[But that thought lasted only for an instant. Very soon, I was shocked and terrified by the fact that I had produced such a bizarre idea. I began to reject Xie Ta like everyone else, even looking for opportunities to bully him, but I never dared to look directly at his face. Though, because of my vision problems, I could not see his face clearly anyway.]

[Soon, I was adopted by a middle-aged childless couple and left that place. But when I returned to my dreams at midnight, that pair of silver-blue eyes I had glimpsed only briefly—eyes utterly devoid of human emotion—would occasionally appear again. After dreaming of those eyes, the fear in my heart and some unwarranted desire would begin to boil {N•o•v•e•l•i•g•h•t} at the same time, making it impossible for me to ever sleep peacefully again.]

[I felt my breathing grow scorching hot, and the blood in my veins was like boiling water crashing wildly through my body, making my temples throb.]

[There was something demonic in those eyes, drawing me in.]

[I rose from the bed, picked up a knife as I passed through the kitchen, and walked to the bedside of my adoptive parents. I lowered my head and leaned very close, observing the pair sleeping peacefully without the slightest guard against me. My breathing suddenly became rapid.]

[In that instant, just like the first instant I saw Xie Ta, that long-absent, violent impulse that had always existed deep within my heart surfaced once more—]

[—I wanted to kill these two people! I wanted to chop them into pieces!]

[The people in this world are all pigs, all dogs, a pack of beasts who abandoned me and did not want me! A group of inferior creatures who only look at money and future potential! They abandoned me simply because I could not see! They never regarded me as a human being. Even their charity and shelter were no different from what one gives to cats and dogs!]

[I want to step on your heads. I want to use this one eye of mine that can still see to control all of you! I want to make you like I am now, wagging your tails and begging me just so you can barely survive!]

[When I barely regained consciousness, I saw the golden retriever puppy my adoptive father had raised barking madly at me, my hands covered in blood.]

[That golden retriever was only two months old. My adoptive father had specially bought it as a companion that could grow up together with me, the new member of the family.]

[When I saw that little golden retriever, I suddenly woke up. Trembling, I knelt before the dozens of pieces my adoptive parents had become. I grasped the right hand that had fallen in front of me and wept bitterly, calling them Mom and Dad, telling them I was sorry.]

[But that little golden retriever would not stop barking. It would not stop barking. Soon, I became afraid. And so, while crying, I let that puppy—the one that was supposed to accompany me as I grew up—be mixed together with my adoptive parents.]

[When I stood up and looked at the scene before me, I knew everything was beyond saving. The only living person, me, was the most important. So I cleaned the room, cooked them, and buried them in the backyard. After waiting a month, until they had rotted sufficiently, I went to report the case with a face full of tears, saying that my parents and the dog had gone missing while out for a walk.]

[No one would suspect a fourteen-year-old child with poor vision. Nor did they understand how much strength I could possess under the gaze of those eyes and the drive of my own inner desires. After more than three years of fruitless searching, I successfully inherited my adoptive parents’ estate at the age of eighteen and became an adult with a modest amount of savings.]

[But those eyes in my heart were still staring at me. I knew this was not enough. This was far from enough to satisfy those eyes.]

[I knew there was one thing that could satisfy them quickly—the thing in the welfare home that those investors dreamed of obtaining. As long as I got that thing, I could sell it for an unprecedentedly high price, and then I could quickly become a wealthy person capable of controlling my own destiny!]

[I returned to the welfare home, but that secret was guarded too strictly. I could not obtain it. I only vaguely knew that it was connected to the statue that looked so much like Xie Ta.]

[Soon, I got married. My wife was a perfumer who owned a greenhouse full of roses. She developed many perfumes with some small degree of fame, but they still never reached the level I wanted. It was nothing more than small-time play. There were still people living better lives than us.]

[In order to make us live better, I used many methods, but my wife never understood me. Every time she came to bail me out, she would question me hysterically, asking why I did such things. I had no choice but to explain helplessly that I was sacrificing myself for our better future.]

[Soon, she left me. She said she was going out to clear her head and would come back to divorce me, leaving behind only that greenhouse full of roses.]

[The police told me that my wife had gone missing. Three years later, I obtained all of her inheritance.]

[Soon after, something happened at the welfare home. I sold everything I owned, returned there, and bought that statue. The instant I saw the statue’s snow-white eyes, I knew my luck was about to change.]

[I placed the statue in my wife’s rose greenhouse. The leaves of the roses inside quickly withered, and the edges of the petals revealed a luxuriant, blurred deep red. The fragrance was so rich that even someone like me, who had never understood perfume, felt intoxicated. I began cultivating these dried leaf roses, but I discovered that no matter how I bred them, the dried leaf roses could not grow normally without the statue.]

[I stared at that beautiful, quiet, dilapidated yet holy statue. It gazed back at me with pure white eyeballs that had no pupils. That cruel, blood-soaked, unstoppable impulse I had felt when I first saw it surged up once again from my frantically beating chest. With a faint smile, I lifted a saw blade and walked toward it.]

[In that instant, I saw the silver-blue eyes in my heart close.]

After scanning through the rather long diary, written in an extremely messy hand, Bai Liu ignored the screams of the Kings’ Guild members behind him urging him to hurry and quickly flipped to the last few pages.

He wanted to find the secret formula for Dried Rose Leaf Gas and the location where Xie Ta had been buried after being dismembered.

There was nothing.

Even after Bai Liu flipped all the way to the very last page, he still did not see it.

The latter half of the diary was filled with Zhang’s meaningless groaning and his final self-entrapment. When he began to feel dissatisfied with low-concentration perfumes and used every possible method to develop higher and higher concentrations, this first factory director, the one most deeply poisoned by the perfume, finally “bloomed.”

In the end, he chose a painful suicide and left behind a suicide note full of remorse. Bai Liu merely glanced at it, determined that it contained no useful information, and tossed it aside—

—He understood people like Zhang very well. Things like this were mostly written to beautify themselves and deceive whoever came after them. This person’s entire logic revolved around himself. He was a typical moralistic criminal, someone who could justify his own crimes to himself.

Many serial killers throughout history had adopted this same rhetoric—“I was bewitched by a demon. I am innocent.”

Moreover, Bai Liu could even sense a certain malicious taste from the game designer toward him within all this. Zhang’s early life experiences were far too similar to his own: loving money, being rebellious, coming from an orphanage, and being stimulated by Xie Ta into fleeing the welfare home.

It was as though something wicked was whispering in his ear—

“Look. This is what your original life trajectory should have been.”

Just as Bai Liu was about to close the diary, the withered corpse in front of him abruptly sat up.

This corpse was Zhang from the diary.

Bai Liu was not startled. He calmly retreated two steps. Although it was unclear how much of the diary’s contents were true and how much was false, there was one thing Bai Liu could be certain of: this selfish factory director could never have committed suicide.

This thing had most likely been pretending in this way in order to better trap the players who entered the Inner World.

Countless tentacles grew out of the hollow ribcage of the dried corpse, and the shriveled skin on its body rolled backward, turning into bright, fresh red flesh.

After a series of extremely distorted tremors, the shrunken, withered head restored itself into a normal human head. His left eye was an opaque color similar to white marble, while a fully blooming rose grew in his right eye.

If one looked only at the head and ignored the lower half of his body, this person seemed like a polite, decent-looking middle-aged man. But looking at the coiled tentacles and tangled petals on his lower half, he resembled a grotesque, mobile cultivation room, with roses growing even from his bones.

The roses on his body bloomed, releasing a faint fragrance much richer than that of ordinary roses.

The fragrance made people dizzy. At the same time, the sounds of fighting behind Bai Liu gradually weakened. Bai Liu looked back and saw that the Kings’ Guild member’s head had already been swallowed halfway by a monster, his limbs hanging limply outside.

Without hesitation, Bai Liu struck the monster’s head with his whip.

The monster hissed strangely, spat out the Kings’ Guild member’s head, and turned its mangled, bloodied face toward Bai Liu, glaring at him venomously.

The “spiders” were drawn by the even richer fragrance and began rustling as they approached Bai Liu. Behind him stood the giant “Zhang,” almost as tall as the bunk beds, surrounded by an increasingly dense and intense scent of roses.

[System Notification: Warning! Player Bai Liu’s Mental Value is below 60! Please restore Mental Value immediately!]

Bai Liu seemed to have been hypnotized by the rose fragrance. Dizzy, he fell to the ground and was joyfully coiled and torn at by the giant monster’s tentacles, as if it intended to rip him into many pieces. The monster’s serrated, disc-shaped mouth muttered indistinctly:

“...You have... the scent of the Evil God on you...”

The moment this thing lifted him by the waist, Bai Liu heard the system prompt.

[The “Rose Factory Monster Book” has been refreshed—Lush Employee (2/3)]

[Monster Name: Lush Employee (First Generation Factory Director)]

[Weakness: ??? (To be explored)]

[Attack Method: Fragrance Induction (S-), using fragrance to lure the opponent and then devour them]

Behind him, the Kings’ Guild member who had been spat out and was barely breathing saw that Bai Liu had been lifted by the monster in order to save him. The member forced himself to stand, gritted his teeth, and looked up—

Then he froze.

His face turned unbelievably pale as he stared at the factory director monster. After checking the opponent’s panel, his voice stuttered, “S-S-rank monster!!”

S-rank monsters in Level Three games were not actually rare, but they were extremely difficult to handle. Especially since the S-rank monster coiling around Bai Liu’s limbs and tearing at him was not some low-level S-rank. This thing had a panel value of 13,000, making it a high-level monster even among S-ranks.

In a situation where most players had not even reached S-rank, the only way for players to fight an S-rank monster was to find its weakness.

But damn it!

In just a few more seconds, this monster was going to tear Bai Liu apart! Where were they supposed to find this thing’s weakness?!

At the same time, in the Multiplayer Zone of the Game Lobby, in front of Bai Liu’s small television viewing area.

Mu Shicheng and Mu Ke, along with members of the Carrion Guild, were locked in a fierce confrontation with the Kings’ Guild members. They seized every opportunity to frantically “Like,” but they could not stop the shameless Kings’ Guild members from constantly “Disliking.”

Almost everyone in the Carrion Guild had bookmarked and liked Bai Liu. Points for “Charging” could not be used casually. If this continued, Bai Liu was going to fall!

Seeing that the dislikes on Bai Liu’s small television were almost equal to the likes, and seeing Bai Liu’s situation on the small television become so critical, Mu Ke, who had originally been able to calm down and command the members, was now completely thrown into disorder. He clenched his fists, his eyes fixed unblinkingly on the small television, the rims of his eyes turning red.

What small television? What Black Room area?

Mu Ke was now utterly unable to think about the situation outside the game. When someone shouted that the monster lifting Bai Liu was an S-rank monster, the blood drained from his face in an instant. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

If Mu Shicheng had not reacted quickly enough to support Mu Ke, Mu Ke’s legs might have gone weak and sent him kneeling directly to the ground.

In the previous game, an S-rank monster had only been killed after three players were exhausted and Bai Liu finally found a way to bring out a God-tier NPC. That incident had almost become Mu Ke’s psychological shadow.

Mu Ke endured and endured, but in the end, he could not help wiping his tears as he sobbed, “Wooo... Bai Liu! Bai Liu, don’t let anything happen to you! If you leave, what will I do!”

Mu Shicheng was shocked. “!”

Nothing had even happened yet! Crying like this made it sound as if Bai Liu were already gone!

He tried to remain calmer, but Mu Shicheng’s calm did not last long. When the Kings’ Guild members began to mock and ridicule Bai Liu, Mu Shicheng exploded instantly.

“I think even if we don’t dislike him, this trash won’t live much longer.”

“Although disliking isn’t exactly moral, as long as I’m happy, that’s enough. Seeing this scene and then giving a dislike is just satisfying. So satisfying!”

Mu Shicheng rolled up his sleeves, gritting his teeth. “I’ll make you ‘satisfied’...”

The two sides soon broke into a fight, though no one was injured.

The conflict between these two guilds had always attracted many ordinary spectators. But because of the Kings’ Guild’s power, although they were curious about Bai Liu, they did not dare come over to watch openly. They only kept sneaking glances in this direction.

At this moment, seeing the conflict break out, some curious onlookers who had been watching finally could not hold themselves back and slipped in amid the chaos.

When they saw Bai Liu’s small television, these spectators were immediately shocked.

This was the first time these ordinary spectators had ever seen a small television with likes and dislikes at nearly a one-to-one ratio. It should already have been about to fall out of the Multiplayer Zone.

Looking again at the content on the small television, although these ordinary spectators sympathized with Bai Liu for being suppressed like this, they had no choice but to agree with what that Kings’ Guild member had just said.

Even without the dislikes, Bai Liu would not live much longer.

Some players who were “spiritual shareholders” of the Kings’ Guild sneered with great arrogance, “I thought such a big commotion was for some god-tier player, but it turns out he can’t even clear the stage. What a waste of the Kings’ Guild’s time to target you.”

Although many ordinary players did not agree with these words, they could not help sighing that Bai Liu’s luck was truly too bad.

In this situation, even if the weakness of the S-rank monster were known, Bai Liu’s panel stats were simply too meager for him to attack that weakness.

Just as these onlookers were about to turn and leave, someone cried out in surprise, and they all turned back.

At the instant Bai Liu was lifted until he was level with the monster’s line of sight, his right hand instantly transformed into a black monkey paw and, without the slightest hesitation, grabbed at the monster’s right eye.

The monster let out a heart-rending cry of pain and released Bai Liu.

In the center of the spider monsters closing in on him, Bai Liu turned around and lashed his whip at the Kings’ Guild member standing dumbfounded at the edge. The whip coiled around the man’s waist and dragged him over. Then Bai Liu lifted the eyeball for him to see.

The giant monster pounded the ground in rage, swinging its tentacles as it approached Bai Liu. The entire ground shook, giving the impression that the Inner World was about to collapse.

Bai Liu’s tone, however, remained calm. He spoke quickly, issuing a command: “Can you see another world through this eyeball? Close your left eye and use your right eye, the one full of desire, to look at this eyeball.”

The player foolishly closed his left eye.

One second, he saw a tentacle swinging with full force toward the back of Bai Liu’s head.

The next second, he and Bai Liu, whose expression remained calm, appeared in the normal large dormitory.

In front of the small television, the two guilds stopped their intense conflict at the same time.

Mu Shicheng finally released the breath he had been holding. Triumphantly, he punched Mu Ke on the shoulder and looked provocatively toward the Kings’ Guild side. “What did I tell you? Even if this whole crowd dies out, that guy Bai Liu still won’t have any problems.”

But Mu Ke was still staring somewhat blankly at Bai Liu’s small television.

The likes on Bai Liu’s small television had finally exceeded the dislikes by a large margin in that instant.

The spectators outside their own guild had silently liked and bookmarked Bai Liu’s small television!

Mu Ke let out a long breath, his eyes shining as he looked at Bai Liu’s small television.

This tug-of-war was still on!

—

Inside the game.

That Kings’ Guild member was deathly pale, sitting unsteadily on his own bunk bed and gasping for breath in lingering fear.

Bai Liu glanced at him faintly, drank a bottle of physical recovery agent, jumped down from the bunk, and walked out.

He was currently still using Liu Jiayi’s shell, and was a formal processing worker in the Rose Factory, so no one drove him away.

Not long after, the Kings’ Guild player behind him stealthily followed.

Bai Liu looked back and swept a glance over the guy, only to find that this fellow had used double-sided tape to tape his eyelids up. Both eyes bulged as large as copper bells, staring at Bai Liu without daring to blink even once. He looked remarkably like Tom from that one episode of Tom and Jerry where he used physical means to keep his eyes open so he could stay awake.

This guy seemed to have been scared into a stupor by the game mechanic of switching worlds with a blink.

Bai Liu: “...”

Bai Liu silently recalled the people connected to the Kings’ Guild whom he had encountered so far: Liu Jiayi, Qi Yifang, Tang Erda, and now this member who did not seem very bright.

Why did it feel as though none of the Kings’ Guild members were quite right in the head?

After following Bai Liu for some distance, the guy finally could not help leaning down and asking in a low voice, “Hey, just now, how did you react so quickly and realize that grabbing the monster’s eye would let us out?”

“He wrote it in his diary and told me himself,” Bai Liu casually brushed him off.

The guy fell silent for a long while.

Then he believed it firmly, appearing extremely shocked. “This is my first time seeing such an honest monster!”

Bai Liu: “...”

He remembered Liu Jiayi telling him that, among the other two Kings’ Guild members, one was not very bright and easy to fool. His intelligence value was only 59, he had the same surname as her, and his name was Liu Ji.

At the time, Bai Liu had felt that this name matched that intelligence value perfectly.