Published at 8th of October 2024 3:14 am

Chapter 1526: Laughter Born of Emptiness

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Each time Lord Tremors managed to steady himself and stand upright, he hated Lin Sanjiu even more than the time before.

If there was anyone in this world who hated Lin Sanjiu the most, it was undoubtedly Lord Tremors, who had previously been a stranger to her. And this record was being continually broken by him.

As Lord Tremors charged at her once again with a shriek, Lin Sanjiu almost thought she was seeing a

duoluozhong

. She effortlessly dodged, and as he stumbled past her, she continued at the same pace, tracking the woman ahead.

In these few minutes, Lord Tremors had attacked her countless times.

Lin Sanjiu had no interest in him at this point; he could attack all he wanted, for his attacks didn’t slow her down much. In the same space, he was also affected by the text and couldn’t casually shout out. Unlike Master Zhang, he couldn’t effectively utilize various texts. Without this greatest aid, his abilities, items, and physical attacks all seemed like a dance around Lin Sanjiu.

Occasionally, the dancing figure would be thrown aside by a flick of her hand. Though wearing protective text and unharmed, Lord Tremors’ mental state was clearly deteriorating with each failed attack.

The filthy and venomous words he had spilled like a torrent were now confused and tangled, biting his own tongue several times without feeling the pain; his angry, incomprehensible roars sent saliva mixed with blood splattering into the air.

Lin Sanjiu glanced at him from the corner of her eye. She noticed that the less she cared about him, the crazier he became, but she didn’t care. Her vortex of air swallowed and shattered a weapon he threw at her. With a quick motion, the air currents carried the fragments back towards Lord Tremors as she elegantly turned and entered the round hall.

The woman had just emerged, panic-stricken, from another game maker’s corridor. Their eyes met, and a look of bewildered confusion spread across her dim face, as if she couldn’t understand why Lin Sanjiu, who should have been stopped by Lord Tremors, was still there.

“I’ll kill you—”

The rage in Lord Tremors’ voice was suddenly comprehensible. It sounded like he was hurling his entire body at her this time.

“Wait,” Mrs. Manas called in her mind, “The target is not you; it’s Yu Yuan!”

Lin Sanjiu realized it almost simultaneously. Lord Tremors had turned his fury towards Yu Yuan, who was a less challenging target. Lin Sanjiu abruptly twisted, and a thin Higher Consciousness shot out like a spirit snake, wrapping around Lord Tremors’ ankle and yanking him into the air. It contracted, and he fell face-first to the floor, hitting his forehead hard.

After a dull “thump” against the floor, Lord Tremors didn’t get up as before. His head was tilted back, face down, as if he’d suddenly died.

“Hmm?” Lin Sanjiu finally stopped, looking back at him. In the corner of her eye, the silent woman seized the opportunity to run down the next corridor. Yu Yuan’s attention was also drawn, and they exchanged glances. Lin Sanjiu approached, flipping the unconscious Lord Tremors over with her foot.

“Is he… unconscious?” she asked, staring at the man on the ground.

Yu Yuan crouched down, pulling open his collar. He’d been wearing protective text all along, and they only disappeared when he lost consciousness, so the collision couldn’t have injured him. Besides, the impact was not that strong; even without text protection, it shouldn’t have been enough to knock a posthuman unconscious.

Lin Sanjiu was originally going to warn Yu Yuan to be on guard for deceit, but after the Veda looked down and examined him for a few seconds, he suddenly spoke.

“He really did pass out,” he said, standing up calmly. “He was too emotionally overwrought and frenzied earlier, coupled with the shock of being thrown into mid-air just now… His nervous system couldn’t bear such great stress, just like an overloaded power grid, it broke.”

Lin Sanjiu blinked at him, unsure how to react—she even felt she might have heard wrong.

“You see, emotions ruin things,” Yu Yuan said.

Lin Sanjiu wiped her face, suddenly feeling a bit like laughing.

It wasn’t that she thought it was funny that Lord Tremors had fainted; rather, it was funny that his fainting had robbed all his anger and actions of their meaning, as if even the last shred of reason for his existence had been lost.

So angry, so urgent, so desperate to prove something, only to trip and faint in the end, making it all meaningless.

If humanity looked into the abyss of meaninglessness, all that remained was endless, silent laughter.

And in this underground space, this so-called new game launch conference, the whole place is filled with that silent laughter—they don’t even know they’ve already lost the meaning of their existence; every breath and every thought in their bustling activities resonates with laughter.

Lin Sanjiu suppressed the laughter that was making her shudder and pulled her blood-red metal gauntlet from Lord Tremors’ smashed watermelon-like skull. Brain fragments and a mixture of red and white fluids dripped from her fist, landing on his entangled skull and hair, making a faint ‘pop’ sound.

Yu Yuan stared at her without saying anything.

Lin Sanjiu stood up and glanced in the direction where the woman had disappeared. Realizing that Lin Sanjiu couldn’t open the door, to survive, the woman knew she had to hide in a room—she couldn’t go back to her own room, so she could only plead with others still in their rooms to shelter her.

At this moment, her faint, low pleas were coming from an unseen corridor, along with a resounding “get lost!” from the middle-aged woman.

In Lin Sanjiu’s observation, no one at the new game launch conference cared about this woman except the now-dead Lord Tremors. If she hadn’t run away while Lord Tremors was holding Lin Sanjiu back and had stayed, asking him to take her back to his room, they would both be alive now—but that silent, shivering woman probably couldn’t think of that.

As Lin Sanjiu slowly followed, the woman had already come fearfully to the third person’s room. She stopped at the corner of the corridor, peeping out to watch the woman knock for a while, calling in a low voice, “Open the door, open the door!”

Who would open the door for her?

When the woman had pleaded four or five times, Short Bangs’ voice sounded from inside. “Is she chasing you?”

The woman didn’t look back, saying, “No.”

Lin Sanjiu again had to suppress the urge to laugh—a meaningless, long, and loud laugh.

Unexpectedly, the short-banged person inside fell silent for a moment, and after a few seconds, there was the “click” of the door lock, opening it a crack.

“Come in,” he began, but the woman had already pushed the door open, as if to rush in before he changed his mind, knocking him back and making him cry out, clutching his nose. She immediately entered the room.

When the short-banged man tried to close the door again, he couldn’t.

Lin Sanjiu extended a hand with a metal gauntlet and held the door, looking at him through the half-open gap. Lord Tremors’ blood was stuck to the door, and a drop slid down.

The two locked eyes, and Short Bangs went a shade paler, but he remained relatively composed. “I knew you might come,” he said.

“Oh?”

Short Bangs took a breath. “You’re actually… different from the rest of us here. I saw it long ago.”

Lin Sanjiu just looked at him without saying a word. She knew she must suppress the urge to laugh at her appearance, splattered with fresh blood, or else it would look highly abnormal. With Yu Yuan at her side, she might have been able to hold back; but the Veda was now hurrying to catch up, which made her want to laugh even more.

“You asked more than one person why the games have to be so… brutal, didn’t you?” Short Bangs shook his head, sighing. “The moment you asked, I knew you were serious about giving us a chance to survive. You just don’t want us to continue writing these lethal games, right? So, I wasn’t planning to resist. If you think carefully, I never attacked you or your friend at the transport tube either.”

Mrs. Manas said in Lin Sanjiu’s mind, “That’s true.”

Short Bangs couldn’t hear Mrs. Manas’s testimony but continued to defend himself, “Because… I’m not like them either.”

Those words finally pulled Lin Sanjiu from the brink of irrepressible laughter. She cleared her throat slightly, looking over Short Bangs’ shoulder to see the woman standing in a corner of the room, her back against the wall, watching them silently and anxiously.

“How are you different?”

Short Bangs studied her expression, seemingly doing his best not to look at the blood on her face. He let go of the door and took two steps back, making a gesture to invite her into the room.

“I wanted to explain it to you back then… You can come in, along with your friend. I can show you the games I’ve written,” Short Bangs whispered. “Every time we exchanged information, I exaggerated the content of my games, making them sound much more dangerous… but that’s not the case. Like you, I also value human life. In my games, people are safe.”

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