Chapter 177: The Despicable Me (Part 2)
Chapter 177: The Despicable Me (Part 2)
Feng Bu Jue wasn’t worried about being shot dead. With four Contra Medals in his possession, the first four deaths were nothing more than a consumption of resources. At this point, aside from disconnection or forced logout, this nightmare difficulty single-player survival scenario had only two possible failure conditions: first, being killed a fifth time after exhausting all medals; second, as the Boss had just announced over the broadcast, "Once the poison activates, you will immediately be judged as failure to complete" – in other words, failure would be declared the moment the timer reached ninety-two minutes.
In short, no matter what awaited Feng Bu Jue in the corridor ahead, the worst-case scenario was simply dying once. Direct failure conditions didn’t exist inherently – unless, of course, there was some completely unknown failure Flag, which would be extremely unlikely and illogical. It would be like playing Super Mario, where the manual stated you died only by falling into pits or running out of time, but then the first question block you hit exploded the moment you touched it. That would clearly become an entirely different kind of game...
Feng Bu Jue raised both hands, steadily and firmly stepping forward. Turning his body to face the corridor head-on, he stood before the first door. Since no response came after his shouted challenge, he mentally prepared for bullets to come flying at him. Surprisingly, the corridor was completely empty.
No shooters. No weapons. Nothing at all.
Maybe the shooter had fired from a distant spot beyond visual range, the gunshot sound echoing through the corridor? Feng Bu Jue speculated. If that were true, the weapon couldn’t be a one-shot pistol – such a weapon couldn’t target anything beyond the shooter’s line of sight. Otherwise, someone could point the gun randomly at the sky or an empty corridor and cause countless people miles away to die inexplicably.
As for what weapon the shooter actually used... given the distance, a sniper rifle was highly suspicious. But if someone’s neck were truly struck by a bullet with a caliber exceeding twelve millimeters, the result wouldn’t be the clean penetration and blood spray he’d seen – the entire head should have been blown off.
Then how could an ordinary firearm achieve such range and precision? Had the shooter equipped a one-shot pistol with a long-range scope? Or did they possess some eagle-eyed skill for ultra-long-distance observation?
Another question arose: if the shooter had indeed fired from extreme range, they wouldn’t have heard Feng Bu Jue’s earlier shout. So what were they doing now? Were they still in position, seeing Feng Bu Jue at the doorway? Or had the shooter moved after killing him? If they moved, were they coming this way or retreating down the corridor’s other end?
"If the shooter could see me, and if that shooter is me, they should notice I’m not the same Feng Bu Jue as before. But if they couldn’t tell, they might believe the first shot failed and attempt a second. However, they didn’t..." Feng Bu Jue pondered, "...does that mean their skills or weapon are on cool-down?"
No... that wasn’t it.
He lowered his hands and calmly crossed through the first door, carefully examining the corridor’s floor, walls, and ceiling for clues as he advanced.
Feng Bu Jue discarded the remote shooting hypothesis. While it could explain why he’d heard only one person’s footsteps fleeing and silence after the gunshot, there was a simpler, more reasonable explanation for the corridor’s emptiness.
"Are they all illusions?" Feng Bu Jue murmured. "The earlier ‘me’ and the gunshot were merely visual and auditory information I received. Now there’s no corpse, no shell casings, and even the bloodstains have dissolved into white lightdisappear..." He glanced back at the fan-shaped area. "That warning of ‘everything’s wrong’ and ‘don’t...’ was hinting that taking this path was incorrect? Should I then ignore this influence and proceed down this route?"
He couldn’t find any anomalies around. This corridor was identical to the ones he’d traversed before – uniform in every section, with no footprints left on the floor. He quickly returned to the fan-shaped space, waiting for over ten seconds without triggering any flags.
Staring at the four doors and four paths, Feng Bu Jue mused, "The usual logic is that each path leads to one of the four potions. But what if the situation was different...? What if only one path leads to the location of all four potions, while the other three are dead ends?"
He scratched his head. "Or maybe... two paths lead to potions, and two are dead ends? Or perhaps three paths are correct, with only one being a dead end." His gaze returned to the first door. "What exactly was that earlier phenomenon – a clue or a distraction? Did I overthink the overlapping space-time phrase, or..."
"Heh..." Feng Bu Jue lifted his eyes toward the ceiling. "In such a monotonous setting with so few hints... how exactly am I supposed to proceed?"
Although this chapter’s narrative of Feng Bu Jue’s thoughts and actions had already exceeded a thousand characters, in reality, he’d only spent two minutes. Simplified to a sentence: dash to the door, speculate, move forward a few steps, speculate more, return to the fan-shaped area, and speculate again.
From the moment the scenario overview ended and Feng Bu Jue regained mobility, seventeen minutes had passed. From the crucial moment the broadcast announced "ninety-two minutes", sixteen minutes had elapsed. The difference was negligible – whether measured by one or the other, that one extra minute was essentially insignificant.
Currently, one could roughly divide the required time to find all four potions equally. Ninety-two minutes could be neatly split into four twenty-three-minute segments – meaning Feng Bu Jue had to locate one potion every twenty-three minutes on average to synthesize the antidote before the poison activated.
Yet he hadn’t even seen the first potion’s shadow. Lingering here wouldn’t solve anything. Thus, with a sharp turn of his head... he stepped into the third corridor.
(End of Chapter)
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