Li Daochang stared fixedly at Jin Rongxu, half of his murky eyes hidden beneath drooping lids.
This player was quite the actor.
It had never doubted the “puppet” was real.
After all, it knew perfectly well that there were only seven players in this instance to begin with. Two had already died, leaving five.
Li Daochang’s murky eyes swept across the room as he silently counted.
There were exactly five people standing here, weren’t there?
There was one more in its house. That person had appeared without a sound or trace, and Li Daochang had seen it clearly: they had coalesced from a mass of blood mist mixed with tiny scraps of flesh. It was probably some kind of special ability.
Although that player had put on a bizarre, oversized cloak and was giving off an extremely dense, intense aura of a horror creature, Li Daochang was no fool.
Someone capable of giving off such a rich, heavy scent of fresh meat couldn’t possibly be a genuine horror creature.
And someone with that kind of ability couldn’t possibly be some puppet or substitute—a ridiculous paper effigy of a thing!
Li Daochang’s throat bobbed involuntarily.
This player had so many treasures on him.
And as luck would have it, Li Daochang also had a precious son.
As luck would have it, it couldn’t bear to let its precious son enter the dungeon.
Li Daochang gave a dark, sinister smile in Jin Rongxu’s direction.
This puppet and this cloak were both excellent items.
And then there was this player’s ability to turn into blood mist, along with his complete vitality…
All of it would belong to its son!
Watching Li Daochang’s smile, Zhu Zeyu felt a little nervous.
This was precisely the kind of situation that tested one’s ability to improvise.
If only… if only Jin Rongxu’s [Mind Reading] had been leveled past 10 before giving it to him.
Zhu Zeyu knew that was an unrealistic fantasy. Practice had already shown that [Mind Reading] came with all sorts of limitations and was nowhere near as powerful as he had imagined.
Even if he got it later, he would probably only be able to use it on humans.
As for horror creatures, he still had to be extremely careful.
Zhu Zeyu glanced at Li Daochang in front of him.
Wasn’t this the perfect example?
“What are we signing?” Li Daochang slowly repeated, chewing over the three words and leaving Zhu Zeyu’s heart hanging.
Fortunately, the other party seemed intent on honoring their agreement and helping him conceal the existence of the “puppet.”
“I have a daughter,” Li Daochang said slowly.
As he spoke, its voice became noticeably shrill. It no longer sounded like a man’s voice and instead took on distinctly feminine qualities.
Zhu Zeyu found it somewhat horrifying.
While keeping an eye on Jin Rongxu’s reaction, he silently took a step back, cautiously pretending to be a terrified weakling.
Li Daochang’s smile widened. The stiff muscles around its eyes began to bunch up, squeezing its eyes into two narrow slits.
“You’re in for a treat! My daughter is young, capable, and knows how to please a man…”
Zhu Zeyu almost failed to keep a straight face.
He stole a glance at Jin Rongxu and saw that the man’s expression had indeed turned as black as charcoal.
He had thought Li Daochang would follow the usual script: marry my daughter, and you’ll be able to leave the dungeon, or something along those lines.
Who could have expected this thing to suddenly reveal its true nature, opening with the classic line, “You’re in for a treat”?
“…She’s healthy too, and she can bear children. I’d say the two of you are a match made in heaven!”
Li Daochang prattled on and on. By the end, its voice no longer sounded remotely masculine.
The military doctor and Ma Dong seemed completely stunned. Pot Lid, meanwhile, appeared to have no attention to spare for what Li Daochang was saying and was trembling in terror.
Jin Rongxu, however, was surprisingly patient—far beyond Zhu Yan’s expectations.
Only after Li Daochang had finished rambling did he slowly speak, stroking the military saber in his hand.
“You said you still have a daughter? She’s alive?”
He had seen the information, so of course he knew that Li Daochang had a daughter named Li Laidi.
But no one had been able to contact her. Her life or death remained unknown.
He was rather surprised that Li Daochang had revealed this today.
Could this daughter have some important clues?
“She’s alive.” Li Daochang suddenly tilted its head to one side. Its entire neck looked as if it had snapped, with the cervical vertebrae jutting against the skin and forming a protrusion.
“You will sign a wedding contract with her and become part of our family.”
“When the time comes, you’ll receive plenty of benefits from the dungeon.”
As it spoke, Li Daochang suddenly took a step forward.
“Since we’ve reached an agreement, don’t keep whining and making excuses. If you go back on your word, you can forget about leaving this dungeon!”
Jin Rongxu suddenly glanced at Zhu Zeyu.
Zhu Zeyu pretended to be startled. “Captain, what is it?”
Jin Rongxu’s expression did not look suspicious or probing. Instead, it seemed more like he was weighing his options.
As for what he was weighing, Zhu Zeyu decided to ask him outright.
In a low voice, he said, “Captain, do you want to meet this woman?”
From Jin Rongxu’s perspective, this Li Laidi was probably an important clue too.
But Zhu Zeyu wasn’t worried in the slightest about Jin Rongxu meeting her, nor was he worried that having Li Laidi’s thoughts read would expose him.
Li Laidi had already gone mad, and the extent of her suffering, along with her filthy, disheveled appearance, was beyond what an ordinary person could accept.
Li Daochang—or rather, “Mother,” Zhang Xiaohong—had already boasted that her daughter was wonderful. There was no way she would actually let Jin Rongxu meet her.
Jin Rongxu couldn’t be bothered to respond to Zhu Zeyu.
Instead, he grabbed Zhu Zeyu by the arm and shoved him in front of Li Daochang.
“The man under my command is suitable,” he said coldly. “Let him come and—”
Zhu Zeyu immediately cut him off.
“Let him come and discuss the wedding ceremony with you!”
He shouted without the slightest concern for Jin Rongxu’s dignity or expression.
Compared with offending Li Daochang, offending Jin Rongxu was much easier to deal with.
After all, in the prophetic vision this man believed in so completely, there was a scene of Zhu Zeyu taking a knife for him.
Zhu Zeyu turned around and saw that Jin Rongxu’s expression had become utterly frigid. A murderous glint flashed through his eyes.
“What did you say?” he asked Zhu Zeyu darkly.
Damn.
How was he supposed to explain this?
Zhu Zeyu’s mind raced. With his back to Li Daochang, he gave Jin Rongxu a meaningful look and shouted inwardly:
Pay attention to the details. There’s a trap, there’s definitely a trap.
He didn’t know whether the witch’s potion would distort what Jin Rongxu read.
But at the moment, there was only one way to find out.
Fortunately, Jin Rongxu did not make things difficult for Zhu Zeyu again.
He yanked Zhu Zeyu back, then looked at Li Daochang and spoke politely.
“Old sir, please wait a moment.”
Then he lowered his voice and tossed Zhu Zeyu three words:
“Log onto the forum.”
Zhu Zeyu fell silent for a moment.
Well, the player’s mark on his palm had only just been copied that morning.
There was no way he could log onto the forum, but Zhu Yan could.
“Zhu Zeyu,” Zhu Zeyu whispered. “Captain, same name.”
…
Sitting at the shabby dining table in Li Daochang’s house, Zhu Yan saw Jin Rongxu’s message in the private-message window of the [Player Forum].
Jin Rongxu’s ID was his real name.
Jin Rongxu: “Zhu Zeyu, what exactly are you trying to do?”
Zhu Zeyu: “It said we’d already made an agreement, so stop whining and making excuses. It also told you not to go back on your word.”
Zhu Zeyu: “Captain, didn’t it only just enter the house? Who exactly did it make an agreement with?”
Zhu Zeyu: “Captain, I think someone is impersonating you. They most likely pretended to be you and made a deal with it.”
lity and could only live as an ordinary mortal. He only wished to live a peaceful life. Yet he didn't know— The dog he adopted, because it ate his food, became a legendary demon king. The kitchen knife he casually forged became a peerless divine weapon, causing numerous experts to fight desperately for it. The young disciple he took in became an immortal lord that led an era, due to cultivating the techniques Ye Feng taught him. Even the skeletons he looked down on the most were ominous demon kings that suppressed countless worlds. Many years later, looking at the void shattered with a punch, Ye Feng murmured to himself: It turns out the peerless kings were myself all along...
s + Rent Collection Wealth】 At the start, he inherited a rundown house in the urban village from his grandfather. The house had no tenants, but the moment he was diagnosed with a terminal illness, a self-proclaimed empress from the Tianxuan Continent arrived as his first tenant. Ye Chuan soon discovered that with every new tenant moving in, not only did he receive massive daily payments, but he also obtained unique items related to their backgrounds. 【Acquired Bai Qianshuang’s related item: Tiger Strength Pill—dramatically enhances physical power!】 【Acquired Bai Qianshuang’s related item: Deer Blood Pill—significantly boosts vitality!】 …… From that day on, all sorts of bizarre tenants began appearing in the house: the empress from Tianxuan Continent, an apocalyptic sorceress from the Magic Realm, a mysterious scientific girl who fell through a spacetime rift… Every single day, he received strange, powerful items and endless money. Then one day, he suddenly realized—he had become invincible. Enough, enough! Stop giving me more!
nd fell into a coma while saving his younger sister from an out-of-control car. He became a vegetable. No one knew that his consciousness had crossed into a world of cultivation. Over the course of sixty years, he began as the lowest kind of mine slave, struggling to survive amid mountains of corpses and seas of blood. By sheer chance, he eventually obtained the complete memories of a fallen Immortal King. Alchemy, medicine, formations, feng shui, physiognomy, artifact forging… Every great inheritance of the cultivation world was now his. But when he opened his eyes again, he discovered that ten full years had passed in the modern world. To pay for his treatment, his father had sold the family’s shop and house, leaving himself covered in lasting injuries and illness. His mother had cared for him day and night, and more than half of her hair had already turned white. His younger sister, who had been only fifteen back then, was now twenty-five. To help repay the family’s debts, she had been forced to lower her head and put on a smiling face in places of glittering lights and endless revelry. Only then did Chen Xuan understand that what he had lost was not merely ten years. He had lost the life his entire family was meant to have. The good news was that he had brought back the memories of an Immortal King’s entire lifetime. The bad news was that his soul had returned alone—his cultivation had not come with him. Spiritual energy was scarce, resources were depleted, and the modern world still had firearms, surveillance, capital, and laws. If he wanted to protect his family, break free from everyone’s control, and become truly invincible beneath the heavens, he would have to start all over again.
he colors of other people’s emotions. Light red meant anxiety. Gray meant exhaustion. Orange meant excitement. Yellow... meant repression. At the same time, he could gain unlimited control over one of those colors. Pale cyan: relaxation. Using this ability, he started offering “two-yuan hugs,” spending an afternoon exchanging emotional-color experiences with others. Then came his final female customer of the day— a girl whose emotional color was pure black... —— A week later, Xu Chuan had become skilled at using pale cyan—Relaxation—treating it like a bottle of menthol balm whenever he needed it. That was when he discovered he had unlocked another unlimited emotional color: Purple, the color of fear. So these emotional colors refresh every week? Fine, I take it back—I’ll never call you useless again... —— Much later, after Xu Chuan had accumulated countless emotional abilities, one night, he suddenly found himself inside someone else’s dream. There, he could use the emotional colors he possessed to paint. And in her dream, he painted her a shower of pink shooting stars, spreading across the depths of the night sky...
