Chapter 903: Chapter 866: Reasonable Interpreter Gu
Xie Bi’an fainted, and in the end it was Liu Ruyan who took out the spare key to his room, opened the door, and moved him inside.
Of course, moving people was still Fatty’s job. As he bustled around hauling Xie Bi’an into the room, he said to Liu Ruyan beside him, "Good thing Miss Liu Ruyan had the spare key. Otherwise, if we wanted to get in, we’d have to smash the door open."
Liu Ruyan let out a "heh heh": "No need to worry I’ll use the spare keys to sneak into your rooms and do something. I’ve already given all of you the spare keys to your own rooms; only Xie Bi’an doesn’t care about this sort of thing, so his spare key’s still with me."
Gu Mian, on the other hand, wasn’t worried about Liu Ruyan having a spare key to his place.
Back before the global game descended, Liu Ruyan was fond of using the spare key to open his door, then going in to mess with his gas tank.
After a long time, Gu Mian finally couldn’t take it anymore, paid out of pocket to replace his door with a super-sturdy security door, and didn’t give Liu Ruyan a key to the new one.
After that, Liu Ruyan could no longer get into his place.
By this time Fatty had already put Xie Bi’an back on his bed.
Gu Mian followed behind Fatty into Xie Bi’an’s room. It was a one-bedroom, and the furnishings were extremely simple; it was obvious it hadn’t been decorated much.
In the living room there was only a fabric sofa set and a glass coffee table; aside from that there was nothing else—"bare walls" would be putting it mildly.
The bedroom was even more extreme, with only a single bed that looked incredibly crude at a glance; the sheets, quilt, and pillowcases were all plain gray.
Gu Mian remembered this bed counted as part of the apartment’s "starter decor."
When he had just rented the place, the room had also come with a single bed like this, but later he’d replaced it.
"He specifically asked for this room. The other units in this apartment have basically all been rented before, and the tenants replaced the furniture with better pieces. Only this one is smaller and gets worse light; it’d been sitting empty because no one would take it. But when he came, he just had to pick this most bare-bones one. It’s ridiculous—I’m not even charging him rent. He explained that he just liked things more spacious." Liu Ruyan said from the side.
She stood in the doorway, blocking Chu Changge behind her, so Chu Changge could only stand in the living room and look in.
Before the global game started, Xie Bi’an hadn’t been a tenant here; he only came after the game had already been going for a while.
"He even took down the ceiling light and changed it," Liu Ruyan said, lifting her head to look at the ceiling.
Gu Mian also looked up.
The light fixture was just a bare incandescent bulb. These days most people put some gaudy decorative shade over their lights; it was rare to see a big bulb just stuck naked on the ceiling like this.
Liu Ruyan liked beautiful, decorative chandeliers. When Gu Mian moved in, the apartment’s starter furniture was all very plain, but the chandelier on the ceiling was quite ornate, with a kind of vintage palace style.
That fancy chandelier had dangled precariously over Gu Mian’s head for many years and was still hanging on even now.
Apparently Xie Bi’an didn’t like anything ornate and had replaced the chandelier with a simple bulb.
In Xie Bi’an’s place, they didn’t find anything like a cabinet or a trunk—there wasn’t even a wardrobe.
Gu Mian looked at the cloak shrouding Xie Bi’an and thought, no wonder he was always dressed like this whenever they met; he probably didn’t have any other clothes to change into.
Fatty hesitated at the side of Xie Bi’an’s bed. "Doc, should we maybe lift his hood? It feels like with the hood pressing down on his face he might not be able to breathe properly."
If the person lying on the bed had been anyone else, Fatty would’ve already yanked their hood off. But the one lying there now was Xie Bi’an, and Fatty thought of the face Xie Bi’an had exposed in the Fierce Ghost Exhibition instance; it didn’t feel right to pull his hood down in front of everyone like this.
It was like how a disabled person doesn’t want others seeing their prosthetics—naturally, Xie Bi’an, whose face had been destroyed by fire, wouldn’t want others seeing his face.
"His face is always hidden under that cloak—don’t you ever get curious what he looks like?" There was a clear note of provocation in Liu Ruyan’s voice, as if she were trying to egg Fatty on to lift Xie Bi’an’s hood.
Fatty hesitated for a moment. "We already saw him in the Fierce Ghost Exhibition instance..."
Having your skin burned off by a fire wasn’t exactly something to brag about, so after leaving the Fierce Ghost Exhibition instance, Fatty and the others hadn’t gone around telling people about Xie Bi’an.
Just like now, Fatty only told Liu Ruyan that they’d seen Xie Bi’an’s real face in an instance; he didn’t mention that Xie Bi’an’s looks had been burned away.
At that, Liu Ruyan was briefly stunned. "You all saw?"
Hearing her tone, Fatty also froze. From the way she sounded, it seemed like Liu Ruyan knew what was under Xie Bi’an’s hood. He looked at Liu Ruyan in confusion. "Miss Liu Ruyan, you also know what Xie Bi’an looks like?"
"I do." Liu Ruyan arched one eyebrow. "After all, we’re all colleagues; there’s nothing that needs to be hidden, right? Isn’t that so, Chu Changge?"
As she spoke, she turned her head toward Chu Changge behind her.
Chu Changge let out a barely audible snort of laughter through his nose, neither confirming nor denying it.
In the end it was Fatty who shooed everyone out of the bedroom, then, mumbling apologies under his breath, quickly lifted Xie Bi’an’s cloak, and just as quickly dashed out of the bedroom and shut the door.
Watching Fatty’s behavior, Liu Ruyan let out a laugh. "Actually, he’s out cold now—he won’t know whatever you do to him, even if you take a dump on his bed."
Gu Mian felt that ever since the global game began, Liu Ruyan had been getting more and more unhinged. She would never have said something like that before.
Just then, Xiao Qiao suddenly rushed in from outside.
This was the first time Gu Mian had seen Xiao Qiao since he left the Paradise World.
She ran in in a hurry, as if looking for someone, her eyes darting around as she muttered, "Gone, gone."
At that moment she spotted Gu Mian standing at the bedroom door. Xiao Qiao’s wandering eyes instantly fixed on Gu Mian and stopped moving. "You’re alive."
She said it like he’d been dead before.
Gu Mian nodded. "Yeah, I’m alive."
Xiao Qiao was happy for a moment, but then she immediately remembered why she was here. Her eyes continued searching around. "Where’s Jiang Yang?"
Compared to Xie Bi’an, the name Jiang Yang was shorter and easier to remember, and Xiao Qiao preferred calling him by the simpler name.
"He passed out," Fatty pointed at the bedroom door, "he’s resting in there, don’t go bothering him."
"Passed out, just like me..." Xiao Qiao thought for a bit, then looked at Gu Mian. "He’s gone."
"What’s gone?" Fatty couldn’t understand what Xiao Qiao was saying.
"She says the world Xie Bi’an was born in is gone." Gu Mian translated for her.
"You mean the Paradise World? Right, I just heard Miss Liu Ruyan saying she couldn’t sense the Paradise World’s existence anymore. Doc, what did you do in the Paradise World this time? Is Paradise really gone?" Fatty scratched his head.
Earlier, Gu Mian had told Fatty that he’d been playing house in the Paradise World, but even counting on his fingers Fatty knew it hadn’t been as simple as Gu Mian made it sound.
Anyway, there were no outsiders here. All four Guardians who were still alive were present, though one of them was still unconscious.
Gu Mian briefly told them about what had happened in the Paradise World, and showed them the seed that Lele Garden had turned into.
"This is really something, Doc." Fatty stared curiously at the thing in Gu Mian’s palm. It was a tiny pure white seed, only about the size of a mung bean. If you weren’t paying attention you might not even realize it was a seed; it looked more like a small white sugar pill.
Fatty leaned in close to the seed in Gu Mian’s hand. "Doc, is the whole world in there now? The Upper Class People and the lower-class ones, oh right, and the NPCs."
As he spoke, something suddenly occurred to him and his eyes widened. "And that Mingliang—he stayed in the Paradise World. Is he in this seed now too?"
Gu Mian didn’t know either.
Logically, when the Paradise World turned into a seed, there should have been other players in the middle of instances in that world. Did those players get wrapped into the seed as well?
"Don’t we have those phone numbers for NPCs in the Paradise World? We can just call them and find out." Gu Mian thought of the three strings of numbers in that programmer’s little booklet; all three were for NPCs in the Paradise World.
"Oh, right." Fatty nodded. "I’ll go back and call them now." Saying that, he scampered out of the room and ran upstairs.
Gu Mian and Xie Bi’an didn’t live on the same floor; he lived upstairs.
At this moment Liu Ruyan, standing beside him, spoke thoughtfully. "The Low-Dimensional Worlds are all connected to each other. Like that time you wreaked havoc in my world—other worlds got dragged into it as well. But this time you plucked the Paradise World out entirely and somehow it didn’t seem to affect the other worlds at all."
Whether the other worlds had been affected could be seen from their corresponding Guardians.
Right now only Xie Bi’an, from the Paradise World, was unconscious, while Chu Changge, Liu Ruyan, and Xiao Qiao were all still lively and kicking.
The three of them hadn’t been affected at all.
Gu Mian pondered. Could this be the Low-Dimensional Worlds’ self-rescue? Had they stopped letting their worlds affect each other? In that case, even if the Twilight Gods World completely collapsed, it wouldn’t impact the worlds before it.
Liu Ruyan seemed to see through what Gu Mian was thinking. "Hard to say. If the Low-Dimensional Worlds really had that kind of ability, they wouldn’t have had to pin all their hopes on you. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I think this time it was purely because of you that the upheaval in the Paradise World didn’t hit the other worlds."
"Looks like I picked the right profession. Not only can I save people, I can save other worlds." Gu Mian let out a dry chuckle. "But last time it was also me making a mess in the Old World and nearly destroying it. The blowback on the other worlds wasn’t small that time."
"It’s not the same." Liu Ruyan looked at the pure white seed in Gu Mian’s hand. "Last time you were trying to destroy an entire world. This time, you took an entire world away."
He had actually planned to destroy it at first, Gu Mian thought to himself.
