NFM Chapter 99

The live broadcast had been cut off by the television station the moment contestant No. 81 burst out of the glass cabinet. Sitting in front of the screen, Su Li, his roommate, and a classmate exchanged glances, their eyes filled with confusion.

“What happened?” they asked.

Simultaneously, the same question was echoed by other netizens in the live stream facing a black screen. Some were still cursing No. 81 for his life-threatening actions, some were waiting with a mix of anticipation and fear for the final outcome of No. 91, while others logged onto the dark web of the Greenhouse, posting all their desires and malice in anonymous forums.

“That murderous No. 81 is a lunatic! Kill him!”

“How long do you think No. 91 has left? I bet three minutes!”

“Offering a high price in advance for a high-definition, uncensored video of No. 81’s execution…”

“Damn, our Brother Jian is really too handsome!”

However, after No. 81 kicked open the glass cabinet and the prisoner appeared in public, all this malice or prayer converged into the same question—

What happened in the Greenhouse Museum?

What happened in Eden?

When we hear a gunshot thousands of kilometers away, we never think we might be experiencing history. In the Greenhouse, facing the pitch-black screen, the thousands of eyes, the faces filled with similar questions or anger, also didn’t know.

But they knew fear, they knew unease. The fear they had once imposed on the inferior citizens, artificially divided, returned to them at that moment, like a breeze brushing over duckweed.

Something was out of control, something… was out of control!

In the capital, after witnessing all this on TV, the secretary clenched her teeth and shakily turned to the governor.

“Governor,” she said, “things… seem to be out of control.”

“This, this is simply absurd!” Dr. Qiao had already stood up and rushed out of the room the moment he saw Lin Huai breaking out of the cabinet, “I need to talk to someone!”

After he left, the young general pressed a few keys on the keyboard, activating another system. What appeared in the system was the Eden broadcast hall, with all the cameras focused on the man who had emerged from the glass cabinet.

He stood there, the tight restraint suit binding his body. He looked down at the red-haired girl on the ground, indifferent to the rest of the world.

After a brief, deathly silence, more voices exploded on the internet.

“How could he get out of the cabinet? Aren’t there effective security measures for prisoners of this level?”

“My God, is the potential prisoner rebellion from hundreds of years ago happening again?”

“Everyone, no need to be so nervous!” some voices desperately shouted, “This is just a small accident, he’s just one person, what can he do? He’s just one person!”

Such comments quickly fermented online under covert operations.

—Yes, he’s just one person, what can he do?

—Moreover, there are so many security personnel in the museum!

Amidst this rising clamor, the venue at the center of the discussion and storm remained appropriately silent.

“Monster…” someone murmured.

The young man referred to as a monster shook his arm and smashed open the remaining three glass cabinets holding the top three potential prisoners with his bare hands—of course, he really didn’t want to use his hands, as it would damage his image and make his style too much like “Fist of the North Star.” But it was indeed difficult for him to use his blood threads to neatly slice through a wall without harming the prisoners inside.

So he had to resort to the most traditional method, using the green skill [Simple Repair] to break the locks of each glass cabinet…

The released Eve and Adam were somewhat bewildered, looking at Lin Huai as if they still couldn’t understand how this had happened. And No. 13 seemed on the verge of being scared to death, crawling out of the cabinet and stumbling into the pit where No. 72 was, looking at the meat paste inside, clutching her throat, and emitting desperate cries.

“It’s all me, I killed him…” she hugged herself, continuously sobbing.

“You go and calm her down.” Lin Huai mercilessly picked up the red-haired girl sitting on the other side and threw her towards No. 13.

…Clearly, compared to the previously amiable host, he looked more like a criminal.

“Forget it,” he thought for a moment and added, “You guys staying here are too much of a nuisance.”

Then, with one hand each, he knocked out the four living potential prisoners and tossed them into a corner.

Host: …

His actions continued. After releasing the three living individuals, he also opened the doors of the two glass cabinets that had already been executed. The host, witnessing all his actions, was scared out of his wits, struggling to maintain his posture amidst several blood threads, trying to crawl away, but accidentally touched one of the threads as he raised his hand.

—The moment he touched the blood thread, his wrist was sliced open by the extremely sharp red line. He screamed, barely maintaining his composure, nearly being cut into pieces—

But the next moment, all the blood threads around him were withdrawn!

Before the joy of surviving could surge in his heart, he saw No. 81 in the restraint suit walking towards him from above. The pale, frail black-haired, black-eyed young man he had been teasing just ten minutes ago now seemed like a death-dealing demon to him.

But he dared not move or speak until the man asked, “What’s your height and weight?”

He instinctively reported the correct numbers. Then, he heard the other’s voice: “Barely passable, take off your clothes.”

—What?

He dared not delay, quickly stripping off his pants, shirt, and even his mask and belt. The black-haired monster stood beside him, looking down at him with apparent good humor, his toes subtly tapping to a beat.

If he had some knowledge of ancient Earth music, he would have recognized that the other was humming “La Vie en Rose” by Édith Piaf.

Then, the tapping stopped.

The host shakily looked up, only to hear the man say impatiently, “I didn’t tell you to take off your underwear.”

Host: “Oh.”

Then, he watched the man pick up the clothes—a black shirt, a purple suit jacket, a pair of crisp suit pants, and a silver mask. The man compared the clothes to himself, seemingly confirming the size, then picked up a sharp piece of metal from the ground, using the other hand to brush his hair back from his neck, and started cutting open the restraint suit along the seams from the neck down.

“Damn…”

There was a slight commotion in the audience.

They couldn’t tell if their commotion was from fear or excitement. Although the person on stage didn’t even glance at them, they couldn’t help but fix their eyes on him. The monster on stage looked as if he were in a fitting room all by himself, casually stripping off the restraint suit, not even glancing at the people watching him below, while he knocked out the other four potential prisoners and tossed them into a corner.

—Even if this was just casual, it was too exaggerated.

—Did this mean, did this mean—a terrifying conjecture sprouted in his heart—

—Did this mean that, in his eyes, the audience below, who dared not speak, had already become piles of corpses?

A person wouldn’t undress in public, even a demon might not like to reveal his body in front of people, but in a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood, it’s different, because…

In the venue, apart from him, everything else was dead.

—Future, to-be-resolved, dead things.

Lunatic, a real lunatic! The worldly-wise host confirmed that he had indeed made the most accurate judgment, but extreme fear had rendered him immobile. The demon’s clothes had been peeled off to reveal half a shoulder, but from the broadcast hall’s speakers came an unfamiliar voice.

“Lin Huai.”

The voice transmitted through the hacked network carried a feigned coldness, but more so, helplessness. The monster called Lin Huai responded with a “Hmm?” He tilted his head, thinking of something, then suddenly smiled, looking up at the direction of the monitor.

“It’s you,” he said.

There was a silence on the other end, as if carefully choosing words. After a while, Lin Huai softly laughed again: “So you’ve seen what you wanted to see? Are you scared? Do you think I’m terrifying?”

The voice said: “…You’re overthinking it, I’m just reminding you not to undress in front of so many people, even if they’re all NPCs, it’s still indecent.”

The host vaguely felt that the voice was somewhat familiar, while the expressions of the museum director, Dr. Lucille, and others turned to sheer horror upon hearing that voice.

“General, the general and that potential prisoner?! They actually know each other?!”

At that moment, Dr. Lucille seemed to hear the sound of his worldview, built over many years, collapsing.

No wonder, no wonder, no wonder when I planned to execute No. 81, so many obstacles suddenly appeared!

God!

“Nothing much,” Lin Huai chuckled, “They’re all going to die soon anyway.”

With that, he whistled, casually flicking the piece of metal in his hand, which embedded itself in the forehead of a guard who was about to draw his gun.

“…Forget it, you have night vision, right? I’ll turn off the lights for you.”

The next moment, the lights in the entire broadcast hall went out.

When the hall went from pitch-black to bright again, the monster originally in the restraint suit had transformed into a dashing young man in a suit. He wore a sleek dark purple velvet suit with a black lace shirt inside, and his face was now adorned with a silver mask.

“Speaking of which, purple suits always remind me of a lot of things,” he picked up the host’s microphone and said to the audience below, “Sometimes it’s the Joker, for which I’d have to dye my hair green to cosplay him, sometimes it’s Kogoro Mōri—the guy behind me with the tranquilizer gun aimed at my friend, put it down unless you want your head blown off.”

While Lin Huai was delivering his speech, Lu Xiaotian and Fatty Wang, who had escaped from the cabinets, also arrived at the path leading to the backstage of the broadcast hall under Zhao Jingtian’s guidance.

They had met on the way and heard of Lin Huai’s feat of coming out of the cabinet in public. And their goal was surprisingly the same—to rescue Lin Huai.

“Who knows what those lunatics will do to Brother Lin!” Lu Xiaotian said angrily, “Brother Lin alone can’t handle a whole group of them, let’s hurry over, or else Brother Lin will be chopped into mincemeat by them!”

Zhao Jingtian didn’t speak. Ever since being released from the cabinet, he had fully embraced his triple Zhao Ritian essence, choosing to fight rather than talk whenever possible. After Lu Xiaotian babbled for a long time, looking at Zhao Jingtian’s silence, he got angry again: “Why aren’t you saying anything!”

“You talk too much.”

“Stop arguing, we don’t know how Brother Lin is doing.” The closer they got to the broadcast hall, the heavier the sense of foreboding in Fatty’s heart became. As the smell of blood filled his nostrils, he became increasingly desperate: “It seems Brother Lin is in dire straits…”

“I won’t allow you to say that!” Lu Xiaotian was frantic, “Brother Lin is such a kind person, he must be fine!”

“Little brother, your filter is a bit heavy…”

While they were bantering, they finally entered the broadcast hall through a small door. As they pushed open the last small door, Lu Xiaotian, with red eyes, said to Fatty: “We will definitely defeat these evil villains and avenge Brother Lin…”

The next second, they heard a sinister laugh.

“—Recently, I’ve discovered something that matches purple even more, do you want to know what it is?” That crazy, evil voice said, “It’s snapping fingers.”

Lu Xiaotian: “…Why does this voice sound familiar?”

Fatty: “…Sounds quite enjoyable.”

Zhao Jingtian: …

“All of you here, if I’m not mistaken, there are 512 people, right?” The voice said unhurriedly, “So let’s play a new game, the rules are simple.”

“—Out of these 512 people, only 16 can survive, only 16 can leave this broadcast hall,” he said, “The first snap begins the game. One hour after the snap, I will randomly start killing, reducing the number to 256, then the second snap. One hour after the second snap, I will continue killing, reducing the number to 128, and then the third snap. And so on, until only 16 people remain. Of course, the rules are flexible, as long as after I snap, the final number of people remaining is half of the number after the previous snap, that’s fine. Whether those people are killed by me or not, I don’t care.”

“Next, the first snap will sound. Please prepare yourselves,” the voice continued, “Three, two, one—”

The crisp first snap sounded.

“Next, I’ll step out for a bit,” the owner of the voice said, “I won’t interfere with your internal activities…”

After saying this, he chuckled lightly, picked up the four people beside him, and walked out through another small door that had been opened.

“…Brother Zhao,” Fatty Wang’s trembling voice came from behind the door, “Are we still going to save him?”

“I kind of feel like Brother Lin is more like the villain here…” Lu Xiaotian said with a crying face, “Uninformed people might think he’s the examiner for this round…”

For some reason, they felt that the person inside the door, carrying four potential prisoners, pushing open the door, walking out with no one daring to stop him—

Seemed to be the most terrifying of all!