Chapter 345: Bonus Chapter

How would the giants Lily had spoken of arrive? Nobody could know yet. Wei Xun looked at Chen Cheng’s group and found their expressions showing only normal worry and tension. He paid particular attention to Zhu Yuande and the Yu twins, the three who historically had been killed by the crippled old giant; none of the three showed any particular reaction.

It seemed Lily’s divination results had been shared privately and Half-Life Daoist hadn’t told them.

“Friends, I suggest none of us sleep tonight.” David proposed.

“Let’s see how exactly that damned giant shows up and figure out what we’re dealing with. Pfft, this meat is inedible; it’s completely rotten with contamination!”

David had taken one bite of the roasted sand lizard skewer and his expression changed immediately. He spat repeatedly, then threw the rest into the fire.

“Contamination in the monster meat too?”

Zhang Xingcang picked up an uncooked piece and sniffed it with a frown.

“Definitely, eating it would make us more susceptible to the Ancient Oasis contamination.”

Zhang Xingcang had been roasting meat too; the little Dreamchaser dragon beside him had its mouth open and ready, and when it saw Zhang Xingcang throw the roasted meat into the fire like a spendthrift it gave him an indignant smack of its tail, then blinked and looked toward Wei Xun in the wheelchair.

Wei Xun felt a small pang of regret. The meat in his hand had been roasted with An Xuefeng’s little flame; the outer skin had turned a crispy honey color, looking perfectly done, and the coconut date pieces sprinkled over it made it smell sweet and fragrant, absolutely delicious. David said the meat carried contamination, and Wei Xun now understood why it was so appealing to him, but he genuinely wanted to taste it.

Unfortunately, David had ruined that with everyone watching; he certainly couldn’t eat it now. Wei Xun put the roasted meat away, Nearby David was asking Chen Cheng for dates.

“Hey friend, could you spare us some dates?”

David said, making friendly conversation.

“All these dates belong to Bai the Boss. If Bai the Boss has no objection—”

Chen Cheng glanced at Bai the Boss in the wheelchair, and after receiving the nod he tossed over a small sack of dates. Nobody had attended the Red Sand giants’ evening feast, and the tower had little food; the portioned meat the giants had sent over was left untouched since they didn’t dare risk the giant creature flesh, and everyone had been eating Wei the Boss’s dates all along.

No meat to eat, no storage tools, and for the time being they could only have dates; fortunately, they had picked so many.

“Bai Xiaosheng truly has foresight.”

Half-Life Daoist said admiringly. Back when Wei Xun had offhandedly set Chen Cheng’s group the task of picking dates, as many as possible, Chen Cheng’s group had been quick and thorough and picked several hundred catties’ worth. Wei the Boss never said he wanted them, so they had kept them on the camels, and now they were proving perfectly useful.

The ripe dates were a warm golden color, soft and fragrant, the texture distinct from other dates, closer to the finest honey-dried dates. Soft and delicately grainy, sweet without being cloying, genuinely excellent.

David ate several and still wanted more, but dates were very sweet and drinking after eating them made him thirsty. He went outside and brought back a stone, and with the little fire dragon helping with the flame he quickly and nimbly carved out a small stone pot and set it over the fire to boil water.

Stone pots were normally difficult to bring to a boil, but with the little fire dragon breathing fire from the side the water heated quickly, yielding roughly one cup each. It wasn’t as though Westerners habitually drank boiled water, but boiling drinking water when adventuring outdoors was common sense, especially when most of the water here came from the oasis streams and was far from pure.

Seeing the stone pot sitting empty after the water was done, Chen Cheng very politely asked to borrow it from David, then boiled more water and added a generous quantity of dates.

“Are you cooking the dates to eat?”

Knowing Chen Cheng was the “main character” of this scene re-enactment, David professionally made friendly conversation, sitting down beside him and directing the little fire dragon to help with the heat.

“Dates can be cooked?”

“Dates are called the bread of the desert.”

The one who answered was Wei Xun; this kind of detailed background information was Bai Xiaosheng’s signature move. Wei Xun essentially recited everything Chen Cheng had said before, about dates in Arabic mythology, the Greek word for date palm and phoenix being the same sound, all of it, speaking with a practiced fluency that left David dizzy and scrambling, calling for him to stop stop stop, then laughing and making a joke.

“With An and dates both here, tonight is definitely a peaceful night.”

He raised his water canteen in imitation of a toast.

“A toast to dates!”

A scattered response followed, but Bai Xiaosheng’s words made everyone present instinctively eat more dates, if only for good luck; even the Stargazer ate a few and, unexpectedly, even tried some of the date soup Chen Cheng had cooked. Naturally one cup of the finished soup and several cooked dates were ladled out first and presented to Bai the Boss.

The cooked dates were soft and yielding, sweet and mild, quite good. Wei Xun ate a few then put them down, picking up his honey water and sipping it idly. The refined demonic bee honey that could restore SAN value and clear contamination was now working on Wei Xun more like a digestive aid; the effect wasn’t particularly pronounced.

Wei Xun wasn’t hungry. The contamination he had “eaten” earlier hadn’t been fully digested; he was actually a little overfull, his body packed with energy while his stomach felt empty, an odd sensation. He knew he needed to eat something, but compared to dates, what he really wanted was that roasted sand lizard. But leaving for that seemed a bit much right now—

“Bai the Boss, there’s something I need to tell you.”

“Mm?”

Wei Xun had just dolefully picked up his cup and taken a sip of hot honey water when the Infected walked toward him.

He had just watched the Infected exchange a few quiet words with Chen Cheng’s group’s West District Butcher Tour Guide; the Infected was probably here to report. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] Wei Xun hadn’t actually expected him to come on his own initiative, since the Infected had been extremely passive in all his behavior until now.

What had caused this change? Was it Metaphysics’s arrival, or had something happened during the battle with the old chieftain? Had the Infected also undergone a slight mutation?

Wei Xun was very interested, and the Infected’s timing was perfect.

“Come on then.”

Wei Xun was unusually warm in his manner, even giving the Infected a small, faint smile.

“Let’s go over there.”

The Infected hadn’t expected things to go this smoothly, for one moment he even felt as though the person in the wheelchair had seen right through him. Since Metaphysics had arrived and joined the group, the Infected had felt like a marginal figure. The arrival of these powerful Tourists had stripped away his usefulness; with everyone together like this, the Blood Baron and Rex would be insane to come and attack.

Keeping a low profile wasn’t bad in itself; there was a time when the Infected would have desperately wanted to keep a low profile, but now things were different.

He looked at his own arm, revisiting that instant from the afternoon; his fingertip skin splitting open, blood seeping between his fingers. Not an injury; this was his alienation, the mutated toxoplasma in his blood. The Infected preferred to call it the “insect essence.”

The Infected clenched his fist and hid his bleeding fingers. The battlefield contamination had swept through at just the right moment; Chen Cheng and Dreamchaser hadn’t noticed his aberration. The mutation had ended quickly and the bleeding had stopped, but the incident had sent tremendous waves crashing through him. A mutation appearing in a place where mutation should be impossible; had the insect essence sensed something, had it heard some kind of call, and that call—

Came from the Abyss.

Came from the person sitting in that wheelchair right now.

Zhang Xingcang, Wei Xun, Bai Xiaosheng, Bing-1, or was it—

The Puppeteer?

Whatever the answer, the Infected was now urgently drawn toward this person, wanting to get close, wanting to understand him. The skin-crawling sensation of his strength being controlled and the elation of recovering his power intertwined and tangled together, making the Infected abandon his original plan of cautious passivity entirely. He understood he needed to demonstrate his value, so he had proactively approached Chen Cheng’s group’s West District Butcher Tour Guide and extracted intelligence.

Now was exactly the time to show his worth.

They went to the chieftain’s tower next door. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] The temperature was very low there, but Wei Xun had the Phoenix bird for warmth and wasn’t bothered at all. The key consideration was the Infected.

Wei Xun noticed the Infected’s face hadn’t gone pale with cold, and understood.

This person had very likely achieved partial alienation too.

But for this first private exchange, with An Xuefeng present, the Infected didn’t say anything sensitive; he reported honestly and straightforwardly.

“C-125, ghost-state alienation, affiliated with the Ferry Guide Alliance. Seriously injured into Return to Zero, then seriously injured again afterward; the heavy contamination on him has essentially made him a living dead man.”

C-125? The comatose, barely-living Tour Guide in Chen Cheng’s group was at the same ranking as the Devil Merchant from the Beijing Suburbs Funeral Palace, also with ghost-state alienation; the coincidence genuinely surprised Wei Xun for a moment. But the Infected’s next sentence made his eyebrow go up even further.

“They are concealing something from you.” The Infected said.

“This Tour Guide will die too, before the journey ends. The people in Chen Cheng’s group who are meant to die number eleven, not ten.”

The Infected’s count of the new arrivals was nine people, which with An Xuefeng and Zhang Xingcang made eleven, not eight as they had claimed. They were hiding one person.

“Who do you think it is?”

Wei Xun was interested. The question of Chen Cheng’s group’s Tour Guide had come up before; Half-Life Daoist thought this Tour Guide was a West District person with no connection to their East District group or Chen Cheng’s tour group and shouldn’t be counted. Zhang Xingcang also felt that even though the Tour Guide was technically alive, having been seriously injured into Return to Zero and then seriously injured again in the alienated state, he was basically already dead and shouldn’t factor into this scene re-enactment.

But Wei Xun wanted to hear the Infected’s reasoning.

“I believe the black werewolf who infiltrated is very likely the Silver Moon Killer. If that’s true, the extra person would be the Lizard Duke.”

The Infected’s tone was unusually certain.

“I’ve looked into the Silver Moon Killer; the gossip is that he’s very fond of keeping tokay geckos, especially the golden-orange varieties. I suspect this has something to do with the Lizard Duke. Perhaps the Lizard Duke has infiltrated under another identity, something like a fragment. But this is only my speculation.”

The Infected had done his research on the top names of the West District Tourist rankings, and the relationship between the Silver Moon Killer and the Lizard Duke had been relatively guarded information; he had traced it out by following one thread to another, a chain of speculation.

Though reasoning from the Silver Moon Killer’s preference for golden-orange tokay geckos to the conclusion that the Lizard Duke had another identity and could have infiltrated alongside the Silver Moon Killer was admittedly a stretch, the Infected said nothing more, only:

“The Stargazer would definitely be able to tell whether that black werewolf is really the Silver Moon Killer, and whether the Lizard Duke has infiltrated.”

So why hadn’t the Stargazer mentioned any of this?

Perhaps they weren’t certain; perhaps the black werewolf had nothing to do with the Silver Moon Killer. But in truth, the Infected’s most important purpose was simply to hint to “Bai Xiaosheng” and An Xuefeng that Metaphysics couldn’t be trusted entirely either. He, the Infected, was still very useful.

“What’s your read on this?”

After the conversation the Infected quietly retreated and Wei Xun didn’t return immediately. Alone in the dark, he took out the meat skewer, had An Xuefeng’s little flame warm it up, took a bite, and sighed with contentment as the flavor lingered. The texture was exactly as magnificent as he had imagined. He exhaled with satisfaction and asked An Xuefeng.

‘Silver Moon Killer is a Tourist; he hasn’t opened a Latitude 30 Degrees journey. His strength here would actually be greater than Stargazer’s.’

An Xuefeng said seriously, meaning that even if Silver Moon Killer had genuinely disguised himself as the black werewolf, the Stargazer might not necessarily see through it. Though—

‘Be careful with the Stargazer, his character is peculiar. He sides with whoever fate stands behind.’

An Xuefeng thought it over and told Wei Xun some details from the time when the Stargazer had made his great prophecy with the Puppeteer listening in.

‘Stargazer later claimed the Puppeteer had deceived and misled him, causing him to misread fate. Their relationship isn’t particularly good.’

If you judged the Stargazer and the Puppeteer’s relationship as friendly based on ??? being under the Puppeteer’s control, that would be a serious mistake. An Xuefeng warned Wei Xun seriously:

‘I know you’re very interested in him, but be careful. The Stargazer holds grudges extremely well.’

******

David had finished his dates and was idly playing with his little fire dragon when he spotted the Infected returning alone, no sign of Bai Xiaosheng behind him. His eyes brightened; he observed for a moment and confirmed Bai Xiaosheng really wasn’t coming back, then eagerly nudged the meditating Stargazer with his elbow twice.

“Psst.”

When Stargazer irritably opened his eyes, David made two little clicking sounds and gestured pointedly in that direction with his eyes.

Bai Xiaosheng hasn’t come back; he’s definitely waiting for you over there. Didn’t you two just agree to have a proper conversation?

“What are you clicking at me for? Do I look like a dog?”

He got another rebuke, but David was cheerful anyway because the Stargazer was genuinely getting up and heading in that direction. David hummed happily to himself. Facing the curious looks from Chen Cheng’s group, he waved a hand and smiled.

“You should know, Stargazer has a bit of a temper—”

But the smile didn’t last because he had just watched Bai Xiaosheng’s wheelchair coming back this way, right on a collision course with the Stargazer.

Hang on. Was Bai Xiaosheng not over there specifically waiting for Stargazer? Was he just over there talking with their Captain An?

Oh no. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] If that was the case, this was going to be deeply awkward. The Stargazer was going to come back and rip his head off.

David’s eyebrows flew up in alarm. But in practice, the Stargazer and Wei Xun who came face to face didn’t produce the awkward scene David had imagined. The Stargazer bent down toward him; he had been intending to bend down, but for some reason he ended up crouching instead, bringing his gaze level with Wei Xun’s in the wheelchair.

He didn’t look at the Phoenix bird, Wei Xun could feel Stargazer’s gaze staying on him. But their meeting had already attracted the attention of everyone by the fire, and this wasn’t a good place for a conversation.

“We’ll have a proper conversation at the Year-End Celebration pre-match.”

“I only want to say one thing to you.”

But before Wei Xun could say more, the Stargazer spoke first. His voice was very quiet, barely more than a breath, circling at Wei Xun’s ear, audible only to him and An Xuefeng.

When the Stargazer’s gaze moved to the Phoenix bird and gestured with his eyes, Wei Xun understood: the Stargazer wanted to speak to him alone.

What was there to say that required An Xuefeng to leave? Wei Xun was genuinely curious, but he didn’t abandon caution; the Phoenix bird flew from the wheelchair and landed at a distance from which it couldn’t hear the conversation but could intervene immediately. The Stargazer paid him no mind.

He stood, leaned over, and murmured at Wei Xun’s ear, words so soft they could have been a whisper, but the words made Wei Xun’s breath catch.

“I once thought he was you.”