Chapter 2458: Chapter 2458: Call
This seasonal irregularity is not the kind Xu Huo has known before, like some plants that should grow in the summer being able to bloom and bear fruit in the winter after the environment changes. What Granny Yi mentions is that within a certain type of plant, some parts might grow slower.
For instance, a certain light purple flower should bloom at the end of October, but sometimes when Granny Yi goes out, she finds these plants, which usually grow together, in two states: half are blooming and half are still buds.
If within the same patch of flowers, some are blooming while others are not, it’s normal. But when one side blooms completely later than the other, it becomes quite strange.
However, when Granny Yi went back to look the next day, all the flowers had bloomed, and she didn’t find any traces nearby, not even footprints.
Granny Yi has encountered such strange phenomena a few times. Later, she asked a player specializing in mutant plants who said that mutated plant growth might be causing such soil changes. Just as plants have their territories above ground, they do under it too. Some plant’s main parts are underground; if that particular patch of flowers happens to pass through two different plant roots, the soil may change in nutrition or temperature under the influence of plant roots, leading to different growth rates.
After understanding this, Granny Yi no longer paid attention to such things, besides, this was not a big issue to begin with.
After learning about it, Xu Huo left the village with the Girl in the painting, intending to visit the place Granny Yi spoke of.
But as time had passed, even if the plant anomalies were due to the changes in the instance, it would be hard to find any traces after so long. Yet Xu Huo still wanted to have a look, as there was nothing else he could do besides watching the dungeon players decrease one by one.
That place was quite far from the village, so after walking a section on foot, they used a Teleportation Prop.
It was now the end of October; the flowers Granny Yi talked about were blooming well, without the phenomenon she described.
Xu Huo circled the flower patch once and used various devices to test it, concluding that it was not much different from the rest of the forest.
"What are you looking for?" the Girl in the painting asked after a while.
"Looking for something different." The disappearance of eight players at once is too unusual. Besides an exceptionally powerful player in the instance, the only possibility is a problem with the dungeon space. Not necessarily like the small space in Fish Banquet, the special magnetic field in the forest could interfere with players’ judgment.
However, Xu Huo discovered no traces in terms of time, space, or Psychic Power. Logically, an instance without these three infiltrations should be easier, yet clearly, this is not the case. He and the other players seemed trapped in mist, apparently free but actually in a cage. The only one truly free in this cage is the "Hidden Friend."
Why is it looking for friends? And where are the friends hidden?
The forever unseen silhouettes, voices appearing in the mist, lost and vanished people, late-blooming flowers... All these scattered facts make up everything in the forest and constitute what players can grasp as clues.
Suppose when Xu Huo got lost near Zhongmu Village before, he hadn’t experienced auditory hallucinations, and in fact, Chi Cai hadn’t called him at that time; the voice he heard was more like Chi Cai’s—then only one possibility remains: the voice he heard wasn’t from that moment.
The magnetic field in the forest is chaotic; it’s hard to say that events occurring here won’t be recorded and, when released at specific moments, present a different scene when seen or heard by people.
Chi Cai had indeed called him, but it happened previously on the way back to the village.
When he was trapped, the surrounding space was no longer the same as before. A previously witnessed scene or voice might reappear unexpectedly, just not in its exact original spot.
Considering the Hidden Friend legend has existed for a long time, this phenomenon should only occur in this forest. It only formed the instance after the game power deepened.
So whether players or locals, nobody can ever find anyone because what they see and hear are not things that existed at that time.
Thinking this way brilliantly explains why players can’t perceive anything either.
But there’s a problem: the people being sought always hear familiar voices and see familiar people. If voices and silhouettes exist in the past, they shouldn’t accurately recognize what shape to appear in...
Here, Xu Huo paused in thought. The instance doesn’t need to accurately identify the corresponding identity because the players here have been in the instance for a short time. The voices they hear are from the other players in the instance, whom they know.
The locals have lived in this forest all their lives and can interact with anyone, but to connect with the "Hidden Friend," the caller must be someone they most want to see at that moment, and the "Hidden Friend" is only responding.
If these hypotheses hold, then this instance’s boss wouldn’t be in any form he’d encountered before; it might not even have a shape.
Xu Huo’s mind went deep as he looked down at the ground, then after a while, let the Girl in the painting revert to canvas and put it back in his coat. He then went back near Upper Wood Village, waiting from day till night, then deep into the night, until all players closed their eyes to rest. Only then did he draw Bubble Bean into his Spiritual World.
There was no need for two people, so he only called for Bubble Bean.
Bubble Bean, half asleep and half awake, heard Xu Huo’s voice. At first, he thought it was Xu Huo calling him, but after three calls, he realized it, and saw that the Yin Yang Master, seemingly dead asleep on the chair, didn’t move at all.
Suddenly, Bubble Bean’s expression changed several times, finally becoming a gritted tooth statement: "Fell into his trap!"
He was about to wake Yin Yang Master, but his outreached hand passed right through Yin Yang Master as if he was transparent, without substance...
Bubble Bean was about to shout when Yin Yang Master opened one eye slightly, glanced at his bed position, and then turned over and continued sleeping as if nothing had happened.
"Damn!" Bubble Bean cursed, immediately taking out devices to prevent Mental Interference, but with little effect. He took out several more, even attempting to wreck the cabin to wake the others, but his hands increasingly struggled to touch any Props, and his voice sounded like it was in a glass bottle, heard only by himself.
"The winner and loser hasn’t been decided yet!" Grabbing a sharp tool, he rushed toward the door but didn’t pass through the wall like he thought he would, instead bouncing back. Amazingly at this moment, his Prop somehow stabbed into his own chest!
Bubble Bean looked incredulously at the Prop that shouldn’t have stabbed him under any circumstance, flipped his eyes, and fell backward...
