Chapter 906: Chapter 869: Tell My Fortune or I’ll Kill You
Fatty turned his head and reached for the spot on the sofa that had jabbed his butt, then pulled out from the crack between the cushions a... bird?
It was a little bird toy.
The bird was stuck in the gap between two couch cushions, only its rock-hard beak jutting upward. Fatty had just sat squarely on its beak.
"What’s this?" Fatty curiously pinched the little bird toy between two fingers. The feathers on it were a bit messy, and a tuft of tail feathers had been yanked out. "Is this Mr. Xie Bi’an’s plush? He doesn’t look like the kind of guy who’d like this sort of thing."
"It’s a cat toy," Gu Mian said.
"Huh?" Fatty turned to look at Gu Mian. "Doctor, how do you know? Did you raise a cat before?"
Gu Mian’s luck had been bad since he was a kid; that misfortune showed up in every corner of his life.
Back when he was in school and living in the dorms, mice were frequent visitors to his room. They ignored all the surrounding dorms and just loved squeezing into his.
One roommate who had a cat at home brought the cat over to catch mice, and sometimes also brought a few cat toys to play with it. After a while, Gu Mian got to know a few types of cat toys.
"A roommate in middle school had one," Gu Mian answered.
It had been so long that he’d already forgotten which roommate had the cat, but he still remembered the cat toys.
"Does Mr. Xie Bi’an still keep a cat?" Fatty glanced around Xie Bi’an’s living room again and didn’t see anything alive. Forget a cat, there wasn’t even a single cockroach.
Liu Ruyan folded her arms across her chest. "Then it was probably one he used to have. Didn’t Xie Bi’an’s place have a big fire? Maybe the cat hasn’t been around since then."
The fire at Xie Bi’an’s home was something Chu Changge and Xiao Qiao had mentioned to Gu Mian before.
They’d said that Xie Bi’an’s house caught fire, and the reports claimed there were no survivors. The two of them had thought Xie Bi’an died in that fire, but after the global game started he showed up again, though always cloaked.
Come to think of it, both Chu Changge and Xiao Qiao had seen what Xie Bi’an used to look like.
Gu Mian asked Liu Ruyan curiously, "You’ve seen what Xie Bi’an used to look like too?"
From her tone, she seemed to have known Xie Bi’an as well.
"Of course I’ve seen him. All of us have. Back then he was pretty close with everyone, not this cold and distant like he is now. Right, Chu Changge?" Liu Ruyan dropped Chu Changge’s name again.
Gu Mian noticed that whenever they talked about Xie Bi’an, Liu Ruyan liked to cue Chu Changge. He had already noticed there seemed to be some old grudge between Chu Changge and Xie Bi’an, and Liu Ruyan looked like she knew exactly what that was.
"Yeah, yeah, we’ve all seen him," Xiao Qiao chimed in from the side. "Not bad. Looked pretty good."
Chu Changge ignored Liu Ruyan’s words. He took the phone that could connect to the Low-Dimensional World from Fatty and handed it to Gu Mian. "Try calling again. If it still won’t go through, we’ll go find Mr. Green. He should know how to contact other NPCs in the Low-Dimensional World. As long as we reach an NPC from another world, we can probably find out what’s going on in the Paradise World."
What a stiff way to change the subject.
It was rare to see Chu Changge this eager to steer the conversation away.
Gu Mian took the phone and notebook from Chu Changge. The notebook listed the contact info for three NPCs in the Paradise World.
"Game City Rabbit Puppet, Game City Gold Store Manager, Carnival Wharf recruiting office Jisan..."
Gu Mian decided to call the Carnival Wharf recruiting office first. The last two times he’d called there, the phone had been picked up by someone named Old Xu, and Gu Mian strongly suspected that Old Xu was Xu Xingcheng.
The last time Gu Mian called Carnival Wharf, the person on the other end said Old Xu had already quit. Without knowing the caller was Gu Mian, he loudly denounced him to his coworkers over the phone, then hung up the moment he realized it was Gu Mian on the line.
Now that they knew this number belonged to Gu Mian, even if they could still answer, they probably wouldn’t.
After a full two minutes of waiting, the busy tone in the receiver cut off automatically.
No answer.
Gu Mian then tried calling the Game City Rabbit Puppet and Manager Jin. Neither of them picked up either.
There was no telling what state the NPCs in Paradise were in now.
"Oh right, Doctor," Fatty suddenly remembered something, slapped his forehead, and turned to Gu Mian. "Doctor, after you came back from the Paradise World last time, didn’t you say an Inverted City appeared there? Now that the Paradise World has turned into a seed, does that mean the Inverted City inside it got compressed into the seed too?"
The Inverted City was Earth’s masterpiece. Had those gotten compressed into the seed as well?
Gu Mian looked at the seed in his hand, thinking that there might also be fragments of the Earth world inside.
Right, and there was Lu Yi.
Thinking of Lu Yi, Gu Mian turned to the others. "Where’s Lu Yi?"
The Paradise World had vanished outright; he didn’t know whether that would affect someone like Lu Yi, who’d come from the Paradise World into reality.
"Ever since Mr. Lu Yi came to our Earth, he’s been curious about everything and never stays in the apartment. He likes wandering around outside," Fatty said as he thought. "Doctor, are you worried that the disappearance of the Paradise World will affect Mr. Lu Yi somehow?"
"I’m worried he might have disappeared along with it," Gu Mian said honestly.
Liu Ruyan had said he had the ability to bring people, items, even entire worlds from the Low-Dimensional World into reality, and to bring them fully into the real world, unlike those shadows.
Lu Yi counted as someone Gu Mian had brought into reality, so the disappearance of the Paradise World shouldn’t affect him.
But I still need to actually see him before I can relax. Right now, who knows where Lu Yi has run off to.
"Doctor, don’t worry, I’ll go out and look for Mr. Lu Yi right away." Fatty said as he jogged toward the door.
"By the way, is Mr. Green in the apartment?" Gu Mian asked.
Just as Chu Changge had said, Mr. Green should know how to contact NPCs from other Low-Dimensional Worlds. Now that they couldn’t reach the NPCs from Paradise World, they might as well try contacting people from other Low-Dimensional Worlds to ask about the situation.
Fatty, who had been heading for the door, stopped and shook his head. "Mr. Green isn’t in the apartment. This morning I saw Xiao Hong take him out to play."
Gu Mian: "..."
"When you go out to look for Lu Yi, also keep an eye out for Xiao Hong and Mr. Green." Gu Mian could only hope Xiao Hong didn’t drag her old employer too far away.
Fatty agreed and left.
Liu Ruyan didn’t stay in Xie Bi’an’s room any longer either. She left with Xiao Qiao and headed downstairs.
Gu Mian had something to discuss with the Fortune-teller downstairs, so he followed the two of them down.
In the end, only Chu Changge remained standing at the door of Xie Bi’an’s apartment, watching them leave.
When they reached the stairwell, Gu Mian looked back. He saw Chu Changge still standing at the doorway staring at them; only when he noticed Gu Mian looking back did he avert his gaze.
After they went down one floor, Chu Changge’s figure completely disappeared from sight.
Gu Mian turned to look at Liu Ruyan, who was going downstairs with him. "Do you know a lot about Chu Changge and Xie Bi’an?"
"Not much." Liu Ruyan seemed to already know what he wanted to ask and answered directly. "I’ve said before, I came here when I was fourteen. Not long after I arrived, Xie Bi’an ’died’. Even though I say we were familiar with each other, it was only a few months."
As Liu Ruyan spoke, she looked at Gu Mian, as if already prepared to answer the follow-up question he was about to ask.
But Gu Mian braked at just the right moment and didn’t continue asking. "We’re here."
As they were talking, they had already arrived in front of the Fortune-teller’s door on the first floor.
"How interesting." Seeing that Gu Mian had no intention of asking further, Liu Ruyan left behind this inexplicable remark and turned to leave.
Beside her, Xiao Qiao copied her and tossed out a "How interesting," then turned and followed Liu Ruyan away.
Gu Mian watched the two of them leave, then turned and knocked on the Fortune-teller’s door.
From inside came the sound of something falling to the floor, as if the Fortune-teller had been in the middle of a divination and was startled by the knocking.
A few seconds later, Gu Mian heard footsteps coming toward the door from inside, and then the door creaked open.
The Fortune-teller froze for a second when she saw it was Gu Mian. "Have you settled the cloak guy in?"
She had been the first to see Xie Bi’an faint and slam his head into the wall, but when they were carrying Xie Bi’an upstairs, the Fortune-teller felt she couldn’t be of much help, so she returned to her room to continue her great divination career.
"He’s settled." Gu Mian nodded and naturally walked into the room. "There are some things I’d like you to divine."
Considering that the upcoming divination might damage the Fortune-teller’s beloved tools, Gu Mian was very polite in his wording.
The Fortune-teller frowned, also noticing that Gu Mian’s tone was overly polite.
His handling of ghosts in the instances had left a deep impression on her. In the Fortune-teller’s mind, Gu Mian shouldn’t be this polite; he should be the type to show up at her door lugging a chainsaw, grab her by the collar, and roar in her ear, "Tell my fortune or I’ll kill you."
Without realizing it, she’d slipped into the ghost’s point of view.
The Fortune-teller snapped out of her awkward fantasy and looked at Gu Mian sitting in front of her. "What do you want to divine?"
Gu Mian decided to start with something lighter.
"I want to know where the Evil God in Paradise World is."
The Fortune-teller hesitated, feeling that Gu Mian thought far too highly of her. He wanted to divine something that difficult? That was a god of Paradise World.
But since the atmosphere was already built up to this point, the Fortune-teller could only bite the bullet and do it.
She took out the Omen Tablet and, before beginning the divination, gave Gu Mian a little disclaimer. "There’s no guarantee we’ll get a result. This tablet often refuses to give answers." She silently added in her heart, like how it never gave an answer when I tried divining your location before.
"It’s fine." Gu Mian said.
He hadn’t pinned all his hopes on the Fortune-teller anyway. If this didn’t work, he could just cast a wide net and catch more fish.
The Evil God had so many avatars; as long as he kept entering instances without a break, he’d run into the guy eventually... though Gu Mian had never been particularly good at luck-based endeavors.
By now the Fortune-teller was a bit nervous as she started the divination with the tablet.
She hadn’t really expected the tablet to give a result, but the moment she finished asking the question, four characters appeared on its surface.
"The next instance?" The Fortune-teller read out the four characters given by the tablet. It wasn’t some obscure, hard-to-parse metaphor; it just gave a straightforward answer.
This tablet was called the [Omen Tablet], so naturally it could foretell things that would happen in the future. If it said the Evil God would be in the next instance, then the Evil God was very likely to be in the next instance.
