Chapter 74
Chapter 74
That tiny groan seemed to wake everyone up.
Standing in the center of the room, Ivy’s eyes moved slightly, her face pale and colorless, quietly suspended in the darkness. The pair of dark pupils showed strange colors under the weak light of the flashlight.
Yu Ran’s heart skipped a beat, her slender fingers tightened instantly, and four crescent-shaped finger marks were imprinted on her cold, sweaty palm. The slight tingling pain pulled on her nerves, and a feeling of weightlessness like falling spread instantly.
At this moment, a louder sound came from beside Yu Ran’s feet again. Those players who had fainted because of the spider finally woke up belatedly, struggling to sit up, and making quite loud noises, which attracted everyone’s eyes.
Looking at Ivy’s dark and menacing eyes, Yu Ran panicked, stepped forward, and gave each of the three players a hit behind their necks.
They passed out again, and fell down in the dust with a plop.
Yu Ran pulled up the corners of her lips stiffly, showing an awkward yet polite smile.
Ivy moved her eyes back, and stared at Mo Yi lifelessly again.
This time, she finally said, “Yes.”
The hoarse and rough sound sounded as if it had been scorched by a raging fire, like fingernails scratching glass. It was particularly ear-piercing in the silence.
Yu Ran couldn’t help being taken aback by her answer, and then reacted belatedly:
It turned out that Ivy was answering the question Mo Yi asked her just now– “Did you know?”
Mo Yi’s face was neither happy nor angry, but his dark eyes seemed to be a little darker as he stared at Ivy in front of him closely, his light-colored lips were pursed into a straight line.
He said, “What are those monsters?”
Ivy’s pale face blurred for a moment, her thin lips twisted into an arc similar to a smile, and said:
“You have already guessed it, so why are you asking me?”
Mo Yi raised his eyelids, his dark pupils were like arrows, tightly locked on Ivy’s face in the darkness.
Ivy didn’t seem to be surprised by his reaction, she looked away, smiled dryly, and said:
“…they are all people I killed.”
There was no change on Mo Yi’s face, but Yu Ran’s breathing was obviously messed up. Regardless of her instinctive fear of Ivy, she asked:
“Since they have been sacrificed once, why can they be sacrificed again?”
Ivy moved her cold and dark eyes, and said coldly and sarcastically:
“Each day’s sacrifice requires only one organ, but there is not only one organ in a person.”
Yu Ran frowned, subconsciously took a step forward, and continued to ask:
“Since only one organ is needed, why did you…” kill so many people?
Yu Ran swallowed the remaining half of the sentence under Ivy’s sneering gaze– now she remembered that every sacrifice needs fresh organs, and most of them are fatal parts. Once lost, they die. How could they wait for the next day?
Her face couldn’t help but be stained with a tinge of embarrassed thin red.
Ivy turned her eyes and looked at Mo Yi, who was still gloomy, and said in a hoarse voice:
“This is a deformed hunting ground. Every dead sacrifice will come back to life. If they don’t plunder new sacrifices to replace their organs, then their own organs will be sacrificed.”
Her terrifying and piercing voice was eerie in the empty, dark room.
Mo Yi pursed his lips and asked, “Is there any difference in the results of the sacrifices?”
Ivy laughed hoarsely: “Of course it’s different. The plague you get from sacrificing the old sacrifices belongs to the old era, and the plague you get from sacrificing the new sacrifices…is your new era.”
When she said the last sentence, Ivy spoke very slowly. The horrible and unpleasant voice seemed to be elongated and amplified, and the infinite deep meaning contained in it shocked Mo Yi’s heart.
He didn’t show it on his face, but he was not at peace in his heart.
The implication in her words was chilling.
He knew before that the plot in the instance was connected with reality, but now Ivy meant that if all the players become sacrifices and complete the sacrifice, the real world will also be affected by the instance, and a new plague would break out?
Mo Yi’s fingers subconsciously tightened a little bit, cold fingertips touching his palm. The thin needle-like pain was transmitted to the brain along the peripheral nerves, making him tremble at the bottom of his heart.
Ivy let out a horrible laugh, but there was no smile in her dark and cold eyes.
She repeated the fateful words:
“That’s why I said, you must die.”
Yu Ran, who knew the inside story, and Zhou Yunchen, who was still confused, felt the same chill for a moment, as if they were being targeted by a predator. Primitive fear and tremor arose in their hearts.
Yu Ran felt as if she was soaked in ice water, without any warmth from head to toe.
If Ivy didn’t deceive them, the sacrifice would be completed no matter whether they died or not, and the only difference was what kind of plague they would release. Instead of dying at the hands of the instance, it would be better to be killed by Ivy.
Yu Ran was a little desperate.
To everyone’s surprise, Mo Yi, who was standing directly opposite Ivy, showed a faint smile. He shook his head slowly, with the same firm tone:
“No, we must not.”
Ivy constricted her pale cheeks that were twisted by her smile, and stared right at Mo Yi.
Mo Yi smiled, the expression on his face looked relaxed and at ease:
“When we were in the kitchen just now, the pendant hurt your feelings the most. It was definitely not enough to stop you from attacking us, but you still let us go.”
He lowered his eyes, staring at his pale fingers that had lost their color, and continued:
“If it is really impossible to win as you said, and this instance is just a dead end, then why did you hesitate just now?”
If Mo Yi didn’t know that the sacrifice would be completed even if the players didn’t die, then he might think that Ivy let them go because she was willing to give them a chance to fight against this evil ritual.
But the current situation was that if a player didn’t die at a certain time, then the old sacrifice would take his place and become the new sacrifice, so no matter how they struggled, it wouldn’t matter.
Since Ivy knew from the beginning, why did she choose to let them go?
Mo Yi raised his pair of bright eyes, looked straight at Ivy, and continued:
“You know there’s another option.”
A way to break the game.
Ivy looked at him coldly, noncommittal.
Mo Yi smiled and changed the subject:
“Each instance can be challenged more than once by different players, so I think you have seen more than one wave of players, right?”
As he spoke, he looked at Ivy’s face carefully, as if he wanted to see something from that stiff and pale face.
After hearing what Mo Yi said, Ivy narrowed her eyes slightly, but did not answer.
Seeing her expression, Mo Yi knew that he was probably right.
He actually didn’t know whether the instance could be challenged repeatedly by different players. After all, each instance was extremely closely connected with reality, and the possibility of it being reset is too small– especially when Mo Yi witnessed the first one with his own eyes. A remnant of the instance in the real world: the charred frame.
So… what happened to those instances that were not successfully cleared by the players?
This question had been lingering in Mo Yi’s mind without an answer. After all, no matter whether the side mission was enabled or not, no player had ever entered the same instance twice.
Mo Yi couldn’t help being startled by Ivy’s familiarity with their era just now.
This side confirmed Mo Yi’s conjecture– an unfinished instance would be reset and wait for the next batch of players, and what was being reset was likely to be only the progress of the dungeon, not the NPC memory.
According to the nature of this game, Ivy would not tell them this matter so easily.
Her silence at the moment was a reassurance.
Mo Yi narrowed his eyes slightly, and continued:
“If the Black Death, which has disappeared for nearly a thousand years, really appeared in the real world, it would definitely cause an uproar. It is impossible for me not to know, and there is no such thing now, which means that neither the old nor the new sacrifices have been truly completed. ”
He paused, raised his eyes and stared closely at Ivy in the darkness:
“It is easy to understand that the new Black Death doesn’t appear, as long as you kill all the players before the time ends, and the old ones have not appeared. That means that even if you used monster sacrifices, you have never succeeded, so you must have a way to stop the sacrifices.”
Yu Ran’s heart was pounding, and she couldn’t help but tense when she heard Mo Yi’s gradually accelerating speech.
She just kept listening to Mo Yi continue to say:
“If we diverge our thinking and make some bold guesses…”
Mo Yi’s eyes slowly fixed on Ivy’s scorched, limping legs, and said pointedly:
“What if you were actually one of the seven sacrificed people?”
Yu Ran was so startled by his conclusion that she almost cried out, and stood there dumbfounded, looking a little silly.
Mo Yi continued to say as if no one was there:
“You didn’t have a helper, it was already extremely difficult to kill so many people. In addition, the entire city was under martial law. You were eager to use a part of your body to complete the final sacrifice in order to resurrect your children, but perhaps it was because you are the leader of the entire sacrifice, perhaps because your physical body was not completely destroyed when you died, so you were not controlled by the house, but retained your own consciousness and had great freedom.”
Ivy stared at him with a flicker in her eyes, and her facial expression seemed a little dazed.
Mo Yi took a step forward with no expression on his face, and said:
“This house can’t control you, so naturally it can’t force you to donate your organs to complete the final sacrifice. You can complete your mission as long as you ensure that the house doesn’t get enough new players.
And, if I recall correctly, on the note I found, the last body part to be sacrificed was the kneecap.”
Ivy met Mo Yi’s open eyes and stared fixedly for a long time, then she suddenly laughed:
“I underestimated you.”
Yu Ran was still immersed in the shock of Ivy being one of the seven sacrifices. At this moment, her feet were wrapped in spider silk, and the three players who had been knocked out finally moved and struggled to sit up again.
Ivy seemed startled by the sound, her pale face slowly dissipating into the darkness.
Mo Yi was taken aback, and subconsciously stretched out his hand to stop her, but the palm he raised froze in the air the next second.
A familiar mechanical female voice came to his ears, the voice was not loud, but the content was deafening:
“Dear candidate member Mo Yi, congratulations on taking another step towards becoming a member of the senior club, please continue to work hard.”