Rules-related weird stories: 4016.

Chapter 589 Wei Liang, Wei Liang, still Wei Liang

Lin Yi was struck dumb, frozen in place, his eyes fixed on the hat in front of him, filled with disbelief!

"Ryoko's hat?!"

"Could Liangzi have fallen into the layer?"

At this moment, he couldn't care less about anything else and immediately transformed into a real street cleaner, reaching out to grab the baseball cap.

But just as he made his move, a flash of inspiration suddenly appeared in his mind!
"Wait! Wait, wait, wait! I almost forgot, I came here to investigate Ryoko's fake person... Could that baseball cap be from a fake person?"

He quickly calmed down.

At this moment, Wei Liang should logically be in the classroom reading erotic comics, waiting for him to go to PE class together.

But this baseball cap is just too realistic!
Exactly the same!
He took a deep breath and used his "visionary insight" and sensory tentacles to continuously examine the pit.

However, something strange happened.

But when he opened the door, the bathroom floor and the toilet floor merged together like water droplets on a lotus leaf, forming a large water droplet.

Below the toilet stall layer, just like below the bathroom layer, there was absolutely nothing!

"What's going on? Did I open it wrong?" Lin Yi couldn't hold back anymore. Could it be that he had actually done the work of a locksmith after all that effort?

"Oh no, I should have tried to pull the latch directly first..."

Lin Yi suddenly felt an absurd sense of using the Crane Control and Dragon Capture Technique to pick up something that he could normally just bend down to pick up.

He hesitated for a moment, but suddenly felt a little dizzy. His intuition told him that he had overlooked some important factors.

He subconsciously called out to Tian Bufan to discuss the mysteries together, but out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of the latch on the back of the door, and suddenly a flash of inspiration struck him!
He pulled the door shut and then engaged the latch.

When the door was closed, everything seemed normal. But when Lin Yi locked the bolt, the space where the toilet stall was located was as if it had been severed by an invisible blade, abruptly separating it from the bathroom.

The space has become independent! Lin Yi's gaze sharpened, and then, a sudden gust of cold wind blew past his ear, carrying with it a strange calling: "Lin Yi..."

“Lin Yi…”

The voice was Wei Liang's, but it was much drier and stiffer, like the voice of a living dead who had been traveling in the desert for a long time without a drop of water.

Lin Yi's body trembled, and he suddenly turned around, only to find no one behind him.

“Lin Yi…”

The sound still lingered, echoing endlessly in this isolated pit space, like a lingering melody.

Lin Yi looked in the direction of the sound and finally found the source of the sound on the baseball cap in the pit.

He held his breath, and a dazzling golden magma slowly flowed deep within his dark eyes as his "Vision Insight" and sensory tentacles were fully activated!
As Lin Yi unleashed his power of insight, his body seemed to transform into a pitch-black world, with subtle ripples spreading outwards from him.

The real and the illusory layers overlap continuously at this moment, and the narrow pit space seems to be infinitely extended, beginning to present another kind of folding and expansion that transcends common sense.

If it were just the partition next to the brick pit underfoot, then there wouldn't be much folded space or layers hidden inside, and Lin Yi's sensory tentacles easily covered it.

But when his sensory tentacles, carrying those ripples, pushed past the baseball cap, the ripples disappeared as if they had sunk into a quagmire.

That baseball cap, to the naked eye, is just a hat, but upon closer inspection, it is a complex creation full of wrinkles—like a human brain.

When Lin Yi focused his perception on the baseball cap, attempting to unfold the folds on a perceptual level, the entire space began to undergo drastic changes, as if a single movement had a ripple effect on the whole body.

The layers are like a folded and blooming flower bud, extending continuously from the center of the baseball cap, while the original reality layer begins to fold, forming new wrinkles.

"Lin Yi!"

Beneath the layers, Wei Liang's calls grew stronger, and the surrounding chilling wind intensified. As the folds were gradually smoothed out, the world beneath the layers slowly unfolded before Lin Yi...

"W-This is...?!"

Just by glimpsing a corner of the layer, Lin Yi felt a chill surge from the soles of his feet into his legs, then permeated his spine, swirling endlessly in his soul.

He saw a scene even more disgusting, unsettling, and nauseating than the nocturnal creatures and pseudo-human classmates huddled and mixed together deep in the greenbelt: countless deformed and mutilated corpses were piled up in a certain area in an irregular manner.

Each of these corpses seemed to still be breathing, their muscle fibers still twitching slowly, and their chests still pulsating in a certain rhythm. But what truly chilled Lin Yi to the bone was not the pile of corpses, but simply the fact that in the limited space he observed, the faces of those corpses were all those of Wei Liang!
This is Wei Liang!
That's Wei Liang!
All the corpses... were Wei Liang's!
The countless corpses of Wei Liang constitute the extremely monotonous, eerie, bloody, and morbid scene of this entire layer!

Countless Wei Liangs, some deformed and twisted, others incomplete, clung to their last breaths, their strength barely a whisper.
Every Wei Liang is not Wei Liang, yet every one of them is Wei Liang!

Lin Yi knew in his heart that they were all imposters of Wei Liang, but subconsciously he couldn't feel any resistance.

He now has two contradictory and extremely contrasting feelings—one is that he firmly believes that all the Wei Liangs here are imposters, and the other is that he is unable to feel any resistance or disgust towards the imposters here!
Looking at the countless fake Wei Liangs beneath this layer, he surprisingly felt a sense of pity and sadness.

"What's going on?" He didn't understand, he really didn't understand, when did he start to feel pity for the fake people?
Was it simply because the other party was "Wei Liang"? But that day he even threw the fake Wei Liang under the sun and burned him to ashes.

Is it because he is becoming more and more like a hypocrite that people are starting to feel pity for him?

Or is it because this layer of corruption clouded his perception and overwrote his emotions, thus making him begin to befriend the fake Wei Liang?

He doesn't understand.

So, ensuring he was absolutely rational, he tentatively spoke up, offering his first response:
"Ryoko?"

But as soon as he opened his mouth, he heard a clanging sound like a train rushing by, and the long-absent vision flickered again, accompanied by that sound.

In that constantly flickering and jumping field of vision, he saw countless images related to Wei Liang. Each image seemed like an independent event, but he couldn't see any of them clearly. Even when he mobilized his strongest observation ability, even when he used that "higher-order perception" that was almost able to stop time, he couldn't capture even the slightest specific scene from those infinitely flickering images.

The only thing he was certain of was that the blurry figures in those countless images were all Wei Liang!
He didn't know how much time had passed, but it seemed as if the roaring train had finally passed by his eyes, and all the images related to Wei Liang had disappeared, leaving only an endless horde of Wei Liang's corpses before him.

Almost every one of the corpses in the horde murmured his name, but finally, the first sound he had ever heard came from among them—"Old Lin."

"Lin Yi... Old... Old Lin..."

The fake man wouldn't call out his name! At that moment, Lin Yi's heart skipped a beat. He tried to find the source of the voice, but he couldn't find the remains of Wei Liang who had called out "Old Lin" at all.

Suddenly, all the fake Wei Liang called him "Old Lin" instead of "Lin Yi".

"Old Lin..."

The fake Wei Liang, whose head was reduced to half a skull, vigorously waved its deformed arms to pick up the eyeballs that had rolled off the ground. It then held them up and looked in Lin Yi's direction, and the skull's mouth began to slur its words.

"Old Lin... has Old Lin arrived...?"

"This time...which Old Lin is it..." The fake man Wei Liang beside him seemed to be fiddling with his strip-like fingers, chattering, "Is it the three thousandth or four thousandth...I can't remember...I can't remember..."

"Ha ha ha ha……"

"Old Lin, oh Old Lin..."

"Run...run!"

"The ending was already predetermined..."

One after another, the fake Wei Liang opened his mouth, and what he said made Lin Yi's eyes widen!

"This is completely unlike something a hypocrite would say!"

One after another, the fake Wei Liangs among the horde of corpses chattered amongst themselves, each saying their own thing:

"Countless simulations... have all failed..."

"The closest I ever came to success... was only 'close'..."

"Run!... Take 'me' with you and run!"

"Time is running out... not much time left..."

"Don't launch an operation! Don't..."

"Let's take action! Let's take action! I can't wait to know the latest developments!"

"Even if you die this time, there will be a next time!"

"Let them do whatever they want... the outcome was already decided anyway!"

"No! Actually... there's still a chance!"

"Boss!"

"The leader is the key!"

"Let her die!"

"She must die!"

"Hahaha……"

"Death is just the beginning! Don't let her live!"

"Trust me! Trust us!!"

"Even if she really dies...it doesn't matter..."

"Hahahaha... Unkillable! Absolutely unkillable!"

Lin Yi wanted to interrupt several times, but the information brought by Wei Liang's zombie horde was far too astonishing. In just a few words, it seemed to reveal some events that were completely different from his understanding.

It was as if... they had entered the campus countless times, but failed every time!

With every failure, a Wei Liang died here!

"Wait...!!" A thought flashed through Lin Yi's mind. He remembered Tian Bufan's words—[Fusheng Weiliang Tianzun will save you once, but only once.]

"Could it be... that the rescue Young Master Tian mentioned was when the plan failed, Liangzi risked his life to save me from the campus, and then he was left in this horde of zombies, becoming part of them, while I lost my memory once again and had to re-enter the campus?!"

"So there are many fake Ryokos on campus, but not a fake version of me?"

He felt he had guessed some kind of truth, but... this didn't make sense!
"How did Liangzi die here, yet re-enter the campus with me?"

"Hiss... Wait a minute! A time loop paradox?!"

"Ryoko crafted his own death into a time loop paradox?!"

"Did he...did he plan his own death?!"

"When they say 'more than three thousand or four thousand times,' could they be referring to the number of times we repeatedly entered the campus?! But... how exactly did they manage that?"

"Could it be... that the entire period of time was etched into the time loop?! Because we couldn't succeed, we've been repeatedly reliving this period?!"

"They're not fake Wei Liang! Every single one of them... is the real Liangzi?!"

"Death causes the corpse to become pseudo-human, so the 'pseudo-human Wei Liang' in the campus was originally the real Liangzi, but he was transformed into a pseudo-human due to death!"

A few days ago, Lin Yi would never have been able to draw such a conclusion, because it did not conform to existing knowledge. But after experiencing so much, the most ridiculous thing is actually "existing knowledge".

If you have a conclusion but cannot prove it to be wrong, then assume it to be right!

We can talk about the rest at another time!
"You..." Lin Yi slowly began, wanting to ask what they had been through, but then he thought that if the countless Wei Liangs in this horde of corpses were to each recount their experiences, even hundreds of brains wouldn't be enough to listen. So he changed his question to, "What constructive suggestions do you have?"

"Did Old Lin ask the same question last time?"

"Idiot, not last time, but the time before last, or the time before that..."

"No objections! Absolutely no objections!"

"Since we're all going to die anyway, let's go all out and cause trouble!"

Some of Wei Liang's hypocrites, unaware of the torment they had endured, were filled with thoughts of giving up.

But there are still some hypocrites like Wei Liang who keep clamoring for the boss to die.

Lin Yi hesitated for a moment, then asked, "Where did you fail, and is there any way to avoid it?"

"Avoid what?"

"What can be avoided?!"

"Fate is a cycle; you might dodge the dump truck at the intersection, but you can't dodge the billboard that falls down!"

"give up!"

"It's really pointless!"