Editor: Elanor
But the treasure map was still necessary. Moreover, the methods to lure the enemies to them were limited anyway.
While holding hands, they spent some time searching and found a fragment of the treasure map at the end of a series of flowerpots that were carved with different stories.
The story carved in the flowerpot was about how a person succeeded by unscrupulous means, and buried his treasure deep in the ground at the time of death, hoping that someone who was destined could find it.
The fragment of the treasure map was a small piece of metal that was thin like paper, carved with dark flowers, and has the effect of aging. This was cryptographic splitting, a boring encryption technology, from which data couldn’t be copied. It was meaningless to get only one piece. One had to collect all the fragments to get the full picture of the information.
Of course, a piece of parchment paper or something was more stylish, but once the paper was scanned, it could be fully recorded and copied in large numbers, which went against the setting of players competing with each other.
“How sincere,” Xia Tian said, wrapping his arms around Bai Jingan, “Lil’ Bai is right. Mr. Shi couldn’t wait to make a neon sign that says ‘Treasure Is Here’ and hang it up.”
He rubbed Bai Jingan’s hair intimately, and the latter had an expression of tolerance.
“There’s no one else here, so there’s no need to put up an act now,” Bai Jingan said.
“Acting starts from daily life,” Xia Tian said, as he tousled up Bai Jingan’s hair and pressed it back down.
“There is no such saying,” Bai Jingan said.
“There is.”
“There isn’t.”
“Look,” Eric said to Wei Xi, “they’re showing affection!”
He tapped the wall with the hilt of his knife to get the other two’s attention. “Hey, you too! Can we get back to the original topic?” He said, “The fragments of the treasure map are so easy to find that the garden will soon be bloody!”
“We mainly watch the excitement,” Bai Jingan said, “Let’s see if we can fish in troubled waters.”
“Lil’ Bai is the smartest,” Xia Tian said.
Bai Jingan took a breath and endured it.
Then their group walked back while discussing who to kill next.
This was now the job assigned to them by the Killing Show—taking enough human lives to build a sky ladder that would allow them to stand at the very top of the altar.
The road to finding the treasure map should be very dangerous, but the garden was so large that the players could barely cover a tiny part of it.
Along the way, they saw some blood stains, limbs, broken branches, and a large pile of red crumbs like stuff, like a human body that had been regurgitated after being chewed. Wei Xi couldn’t hold back and vomited after seeing this.
Xia Tian looked down at a small part of human limbs half hidden in the grass and pile of rocks. The teeth marks had turned black and red, and they were still fresh, most likely from the previous night.
Bai Jingan also leaned over to look, and said: “It was in the middle of the night.”
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
“This will teach us not to go out at night,” Eric said.
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With a cold face, Wei Xi took out yesterday’s video to compare. The mutant creatures were very human-like, like white ghosts in the dim light, making people feel creeped out.
Eric said, “It’s amazing that this thing’s teeth aren’t modified. They are using a human version—”
“I’d like to know what weird reason they came up with for the monster’s breed this time,” Xia Tian said.
They were talking while walking through an elegant pavilion when they saw a scene.
Xia Tian didn’t recognize the guy. The man had somewhat long hair that was dyed red at the tips, and was wearing a formal suit, which was as valuable as the clothes of all the players in the arena. He was roughly pressing a young woman to a large rock.
This was by no means a consensual encounter. She struggled desperately, her forehead was wounded, and blood stained half of her face. Her nose was also bleeding, and one of her cheeks was badly swollen.
But the assailant’s method of subduing the victim was very professional. In real life, you generally had to resort to drugs to do this kind of thing, but in the Killing Show, you relied on the most blatant violence. Everyone here were masters of violence and were condoned by the whole world.
Xia Tian stood frozen in place. Though the lady was beaten badly, he still recognized that face.
The rapist raised his head, saw the group of people, raised an eyebrow, and then smiled, raising his chin to greet Xia Tian. It was as if they were well-dressed colleagues who happened to run into each other on a small road, and the situation at hand was no big deal or anything to be ashamed of or mind about.
He was probably passing by and happened to run into a pretty NPC. He probably struck up a conversation with her, or didn’t even bother with a conversation and just grabbed her by the hair and dragged her to a convenient place to do his business.
This was normal at Killing Shows, where there was a lot of abuse and rape in the arena. It was not a big mistake. At most, it was “not pretty”. And in this case, it was even more discreet.
—This was not a public area. There were no public cameras, only TV stations’. The NPCs were not contestants. If they disappeared without a sound, no one would know it. They didn’t talk on camera, and they had signed a high confidentiality clause.
The TV station would decide whether to release such scenes according to the needs of the show and the type of players, and most of these scenes were casually buried in the graveyard of the editing room.
The Upper City tried to make heroes out of these people, but they were ultimately a group of villains and killers. Of course, there were some really unlucky ones here, but the vast majority of the players had questionable personalities, otherwise, they wouldn’t have ended up in this situation.
With such a group of villains playing under the high pressure of the Killing Show, there would, of course, be countless bad incidents, but… it was just that he knew this girl.
Her name was An Xiaoyin, and she knew the names of all the trees and wildflowers, and also knew what species those little bugs were. Xia Tian found this talent very impressive.
She had given him her phone number just that morning, and he had promised that he would call her and ask her out if he made it out alive. He could have also just asked her out on the arena, but he didn’t want to, it was a personal thing.
Dee Dee would have liked her, and she worked in the botanical garden, which sounded great.
Now she had a wound on her face, but he could recognize her at a glance. He was very good at recognizing people underneath a body full of bruises.
The rapist greeted them briskly and asked, “What, do you want to join—?”
Before he could finish his words, Xia Tian walked past him. There was no expression on his face, and before the man could react to what was going on, Xia Tian’s sword had already pierced through his chest.
Xia Tian’s movements were unstructured. The places where he stabbed were not vital parts, which he rarely did.
But he always knew how to kill. At the moment he stabbed in, Xia Tian turned his wrist and slashed towards the left. The blade cut open the human body without any hindrance. The blood surged out in an arc with his movements and splashed on the grass.
He cleaved the man’s body in half diagonally, and bright red blood gushed out and landed on An Xiaoyin’s naked back. The dying man looked perplexed and reached for the knife hidden in his clothes, but it was no longer of any use.
He fell forward. Xia Tian expressionlessly grabbed his hair and pushed him backwards, lest he fell on top of her.
When he fell to the ground, his eyes were still wide open, his body was twitching slightly, and his penis hadn’t even had the time to soften yet. Xia Tian stared at the scene in front of him, anger not in the least diminished by this guy’s death, but he did not know what else to do.
An Xiaoyin slid down from the stone and sat on the grass. There were beautiful red, yellow and purple little flowers all around her, splashed with blood, swaying in the breeze. When she had seen flowers on TV in the Lower City, she had thought that the Upper City must be as beautiful as a fairyland.
An Xiaoyin held her clothes tightly and sat on the grass, staring at the corpse. Xia Tian took off his coat and handed it to her.
She glanced at him, took it and put it on her body. Then she leaned on the stone and tried to stand up. Xia Tian reached out to help her, but she jerked her arm back.
Xia Tian stood there uncertainly, and without saying a word, she avoided his gaze, hastily pulled her clothes back on and turned to leave.
Her gait was unsteady but she took every step firmly, and Xia Tian stopped after taking two steps towards her. He knew that when a woman left like this, she just wanted to be by herself.
Eric exhaled a sigh. Wei Xi’s face was pale, but he fixed his gaze on the corpse. The man’s body had been mutilated and he had died horribly.
Xia Tian lowered his head and retracted the sword into his palm. Bai Jingan watched this scene with a cold expression, without saying anything.
Then Xia Tian, without looking at the corpse, turned around and walked away. Streams of sunlight gently illuminated their bodies, and behind them lay a large pool of blood dyeing the grass red.
Xia Tian felt that An Xiaoyin would not call him anymore. When she left, she looked anxious to stay away from him. He was familiar with this attitude.
They had planned to continue to bait the enemy, but Xia Tian was completely not in the mood and headed back to the residential area.
On the way, they came across another corpse that had been chewed miserably, and Wei Xi couldn’t stop the scream of terror. No one said anything. They all knew very well that if something extremely terrible appeared in the arena, then they would never just disappear.
There was no luck here. At the end of the road, there would be a lot of monsters waiting for you.
Xia Tian went to the bar and asked for half a glass of some liquor—it was officially guaranteed that the food here was safe—and sat sullenly by the bar.
Eric and Wei Xi sat on the other side to ensure the maintenance of his couple’s persona with Bai Jingan.
Xia Tian stared at the glass. The “Flaming Dawn” was transparent orange-red, with crystal ice floating in it, and water vapor condensed on the wall of the glass. It looked as beautiful as an advertising painting.
“Such a thing is quite common in the Lower City,” he whispered, “My sister… She was beaten badly one time, but she kept saying it didn’t matter, that she could control it, and she wouldn’t let me find trouble with that guy.”
His voice was muffled: “It was definitely not that it didn’t matter to her but in a place like that, you have to swallow your anger when encountering this kind of thing.”
Bai Jingan sat next to him, with a cup of lemon tea placed in front of him. The bartender had given it to him directly. He didn’t know what kind of persona the organizers had given him.
“But this is the Upper City… When I was a kid, I thought the life above must be very good. No one would go hungry. There would be singing and dancing, and nothing to worry about,” Xia Tian said, “Because… all the resources are here, aren’t they? If we ended up with nothing at all, there would always be someone in this world who’d gain satisfaction from this fact.”
“What happened to that guy?” Bai Jingan asked.
“I killed him,” Xia Tian said, “If you compare it, the bastard just now died very peacefully.”
Bai Jingan patted him on the shoulder, took Xia Tian’s glass over, took a sip, and said, “The way he died just now was not bad.”
Xia Tian shook his head and gestured for another glass of the same drink.
It was a bit of a strange situation, but he felt appeased by the corpse.
The next day, Xia Tian ran into An Xiaoyin again in the West Wing garden. She was responsible for taking care of the flowers and plants in the surrounding area.
She was wearing a floral dress. You couldn’t see her injuries from a distance. She looked graceful and gorgeous under the sun. You couldn’t see what kind of damage she had suffered.
She was in the middle of pruning a few roses when she suddenly turned to look at him as if she sensed Xia Tian’s gaze. Xia Tian noticed that the injury on her face was not healed. Although the intensive treatment could solve the problem within two hours, they made her feel pain by not treating her injuries.
He walked two steps towards her before stopping. An Xiaoyin stared at him against the light for a while, put down the scissors, and walked up to him.
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking at Xia Tian’s eyes, “I don’t mean to come across as rude, it’s just… I hope we don’t talk anymore.”
Next to him, Xia Tian’s companions suddenly became interested in the flowering branches and retreated a few steps away, pretending not to hear the conversation between the two.
Xia Tian subconsciously put his hands on the back, trying to make himself look polite, and said: “If I offended you before…”
“No, no, I’m very grateful,” An Xiaoyin said, doing her best to flash a smile at him, “You saved me, I was… I had never encountered such a thing before, and I am glad you killed him. It’s just… this is a… game, Xia Tian, and we all know what ‘Mr. Shi’ would like to see.”
—Under the public cameras, you couldn’t directly talk about off-site events, you could only speak and act like the character that has been assigned to you..
An Xiaoyin looked at a bewildered Xia Tian, took a breath, and continued, “It’s no accident that I ran into that guy there.”
Xia Tian stared at her without speaking, his fists clenched tightly, and the air around him seemed to be stagnant.
“He came to me because you asked me out and I gave you my number,” An Xiaoyin said.
Xia Tian shrank. Those words pierced him like a knife. He stood frozen in place. He was under the sunlight, but his whole body felt so cold that he didn’t even think to grab a weapon—he always wanted to grab a weapon when he was stimulated. He stood in the garden, at a loss, not knowing what to do, where every flower and the beauty of the place could stab him.
“Our conversation was not private. Here, nothing is private. I can’t believe I forgot,” An Xiaoyin said, “They will not let anyone off. This place… has no happiness or hope. That… ghost, it will notice all the signs, and then…”
She continued, “It likes you and wants to see a more dramatic scene, it likes the way you killed that guy and the way you looked so… miserable. Sorry, I can’t be a part of this…”
It took a lot of effort for Xia Tian to find his voice, because he felt he had to say something.
In the end, he only said the stupidest sentence: “I’m sorry, I didn’t know…”
Seeing An Xiaoyin shake her head very hard, he didn’t say anything more. She gave him a sad look, and for a moment seemed to want to touch him, but she held back, turning away her hands firmly.
She averted her gaze, turned and walked away.
Xia Tian didn’t follow her. They all knew he would never follow her again.
The courtyard had a lovely landscape with every blade of grass and tree carefully designed. There was a gentle breeze that carried a cool and refreshing scent of a distant stream.
Xia Tian stood alone, expressionless. Bai Jingan walked to him, didn’t say anything, and simply patted him on the shoulder. Xia Tian followed him back in.
The atmosphere didn’t look sad; rather it was full of anger and depression.
Thanks for the chapter
aww…they would’ve been so cute together… (╯︵╰,)