Chapter 1111: Mr. Kang
Now, Jiang Wenzhang seemed to have only a dead end before him. Whether he confessed or not, or whether what he said was true or false, he would ultimately end up like Zheng Da, killed by Xu Huo.
"If I tell you, will you really let me off?" he pondered for a moment and said. "As long as you spare me, I can use my ticket to leave right in front of you. After all, once I'm out, I'll be starting over at a new wormhole point. That way, both of us have an out."
"That's worth considering." Xu Huo sat back down. "But letting you go like this still doesn't feel safe to me. Through the Under Dimension, you can still contact your old boss."
"How about we use a compromise?" He took out "World Within the Painting." "You go into my container item. Once I'm sure I can safely leave this high-risk instance, I'll let you out."
"That way, both sides can rest easy."
Jiang Wenzhang frowned at the painting frame. "How can I guarantee you'll keep your promise?"
"Do you have any other choice?" Xu Huo smiled. "Actually, you don't have to think everyone in the game is bad. You can trust my conscience a little."
Jiang Wenzhang didn't believe that someone who had put on an act, played a role, and killed almost all the players who followed him out had any conscience. He couldn't help but ask, "If you go back alone, how will you convince Mr. Kang?"
"While entering the stone forest to capture mutant beast cubs, I accidentally attracted a mutant beast pack. The folks from Xiaohe City selflessly stayed behind to buy time, giving me and my companion a chance to survive... How does that excuse sound?" Xu Huo raised an eyebrow.
Such a perfunctory excuse actually revealed one thing: for the remaining players in Xiaohe City, no reason could win them over, so Xu Huo had no intention of convincing them at all.
"Either you go into the item, or you die now..." Jiang Wenzhang gritted his teeth. "I agree."
Xu Huo nodded with satisfaction and casually asked, "By the way, you haven't eaten people, have you?"
"I'm a white player." Jiang Wenzhang said calmly. "And I've been vegetarian since I entered the game."
After a pause, he began to talk about Mr. Kang.
"Actually, I don't know much about Mr. Kang. I heard that the earliest batch of players who came in after him are all dead. Those of us who came later arrived at different times, with the earliest being about five or six years ago."
"But I'm not sure if that number is accurate, because that's what others told me."
"Mr. Kang usually lives behind the building, but he comes out every day to eat with the others. He's a cannibal player, and he especially likes children."
Xu Huo interrupted here. "He once had a son who went missing, right?"
Jiang Wenzhang nodded. "A female player gave birth to it for him. That female player died not long after giving birth in a skirmish with outside players. The child was raised for two years, but it was swallowed by the chaos space. Even a vicious tiger won't eat its own cubs; he wouldn't go after his own flesh and blood, would he?"
So the reason the chaos space swallowed people still remained questionable regarding Mr. Kang.
Xu Huo motioned for him to continue.
"As you probably know, not many children born in Xiaohe City grow up. Some of them died at his hands." Jiang Wenzhang said. "He only didn't hide this from Gong Jiaji. I got it out of Gong Jiaji."
"He rarely makes a move against outside players, but he has a very powerful item that can instantly control dozens of players, rendering them immobile. To this day, I haven't figured out the trigger method for that item, but I can tell you the control time accurately: five seconds."
"Five seconds of control over any player is enough for a B-level player to kill over a dozen people one by one."
"You'd better watch out for that."
"Also, his speed is astonishingly fast, so fast that at one point, all you could see were his afterimages. I once saw another B-level player use positioning items and prediction items to catch him, but they all failed."
"So I suspect he's also a super evolver, just with a different evolutionary direction."
Jiang Wenzhang paused slightly and looked at Xu Huo tentatively. "One crowd control, one high speed—either one alone is hard to deal with, let alone having both. You're not in Xiaohe City. Your companion's instance time might be almost up, but you still have a long way to go. Do you think you can handle it?"
"Don't worry about it." Xu Huo raised his hand. "Give me the details of what happened before and after those two items were used."
"I've seen the crowd control three times." Jiang Wenzhang, relying on his exceptional memory, described in detail what happened in the half hour before and after each of the three crowd controls. Of course, aside from basic human actions like walking and talking, there were no specific trigger words or actions. He still didn't know which item of Mr. Kang's this corresponded to.
Xu Huo thought for a moment and then asked, "What makes you think he's a super evolver?"
"Isn't that kind of strange speed enough?" Jiang Wenzhang said. "You haven't seen it with your own eyes. It's completely different from the speed of an ordinary B-level player. It doesn't look like using an item or the point-to-point movement of a spatial evolver, which can't be tracked in between in the eyes of others."
"So you can barely keep up with him visually, but you can only see afterimages, which doesn't help with pinpointing his position or predicting his direction." Xu Huo followed up.
"Exactly!" Jiang Wenzhang said. "I've seen no fewer than ten experts die under his speed. He doesn't even need to use other items."
It was precisely because his power was so elusive that the other players in Xiaohe City were so obedient, including several other players of the same level.
"Do you think he's a physical evolver or a mental evolver?" Xu Huo asked.
Jiang Wenzhang hesitated for a moment. "It should be physical enhancement."
Although the inability to track with items might seem like a misjudgment caused by mental interference on the holder's part, it was unlikely to completely affect a B-level player in such a short time. People who reached B-level had some defenses in this regard.
"So he basically never leaves Xiaohe City." Xu Huo thought for a moment and then said, "Has he ever used these two items outside the commercial building?"
Jiang Wenzhang carefully recalled and then said firmly, "Yes, there was a time when a troublesome player knocked him out of the commercial building, but he still ended up killing him."
"Using what?"
"The process wasn't long. Both sides were injured at the time, and his speed gave him the advantage."
The result was self-evident.
After hearing this, Xu Huo frowned slightly. This contradicted his earlier judgment. He had originally thought that Mr. Kang's control range was limited to the commercial building.
Jiang Wenzhang reacted quickly. Combined with the chaotic time and space in the commercial building, if this was caused by Mr. Kang, it meant that the commercial building might have been under his control all along, or that the commercial building itself was an item. Now, this range had suddenly expanded to the entire Xiaohe City, a scale that was incomparable.
(End of Chapter)