Chapter 1528: Yu Yuan Leads the Way

"The nation has its laws, and the family has its rules. If you just do whatever you want, won"t things fall into chaos?"

Short Bangs hadn"t yet moved the camera into the forest, but he had already spent three to five minutes explaining the background of the appearance of the prison. Lin Sanjiu had still been sitting on the sofa, silently watching him, smiling only when he finally finished speaking.

"Now, show me," she said.

Her smile seemed to make Short Bangs a bit nervous. He rubbed his fingers together for a while, and one hand slowly rose, reaching into the air.

The forest was zoomed in and enlarged, countless tree trunks whizzing by, sunlight blocked by the canopy, as if entering the flowing darkness at the bottom of a lake. Lin Sanjiu squinted and saw the prison in the forest.

The farmhouses, built by the game players themselves from chopped trees, were the result of very few being construction workers: neat but askew. Neither house nor tent-like, made of wooden frames covered with cloth. If the living s.p.a.ces were like this, how crude must the prison have been? How could it keep posthumans from escaping back to the farm?

The answer to this question quickly revealed itself to Lin Sanjiu, and it was very simple.

In a place full of posthumans, Special Items for imprisonment, confinement, and restriction were abundant. It seemed all such items in Taoyuan Towns.h.i.+p had been gathered and used to detain criminals.

Several emaciated prisoners, their hair cut short, squatted in a circle, each was.h.i.+ng a large bucket of clothes. Around them, bright bubbles encased them, as if bubbles from the wash buckets had grown and enclosed them along with the dirty clothing. These bubbles stretched across the forest, interspersed among the trees, each bubble containing several people, all silent, heads down, working.

Bubbles were just one form of imprisonment. Along a seemingly unremarkable gra.s.s rope, five or six posthumans were bound like gra.s.shoppers, limbs tied, necks constantly twisting, mouths bulging with something unknown.

They didn"t seem to be eating, as no one eats with such expression or lies on the ground to eat. They bit from a pile on the left, chewed silently like donkeys, then spat onto the right. Saliva, tears, lips worn to bleeding, and strong jaw muscles were common features.

"Prisoners can"t just sit there and eat; how can we have good people working hard and supporting criminals in prison?" Short Bangs explained. "They do work within their capacity to earn their food. Dangerous ones are hung on ropes, and only their heads and mouths can move. But even with only the mouth, they can still work."

"What work are they doing?"

"In the mountains, there aren"t many things to feed chickens and ducks, so some villagers collect things like husks, stones, and tree bark. If not broken down, they can injure young birds, so the prisoners chew them first. That way, the birds don"t get hurt."

Lin Sanjiu nodded. On the screen, the wind pa.s.sed through the forest, its rustling distant and lonely.

She asked Short Bangs to raise the camera angle, which he reluctantly did. The view moved over the forest like migrating birds, revealing scene after scene of a prison formed by various confinement tools. The few people in the farm wouldn"t have had so many, so probably later ones were provided by the game itself. The heads filled the s.p.a.ces between the trees, dark ma.s.ses everywhere. Minute after minute pa.s.sed, the prison still stretching on.

As the camera continued to move, Lin Sanjiu slightly turned her eyes, watching a bird flash across the distant corner of the screen, disappearing into the cloudy sky. Left behind on the earth, the black ma.s.s of heads wriggled and squirmed, the rustling of the forest the only sound in the silence.

She felt as though she should ask many questions, but she didn"t want to ask any now.

"Our farm has very strict rules," Short Bangs explained slowly. "For the welfare of most people, strict governance is necessary. If you can"t follow the rules, then you deserve to be punished, don"t you? You can"t blame our farm, can you?"

He paused here, seeming to think that Lin Sanjiu would interject with a question at this point, appearing to have the answer ready—but she didn"t ask, "What are your rules?"

Without waiting for the counter-question, the man with short bangs continued awkwardly, "But posthumans have many unchangeable bad habits, so there are slightly more people who violate the rules than in ordinary society."

Lin Sanjiu responded with an "Oh?", her perfunctory tone like that of meeting a talkative but inescapable neighbor.

The man with short bangs looked at her expression and closed his mouth. He seemed to feel that something was wrong, this was not the response he wanted, but he couldn"t figure out what was wrong for a moment. After thinking for a while, he seemed to decide to remind Lin Sanjiu of a fact. "Although they are in prison, their lives are safe, and they can still live safely for 14 months. Unless the crime is heinous, ordinary farms will not sentence people to death. So compared to other people"s games, even being able to enter the farm"s prison is good luck."

Lin Sanjiu was silent for a while, then pointed to a person on the screen and asked, "What rule did he break?"

"Which one?" The man with short bangs glanced around at the densely packed heads.

Any of them would do; she was just pointing randomly.

After the man with short bangs understood her meaning, he too fell silent for a moment. "Well, the specific sentencing process is collectively decided by the people of the farm. I"m not particularly clear. Actually, that isn"t important... You don"t know how cruel other people"s games are, right? I was frightened to look at it. When I first entered this room, there was a whole set of things left by the previous game maker, including the game he wrote. Let me tell you..."

Next, he detailed a game that reportedly "left a particularly deep shadow on him." It was a contagious disease game in a closed environment, where the infected person could recover after spreading it to two people. Lin Sanjiu had just heard the beginning of this game"s premise when she heard footsteps behind her.

She was familiar with Yu Yuan"s footsteps and turned to ask, "What"s wrong?"

Veda was standing in the living room. The silent woman ran out of the doorway as soon as she saw him enter the room. However, neither Yu Yuan nor Lin Sanjiu chased after her, letting her disappear at the door.

After all, where could she run? The transport tube to the outside world had long been blocked by two corpses.

"You need to come with me quickly," Yu Yuan replied. "Did you notice what he just said? When he first came into this room, he could still see the whole set of things left by the last game maker."

"Yeah," Lin Sanjiu subconsciously responded, suddenly waking up as if splashed with a bucket of water.

"The girl called Little Demon, who created the apartment game, probably took Ji Shanqing too," Yu Yuan explained further, as if afraid she hadn"t understood. "Although she"s dead, no one has entered her room since. After all, the person who took her place also lost his life in the channel... That means if we go to her room now, we might find clues about Ji Shanqing."

As he spoke, Lin Sanjiu had already leaped up, flipping over the sofa and landing on the living room floor. The man with short bangs, though he didn"t understand the key part, understood that they were going to the ninth room. He immediately tensed up, saying both expectantly and warily, "Do you want... want me to open the door for you?"

Lin Sanjiu didn"t even glance at him; she grabbed Yu Yuan and dashed out the door.

She didn"t need anyone to open the door for her; there was still an unconscious Master Zhang lying on the dining table outside, and he would be enough for her use—bearing this thought in mind, she almost stumbled as she quickly rushed into the rotunda.

On the dining table, the plump Master Zhang had turned into a bloated corpse at some unknown point.

Behind her, a "bang" sound of a door closing came from the direction of Short Bangs" room.

Someone had repeatedly pierced Master Zhang"s neck with a sharp stick, brutally breaking through his throat. The blood had not yet coagulated and was still dripping—presumably, those remaining in this s.p.a.ce had realized that without Master Zhang"s existence, Lin Sanjiu couldn"t enter any room, and they were safe.

"Wait, let"s go to the ninth room first and see," Yu Yuan said, seeming to understand her budding emotion despite having none himself. He held her arm and said, "If the room"s host is dead, the chance of the door being closed is fifty-fifty, right? Let"s go and check first, and if it is indeed closed, then we"ll think of a way."

Lin Sanjiu"s face was wooden, and her hand wearing a metal gauntlet opened and closed a few times before she nodded.

She followed behind Yu Yuan, walking step by step towards the ninth room. Perhaps because Little Devil was dead, all her alterations to s.p.a.ce had disappeared; their path was filled with unremarkable concrete corridors, and they quickly found the dull, grey room. Yu Yuan walked briskly up to it and tried pus.h.i.+ng the door.

As Lin Sanjiu reached the doorway, the door slowly slid open, revealing an empty concrete room with nothing inside.

Except for one person standing with their back to the two.

The figure was tall and slender, leaning on a thin cane, seemingly staring at a grey concrete wall without even a picture hanging, as if watching the most interesting film in the world, utterly absorbed and motionless.

Only when she heard the footsteps of the two entering did she turn her head slightly.

Nüwa smiled at Lin Sanjiu and said, "You"ve come? See, I told you, he would bring you to me."