Chapter 256: Beating You Up on Behalf of Society
Team Leader Song hung up the phone and, unwilling to give up, asked the surveillance personnel beside him, "Are you sure you saw him disappear from the room all of a sudden?"
"Yes," the surveillance officer replied. "His thermal image vanished right in the middle of the room."
Team Leader Song let out a long sigh. "What a shame. If only that person could be used by us..."
Dai Wenqian stood behind him, adjusting his glasses. "Does Xu Huo really have a space teleportation item?"
"We haven't received any feedback from the facial recognition system yet, so he should have already left Jing City," Team Leader Song said. "He's so emboldened, probably relying on the fact that he's become a D-level player."
"Becoming a D-level player in such a short time shows he does have ability," Dai Wenqian said. "But if you'll forgive my frankness, Team Leader, Xu Huo isn't the type to cooperate with others. To put it bluntly, he doesn't trust anyone but himself and sees everyone else as dead weight. Even if he joined the Special Defense Department, he wouldn't follow orders."
Team Leader Song naturally understood this. Just look at Team Leader Wu—after all that effort, he still hadn't managed to win him over, right?
"I just regret that such a good item can't be used where it should be."
Dai Wenqian smiled gently. "The items Xu Huo has probably aren't that high-level. Showing off like that was also a way to demonstrate his strength. What he wants is simply mutual non-interference."
"Besides, there are plenty of good items in the game. Team Leader doesn't need to envy him. Once the Special Defense Department has more players, what item can't we get?"
Team Leader Song's expression relaxed, and he patted Dai Wenqian's shoulder. "Wenqian, I have high hopes for you. Keep up the good work."
Dai Wenqian smiled and nodded, then led his subordinate, who was also a player, out of the room.
"Brother Qian, it seems Team Leader Song doesn't want to let Xu Huo go. Will he send us to catch him?" the young player with an eyebrow piercing asked in a low voice.
"How would we catch him?" Dai Wenqian laughed. "By carrying a cannon to blow up a residential building? Not to mention that Xu Huo now has the support of a large number of ordinary people and evolvers. Even without that video, the Special Defense Department wouldn't dare to go all out to capture him. What if he escapes into the game, levels up, and comes back to settle the score? Wouldn't the high-ups in the Special Defense Department be the ones to suffer?"
"For the sake of their own lives, they won't do that. They can only obediently help clean up the mess."
"But I do admire Xu Huo," the eyebrow-piercing player said. "Actually, I got wind a few days ago that someone was offering a high price for information on evolvers and players. I just didn't expect those people to go that far. I always thought only cannibal players didn't treat their own kind as human. I didn't expect... He's kind of avenged us players too."
"That's perfectly normal," Dai Wenqian said. "The development of civilization has always been about those above stepping on those below. Being caught by a few tranquilizer darts only shows they're stupid. People like that wouldn't last long in the game either."
"Contact the others to secretly look after those evolvers who are hiding. If you find any who are imprisoned, find a way to set them free. I want to ride this wave."
The eyebrow-piercing player asked in confusion, "Why should we save them?"
"The development of civilization is indeed about those above stepping on those below, but who ends up on top is anyone's guess." Dai Wenqian adjusted his glasses and said.
* * *
The Fifty-Fifty Vent could only be used within the same space, and only once outside an instance. Xu Huo used this item just to make one thing clear: that he could easily escape the Special Defense Department's encirclement without relying on a ticket. The more trump cards he had, the more the Special Defense Department would be wary—not just the high-ups, but other players as well.
So using this opportunity wasn't a waste.
The conditions Jiang Qiao offered seemed more advantageous than him aimlessly searching through the game alone, but in reality, the Special Defense Department's understanding of the Seventeenth Hospital was far less than his. They only knew the name of a hospital, while the real clue was sealed in his memory of that doctor.
So it was just an empty promise from them. Joining the Special Defense Department in exchange for a slim lead would do more harm than good, and information could also be obtained through trade.
Besides, finding someone in the vast game was extremely difficult. A better approach was to let them come to him—by becoming a well-known high-level player in the game.
As long as both parties were still in the game, they would meet sooner or later.
So what he needed to do now was settle down and focus on raising his evolution rate and player level.
"Biu!" Xu Huo felt like he was spat out of the Fifty-Fifty Vent in an instant, but the sky outside had already darkened. For a moment, he thought he had been teleported abroad, but then the vent behind him made a strange sound effect, and he realized he was in mid-air, with at least several dozen meters still to go before reaching the rooftop.
Quickly adjusting his posture in the air, he grabbed the ever-present strings to slow his fall and landed steadily on the rooftop a few seconds later.
The vent had shrunk into a small ball. Xu Huo reached out to catch it, but the ball spat out a plastic tongue accompanied by a game sound: "Was that fun? Exciting?"
Exciting enough. Good thing he had a matching item, or falling from that height would have smashed his face to pieces.
Putting the vent into his item slot, Xu Huo glanced back at the distant buildings, then turned and went downstairs.
He hadn't figured out the teleportation pattern of the Fifty-Fifty Vent yet, but it seemed the time interval was a bit long, and the location was very random. He wasn't sure if it was always the same.
As it happened, the place he arrived at was Flower City, near Ting City, in the old district. The streets and buildings here were old and run-down, with few people around. After going downstairs, Xu Huo found a nearby noodle shop to eat.
"...Did you really see it? That little girl has twenty thousand yuan on her?" Voices came from the end of the alley, hidden in a blind spot.
"It's in a plastic bag tucked inside her clothes. A crisp twenty thousand," another voice said. "I think she might be mentally off. She's been hanging around that broken puppet in the park for days, eating steamed buns and drinking mineral water when she's hungry."
"Hugging cash while eating steamed buns, what a waste. There shouldn't be anyone in the park at this hour..."
"No one, no one. It's a remote place, and they say it's haunted. No one dares to go in even during the day... Heh, the little girl looks pretty tender..."
The voices gradually faded away. Xu Huo paid for his noodles and stepped into the alley.
In the dim park, Yan Jiayu crouched in front of a carousel, staring intently at a crooked puppet beside it. After a long while, she sighed. "My eyes are sore. When will it light up?"
"Sister, your eyes hurt? Want big brother to rub them for you?" Two sleazy-looking young men with dyed hair walked over, winking and grinning.
Yan Jiayu stood up, casually lifting the stone rod at her feet, and turned her head. "What did you say?"
One of them was about to speak, but before he could open his mouth, he saw the stone rod swinging toward him. He raised his arm to block it, but his forearm was directly snapped and bent backward. He screamed and fell to his knees.
The other wasn't any better. A stone rod hit him in the leg, and he collapsed to the ground.
Yan Jiayu then gave their hands and feet a few more hits with the rod, then dragged the two with broken limbs together, crouched in front of them, and said, "My master said that people who do bad things need to be beaten up by society."
"We weren't going to do anything bad..." the two hurriedly said.
"You were thinking about it, even if you didn't say it out loud," Yan Jiayu said firmly. "I can see your hearts through your eyes. People with impure hearts have crooked eyes. Today, I'm going to beat you up on behalf of society."