CH 91

Once Luo had dealt with the unexpected harassment, Xiao Lan withdrew his attention and reached out to push open the door to the control room in front of him.

Xiao Lan almost thought she was facing nothingness when the torch shone into the room.

The entire control room was pitch black from ceiling to wall, with little to reflect off, and he reached over to the wall by the door and felt a handful of black dust.

"This black and grey is ......" Xiao Lan twisted his fingertips, a familiar touch, the kind of black and grey he'd found on the back of posters and on train schedules on bulletin boards before.

"It's something I've seen before, not only the posters and timetables, but the same black dust on the cleaning clothes." Luo confirms his suspicions.

Xiao Lan swept his torch around the entire control room, which was covered in such black dust.

It was almost as if - by fire - it had been burned.

At this point, Xiao Lan remembered the newspaper clipping she had seen on the train earlier - "There has been an explosion on an underground platform in the city, three explosions in a row within 15 minutes, and the accident also caused a fire".

That's probably what happened after the fire caused by the accident burned through, right?

He had previously wondered if what had been put out on both sides of the station and the train was false information, that there had been no accident at all, and that they were just spreading suspicion. Now he saw the control room, which was hidden and full of burn marks.

Does this mean that the newspaper clipping on the underground is telling the truth?

Xiao Lan walks towards the chamber, the floor of the control room is also covered in a thick layer of ash, with a lot of carbonised or melted residue, and the air in the chamber, which has been closed for too long, is very foul, with a slight smell of burning that has not gone away for years.

Luo secured the gate at the back, partly to allow air circulation and to avoid injury to his human master who, despite his strength, was still fragile, and partly to prevent a sudden crisis of closing the door.

Not far away, Xiao Lan found a row of computer-like debris, blackened but not too cleanly burned, which still retained a little of its original appearance.

In the light of the torch, he noticed that the monitors on these computers were thin, or at least LCD, whereas the computers of the nineties were still the big, thick CRT monitors of old.

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Xiao Lan surveyed the monitors: "These are clearly not from the nineties."

There were even some charred and blackened squares on the floor that looked suspiciously like smartphones.

"Sir, there's something here." On the other side, in the clutter in the corner, Luo also found an object covered in black dust.

After a little wiping, Luo handed the object to Xiao Lan.

They found it to be a souvenir of the station's opening ceremony, and although it had been partially melted away by fire, the writing on it was still there, and the date indicated that the station had opened in the 1990s, but this souvenir had likewise been made recently.

Xiao Lan frowned, "The previous clues clearly indicated that the train accident was in the nineties, yet we found very recent magazines on the train, and this old looking station has the same current stuff hidden in it."

Luo: "Perhaps the station just looks dated, it's not actually in the nineties, but located at the time of the bombings."

That's why they can see the automatic swipe type gates, because it's simply a station now!

Why does this station have to keep disguising itself as being from the nineties? And keep dropping clues to confuse the player.

Associated with that newspaper about the train accident, and the station announcements telling them not to get on the train, and the appearance of ghosts and ghouls all hinting at the danger of the train not going.

Could it be that the ghosts on ...... stations have been keeping the appearances in the nineties in order to give more credibility to the newspaper of the train accident and thus the players believe that the train is the more dangerous one.

The train was once in trouble, but not at this time of the year they were in; the ghosts and goblins now actually died in the station explosion, and the ghosts on the platform have been trying to keep the players at the station for some reason.

And in fact, the train accident was so long ago that the station explosion was the real backdrop to this game.

The station where the bombing took place is where the real danger lies!

The black and grey they always saw in detail before was actually a hint of this.

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The two men looked at each other and figured this out at the same time.

Xiao Lan said softly, "The real way to get through is - choose that side of the train."

Perhaps the truth is that the ghosts after the explosion, partly wanting to leave the station and partly unable to do so, even obstruct the train and space so that they too cannot leave the space. Also the ghosts of the station create the illusion of the nineties to mislead the players so that they do not choose the side of the train.

"But no ...... we got on the train at the very beginning and couldn't leave the loop." Xiao Lan was lost in thought, "Then we got the tickets and still couldn't leave either, something else must be missing."

Xiao Lan takes the black and white ticket handed to him by Luo and weighs it in his hand.

The white tickets were found on the platform, and all the platform NPCs they saw held them, but there was no guarantee that they were all white.

The white tickets also happen to be the same colour as the exit gates on the platform, which should correspond to the exit.

The black ticket, on the other hand, had been found on the train. Black, reminding Xiao Lan of the man in black whom he had only met on one side, and thinking about the clothes he wore, what looked like some sort of uniform, and the strength he made feel dangerous, that man must have been in a rather important position on the train.

And the black ticket matches his colour, corresponding to getting on the train.

Xiao Lan thought of the mission he had received - [Passing Thoughts] - and since it was a key mission, perhaps the final doubt could only be answered by it.

Their goal now was to find the brooch the mission had described, and to find another black ticket.

Xiao Lan looks up from his thoughts and meets Luo's eyes.

While he was thinking, Luo kept quiet and looked around, not interrupting his thoughts. When Xiao Lan came back to his senses, Luo reached out his hand and pointed to another corner of the room, "There are many bodies piled up there, among them our acquaintances."

An acquaintance? Xiao Lan is a little puzzled and comes forward.

As he got closer he realised that there were a lot of bodies piled up here.

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Some had been burnt to a crisp, others appeared to have been choked to death by the smoke, the bodies were still intact, they should not have died in the same place, but were carried here after death. The image of these bodies layered on top of each other was a little numbing.

Follow Luo's fingertips and see a body.

That did indeed qualify as familiar, wearing a cleaning uniform, the body still intact but missing two fingers, and identical to whichever one they had seen earlier at the toilet door, except that the cleaning uniform was the current style.

The sight of the bodies made Xiao Lan even more certain that these were the men who had died in the station explosion, all dressed in the current style, the nineties style being nothing more than camouflage.

Heh, a bunch of movie stars.

Behind the bodies was a small, closed door, and given the group's penchant for hiding key clues, Xiao Lan had a feeling there must be something behind it.

But it's also weirdly disgusting to have to go through this gaping hole of bodies.

The two men struggled to find a place to land and finally reached the small, closed door, the lock of which was blocked so tightly by something unknown that they could not even reach in with a wire.

Xiao Lan put away the wire: "Looks like there's no way to pick the lock if you want to."

Luo was about to ask if he needed help when he saw Xiao Lan reach out and grab the door handle.

Then he simply removed the entire door lock. After a crisp clang, the hard handle was now picked up by him with one hand like a poor little chicken and thrown to the side with one hand.

Luo: "......"

Well, sometimes Sir really makes his presence feel redundant, as if his greatest function is only to keep company?

Luo suddenly felt like he was in imminent crisis of losing his job.

Behind the door is a Little Xiao office, still darkened, and it is impossible to see what it was originally used for.

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There was only one body in the entire office, lying upside down with its back to the door. The clothes she was wearing looked familiar, it was the woman from the photo in the money clip earlier.

Xiao Lan walked up to her face and found a beautiful woman with delicate features and silky hair, her death was not gruesome, but rather peaceful, as if she was asleep, out of place in the darkened room.

The brooch that I had seen in the photograph was staying quietly on her chest.

Xiao Lan crouched cautiously and tried to reach out towards her chest, all the while keeping a careful eye out for possible changes to the corpse; after all, dead, grisly corpses aren't the only things that are dangerous in the Advent world.

Surprisingly, the removal of the brooch went surprisingly smoothly.

When Xiao Lan had completely removed the brooch, a new system prompt appeared.

[Brooch acquired (1/1)

[Get the brooch and return it to the police officer (incomplete)]

"The police officer? Could it be the man in black?" Xiao Lan was the first to come to mind, "He and this woman were supposedly lovers and then died together in the station explosion, though I don't know why they were one on the train and one hidden in the control room on the platform."

At the same time Xiao Lan was a bit puzzled: "Looking at the texture of the wallet and the look of the brooch, this man in black is well-off and his original occupation should not be a police officer."

Luo: "It's possible that the Advent world will give him a new identity, and ghosts and monsters are not set in stone in the game."

The fact that the powerful police officer has to issue a quest for the player to find his lover's brooch shows that he cannot actually leave the train at all. And with the ghosts of the station hiding his lover's body, he will not be able to help the train leave this station without being able to join his lover.

Xiao Lan thought that perhaps this was why the train could not leave.

At this point the woman's body dissipated, as beautiful as she had been when she died, and the image as it disappeared remained beautiful, like a glow in the night.

The fluorescent light floats in the air and finally merges into the brooch in Xiao Lan's hand.

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When she disappeared completely, a black ticket appeared in the place where the body had been.

Luo stepped forward and picked up the ticket on the floor, identical to the one they had found in the train earlier, and smiled at Xiao Lan: "We have all our tickets, sir."

If you want to disguise yourself as a player, it's certainly safer to have one of each in a situation like this where you need a key prop to get through the level. Otherwise it would be too conspicuous for a group of players to suddenly mix in a guy who doesn't need a prop to get through the game.

"Come on, now our goal, is to get back to the train to turn in our mission." Xiao Lan said.

--

The two men step out of the control room.

At the same time they sensed something wrong around them, as if peeling away the illusion of camouflage. The pillars, which had been old but intact, began to collapse, the ceiling began to fall downwards as if overwhelmed, and even cracks appeared on the floor.

A black patch began to appear on the tidy wall, which was full of burn marks and even carried a little spark.

Because of these sparks, some light appeared on the platform, which had been dark, still not bright, but better than the original range where only torch light could be seen.

By these lights, Xiao Lan discovers that such changes are taking place throughout the area within sight.

At the same time there was a burnt smell in the air, which smelt a little pungent and tended to get stronger and stronger.

"Ahem ...... this might be what the station really looks like." Xiao Lan coughed dryly, feeling a few uncomfortable moments in his throat and his breathing, the oxygen in the air seemed to be dwindling.

It seems that we must speed up and get out of here.

"Thump, thump, thump--"

At that moment, there was a sudden rush of footsteps ahead.

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Xiao Lan looked up and saw a twisted figure darting towards them, the man's limbs in an unnatural posture, but running at a surprisingly fast pace.

He stepped into the fire and burst out of the darkness looking like a demon.

Xiao Lan raised his hand and took out the [it was a dagger covered in poison] from his storage space and held it in front of him, he adjusted his stance and leaned down slightly, in the best position to attack at any moment.

He also prepared [Introduction to the Basic Principles of Marxist Philosophy], so that he could have a battle with the other side, regardless of whether this guy was a solid or a soul.

When the other man got closer, Xiao Lan could clearly see that his face was so decayed that large chunks of skin had peeled off, exposing the muscles and teeth beneath in a hideous manner.

His cloudy eyes darted around the two men, then seeming to find Xiao Lan a little more tasty, he flashed an impish grin at her and proceeded to open his mouth to an incredible angle, his mouth full of interlocking sharp teeth.

He lunged towards Xiao Lan with a sudden acceleration, his feet making deep cracks in the ground.

Xiao Lan anticipates his attack and slides to the side, his dagger in his hand ready to strike back.

The next moment -

"Wow..."

The floor, which was already full of cracks, ...... collapsed under the opponent's vigorous stamping.

In Xiao Lan's dazed eyes, the flailing fellow struggled helplessly in mid-air, his twisted arms and legs drawing irregular arcs in the air like a picked-up kingpin.

Then he fell helplessly towards the ground and barfed onto the floor of the next level.

Xiao Lan's heart had just been filled with a little sympathy when he saw Luo next to him lift a broken pole and throw it downwards, hitting him with a loud bang.

When there was no more noise from below, Luo gave a satisfied smile and gently patted the dust from his hands with a graceful gesture.

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Xiao Lan turned his face away from the scene.

Tragic, really tragic ......