Three days later.

[System Notification: Player Mu Shicheng has cleared the game “Urban Legends”]

[System Notification: Player Mu Shicheng has obtained League Registration Qualification]

Amid firelight and thick smoke, Mu Shicheng seized an invisible rope and shot forward at high speed. When he heard the notification, he gave a whistle, the corners of his mouth curling into a grin.

Deafening, fast-paced music blasted through his headphones. Reflected in the blaze, Mu Shicheng’s joyful expression carried an eerie, vicious edge.

[Confirm.] 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

The instant Mu Shicheng’s small television went dark, a new poster appeared at the very end of the system’s League Registration list.

On the poster, Mu Shicheng had one arm transformed into a monkey claw. His eyes were unfocused, and his expression was ferocious and sinister. Behind him was a train on the verge of exploding—the scene from The Last Train to Blast Off, when Bai Liu had stabbed him until his mental value erupted.

Standing in front of Mu Shicheng’s small television, someone looked up at the screen.

The butterfly perched on his shoulder stirred its wings almost imperceptibly, and the faint breeze lifted the long hair falling over his shoulder.

Inside the small television, Mu Shicheng declared triumphantly to Bai Liu, “Registration successful. Just wait for us to keep winning all the way to the end of the League!”

Armand lowered his eyes. His long lashes cast dense shadows over his face. Then he turned to leave, a very faint smile on his lips.

—Mu Shicheng, no matter what game you want to play this time—

I will be the same as before.

I will accompany you until the end.

In our previous life, the final result of the games between us was only fifty-fifty at best. At most, we destroyed each other.

If you want to beat me, it still will not be that simple.

Behind Armand, the player ranked third on the Nightmare Rising Star rankings was wearing an ugly Joker mask painted by hand.

He was laughing shrilly while using a toy trumpet gun more than half a meter long to indiscriminately sweep through the monsters and players in front of him. Minced flesh and fresh blood splattered across his mask.

The audience in front of his small television was shocked into a long silence.

“S-so terrifying. Is this person crazy?! I remember he’s still a newcomer, right? How can he grind through games this desperately? This is already the seventh time I’ve seen him on the Rising Star rankings in the past two days. Does he not sleep?”

“...Yesterday, I even saw people from the Kabbalah Guild enter the game to recruit him, but he killed them on the spot...”

“Today, isn’t the Kabbalah Guild surrounding and intercepting him? God, they were all killed by him...”

“What kind of skill is that? With one shot, the Kabbalah Guild’s reserve team members didn’t even have the ability to fight back. He’s a newcomer. His skill damage value can’t possibly exceed ten thousand...”

Daniel emerged from the login point covered in blood.

The players around him retreated in terror, avoiding him.

This man was the only player to come out of that game alive.

And it was not because the game’s clear rate was low, but because this man had killed all the other players.

He had practically beaten them into meat paste.

But Daniel was utterly indifferent to the way everyone avoided him.

Ever since he had logged out of a game like this for the first time, he had fallen in love with the sensation of being submerged in warm blood when he logged out.

It made Daniel feel as if he were still living in that time from before.

Living before he met Bai Liu.

Before that beautiful dream turned into a nightmare.

Daniel casually crushed his bloodstained, self-made disposable mask and threw it away. When he turned around, a man was standing quietly in front of him.

The left side of the man’s face was covered by armor with a metallic sheen, and his eyes were fixed steadily on Daniel. It was obvious that he had come for him.

If they had been inside a game, Daniel would most likely have already drawn his gun and killed him.

But this was the Game Lobby.

Daniel acted as if he had not seen the man and walked straight past him. The man, however, very tactlessly reached out and grabbed him.

“Do you want to join my guild?” the man asked.

“The last person who spoke to me like that,” Daniel said, the corners of his mouth stretching wide into an exaggerated grin while his eyes showed no trace of a smile, “has already become a bloodstain on my mask.”

The man remained unmoved. He gave a disdainful snort of laughter.

“What if I said I could make Bai Liu accept you? Would you be willing to be used by me?”

Daniel stared him down for a moment before finally asking, “What is your guild called?”

The man seemed to have expected Daniel’s compromise.

“The sixth guild, Deer Hunter.”

“I don’t cooperate with people who refuse to show their real faces.” Daniel glanced at the mask on the man’s face and demanded maliciously, “Take off your mask first. Then I’ll see whether a hide-and-seek coward like you is qualified to discuss cooperation with me.”

“I thought you might like your own kind—someone else who wears a mask. After all, there is no monster more afraid to face the meaning of its own existence than you, Daniel.”

The man was not angered by Daniel’s words. Instead, he returned the mockery in an even harsher tone.

He slowly removed the armor, looking at Daniel with a yellow right eye like a hawk’s. Beneath the mask, his left eye was a hollow black cavity. The sight alone was enough to make one’s scalp go numb.

“Cen Buming, Guild Leader of the Sixth Guild.”

...

Six days later.

[System Notification: Players Bai Liu/Mu Ke have cleared the game “The Daughter of the Mire”]

[System Notification: Players Bai Liu/Mu Ke have obtained League Registration Qualification]

[System Notification: The “Wandering Circus” team has gathered five basic members and officially entered the League screening process. We wish everyone excellent results in the League...]

Tang Erda looked around at everyone and nodded.

“It’s time. All your basic panel values have been raised above eight thousand. Let’s enter the Game Pool.”

The tightly shut doors of the Game Pool slowly opened outward. Multicolored light and shadows from the screens fell across everyone’s faces.

The moment the doors closed, the first place on the Nightmare Rising Star rankings in the small television area changed to Daniel’s face wearing the Joker mask.

He giggled and laughed. “I’m going to play in the League, everyone. Please support me.”

He bowed politely, raising one arm high in a standard curtain call.

Then he lifted his face slightly, revealing a pair of clear apple-green eyes, and smiled until his eyes curved.

“Otherwise, if I get the chance, I will kill the audience members who don’t support me.”

At the same time, the Deer Hunter Guild released an announcement—

[The player currently ranked first on the Rising Star rankings is one of our guild’s official members for this year.]

In the real world, at the headquarters of the Dangerous Heretic Management Bureau.

Cen Buming, dressed in uniform, walked past Tang Erda’s empty office. He turned sideways, his gaze sweeping over the vacant room before finally settling on the gun lying on the desk.

He was silent for several seconds. Then he gave a mocking sneer.

“Is it a hunter’s fate to be abandoned by the Prophet?”

“Whether it’s the first generation or the second generation, the result is the same. Turning into a monster under observation. It really is...”

“Pitiful enough.”

After he finished speaking, he composed his expression, hooked the door shut with the tip of his foot, and left without looking back. His face was dark and unreadable.

This office had once belonged to the Captain of the First Branch, the Prophet. Later, it had become Tang Erda’s office.

On the desk lay top-secret files that only the Prophet could perceive, and beside them was a perspective monocle used to read those files.

It was obvious that before Tang Erda left, he had intended to use the monocle to bypass his clearance level and pry into the information contained in these sealed top-secret files.

But in the end, he still could not cross the hurdle in his heart, and stopped without investigating.

At that moment, the monocle on the desk was flipped over by the wind and landed face-up on one of the files.

Through the convex lens, the title written on the file could be clearly seen—

—[Heretic No. 0009]

[Heretic Name: First Generation Hunter Cen Buming]

[...Former Vice Captain of the First Branch. Beginning with world line No. 0006, he took over the Prophet’s authority to execute hunter missions. In world line No. 0317, his spirit completely collapsed and underwent dimensional reduction, leading to the first riot. His hunter duties were revoked, and his Prophet authority was canceled. He was transferred to the position of Captain of the Second Branch and handed over to the Captain of the Third Branch, namely the Second Generation Hunter, Tang Erda...]

[...No intent to harm others has appeared in the current world line so far. Shows a tendency toward recovery. Remains in office under observation...]

Inside the Game Pool.

This area was completely different from the small televisions outside. There was only a single enormous screen projected onto the ground, like a huge pool of water. Around the edge of the “pool” was a retaining wall roughly half a meter high.

The entire Game Pool area was enveloped in a peculiar, hallucinogenic, dark yet colorful light. It gave people the feeling of an underground dance hall from the eighties.

Within the multicolored ground screen, countless game covers drifted and rotated rapidly, like schools of koi swaying through a pond, making one’s eyes blur.

From time to time, players jumped in or leapt out. The scene was extraordinarily dreamlike.

“The light here...” Before long, Mu Ke began rubbing his eyes. “It’s so dazzling... Looking at it for too long makes me dizzy.”

“That’s normal.” Liu Jiayi spread her hands. “The light in the Game Pool has the effect of lowering mental values. This is also part of improving one’s strength.”

Mu Shicheng glanced at Liu Jiayi. “Isn’t this your first time here too? Why do you seem so familiar with this place?”

Liu Jiayi paused almost imperceptibly.

“Previously, in order to train me more safely, Queen of Hearts had me use her skill card to transform into her and sneak into the Game Pool for training. The intensity of game training here is higher. Most of my time was spent inside the Game Pool.”

“No wonder I didn’t see you much on the rankings outside.” Mu Shicheng clapped his hands in realization. “So you were in here. I thought you had died in some game since you didn’t show up for so long.”

Liu Jiayi: “...”

Forget it. This idiot spoke without thinking.

She would endure it.

Bai Liu stood beside the giant ground screen, looking thoughtful.

“These rapidly flowing game posters are also part of the training, aren’t they? An assessment of dynamic vision and the ability to obtain information?”

Tang Erda answered Bai Liu’s question. “Yes. Choosing the right game is extremely important for a newcomer team like ours, because some powerful large guilds fix certain games as their training grounds. For us, we have to avoid those games. Otherwise, if we run into them right at the start...”

Before he could finish speaking, a large number of players suddenly emerged from the Game Pool, logging out together.

It was not strange for players to log out.

But these players looked as if they had seen a ghost. Their faces were full of terror as they crawled out, screaming and cursing while they scrambled away.

“Fuck, what kind of luck is this?! We picked a game at random and stepped right on a landmine!”

“Damn it, luckily I ran fast. Otherwise, I would have been whipped to death!”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck! When I saw Spades appear on the game map, I almost fucking pissed myself!”

“Hasn’t Killer Sequence been fixed on the Snow Region dungeon for training recently?! Why did they suddenly come to the Ice Age dungeon today?!”

Bai Liu raised an eyebrow and looked at the soaked players scrambling out of the Game Pool. Then he picked up the end of Tang Erda’s sentence.

“—It would be like this, wouldn’t it?”

As he spoke, a sharply defined, snowy white, slender hand reached out from the edge of the Game Pool and gripped the rim.

The hand pressed down hard. The person in the pool rose like a fish breaking the surface, his tall upper body emerging from the water.

He wore a simple black top on his upper body, and very loose cargo pants with many pockets on his lower body. In his other hand, he held a long black whip that trailed along the ground.

He was soaked from head to toe.

Water dripped constantly from the ends of his hair, which covered his eyes, all the way down to the tightened cuffs of his pants. Just as the fleeing players had said, he must have come out of an ice-field dungeon.

The chill radiating from him was astonishingly cold, making people instinctively afraid to approach.

With one leg bent and planted on the edge of the Game Pool, he pushed off with one hand and leapt out, landing steadily in front of Bai Liu.

He only gave Bai Liu a faint glance from the corner of his eye, as if treating him no differently from the dozens of unfamiliar players he had frightened out of the Game Pool.

He did not look at Bai Liu again.

He walked forward, brushing past Bai Liu’s shoulder.

In the instant their shoulders crossed, Bai Liu suddenly reached out and grabbed his wrist.

It was so cold that there was not even the slightest hint of warmth in it.