dognovel Chapter 311 Flame
Chapter 311 Flame
Chapter 311 Flames
The loudspeaker was too loud, but strangely, apart from the players, none of the residents in the community came out.
Finally, the bamboo pole and the muscular man arrived. When they saw the shirt in the body bag, both of them showed extremely shocked and disbelieving expressions.
As a matter of routine, the staff inquired about the details of the previous night.
“Last night…” Muscles’ expression was somewhat cautious, “we left the house together.”
“He suddenly ran out of the house, and we were worried that something had happened to him, so we chased after him together,” he said, pointing to his buzz cut.
The staff's eyes immediately turned to the crew-cut man.
“I’m going to find him.” The crew-cut man immediately pulled Du Yun along. “I need to talk to him about something.”
“I left the house with them,” Xie Qingdu said. “I saw they were in a hurry, so I followed them.”
“But we hadn’t walked far when a thick fog suddenly rolled in. I felt something was wrong and wanted them to go back quickly, but when I spoke, they had both disappeared.”
Muscle said, "I saw a shadow that looked like him and immediately chased after it."
He still referred to himself as having a buzz cut.
"After I realized I was seeing things, I found myself back at the front door of the house by some strange twist of fate, so I quickly went back inside."
Xie Qingdu nodded, "Me too."
The staff did not ask why they did not go out to look for the shirt when it was missing; they simply nodded in understanding, "I see."
He closed the notebook in his hand. "Then I'll take him back first."
As he spoke, he gestured for the others to close the body bag again.
"Can I see him again?" Yan Xun asked.
The staff member glanced at him. "Are you a forensic pathologist?"
"No."
"What's so interesting about that?"
"Heh, I see you guys packed up so quickly, are you trying to cover up clues?" Yan Xun said shamelessly.
The staff member was slightly annoyed, "Why should we do this?"
What's in it for us?
"Hehe, who knows?" Yan Xun maintained his usual attitude.
Finally, someone patted the other person on the shoulder, and the staff member said reluctantly, "Go ahead and watch if you want."
"It's best not to get scared."
Yan Xun walked up to the body bag, reopened the zipper, revealing the intact corpse inside, dressed in a shirt.
As the staff said, the shirt had no fatal wounds, not even any injuries.
Yan Xun reached out and touched the other person's body. The shirt-clad body felt somewhat stiff, but the texture of the other person's skin was not quite like skin; it was too smooth, as if it had been waxed.
He touched it for a long time, leaving the other players behind him speechless.
Lou Yanchuan, who was slowly pushing his wheelchair out of the house, had just arrived at the scene when he saw Yan Xun squatting there, touching the dead shirt.
He even pinched the other person's cheek.
"...What's going on?" Fang Shuo whispered to Lin Wen, "An autopsy?"
"Let's look for clues," Lin Wen said, walking over to Yan Xun's side and squatting down with him to look at the body in the shirt.
"Can I lift his clothes?" Yan Xun asked.
"..." The staff member looked Yan Xun up and down, "Whatever you want."
Yan Xun unbuttoned his shirt.
There were indeed no marks on the other person's body.
Yan Xun pressed hard on the other person's ribs. Perhaps he used too much force, because the shirt made a slight cracking sound, and then something poked out of the other person's chest.
Yan Xun looked closely and realized it was a bamboo strip.
"Could it be that he suffered internal injuries?" Yan Xun exclaimed in alarm, calling for the others to come and see.
Upon hearing this, the other players immediately gathered around.
Fang Shuo was the first to approach, followed by Shu Fan. They both noticed the bamboo strips protruding from the chest of the shirt.
"This is?"
"Bamboo strips?"
"Have you finished looking?" The staff member was already getting impatient. Seeing them crowding around, he started shooing them away again, "Don't damage the body and the evidence."
As he spoke, he ordered his men to quickly re-zip the body bag and forcibly take away the body in the shirt.
Before leaving, he glanced at the players and said, "As long as you follow the rules, this kind of accident won't happen."
Once the staff left, only the players remained on the street.
The unexpected death of Zhugan also brought a sense of urgency to these new players.
Yan Xun stood up and noticed that Shu Fan seemed to have something to say.
Finally, she glanced at the remaining players and began to speak, "...I think this instance still requires us to cooperate and exchange information."
Perhaps worried that others would think she was just trying to extract information, she immediately added, "Song-eun and I have found out the truth about our house."
“I think the secrets in our five houses are all interconnected.”
“It would be difficult to uncover all these secrets by working alone without cooperation,” Shu Fan said to the others. “In that case, why don’t we work together to complete side quest 2?”
"Maybe we can try our luck and find clues to the hidden quest."
After hearing Shu Fan's words, Yan Xun understood that she must have learned about the connection between their family and the master from Duan Songen's clues.
Every family has someone who has a direct or indirect connection with the master.
It was clearly Duan Songen who was at Shu Fan's house.
Du Yun had no objections at all. He looked at Yan Xun after hearing Shu Fan's words.
Lin Wen and Fang Shuo exchanged a glance, and finally Lin Wen spoke up, "What do you think?"
The question was also directed at Yan Xun.
Now, with his crew cut, he dared not go home and was as pathetic as a stray dog. Naturally, he dared not express any opinions. He had already realized that Du Yun truly regarded Yan Xun as his boss, and being a dependent, he naturally dared not utter a single word.
The other two in the crew-cut family were NPCs. The muscular man, with his NPC mind, couldn't really understand the meaning of those words, but he nodded habitually, "Sure."
"Many hands make light work."
In the end, only Yan Xun's family remained.
From the reactions of the other players, Shu Fan and Duan Songen could tell that... they seemed to have secretly allied with Yan Xun?
Lin Wen's family, in particular, puzzled her.
They were the ones who opposed Yan Xun in the first place.
But the street isn't really a place to talk, especially since the new rules haven't been released yet.
"How about we wait for the rules to be released?" Fang Shuo said.
"It's time to go to Shu Fan's house."
The other players had no objections, and the players dispersed on the spot. Yan Xun and Lou Yanchuan returned to their own houses.
After threatening my father yesterday, they moved him back to the living room and told him he had just had a nightmare when he woke up.
Although his father was skeptical, he could only assume that Lou Yanchuan was still alive and that he was dreaming about him because he had been thinking about him all day... He didn't dare to look Lou Yanchuan in the eye and made an excuse to hurry upstairs.
When her mother quietly asked Yan Xun what they were going to do about that rule...
Yan Xun casually mentioned that they killed the white goldfish that Lou Yanchuan had brought back—the blood on the knife was from when they killed the fish.
Mom finally breathed a sigh of relief.
Yan Xun looked at her, actually wanting to ask if she knew the secret of this family, but in the end he didn't ask.
When Yan Xun and his companion returned home, they discovered the extra letter on the ground—
They had been lingering at the door for a while without seeing any mail carriers, so it seems that the letter paper appeared along with the creation of the copy rules.
Yan Xun bent down to pick up the letter and saw the new rules on it.
He handed it to Lou Yanchuan.
Lou Yanchuan took it and glanced at it. "Looks like you guessed right?"
The new note read—
Open flames are not allowed within the residential area. If any open flame occurs, please extinguish it immediately.
If you see black flames, please contact security immediately.
When the black flame appears, someone will speak from within it; whatever they say, do not believe them.
Will there be black flames? Yan Xun wondered.
He put down the note, "I saw the bamboo strips inside the shirt."
"His skin felt strange to the touch."
Staff said the shirt was killed by sudden death due to extreme shock.
When the players saw the bamboo strips sticking out of their shirts, the staff told them to leave immediately, as if they had something to hide.
Yan Xun sat at the dining table. His parents and Shuangshuang were still upstairs and hadn't come down yet. At this moment, only he and Lou Yanchuan were there. He suddenly sighed.
"Don't you want to make a move?" Lou Yanchuan asked.
"Not really," Yan Xun muttered. "Wouldn't it be embarrassing if I made a wrong judgment?"
"What a pity," Lou Yanchuan said. "If I could still walk, I would be happy to do it for you."
Yan Xun didn't say anything, but Lou Yanchuan understood what he meant.
"A lawless madman!" Yan Xun exclaimed.
Lou Yanchuan looked up at him. "Are they even human?"
"The NPCs in the dungeon are data, the BOSS is a monster," Lou Yanchuan said slowly and deliberately. "Even if they look alike, even if they have emotions..."
"They are not human either."
"They won't hold back."
Yan Xun understood this principle, of course. He leaned back in his chair and pondered for a moment before finally standing up. "I'll be right back."
After Yan Xun left, Lou Yanchuan's system suddenly spoke.
[Bad guy.]
[You want to verify this? It's actually very simple.]
Lou Yanchuan didn't speak, he just looked at his legs.
"Actually, I'm getting a little impatient," Lou Yanchuan suddenly said to his system. "I don't want to be in a wheelchair anymore."
"Yan Xun will hate you to death." The ostrich egg wearing glasses said.
Lou Yanchuan's system avatar is an ostrich egg with glasses and legs, which looks just like a fun plush toy from a well-known plush brand.
Lou Yanchuan sighed, "So I'm just thinking about it."
In order to prevent Lou Yanchuan from disrupting the balance of the instance, the system imposed a rule on him as soon as he entered the instance.
[Once a player leaves their wheelchair and stands up, the instance ends, and all players fail.]
The main system probably knew that it couldn't stop Lou Yanchuan's actions, so it could only put this shackle on him.
It looks simple, but it's very effective.
Of course, all of this is based on the premise that Lou Yanchuan will obediently follow the rules for the sake of someone in the instance.
“But I think it would be good for him to hate me too,” Lou Yanchuan added.
"It's better than watching him run around here."
Ostrich eggs: [...]
Men's jealousy is truly terrifying.
It knew that Lou Yanchuan had some problems, and that it was already his third system. The previous two systems had disappeared for some unknown reason... When it was first sent by the main system to be Lou Yanchuan's personal system, the ostrich egg decided to be a quiet mute.
After getting to know him for a while, it found that Lou Yanchuan was easy to communicate with most of the time, and it was fine if it didn't communicate with him for a few hours.
Compared to some hosts who are unaware of their own abilities, Lou Yanchuan is already considered perfect.
The other person doesn't talk to him much either; 90% of the time, they treat each other as if the other is dead.
Ostrich Egg thought to himself, Lou Yanchuan wanted to verify the identities of those NPCs in a very simple way, but he just wanted to imply to Yan Xun that it was a matter of fact—as if he was deliberately making Yan Xun realize that players and NPCs are two completely different things.
Everyone's positions are opposed; it's a matter of life or death for each other.
"Sigh." Lou Yanchuan sat there sighing again.
Ostrich Egg looked at him, not understanding why Lou Yanchuan was still putting on a show when the only audience member was gone.
“He definitely knows,” Lou Yanchuan said.
He shook his head. "I was too hasty, so he must have known what I was thinking."
As soon as Yan Xun left the house, he whispered to the green dinosaur, "He did it on purpose."
[What does this mean?] The green dinosaur nervously touched its short little hands.
“Although I don’t know what his method is, I feel that he has some kind of prop or something that can directly verify the identities of those NPCs,” Yan Xun said.
"Then why did he call you here?" the green dinosaur exclaimed in surprise.
"I'm used to it." Yan Xun shrugged indifferently. "Anyway, Lou Yanchuan isn't a good person either."
In his opinion, Lou Yanchuan was a strange and unpredictable person.
So, who are you planning to cause trouble for now?
"Let's pick our troops," Yan Xun said, counting on his fingers. "Whoever we encounter will be our 'troops'."
As they were talking, they met their first neighbor of the day.
The neighbor had a long face and didn't smile when he saw Yan Xun.
Yan Xun, however, revealed a smile—
"It's just you."
Before the neighbor with the mournful face could even react, an axe had already come crashing down on him.
"Do not……"
His mind suddenly felt a little confused.
Normally, the new resident should have fled immediately at this point.
Why would someone chase after him with an axe?
"Help... help..."
Seeing this, the neighbors were no longer frightened. When they saw Yan Xun raising an axe to chop them up, they immediately ran away in a panic.
"Help!"
He shouted so loudly, but apart from the players, no one paid any attention to the cries for help in the community.
Du Yun first heard cries for help.
He was about to stand up and open the window when he realized something was wrong.
This voice doesn't sound like it belongs to the players. Have the neighbors in the community already learned to lie?
He huddled cautiously by the window, peeking out only half his head, afraid that the people below would discover him.
But when he looked closer, he saw Yan Xun chasing after a neighbor with an axe...
In a daze, he couldn't help but stand up, open the window, and ask Yan Xun what he was doing.
Upon seeing him, the neighbor with the mournful face immediately reached out for help, looking as pitiful as if he had been peacefully taking a walk in the neighborhood when he suddenly encountered a deranged killer.
"help me……"
He reached out his hand to Du Yun.
But the next second, Yan Xun's axe chopped down on his head.
Because Yan Xun was too strong, the axe got stuck in the middle of the other person's head. He shook it with some effort—and the other person's body swayed along with it—like a farmer shaking off a log while chopping wood.
Yan Xun finally pulled out the axe, as if he had just realized that he had arrived at Du Yun's doorstep.
She looked up at him.
"Hi." He waved and greeted him.
“…Hi,” Du Yun said timidly.
He was afraid that his brother would think he was also a bad NPC and kill him.