Chapter 2689: Puppet Wall
Xu Huo had already searched everywhere earlier. In the circus city, there was no dedicated garbage disposal site. Generally, items needing repair or broken things were all gathered at a transfer station—what could be fixed was fixed, and what couldn't be fixed eventually became spare parts for patching things up.
Even decorative items were made from recycled materials, emphasizing on-site digestion. But these puppets had come from the city center, and judging by where they were headed, it seemed to be the city's edge.
After avoiding those living props as much as possible, Xu Huo followed them for a while longer. However, when a giant, multi-colored living prop swept past him, the combat puppets, along with the "celebration supplies," all vanished without a trace.
He didn't waste too much time there because that multi-colored living prop had its eyes on him. It spread its arms wide, and the air was suddenly filled with colorful silk ribbons of all shades. These ribbons hung densely in the air, entangling any moving object they touched and dragging it up into the sky.
At the end of the ribbons was a black hole. Anything dragged inside disappeared instantly, as if it were a bottomless abyss.
The nearby puppet people seemed accustomed to this. The moment the ribbons descended, everyone froze in place, neither moving nor speaking. This made Xu Huo, who was still active, stand out conspicuously. Large swaths of ribbons flew toward him, forming a massive barrier like writhing worms to block his path.
The Black Blade's attack range was limited, and it was a drop in the bucket against the sheer volume of ribbons. In no time, he was wrapped up along with his defensive barrier.
Feeling his body being lifted, Xu Huo estimated the distance. When the ribbons stopped focusing on him, he slashed openings above and below, then tossed the space bomb he had prepared earlier up!
The explosion blasted apart the clump of ribbons that had nearly formed a ball. As he descended with the shockwave, Xu Huo saw the black hole in the sky rapidly contract and then suddenly disappear.
The nearby ribbons lost some of their vitality after the explosion. Xu Huo took the opportunity to quickly teleport through a Spiritual Gate. Similarly, this living prop hadn't restricted the area, so he escaped easily.
"Clang!" Something nearby made a sound like it had tripped over something metallic. He paused, then turned and walked toward the source of the noise.
A Spiritual Gate abruptly appeared inside the mechanical workshop. It remained still for three seconds before being opened. Xu Huo stepped out from behind the door and quickly surveyed his surroundings—the combat puppets were gone, leaving only a few crates of "celebration supplies" stacked behind the workshop door.
There were quite a few more crates like this.
After taking protective measures, he pried one open. As a cloud of ash-like dust burst out, Xu Huo stepped back, waited a moment, then approached again to examine the contents.
The crate was filled with puppets.
To be precise, they were damaged puppets. Several puppets were missing limbs, and the materials were warped in many places. They looked more like semi-finished products. The dust that had sprayed out was the material used for the puppets' skin.
Some remnants still clung to the puppet skeletons. He reached out and wiped them—the fragments, which had delicate skin-like textures, peeled and crumbled like dried, brittle shells.
Still human skin.
Having a peculiar hobby of making puppets from living people, it wasn't surprising to see human skin on puppets. Xu Huo's attention was on the metal used to make the puppets.
He pried off a piece of bone and found that the metal was mixed with tiny crystals. However, it didn't seem like these crystals were originally part of the metal, because in areas where the crystals were dense, the metal's structure was unstable, showing slight bumps, depressions, and pores.
Were these failed puppets?
Xu Huo picked out a few small metal bones and put them into his backpack and inner pocket.
After checking, he opened a few more crates. Most contained incomplete puppets, but when he opened the seventh crate, he found two corpses inside.
A male and a female corpse. Their faces and bodies were almost identical to normal humans, likely preserved with special materials. However, there were gaps at their joints. When he pried them open, he saw that the bones inside had all been replaced with metal.
Xu Huo cut through the skin and flesh attached to the metal skeletons and found that the metal bones were almost a one-to-one replica of human bones, and they were even adhered to the surrounding meridians. But aside from a few major joints, there were no other signs of surgery on these corpses.
He pressed on the abdomen of one corpse—it was soft inside.
This meant that the internal organs, like the skin, had been preserved.
Standing in front of the crate, Xu Huo frowned at the player ID numbers on the corpses' backs. He recorded them with his communicator and quickly checked the other crates.
More than half of the crates in this mechanical workshop contained such corpses and deformed metal puppets, along with some puppets that had been contaminated with toxins or bacteria and were specially sealed.
The workshop floor showed signs of multiple movements, suggesting this was likely the circus city's actual temporary waste storage point.
It was unclear what the crystal metal was, but judging by the physical features of these corpses, they clearly didn't come from the same district. Xu Huo didn't know the Box Carrier's selection criteria. The crates near the door were mostly recent, indicating that he had never given up on making puppets from living people.
Perverts always think differently from normal people, and ordinary folks can't understand them. After making his records, Xu Huo closed all the crates and headed toward the city center.
After the first morning bell rang, the circus city's nighttime mode ended. Thanks to the experience Yan Jiayu had shared, Xu Huo found Painting Woman, Dai He, and the others and smoothly led them to the agreed-upon location. Zhu Bu's team had now grown to three people.
The group, all wearing puppet costumes, stared in shock at the massive wall before them, which was at least two hundred meters high.
"A wall this tall, and it's invisible from other parts of the city!" Dai He was astonished by the wall's peculiarity. "Could it be that the Super Instance's terrain is vastly different from other instances?"
Of course, the terrain of a Super Instance couldn't be compared to ordinary instances. But this wall was clearly a special item. A two-hundred-meter-high wall—without a suitable hovering item, players couldn't get past it. And from a distance, the wall was completely invisible, while the castle inside could be seen. If anyone said it wasn't a trap, no one would believe them.
But that wasn't the most shocking part. The Puppet Wall—this wall seemed to encircle the entire castle, its length incalculable. Its components were puppets. All kinds of puppets were fused together with black material, their original forms barely distinguishable. Piled on top of each other, limbs twisted, some protruding from the wall, some climbing upward, it looked as if countless living people had been sealed inside.
There might actually be quite a few living people in there.
"Those few... puppets, they should be puppets, right? Why are they placed separately?" Qi Cong asked.
Near where Xu Huo and the others were standing, there was no door. But on the wall directly south, thirty meters above the ground, there was a twenty-meter-long section that had been specially smoothed out. On it were attached five puppets—three large and two small. The first was a skeleton, the second and third were adult males, and the remaining two were children: a boy around ten or eleven and a girl about five or six.
Because something had been poured over them, only rough outlines were visible. But being placed here alone meant they must have held special significance for the Box Carrier.
"Maybe it's a family of enemies," Zhu Bu chimed in. "Given the Box Carrier's style, it wouldn't be strange for him to kill an entire family of enemies."