Editor: Junyans
On the profile, Ge Pei had a handsome face, with most of his facial features adjusted artificially. Unlike the template-style micro-plastic surgery, his face was a finely crafted work of art. It looked both gentle and cold, and a little bit arrogant.
He behaved in a low-key manner, with no presence in the public media. Powerful people didn’t need to work or have exposure, having long ago held the decadent lifeblood of the world in their hands.
Xia Tian and Bai Jingan spent a day tracking him down.
These days, as long as you were good at hacking and knew who you were looking for, tracking was not difficult at all.
Ge Pei spent most of his time having fun. After a day of tracking and backtracking, Xia Tian and Bai Jingan learned a great deal about the wacky businesses going on in the Upper City high clubs.
Deep in this already huge, crazy city, there were obviously many crazier cliques.
Near noon that day, they tracked down a club called “Realism,” which actually had a slaughterhouse experience center. Nowadays, meat was produced in gene factories, but these people obviously thought these factories were too simple and convenient, and not old-fashioned and classy enough.
The publicity on the club’s homepage was absolutely imposing. The page introduced the history and ways in which animals had been slaughtered by humans since ancient times.
Here, you could get a feeling of what it was like to be a butcher. You could also buy “fresh meat” here, which was dozens of times more expensive than the market. After all, this was not just meat, but an ancient cultural way of eating.
Xia Tian curiously browsed through the club’s services and architectural layout. In a concealed area, he discovered that the club spent a lot of money to buy refugees and criminals. Those people went in and never came out.
Xia Tian was blank for a few seconds before immediately realizing where these people had gone and what had happened to them.
“He had attended an internal event at 1 a.m.,” Bai Jingan said.
Xia Tian read the description of that internal event with a cold expression. There was also a “documentary” attached to it. When he clicked on it, he found that it was a horror film that introduced the history of human domestication. The music in it was also very elegant.
They didn’t say anything for a while. In the glittering floating city, the dark corners were even darker, and no one cared about the piles of corpses and maggots beyond the bright lights.
At night, Xia Tian and Bai Jingan saw the… internal dinner party through the club’s cameras. Midway, Xia Tian went to the bathroom and vomited. Despite not eating all day, the video had completely quelled his appetite.
He turned the faucet as far as it would go and washed his face with cold water, but still could not summon the courage to go back to the living room.
He thought to himself that the most terrible thing was actually the soundtrack and the decoration. The screens, clothes, and etiquette were so exquisite that people could write a thesis on it.
According to the “documentary,” the activities here were not like most Killing Shows, which was a pop culture that could only attract attention with blood and violence. The club’s opulent, intricate, and unconventional activities were rooted in ancient traditions; they embodied attitudes and legacies. It talked as if the style and order of their tableware really had great significance in determining the essence of human social stratum.
Xia Tian raised his head and looked at the man in the mirror. His face was very pale, and a few strands of his hair were loose… He didn’t like what he looked like.
He didn’t look like he had just seen a horrible image, but like he had just gotten out of someone’s bed or was about to go to someone’s bed.
He had once complained to the hairdresser about whether he could cut his hair. It was impossible to tie it completely. A few strands would come loose, which made it difficult to fight. The other person just smiled at him admiringly.
But now he knew that this was the purpose.
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.
His use had never been to fight or kill. The significance of his existence in the city lay in his commercial value. All those luxury cars, weapons, and resistance forces served one purpose.
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The information he and Bai Jingan had found was all part of the Guest Show. The bigwigs wanted him to see these perverted things for their amusement. At the same time, it was some kind of climactic build up, maybe even an advertisement.
Those people liked to see him scared. He didn’t want to show them that at all, but it was hard to control the trembling of his body.
Xia Tian returned to the living room with wet hair and saw Bai Jingan sitting on the sofa with a dozen screens open in front of him while pressing his brows. It seemed as if he had been squeezed clean by the things inside. He looked exhausted and left with nothing but wreckage.
“You should go take a nap,” Xia Tian said.
Still staring at the screen, Bai Jingan grabbed the empty cup, and his hands were shaking a bit. But he did not respond for a long time.
Xia Tian gave him a gentle push. Bai Jingan turned his head to look at him, and Xia Tian threw the blanket to him.
“I’ll keep watch for the night,” he said.
Bai Jingan looked at him for a moment, tiredly stood up, and walked to the other side of the sofa. It was going to be a long war of resistance, and they needed sleep.
Xia Tian sat in his position, dragged the screens over, and stared at a large number of pages with elegant design and gentle music. Despite being vastly outmatched in strength and resources, he continued the hunting.
It was deep in the night when Xia Tian noticed an article being recommended on the ad space of the website.
He didn’t know if it was because he had used this terminal to check the factory settings of Marshmallow before, but the headline of the recommended article was “How to Unlock the ‘Doomsday Beast'” by Sky Entertainment Community.
Xia Tian was stunned for a moment.
The Guest Show had blocked most of Marshmallow’s functions, so he had to turn the top-of-the-line nano-weapon into a button and put it on his cuffs. Now it could only be used as a knife.
Of course, as long as the weapon had a system, it could be externally unlocked, but Marshmallow’s encryption was so strong that even the best hackers would have to tinker with it for months to unlock it. But they didn’t have that much time.
But there was someone there who had the time.
Xia Tian clicked on the post, and the author’s name was a string of numbers.
“I know it’s a competition, but I had already gotten sick of the planning team’s attitude when they said that they were banning the Doomsday Beast. They are just a bunch of losers, yet they really think they are the gods of destiny,” the man wrote.
“The lock on the ‘Doomsday Beast’ is controlled by the Heaven’s Work Pavilion’s root system, which is very troublesome. But it’s not like there’s no way out except for the planning team’s great mercy. Wei Xi must have known that as long as he could get a ‘Thousand Layer Decoder,’ even if he only unlocked a basic model to Xia Tian, not so many people would’ve died!”
Xia Tian quickly skimmed this article.
While he was reading it, countless related links popped up on the ad space. It was like entering a hacker camp where thousands of people were discussing the unlocking theory.
The Guest Show had disabled the Marshmallow’s functions, but the Upper City’s powerhouse were not really gods after all, nor could they cast magic. The “Doomsday Beast” was ultimately a high-tech weapon, and it had to be locked with a program lock.
The Upper City programmers knocked out the code one by one.
Bai Jingan woke up and saw Xia Tian sitting next to him, with nearly a hundred windows open in front of him, and he was studying some codes.
He sat up, took a look across the screen, and quickly sat up straight, saying, “Holy shit.”
Xia Tian continued studying it without raising his head. The faint light from countless screens fell on him, revealing his resolute stance. Bai Jingan looked at him for a while, stood up, threw the blanket to him, and said, “Sleep for a while, I’ll take over.”
Xia Tian grabbed the blanket, which still had Bai Jingan’s warmth on it. He opened his lips, but Bai Jingan cut in, “Go to sleep.”
After observing Bai Jingan for a moment, Xia Tian threw the button-shaped Marshmallow over to Bai Jingan, who reached out and caught it.
“I tried them one by one,” Xia Tian said, his voice a little hoarse from staying up all night.
Bai Jingan nodded and waved his hand, telling him to shut up and go to sleep, before sitting down in the corner of the sofa to gather information.
Xia Tian curled up on the sofa exhausted. Next to him, Bai Jingan concentrated on the screen. His hair was still a little messy, and his eyes reflected the illumination from the screens.
It was still dark. His body was tense. They were both trapped in a game where they had no chance of winning.
Xia Tian closed his eyes and touched Bai Jingan with his toes.
When Xia Tian woke up, it was already dawn.
Bai Jingan threw a pitch-black gun into his hand and said, “Basic gun function.”
Xia Tian sat up sharply. What he had in his hand was none other than his Marshmallow, but it had turned into a .45 caliber gun with a black body. The program showed that the basic ban was lifted and there were three different gun models to choose from.
The Doomsday Beast felt cold and weighty in his hands. He quickly checked its functions. His movements were precise and calm, as stable, lethal and murderous as the dark body of the gun.
On the side, Bai Jingan turned off an elongated screen, as if he had just finished a tactical meeting.
Xia Tian wasn’t sure if the organizers had anticipated this, but nowadays, the skill of causing disruption was no longer the organizers’ exclusive privilege.
When Huitian had said that he and Bai Jingan’s fans had changed their fandom name to “Resistance Army” after they had finished their medical treatment, Xia Tian had thought that the name was too odd, but now it seemed that they indeed had a matching function.
Then, Bai Jingan raised his hand and swiped a floating screen towards Xia Tian. It was an encrypted message. Xia Tian glanced at it and saw that it was a certain location.
He immediately understood what he meant.
The attack location.
After a day of tracking and investigation, Xia Tian and Bai Jingan found that Ge Pei had been to a number of odd places, one of them being a wasteland. It was located half a street away from the “Realism” Club and was rumored to be owned by the Floating Gold Group. It had been left empty all the time, purportedly because they liked the fact that there was a “rather wild and barren place” in this area.
This wasteland had witnessed some missing person cases, but nowadays disappearances were commonplace. Many overdosed on drugs and ended up gone, while others exploited the bodies for business—it was nothing extraordinary. Anyway, it was the victim’s own fault.
In the previous week, Ge Pei, who had a love for hardcore and kinky stuff, had been there three times, and each time he seemed to have disappeared into thin air.
Xia Tian and Bai Jingan suspected that it was the entrance to yet another dark club. Such organizations were growing everywhere in the Upper City.
Their eyes met briefly, and silent communication passed through their eyes. This was indeed the perfect place to attack.
—Of course, the best places to kill people were either in a busy city where traffic was heavy or at a party where people were too delirious to care about an extra body.
But the organizers of the Guest Show must have known that. Even if they had the chance to enter the club, they would never leave unharmed.
For Killing Show contestants who had encountered countless delicate situations, this judgment was not difficult.
The more perilous the situation, the greater the need for precise assessment. Sometimes you have to give up your biggest advantage and take a calculated risk. Unexpected gambits could, at times, turn into significant advantages, or at least give you a slim chance of survival.
For people like them, a slim chance was more than enough.
Xia Tian’s garage was full of luxury cars. In addition to exclusive cars, many limited-edition cars would also be given away to him when they came out.
Bai Jingan picked the most sturdy and crash resistant car, threw his weapon bag in, and sat in the driver’s seat.
He started to run the self inspection program again. They had hardly driven a few cars here. There were so many cars here that even if they switched from one car to another every day, they would not be able to finish driving all of them by the fifth round. Maybe it wouldn’t finish until they died.
They couldn’t even try the cars one by one. The company had specific requirements on the number of times and hours to drive each car. The time was accurate to minutes.
Xia Tian suddenly remembered the statue in virtual space, standing in the battlefield-like temple, with an exhausted face. Huitian had once said that it was so wretched that it did not look like a god, but it resembled the face of people of this era.
But its posture with the gun was unyielding, as if it would fight to the death before succumbing to the ground, joining the lifeless corpses surrounding it.
Bai Jingan started the car. Xia Tian went over and sat in the passenger seat.
His comrade looked ahead. Against the black background of the car, his face looked pale and a little thin, but without fear. Under the blinding lights of the Upper City, his face looked increasingly more gloomy and cold. There was something burning on his body, and he had no time or luxury to be afraid.
Then Xia Tian realized what it was, and he was familiar with it.
Between the corpses everywhere, like the sharp reflection of a sword.
It was anger.
They kept quiet the whole way. They were calculating.
Calculating that at the time Ge Pei’s car arrived at the park, how many bodyguards would be around him, and what defensive items he might have.
The two soon saw the park in a semi-deserted state, with grass growing wild and wildflowers dotted sporadically. Bai Jingan slowed down the car. They saw a stone wall in front of them, with a bas-relief carving on it that read “Purgatory.” It was made to look old. It didn’t have any of the now popular glitter paint. Instead, it was full of momentum.
This thing was three meters high, spreading out like a wall in the barren garden. The carving was extremely horrific, with painstaking attention to details; it was obviously a work of a famous artist. But with weeds and vines growing around it, blocking the edges, those familiar with the Upper City’s culture would realize that this was a deliberate cover-up to add to the taste, making it appear as if it had stood here since ancient times, carrying ancient desires.
After a while, they saw Ge Pei’s car drive by, silvery gray with blue lines, a high-end custom model.
It didn’t matter. Bai Jingan turned off the autopilot, stepped on the accelerator, and rushed next to Ge Pei’s luxury car in a flash.
The next second, he spun the steering wheel sharply and rammed into it.
Thank you so much for posting these chapters. 🧡🧡 I missed Bai Jingan and Xia Tian so much! I don’t know if it’s possible but I really want them to get their happy ending.