Quayside, Wooden cottage.
The moment The black tower prompt ended, all four people in the room stood stunned, staring at each other. The four of them were just about to leave the house. It was dawn, and apart from Lin Yi, who had been lurking around the circus, keeping a watchful eye on the movements inside, the other four of the team were going to split up and search the area where Mr B had disappeared yesterday. Before they could leave, they received an alert from The black tower.
The leader of the group, the man with the glasses, calmed down and looked at his teammates: "Did you all hear The black tower's cue?"
The three men nodded in unison.
The man with the glasses said, "Today is the second day, and in six days it's the surprise night at the Circus of the Weird. The black tower says we've triggered 'Disdain from a Famous Detective' and will announce the location of the monster every three days, which means it will announce the location of the monster twice in the next six days."
Mr. Li immediately said, "Captain, in that case, do we still need to go looking for the monster today?"
The man with the glasses thought for a long time and said, "No. The black tower has given us this hint, but it actually implies three things. Firstly, the reason why we can trigger this effect is because we are currently at a disadvantage and cannot compete with the two The black tower bosses. To make the game fair, it gives the player preferential treatment. And secondly, The black tower actively gives the location of the monster, which most likely means ..."
The man with the glasses walked to the sandbox in the centre of the room. His three teammates came over to him. The man with the glasses holds out his hand, pointing to the circle he drew himself last night. Last night, when the five of them had been discussing their response, he had drawn two circles around the spot where Mr B had disappeared. The first circle was smaller, and considering that Mr B might be incredibly strong, the man erased it and drew a second, larger circle.
It was in this circle that the four of them intended to look for Mr. A and Mr. B today.
The man with the glasses mused, "Since The black tower took the initiative to give us the coordinates of the monster's location, that means one thing. There's an 80% chance that we can't find the monster's location on our own initiative." He said, slamming his fist on the circle he had drawn, "The monster isn't even here. mr. B is stronger than I could have imagined, he disappeared here not because he hid the monster right around here, but because this place was able to make him disappear."
His teammates looked at him blankly, "Captain, what does that mean?"
The man with the glasses: " Mr. Li, you were the one who went with Xiao Yi to track that Mr. B yesterday. All of us on the pier saw that the carriage holding the monster was so heavy that Mr. B left deep footprints with every step he took and the car's ruts were embedded in the ground and could be spotted at a glance. Right?"
Mr. Li nodded, "That's right. The creature was really big and heavy and there was a whole dock full of underground people milling around."
The man with the glasses reached out and pointed to the pile of sand that he had just smashed into flat ground: "Mr B left footprints because he was pulling a very heavy car, causing the force of the car to press down on his body. As fast as he ran, the footprints and ruts in the ground would not disappear. So from the docks to here ..." he nudged the sand hard with his finger, "he didn't run the whole way. And this street where he disappeared is one of the few stone streets in the Kingdom of the Underlanders, not a dirt one."
Mr. Li reacted with a start, "Holy shit, he came this far before he suddenly disappeared because he didn't want us to follow the footprints and find him."
This was something they should have thought of a long time ago, but with the smokescreen of "Mr B is hiding around here", they had overlooked this crucial piece of information.
"I was the one who underestimated Mr. B's strength." Captain Glasses blamed himself, "If I'm right, he could have pulled the monster wagon anywhere in the underground human capitol, which is why The black tower thought for sure we wouldn't be able to locate him in three days. Of course, there's actually an upside to this; the place where Mr B is currently hiding must be accessible from here all the way to the stone path only. He didn't take any of the dirt roads, otherwise he would have left footprints and ruts. Mr. Li, Little Chen, and Hao, let's follow every stone road in the Capitol for the next three days and look around, maybe we might find Mr. A, Mr. B and the monster."
"Yes!"
After explaining the next three days, Little Chen wondered, "Captain, you said 'disdain from a famous detective' implied three things about us. You've only made two points here. The black tower thinks the players are at a disadvantage, and Mr B probably hides monsters in every stone path accessible from all the cities. ... What's the other point?"
The man with the glasses raised his hand to hold up his own glasses and looked calm: "Didn't you hear The black tower say that Mr. A and Mr. B played 21 players for all they were worth?"
All three players froze.
The man with the glasses sighed: "23 players, one night has passed and there are only 21 people left, two less. What does this mean? It means that the man from ... the dock yesterday still has a teammate, and he, along with his teammate, has been killed by Mr. A and Mr. B."
Small abandoned building, first floor.
When Wang Yinggui woke up, he opened his eyes and there was darkness in front of him. Wang Yinggui was so frightened that he rolled to his feet and tried to escape, but he had just come to stand up with his hands on the floor when he suddenly hit his head on something. He fell back with an ouch. Soon he remembered what had happened before he passed out.
He was caught by Mr A!
After a sudden glare from Mr B on the pier yesterday, Wang Yinggui turned and ran in fear, skulking around the pier for another five minutes before going to find his teammates. He thought Mr B had forgotten about him, but he was caught by Mr A just as he met up with his teammates.
Wang Yinggui couldn't understand how Mr. A and Mr. B could have spotted his identity at a glance when he hadn't done anything out of the ordinary. Could it be that they, like Mr. A and Mr. B, had their own identities on their heads? But there was nothing on their heads.
Wang Yinggui was puzzled. After being spotted by Mr. A, he and his teammates were unable to fight back at all, and within a minute they were overpowered by Mr. A and thrown in with their heads covered.
"No. Old Bird and I have been pretending we don't know who they are and pretending we can't see the letters above their heads, so how are they so sure we're players and thieves?" Wang Yinggui thought for half a day and then suddenly realised, "Wait, where is this place. Am I dead? No, I'm not dead, I'm still alive!"
Wang Yinggui gropes up in the darkness and soon he reaches the end of this space. It was a very small cage, so small that it could only hold him alone, and he could not even stand up (he would hit his head). He was imprisoned here, completely immobile. He hesitated for a moment and asked in a small voice, "Old bird?"
The answer to his question was a silence.
Wang Yinggui asked again, "Old Bird, Old Bird, are you there? Old Bird ..."
After a long shout, a dull grunt sounded beside him. Wang Yinggui immediately went over to him, his path blocked by the cage. He shouted "old bird" several times before his teammate finally woke up. Wang Yinggui told his teammate about his current situation, and the old bird felt around for a while and said, "I'm also in a cage, a small cage, a sparrow-sized cage that I can't even stand up in."
Wang Yinggui: "What do you think, where the hell are we...why didn't Mr. A and Mr. B kill us?"
"... He didn't kill us, it must be because we're still useful!" The old bird racked his brain and analyzed, "By the way, don't the underground people and monsters like to eat us players. They must be trying to sell us for money! Last month's Banana Tavern rally, that banana wine was brewed from the corpses of players, wasn't it? It's over, they're definitely going to sell us there. What's this going to be like, Eagle."
Wang Yinggui was worried himself to death and was about to open his mouth to comfort his teammates when suddenly he heard a strange sound. It was as if something thumped on the ground and came towards them. The sound was definitely a behemoth, and its footsteps on the ground actually made the two men's cage shake slightly.
The eagle swallowed, "Did you hear that?"
Old Bird: "I hear you."
"What is it?"
Old Bird: "I don't know, what's it all about ..."
"Kiri!"
A cry of surprise rang out in front of the two men. It was so close, so close that it was as if the thing was already standing in front of them. But there was darkness before Wang Yinggui and his teammate's eyes, their eyesight not yet evolved enough to see without any light source. The two men screamed in terror and their voices made the creature even more agitated as it began to treat the cage they were in like a little ball of fun, tossing it in mid-air and dropping it high into the air.
In the cage where the monster is kept, the screams of Wang Yinggui and his companions are incessant.
Outside the cage, Tang Mo's face looked odd when he heard the old bird say, "Mr A and Mr B don't kill us because they want to sell us for money". He shook his head helplessly when he later heard the screams of the two men being toyed with by the monster.
"There are still such stupid ... naive players who have cleared the first level of The black tower since Earth went online. That's a lot of luck."
I have to say that these two players are really lucky now.
Tang Mo heard from Fu Wenduo that both of them were not very strong and were only in the middle of the pack. Only Chen Shanshan has cleared the first level of The black tower, while the others (including Jackass and Tang Qiao) have been strictly instructed by Luo Fengcheng to go back to the first level of The black tower in a couple of months to prevent any accidents.
Not a lot of martial power, and that conversation just now didn't sound very smart. If you're able to get through the first level of The black tower, there's a good chance that you've just muddled through. For example, if you meet a good teammate after entering the game, and if you're lucky enough not to die, you'll be able to follow your teammate all the way through.
Apart from that, they were even more fortunate in that in this game, Mr A and Mr B were not real underground people, but Fu Wenduo and Tang Mo. If they were real underground people, they would not have locked them up, but would have killed and eaten them.
In fact, killing the two is the best solution. By killing them, there would be two less enemies to worry about. But neither Tang Mo nor Fu Wenduo chose to do so, instead they knocked them out and put them in a cage, where they now have to spend their energy guarding them.
The cage was still filled with the miserable cries of the two men, and Tang Mo leaned against the pillar and mused, "It would be better to kill them." Despite his words, Tang Mo still stood still, not moving.
At noon, Fu Wenduo came back from outside and Tang Mo immediately went up to him.
"Well?"
Fu Wenduo's voice came from beneath his heavy helmet, "There are people, about three groups of people. Two are hiding too deep to see the exact number or location, and one is a middle-aged man." Picking up a stone from the ground, he quickly drew a map on the wall. He drew it quickly, and although it was a simple map, he marked every location clearly.
This is a map of the area around the Strange Circus.
"Here and here, there are two groups of people hiding." Fu Wenduo took a stone and nodded to a small three-storey building behind the circus, "Here, the middle-aged man is hiding on the third floor."
Tang Mo said, "Have they seen you?"
Fu Wenduo: "The person hiding in this area most likely saw it." He points to a grassy area by the square, "She tried to follow me when I left the circus and I threw her off."
Tang Mo and Fu Wenduo had planned to spend the first six days peacefully and wait until the seventh day to deliver the big earthworm to the circus. However, the black tower gave the player a "Disdain from a Famous Detective" effect, which threw all of Tang Mo's plans out of whack. Tang Mo changed his plan and asked Fu Wenduo to check around the circus, where a player must be hiding and watching the circus.
"There are only three groups, and excluding these two, there are already only 19 players left." Tang Mo said in a voice so soft that Wang Yinggui and the old bird in the cage, who were being kicked by the monster as a small ball, couldn't have heard him, "Assuming these three groups of people have an average of 3-4 people per team, that makes them about ten. That leaves nine people who didn't go near the circus to monitor it. What were they thinking?"
Fu Wenduo: "Maybe there was a team of more than four people, a lot of people, up to five or six."
"Five is possible, six is difficult. It's too difficult to get a team of six players to clear the first level of The black tower all at once." Tang Mo mused, "Maybe there are five people, and maybe two teams that have given up monitoring around the circus."
Tang Mo picks up the stone and draws it on the wall.
"Those three groups of people can be counted as eleven. There are eight left. There should be two or three teams that abandoned the circus and didn't bother to monitor it." Tang Mo looked at the numbers sorted out on the wall, lost in thought. He slowly turned his head to look at Fu Wenduo .
Fu Wenduo was wearing thick armour and a silver helmet, Tang Mo could not see his expression at all, but he felt that the man was looking at him at the moment too. The two men stared at each other for a moment before Tang Mo asked, "What circumstances would make them give up on monitoring a place so obvious."
Fu Wenduo's voice was calm: "Unable to move freely, or dead."
Tang Mo is silent.
"About two or three teams abandoned to monitor the area around the circus, too many indeed. If it had been me, I would have arranged for someone to head there early and lurk overnight." Fu Wenduo raised his hand and drew a circle around the circus for a kilometre, "It's still possible that one or two people didn't think of this, it's not normal that seven or eight people didn't do so."
Tang Mo said, "Do you think it's imprisoned or dead?"
Beneath his helmet, Fu Wenduo's steely face shows no sign of expression, and the words he speaks are the same as the look on his face at the moment.
His voice was low and his tone certain, "Dead."
The man with the glasses and Mr. Li searched every stone path in the kingdom's capital city, but found nothing.
Most of the roads in the Kingdom of the Underlanders are dirt roads, and there are only eighteen stone roads. But these roads are the main roads in the Kingdom of the Underlanders, and people come and go on both sides of them, so it is hard to find anything unusual. After a long day of searching, the man with the glasses and his companion returned to the hut by the pier and waited half an hour for Little Chen and Hao to return. In another half hour, the dusty young woman jumped in through the window.
The five men exchanged information.
Mr. Li: "The captain and I searched three paths and found nothing unusual. Although we were now taking part in the game, those underground people did not recognise our identity and eat us. But we didn't dare to get too close to them and ask them for information. So there was nothing to be found. What about you guys?"
Little Chen shook her head, "No."
A young female voice rang out, "I saw Mr. A."
The eyes of the four men turned to her in unison.
Lin Yi said calmly, "Mr. A, wearing a suit of armour and a helmet on his head, couldn't see his face. He went to the circus this morning and entered quietly through the back door, so no one should have noticed, at least the players monitoring the other two places probably didn't notice him. It was only by coincidence that I saw him too. My powers are more on the stealthy side, so I followed him up to see where he was really going. But Mr. A spotted me and he quickly shook me off."
The eye man asked, "What was he trying to do at the circus, where's the monster?"
Lin Yi: "I didn't see the monster, he went alone."
The spectacled man's fingers tapped lightly on the table.
Mr. Li thought for a moment, twisted his head and asked, "Captain, since Mr. A didn't send the monster to the circus, what was he doing there? With that obvious letter on his head, doesn't he know that we players can see that letter and try to sneak into the circus and do something?"
Glasses Man: "If he really didn't know, he wouldn't have snuck in through the back door quietly and out of sight."
"So what does he want?"
The man with the glasses tapped the table faster and faster.
The sound of tapping echoed softly in the room as all four team members held their breath, waiting for the captain's answer. Three minutes later, the man with the glasses heaved a sigh of relief and looked to the young woman, "Xiao Yi, don't go tomorrow. Mr. A has found you out. He went to the circus today to see how many waves of people wanted to steal the monster. They're gathering information on the players."
Lin Yi was shocked: "So, Captain, I've been exposed?"
Glasses man: "Yes, so you don't go back to the circus and spy on it. Tomorrow we'll keep going to each of the stone paths and see what we can find. The day after tomorrow is the day The black tower tells the players where the monsters are, so we'll spend the next two days gathering our strength, and the day after that should be a big fight."
Lin Yi said, "That Mr. A is indeed very strong, he spotted my stalking and was very fast when he shrugged me off. It's a very powerful enemy."
"I'm talking about enemies, maybe not just Mr A and Mr B."
The crowd looked to the man with the glasses.
The hand of the man with the glasses tapping on the table suddenly stopped as he said, "Including us, if there are only three groups of people watching the circus, there are too few of them. There were four groups of people following Mr B on the first day, and now there are only three left. There are still at least ten people who are not monitoring the circus. The number of people who didn't go spying is too many, something must have happened for there to be only three groups of people spying on the circus."
Little Chen asked nervously, "Captain, what can happen?"
"I don't know. But it feels like ... is not a good thing."
The third day into the replica, four days before the surprise night at the Strange Circus.
When the man with the glasses and Mr. Li reached the seventh stone path they were searching, they stopped and looked at the crowd gathered in the distance. The two men looked at each other and quietly walked over to get a better look. Surrounded by Underlanders, they had to hide their identities and pretend to be of the same kind as the Underlanders. This time, however, the man with the glasses and Mr. Li hadn't even started acting, they had already seen something like that.
The man with the glasses looked up and slowly opened his mouth wide at the sight of the three humans hanging from the eaves.
Mr. Li also looked at the three bodies with disbelief. He paled when he saw the three men's disembowelled stomachs and the internal organs inside. Immediately afterwards, he saw the intestines of one of them dangling down to the ground, leaving only a cut attached to the stomach, and when the wind blew, the intestines drifted intermittently in the air.
Mr. Li felt his stomach turn over and he almost threw up, but he hurriedly held it back.
The underground people looked at the three bodies and swallowed.
"Three human players, sadly dead and the meat is not even fresh."
"Don't eat it if it's not fresh, I'm the first to see it, I want to eat it first!"
But in a few moments, a cacophony of underground men ripped the three bodies from the eaves. They plucked the limbs of the three men, crunching and gnawing. Mr. Li was so sick to his stomach that he stepped aside not to look. The man with the glasses wanted to go up and examine the bodies, but he turned slightly white as he looked at the devoured bodies and turned away.
Mr. Li said in distress, "Captain, don't you want to throw up?"
Without speaking, the man with glasses continued on his way. When he left the street and came to an isolated alley, the man with the glasses spat it all out in one mouthful.
Mr. Li also vomited a lot, until he was left with nothing but sour water at the end. He said angrily, "Fuck, those underground people can kill and eat if they want to, why do they have to cut open people's stomachs and hang them up there for public display! These underground people just look like people, they're not people at all, they're all monsters!"
"Not the underground people."
Mr. Li was stunned: "What?"
The man with glasses wiped his mouth and narrowed his eyes, "I have long found that although the Underlanders eat humans just like monsters, they rarely take the initiative to attack humans. Especially now, we are players participating in the game, and the five of us have encountered many underground people in the Kingdom Capital, but none of them have discovered our identities and taken the initiative to attack us."
Mr. Li: "Captain, what do you mean?"
"It's the players, kill them."
Twelve noon on the fourth day, Kingdom of the Underlanders.
The sun is high in the sky and Tang Mo is standing by the window of a small abandoned building, looking up at the blinding sun. A clear child's voice rings in his ears -
"Ding Dong! Turn on 'Disdain from a Famous Detective'."
A green light shot out from the centre of the sun, splitting into eighteen parts and shooting out into the earth. The light flew so fast that even Tang Mo's dynamic vision could not see where the other sixteen rays were going, and it was clear that The black tower was hiding the location of the other players.
Tang Mo turned his head and asked, "Did you get a good look?"
Fu Wenduo: "No."
Without further ado, two green rays of light shot into the small abandoned building they were in. One of the two rays of light shot into the cage where the monster was being held. A whimpering sound came from inside. Two days had passed and the two players were so exhausted from playing with the monster that they couldn't even shout, they could only grunt in pain and didn't have the energy to read the so-called "Disdain from a Famous Detective" alert.
Flying towards the cage the two green lights were caught by Tang Mo and Fu Wenduo before they could get inside.
Tang Mo looked down at the green light that flew into his palm. He studied it for a moment and then raised his head to meet Fu Wenduo's gaze in the air. Then, together, they opened the green light.
In a flash, two green lights flew above the two men's heads, enveloping them. Tang Mo's heart froze as he looked at the appearance of the green lights above Fu Wenduo's head, and he vaguely sensed that something was not right. Before he knew what was wrong, a map appeared in front of their eyes, with a green heart in the centre, drawn on the small abandoned building where Tang Mo and his team were at the moment.
A small line of text slowly emerges next to the map -
[Props: Disdain from a Famous Detective]
[Owned by: Wang Yinggui].
[Quality: None]
[Level: None]
[Attack Power: None]
[Function: Shows the location of the big circus monster].
[Restriction: One-time prop, only displayed for three seconds, then the map disappears. Please remember the detailed location carefully.]
[Remark: You want information without giving it? You need a little green on your head if you want to get by, little man].
Three seconds later, the green light above Tang Mo's and Fu Wenduo's heads disappeared. Tang Mo looks at Fu Wenduo: "Are you ready?"
Fu Wenduo seemed too absorbed in the fact that he had just been forced to go green to answer.
Tang Mo asked again, "Fu ... Donji ?"
Fu Wenduo looked up at him, "Good."
Tang Mo clenched his fingers and curled his lips. He put his mask back on and smiled, "Then let's stick to our plan ... Donji, see you in three hours."
The next moment, the two of them turned into a stream of light and disappeared into the house in two separate ends. In the centre of the house, a large cage stood silently in place, untouched.
--------------------
The author has something to say.
Green Sugar: ...
Green Fu: ...
#No problem with being green to each other before we even fall in love