course the police should take me back to the police station."

"Hehe, Dr. Gao, you're very smart, but sometimes you're too smart." Xue Se tossed a black cloth hood over the back seat: "Cover him up."

Half an hour later, the vehicle stopped, and Dr. Gao was dragged a long way before being thrown onto the hard, rough cement ground.

The hood was removed, and Dr. Gao's eyes adjusted to the light. Unlike the clean and bright Autopsy Avenue, the surrounding buildings looked like drug dealers on a drug addiction, exuding malice, extremely distorted, and on the verge of collapse. They were so dirty and chaotic that they were indescribable.

“Not everyone can live like you on Autopsy Avenue. The living conditions in residential areas like this are what most people live in.” Xue Se smoked a cigarette by the window. “Do you know why they live such miserable lives? They are kept like insects in the mud.”

Dr. Gao did not answer; he shielded the medicine in his pocket with his body.

"Because they were too kind and naive, completely immersed in their own world, they ended up handing this city over to bastards like Bu Cun. If it weren't for the police, they probably wouldn't even be able to live in this muddy hut; they might all have been turned into human flesh cans, becoming ingredients, toys, and food for the upper-class citizens." Xue Se said with great certainty, "I don't hate smart people, but I hate those guys who think they can control other people's fate just because they're clever."

Exhaling a puff of smoke, Xue Se squatted down next to Dr. Gao: "Yesterday we discovered that Dr. Bu had mobilized the internal resources of the ethics oversight group. The police officers monitoring Bu followed them all the way and found that they went to the forest. Through arrests and questioning, we learned that they were looking for you."

“I was on duty at the hospital all night.”

"It's too easy to fabricate an alibi. You just need to tell me why Bu Cun went to the forest to find you!" The gun barrel was exposed, and the gun in Xue Se's hand was not a medical stun gun, but a real one.

"He's the one who sent me there."

"What did you do in the past?" "To share a brain with the patients at the core of the forest, thereby gaining control of the entire forest." As soon as Dr. Gao said this, the whole room fell silent, even the patients in the social disorder supervision center stopped talking.

The horror of the forest was proven last night. The citizens, who considered themselves plants and trees, gathered together to form a forest. Individually, they were docile and harmless sheep, but when their will was united, they possessed an incredibly exaggerated power, easily crushing more than a dozen adult men, leaving them without a complete corpse, not even ashes.

"Before me, Dr. Bu was the gardener's attending physician. That guy was an extremely controlling psychopath. You could think of him as a monster covered in umbilical cords. He liked to control everyone and everything around him."

"Even after becoming a trainer in the ethics watchdog group, he was still not satisfied and wanted to gain even greater control, so he set his sights on the forest."

Dr. Gao's words sent a chill down Xue Se's spine.

"The forest did not appear out of thin air. At its core is a special patient who has unified the thoughts of all the 'trees' and connected them into a whole. As long as you can share a brain with her, or rather, swap brains, there is a chance to control the forest."

Dr. Gao drew a circle in the dust on the ground and continued, "The gardener was sentenced to death using the brain-computer interface of the ethics oversight group. I received his instructions that night to go to the forest for reconnaissance, but I don't know why he wanted to silence me."

"Perhaps it's because you know too much." The burly man next to him pressed down on Gao Ming's shoulder to prevent him from hurting Xue Se.

“Everything I’ve said is true. If you don’t believe me, you can even choose to share your brain with me. This technology is very convenient, but if you share your brain too many times, you might lose your way.” Dr. Gao was calm and composed, showing no fear even when a gun was pointed at him.

As his cigarette burned out, Xue Se was still pondering. He had brought Dr. Gao to this place with the intention of subjecting him to severe torture.

The phone rang crisply. Xue Se glanced down at it and answered the call.

Two men's roars came through the phone. The Shanghai police force was already stretched thin, and two teams had been wiped out last night, with Xue Se, the commander, bearing significant responsibility. More crucially, the disappearance of Bu Cun, the instructor of the ethics monitoring team, and numerous other personnel had further strained the already delicate relationship between the two sides.

"Bu is missing."

“The best outcome is that he flees to escape punishment.” Dr. Gao seemed to be talking to himself. “The worst outcome is that he completed a brain-sharing with the core of the forest last night, and now he is that forest.”

"The forest, which was once harmless and docile, suddenly went berserk last night, swallowing up so many people. The change is too great, and it's hard not to have some doubts."

Dr. Gao made no mention of the various alarms and gunfire he had set up in the forest the previous night, nor did he mention his father. In fact, he suspected that the forest rampage was related to his father.

Unlike Dr. Gao, Xue Se has many things to consider. The new Shanghai maintains a very fragile balance, and the appearance of the forest is very likely to break everything.

From a gardener's perspective, the trees that make up the forest are all living people, but from the perspective of a new Shanghai resident, they are just trees, a group of trees growing out of control.

(End of this chapter)