“Kill half?”
The Audience members turned pale with fright!
Last time, he only killed one person. Why had he suddenly fast-forwarded to killing half of them?
This was unreasonable!
Some wanted to speak up, but Yue Shi was never one to listen to reason. He didn't give them a chance to speak at all.
With a snap of his fingers, the Audience members began to twist and contort like pretzels, dying in excruciating agony.
Screams echoed incessantly, but soon, the noise died down. They realized that those who screamed and shouted were prioritized as targets for execution.
Yue Shi said he would kill half, and he was a man of his word. He even rounded up.
The circular space quickly transformed into a horrific, bloody slaughterhouse.
The remaining Audience members were scared out of their wits, none of them daring to make a sound.
Yue Shi piled the corpses into a small tower, which looked quite magnificent and beautiful in its own way.
Then he turned his head, his gaze shifting through the crowd before stopping on a young woman wearing a red hoodie.
She was huddled in the middle of the crowd, her hair hanging down to cover half of her face as she tried her best to lower her presence.
“Do you know about the Bewitching Beauty Painting Workshop?” Yue Shi asked.
She shook her head vigorously, her hair flying and revealing a deathly pale face.
Yue Shi gave a soft “Oh,” and the woman in the red hoodie collapsed. It was as if her bones had been removed; her knees buckled as she slumped to the floor. Her eyes remained open, but her breath was gone.
The people in the crowd covered their mouths, continuing to maintain their silence.
They had realized that this game had no rules at all. Everything depended on the whims of the monster before them; he would play however he wanted.
Yue Shi took two steps forward, and the crowd instinctively backed away.
“Third question: What is the essence of this world?”
Silence. Not even the sound of breathing could be heard. Some covered their mouths, some pinched their arms, and others closed their eyes, fantasizing that they could wake up from this nightmare.
Yue Shi stood in the center of the crowd, surrounded by overturned chairs, shattered screens, blood, and severed limbs.
“No one knows?” He looked around. Wherever his gaze landed, everyone lowered their heads.
He stopped in front of a young man wearing a denim jacket. The man had yellow-dyed hair and several earrings.
“You really don't know?” Yue Shi singled him out.
The yellow-haired man's lips trembled. He glanced at the pile of corpses for a moment before quickly looking away. “I... I don't know anything.”
Yue Shi reached out and patted the young man's shoulder, comforting him softly, “If you don't know, you don't know. Don't be so nervous.”
The young man was not comforted; instead, he broke into a cold sweat. Then he collapsed, his body hitting the ground with a thud. His head struck the floor with a dull sound, and his eyes remained open, staring as if in grievance.
Yue Shi withdrew his hand and turned his gaze back to the crowd. “Fourth question: What exactly are you things?”
Fear spread through the crowd. Someone began to cry, tears falling silently.
Yue Shi stood among them as if picking out goods at a market, unhurriedly moving his gaze from one face to another.
“You.” He pointed to a middle-aged man who had been shrinking back, trying to hide in the crowd.
When pointed out, the middle-aged man's body froze, and his voice shook. “I... I can't say. I really can't say...”
Yue Shi had an epiphany. “So it's not that you don't know, but that you can't say? Very good. You've provided a key clue.”
As soon as he finished speaking, he snapped his fingers again.
The middle-aged man looked terrified, but he didn't die. It was the people around him who died.
“How dare you deceive me? You really are a group of naughty children. You must be punished!”
“The punishment shall be... half of your current number. Everyone, die,” Yue Shi said with a smile.
Of the surviving Audience members, another half were randomly killed off.
The remaining Audience members became restless. Someone turned and ran toward the exit, and others followed suit.
The person in the lead reached the door handle and twisted it hard. The door opened.
He stepped out with one foot, but then he collapsed, his body split in two—one half inside, the other half outside.
The others stopped in their tracks; no one dared to run anymore.
The blood turned a dark red under the lights. Yue Shi acted as if nothing had happened and continued to ask gently, “Fifth question: Who will tell me the truth about those scripts and bullet comments?”
Silence remained. Yue Shi didn't rush them. If slaughter and fear couldn't force them to speak the truth, then there was a high probability that no useful information could be extracted this way.
Fortunately, Yue Shi didn't care much. So what if he didn't know the truth? It didn't stop him from silencing them for good.
The shadow beneath his feet slowly expanded on the floor like a pool of spreading ink, silently swallowing everything.
“I know.” A voice came from the back of the crowd, raspy and trembling.
The crowd automatically parted.
9527 stood there, his clothes wrinkled and his hair as messy as a bird's nest. His legs were shaking, and so were his hands.
He had been hiding in the back of the crowd and had luckily escaped the first two waves of random slaughter. Now, however, he dared to stand up and face Yue Shi directly.
“I know about the Deep Red Continent, and I know about the Bewitching Beauty Painting Workshop. I can answer all your questions about this world,” 9527 said in a low, trembling voice, but he articulated every word clearly.
“Traitor! You must not leak secrets to an outsider, or we will all meet a terrible end!” An old man stepped forward, pointing at 9527 and cursing.
The next second, the old man dropped dead.
9527 looked at the old man's corpse speechlessly. They were all about to be wiped out; what end could be worse than this?
Yue Shi looked at him, his eyes urging him to continue.
9527 took a deep breath. “The Deep Red Continent is the world outside. The Bewitching Beauty Painting Workshop is a strange maritime tower ship.”
He pointed to the ceiling and then to the floor. “This world is just a room on the Bewitching Beauty Painting Workshop.”
In the crowd, some Audience members clenched their fists but didn't dare to stop 9527's bold revelation.
9527 ignored them. Since he had already decided to be a collaborator, he might as well sell them out completely.
“We people are actually the owners of this room—the rulers of the world.”
“Rulers of the world? You bunch of weaklings who only know how to hide and send scripts?” Yue Shi raised an eyebrow, not quite believing 9527's words.
The last room owner he had encountered was the boss of the Deep Blue Route, who had possessed both strength and means.
9527 hurriedly explained, “We are equivalent to this world's Heavenly Dao, the world consciousness.”
“Scripts, filming, sending bullet comments—these things are the unique rules of the world itself. We only know how to use these rules; we are not the creators of them.”
“We can act on behalf of the Heavenly Dao, but we are also strictly bound by its rules. We can give scripts to others and use them to trigger natural disasters or man-made calamities to eliminate many people, but we cannot obtain the mighty power to kill someone directly.”
Rate on N.U.
