All around them, the crawling monsters unfurled the petal-like growths on their skin and scuttled swiftly over the old walls. Their mangled, bloodied faces twisted as they opened their mouths, low, hoarse roars scraping from their writhing throats, as though they meant to intimidate Bai Liu and the others.
The skill Little Witch Liu Jiayi had activated, [Mind-to-Mind Connection], directly exchanged the bodies of two people. In other words, the body Bai Liu currently occupied was his own, but his panel’s movement speed stat was very low. As a result, he quickly began to fall behind while being chased by the monsters.
One of the Kings’ Guild members saw that [Liu Jiayi] was about to be caught from behind by a monster whose “flower bud” had opened wide, ready to swallow him whole.
Seeing this, the Kings’ Guild member had no choice but to grit his teeth, reach out, grab [Liu Jiayi] by the back of the collar, and carry him along as they ran.
Soon, they arrived at the door of the old, spacious dormitory. The member twisted the rusted door handle several times, but the door would not open.
“Fuck,” the member cursed angrily. He immediately turned around and pressed his back against the door, his gaze dark as he watched the rose monsters closing in. He pulled out a long hammer. “These monsters are all S-rank. I won’t be able to hold them off for long.”
Bai Liu suddenly asked, “If you were holding them off alone, how long could you last?”
“???? Five or six minutes, I guess.” The member looked back at him in confusion. “Wait, why would I be holding them off alone? Little Witch, aren’t you right beside—”
Bai Liu gave him a refined, elegant smile.
In his hand was the bottle of low-grade perfume he had received that very morning. Without the slightest hesitation, he sprayed it directly at the teammate who had not yet reacted.
The choking perfume made the member cover his face and cough several times. As the fragrance spread, his body began to give off a faint scent of roses. The mangled monsters, which had been staring fixedly at both of them, turned their gazes in unison toward the teammate beside Bai Liu.
A gluttonous, covetous smile appeared on the monsters’ blurred, blood-soaked faces.
[System Notification: Warning! Warning! The concentration of perfume on the player’s body is too high! You have attracted the attention of the (Corrupted Staff)! They are about to come and suck the scent from your body!]
The teammate looked up. “...”
Then he let out a roar of resentful fury. “I’ll fuck your mother!! You’re Bai Liu!!”
Like spiders whose nest had just been stabbed open, the monsters swarmed toward the teammate. They quickly formed a dense, airtight circle around him.
While cursing Bai Liu’s ancestors for eighteen generations, the teammate had no choice but to remain trapped in place, swinging his heavy hammer to draw the monsters’ attention away from Bai Liu.
Meanwhile, Bai Liu deftly slipped out of the encirclement and began searching rapidly for clues inside the [Inner World] of this large dormitory.
The setting of the [Inner World] in games could usually be explained as follows: two different timelines, or parallel worlds existing at different points in time, overlapped in a single location. After entering, players could travel freely between the two world lines once certain conditions were met.
Generally, this method of supplementing the world lines was designed to allow players to return to a particular point in the past or future and uncover hidden information behind the game’s worldview.
Therefore, the [Inner World] usually contained a great deal of crucial information.
What Bai Liu needed to do now was find the key information he wanted.
More than a dozen workers’ corpses lay on the crookedly arranged bunk beds. The uniforms they wore were different from the ones Bai Liu and the others were currently wearing. They looked older.
This was most likely an [Inner World] from the past.
Soon, Bai Liu found a newspaper under one of the corpses, confirming this.
It was a copy of the Jingcheng Evening News. The headline read:
[Illegal Perfume May Contain Addictive Toxic Substances; Several Employees Already Addicted, Several Others Missing; Factory Now Shut Down by Relevant Departments]
Bai Liu scanned the article, and his eyebrows soon rose slightly.
The report stated:
[...The factory manager of this illegal perfume factory is an orphan surnamed Zhang. Due to congenital cataracts, the vision in his left eye is poor. He grew up in a private welfare home called Love Welfare Home and aspired to become a billionaire. Zhang was adopted at the age of thirteen. After his adoptive parents passed away, he inherited their estate. After being imprisoned three times for illegal smuggling, he secretly accumulated considerable wealth and connections, but he still remained unsatisfied...]
[In September of this year, after the poisoning incident at the welfare home broke out, Zhang saw the news and returned to his original welfare home with the intention of making a donation. However, Zhang proposed one condition for the donation: he greatly liked the original divine statue sculpture from the welfare home and wished to purchase the original statue under the pretext of making a donation...]
[...The Dean of the welfare home agreed. In the end, Zhang used a donation of ten million yuan as justification to exchange for the divine statue that had been buried underground during the welfare home’s renovation...]
[Not long afterward, the Dean of the welfare home was imprisoned because of the Blood Lingzhi incident. Relevant departments investigated Zhang, who had been the Dean’s last financial contact. Zhang claimed that he knew absolutely nothing about the Dean’s malicious actions, stating that he had only wanted to donate money to help the children and had simply happened to like that statue. Afterward, relevant personnel searched every fixed residence and bank safe-deposit box under Zhang’s name, but the statue was never found.]
[Later, when relevant personnel questioned the Dean about the origin of the statue, the Dean claimed deliriously that the statue was an ominous, evil object. In order to pray for the successful cultivation of the Blood Lingzhi, the investors had specifically purchased it from a museum in a declining coastal town that specialized in selling amulets and statues. It was said to be the most expensive statue in that town.]
[She said that the reason those investors believed the statue could guarantee the smooth cultivation of the Blood Lingzhi was because the statue’s face was exactly the same as that of an even more evil child who had died long ago and had catalyzed the Blood Lingzhi!!]
[After that, Zhang began cultivating a new type of rose and developing perfume. He leased large areas of land in the suburbs, hired a large number of workers, and began planting roses on a large scale. He named this rose, whose leaves withered after blooming, the “Dry-Leaf Rose.”]
[The growth cycle of this species—the Dry-Leaf Rose mentioned in the text—is extremely miraculous. Even in soil that does not meet the requirements for Rosaceae flowers, it can grow rapidly, covering the entire outskirts overnight.]
[Later, the perfume Zhang made from this species produced caffeine-like effects and became very popular on the market through online sales. However, regulatory departments soon intervened and discovered that the perfume posed serious safety hazards. It was banned that same month, and Zhang was heavily fined and strictly prohibited from planting the roses or selling the perfume again.]
[One week later, Zhang went missing, and there has been no news of him since.]
The report ended there.
But judging from the reality of the situation, this Zhang, the first manager of the Rose Factory, had clearly not stopped there. Instead, he had secretly established an even larger Rose Factory, which ultimately drew the intervention of the Dangerous Heretic Management Bureau.
The employees lying here should have been the first batch of Rose Factory workers—those who died because they could not withstand the rose perfume and were discarded here.
They were the missing employees mentioned in the newspaper headline.
After browsing through the newspaper, Bai Liu continued searching. He looked under every corpse’s bed and around the surrounding area for anything that might carry information.
There were usually only a few kinds of information carriers in horror games.
Newspapers, notes, calendars, video tapes, audio tapes, or diaries.
Soon, in the large dormitory room, Bai Liu found a diary inside the abdomen of a corpse lying face-up. The corpse was clutching a knife stabbed into its own neck, its expression fixed in extreme agony.
Bai Liu opened the diary.
On the first page of the dust- and decay-filled notebook, there was an inscription in the lower right corner, written with deep remorse:
[I have never regretted anything as much as opening an unprecedentedly evil thing. I thought my bottomless desires were the most terrifying thing in the world, but later I discovered they were not. The statue I bought back was!]
[The Dry-Leaf Rose is a flower brewed by an evil god. It will not wither. It will not fade. It will not decay. It merely reveals its process of blooming and falling through the human bodies it has completely bewitched. As a product favored by the gods, it achieves a beautiful immortality inside human bones and flesh, and within that frenzied fragrance.]
[Dried Rose Leaf Gas is the most perfect perfume and a poison without an antidote. I understood the former as its discoverer, and I will prove the latter as a dead man.]
Bai Liu glanced at the final word of the passage, then turned to the next page without pause.
[I grew up in a private welfare home funded by others. I know that the investors here possessed a strange kind of sorcery. This sorcery was inseparable from a strange child in the welfare home.]
[He was a very, very strange child. I could not see his face clearly, because he always let his long hair hang down to cover his eyes.]
[But I am certain that no matter who it is, once someone has seen this child even once, they will definitely be able to recognize him again later!]
[Because he is too terrifying. The moment I saw him, there was only one terrifying thought in my mind, one that still makes me tremble even now when I think of it. I was indeed afraid of him, but after I looked through the fine strands of his hair and met those pale blue eyes, eyes like giant beasts lurking in the deep sea—]
[—I had an impulse, as if possessed by a demon—]
[—I want to kill him! I want to tear him into pieces!]
