The Moon Wheel slowly floated back into Yan Wei’s hand.
He had first used the zero-point of the immortality skill to save Xu Miaomiao, and now he had activated the most profound ability of the Moon Wheel without his Body Index and Perception. After two consecutive layers of consumption, as soon as the Moon Wheel returned to his hand, he swayed, nearly losing his balance.
Yan Wei took a deep breath, ignoring his fastidiousness, and used his sleeve to wipe the cold sweat from his forehead.
The light and shadows swayed slightly with the movement of the train. Outside the sliding door of the sleeper compartment, Yan Mingguang stood beside Xu Miaomiao and reached out to Yan Wei: “Come out. You need to rest.”
The light, as bright as daylight and as pure as the moon, gradually faded. The Moon Wheel spun a few times and finally settled quietly in Yan Wei’s hand. Using the dim white light, he could only vaguely make out Yan Mingguang’s silhouette, unable to see his expression. But it must be one of coldness tinged with a unique warmth.
Yan Wei instinctively bypassed Ding Xiao and Xu Miaomiao, walking to Yan Mingguang’s side.
Lin Qing was right.
He was just pretending to be oblivious.
Even though he knew he was still missing some trivial yet crucial memories, even though he knew Yan Mingguang was still hiding some things from him, even though he knew the missing memories might be closely related to Yan Mingguang’s secrets, he unconditionally believed—this person would not betray him.
Looking back now, the malicious imposter Yan Mingguang from the last top-floor instance was vastly different from the one before him. That low-grade malice could only exploit the Tower’s convenience, drawing on all the malevolence flowing within the Tower World, finding loopholes in the rules, exuding a rotten and filthy aura. Even with the same face as Yan Mingguang, it felt worlds apart.
He must have been out of his mind to mistake the two.
Xu Miaomiao had already been helped up by Ding Xiao, who was now attached to a puppet. Ding Xiao seemed somewhat dazed, bowing her head as if recalling something. Xu Miaomiao, having just gone through a rollercoaster of emotions, was also speechless, her eyes slightly red, silently waiting for Ding Xiao to come back to her senses.
Lin Qing still stood seriously at the back, vigilantly guarding the surroundings. He had shown no significant emotional fluctuations throughout; he had no emotions like sorrow or regret that could hinder Ascension.
Yan Wei steadied himself with Yan Mingguang’s support and whispered, “Before the incident tonight, it came to me.”
Yan Mingguang turned his head, looking down at him, his expression pausing slightly.
“It tried to deceive me into giving up. I ignored it, and it left without saying anything else,” Yan Wei said, deliberately meeting Yan Mingguang’s gaze. “Did it come to you? We’re both players who reached the top but were reset.”
Yan Mingguang’s eyes flickered, recalling what had happened earlier with Ding Xiao in the sleeper compartment.
At that time…
He had held onto the folder that triggered death for an extended period, and before the lights even went out, something filthy had quietly appeared beside him.
Ding Xiao was watching from the lower bunk across the compartment. The filth first emerged from the shadows under the bunk, then more Ghosts and Monsters appeared from all directions. With a simple gesture, Yan Mingguang easily subdued the surrounding Ghosts, and the narrow sleeper compartment seemed to freeze, everything coming to a standstill.
Ding Xiao sighed, “You’re still the same…”
As she spoke, she too froze.
Yan Mingguang naturally understood what was happening.
Before him, the nearest Ghost moved slightly, its purplish lips parting, a faint, eerie laughter emanating from all directions.
The malice laughed for a while, then said to him, “I’ve been saving up my strength, hoping to possess Yan Wei for a few minutes to catch up with you. Why did you give him a cloak I can’t penetrate? This time, I’ve used up all my strength entering this instance, and I won’t have another chance. What a pity, there won’t be any more instances that suppress data enough for me to possess players.”
Yan Mingguang’s expression remained unchanged, calmly saying, “Get lost.”
The malice laughed again.
The laughter gradually faded, and the Ghosts disappeared. Everything around them resumed motion, the train clattering along.
Then, the malice found a way to enter another Ghost and went to find Yan Wei. Yan Mingguang, in the next carriage, was fully aware of this but had left protection for Yan Wei. Knowing Yan Wei wouldn’t be swayed by the malice, he didn’t intervene.
Later, Xu Miaomiao’s cry for help came, Ding Xiao was in danger and died, and Yan Wei cut off a remnant of her consciousness and cast it onto Xu Miaomiao’s puppet.
Yan Mingguang’s thoughts flashed by in an instant. He looked down at Yan Wei, concealing all his thoughts, and half-truthfully said, “It came, but left quickly.”
Yan Wei nodded. “Same as what I encountered. This thing is hiding in the Tower World, dreaming all day? Forget colluding with it; just the fact that all the players who entered the 99th floor with me last time died means I can’t reconcile with it.”
Yan Mingguang said no more.
After a while, Ding Xiao finally spoke, still dazed: “I don’t remember much. Just now, I heard Miaomiao’s cry and wanted to follow Yan Mingguang out, but before I could act, Ghosts kept coming. I used items to block them, and then Li Mao suddenly appeared… I can’t remember clearly, many things are fuzzy. I recognize you, remember some things about Manjusaka, but not much else, I…”
Xu Miaomiao immediately turned to Yan Wei.
Yan Wei said, “That’s normal. You…” He paused, somewhat awkwardly, “died. When we found you, your consciousness hadn’t completely dissipated. I tried using the Moon Wheel to cut out a small fragment of your soul’s consciousness from your… corpse, just like I did with Lin Zhen from Lin Qing. Then, using Xu Miaomiao’s Puppetry skill to create a matching body, I cast that fragment into the puppet. I was careful when cutting; this fragment is very small, so only the most profound memories remain.”
Xu Miaomiao bit her lower lip, but Ding Xiao smiled gently, “I understand. I’m dead now, just a remnant of consciousness residing in a puppet.”
Yan Wei sighed silently.
He said to Xu Miaomiao, “I’m sorry, this is the best I could do. Death is irreversible; the consciousness is only preserved, not a resurrection. The situation was urgent, and I feared further dissipation if I delayed, so I didn’t inform you beforehand—you might now be inseparable from Ding Xiao. Either treat her like other puppets and store her in your bone staff, or let her out to act with you. In a way, she’s…”
Ding Xiao chuckled, “I’ve become Miaomiao’s item?”
Yan Wei was silent.
She truly couldn’t be considered a person anymore.
Perhaps because she remembered little and wasn’t a complete soul, Xu Miaomiao looked dejected, while Ding Xiao remained unfazed, smiling as usual, “Then remember, if you meet someone good-looking, let me out.”
Xu Miaomiao’s tears nearly choked her.
“…Alright.”
“It’s time to go back,” Lin Qing said. “I listened carefully; there’s movement in the next carriage, where the two people on today’s Death List were staying. Tonight’s been chaotic, and the corridors are still risky. Let’s rest and discuss it tomorrow morning.”
Yan Wei frowned slightly, “Those two touched the folder and are on today’s Death List; they won’t survive. Now, we’re… four people. Two per room: Room 1 in Carriage 11, Room 1 in Carriage 12. This room has… Ding Xiao’s corpse, so we won’t stay here.”
The others naturally had no objections.
Yan Wei then asked, “Ding Xiao, do you remember the Retrospection you watched yesterday?”
Ding Xiao was puzzled, “Did I watch something yesterday?”
It seemed she had forgotten.
This Retrospection wasn’t particularly profound in Ding Xiao’s life, so it was normal for her not to remember. Yan Wei was just trying. Ding Xiao had made Li Mao personally act, and she died without even a chance to cry for help, the death threat she triggered being greater than what Xu Miaomiao faced. The only difference was the Retrospection she had watched.
She must have overlooked some crucial but unnoticed detail.
Yan Wei also vaguely felt that he had missed something.
It was subtle, so slight that even after scanning his memories since entering the instance several times, he couldn’t pinpoint the source of this anomaly.
He kept feeling that the train’s head wasn’t the dining car.
But now that Ding Xiao was effectively dead, that detail had vanished with the dissipated part of her soul’s consciousness, making it impossible to uncover. He could only continue trying to grasp that fleeting sense of something being off.
Yan Wei gave some reminders about things to be cautious of and said no more.
He had initially wanted Yan Mingguang to keep an eye on Xu Miaomiao and Ding Xiao, who was no longer a player, but considering Xu Miaomiao might have some things to discuss with Ding Xiao tonight, he assigned Lin Qing, who was emotionally stable, to share a room with Xu Miaomiao. He himself returned to the sleeper compartment in Carriage 12 with Yan Mingguang.
The latter half of the night passed unusually quickly.
Being with Yan Mingguang always lowered Yan Wei’s vigilance, and he soon fell asleep. But this sleep wasn’t as peaceful as before. Perhaps too much had happened tonight, as even in sleep, many thoughts flashed through Yan Wei’s mind.
He first dreamed of the time he saved Ding Xiao.
That instance was on a mountain full of hot springs, with extremely vicious Ghosts everywhere.
The Ghosts in the instance swarmed in, and the sky turned dark. The then-inexperienced girl had accidentally wandered into a group of a hundred Ghosts and was about to be torn apart. Luckily, the girl seemed to have some item, and in the blink of an eye, she suddenly moved a great distance forward, temporarily leaving the Ghosts behind.
He had saved many people.
Ding Xiao was right; he had wanted to save everyone back then.
So Yan Wei turned back, grabbed the girl’s hand, and pulled her along to catch up with Yan Mingguang, running forward together.
They reached the edge of a hot spring, and Yan Mingguang took his hand while he held the girl’s hand, and they jumped into the water without hesitation.
The sound of splashing water echoed, and the rising steam from the hot spring formed a perfect barrier as the Moon Wheel floated on the water’s surface. The mindless Ghosts lost their target, wandering around the hot springs, searching. The shore seemed like an open gate to hell, with demons and monsters roaming freely.
The water’s surface reflected the dirty and filthy Ghostly figures, while Yan Wei and Yan Mingguang were submerged in the clean, clear hot spring water.
The warmth enveloped them, and the previously calm water was now bubbling from their jump. With the data enhancement, players had superior vision even underwater. Yan Wei barely opened his eyes and saw Yan Mingguang beside him.
This person seemed to be looking at him underwater too, pulling him along with the current into his embrace, lowering his head slightly, and kissing his lips.
In the warm water, the heat rising from Yan Wei’s body seemed even more intense than the hot spring.
The girl was in the water not far away, watching with wide eyes.
After that, he never encountered Ding Xiao in another instance. He didn’t know that in the years since he reached the top and was reset, the girl had become one of the leaders of major organizations, frequently entering and exiting high-floor instances.
He had moved too fast, and apart from Yan Mingguang, all his old acquaintances were just fleeting passersby.
—He wondered if Ding Xiao would still remember that moment now.
In a daze, Yan Wei thought about the various aspects of this instance.
What exactly was off?
He was just a step away from grasping the root of this anomaly, but he always fell short.
Dawn broke.
The rain seemed to have latched onto the train, falling intermittently for days. The morning woke everyone with the rumble of thunder.
The two people on last night’s Death List were indeed dead.
There were also two players not on the Death List, who must have triggered something while searching for items during the day, their heads split in half, dying gruesomely in the bathroom.
Adding the initial deaths of Zhao Jingchen, He Dong, Cao Qun, and the extra person in the three-person room, of the sixteen players who entered, nine had died. The 89th-floor instance usually attracted the cream of the crop from the Tower World, players who could either clear the instance or find a way to descend and leave, with deaths being rare.
But this time, the instance had suppressed everyone’s data from the start, and now over half the players were dead.
Only seven remained: three other players, and Yan Wei, Yan Mingguang, Lin Qing, Xu Miaomiao—Ding Xiao no longer counted as alive.
When Yan Wei arrived at the dining car, the atmosphere had already plummeted to freezing.
Not because five people had died last night, but because the small blackboard at the end of the dining car had no numbers on it. The blackboard had faint traces of white chalk, and the eraser’s surface was covered in powder, clearly used to wipe off last night’s Death List, but the chalk was nowhere to be seen.
It seemed no new numbers would appear on this blackboard.
Lin Qing: “No one’s being targeted tonight?”
Yan Wei shook his head, whispering, “No, the Death List has become meaningless.”
Today, they would all die.
And they still hadn’t found the photo of the worker’s corpse, which was likely the Stairway.
