Chapter 2699: The Tumbler
The Painting Woman didn’t think she was unreliable. She pushed past the others and strode up to Yan Jiayu, raising her palm high.
“What are you doing!” Qi Cong said, a bit agitated. “Xiaoyuer is already injured, and you still want to hit her?”
The Painting Woman didn’t waste words with him. She backhanded him, sending him flying with a slap, then grabbed Yan Jiayu and started smacking her kangaroo head repeatedly.
The others also wanted to see if this method could actually wake someone up, so they didn’t stop her.
Yan Jiayu woke up, but not because of the beating. When she was injured by the “Sealed Door,” she had a brief moment of blank consciousness. She had lost her main awareness and was nearly assimilated by the prop. When she was pulled out of the wall, she couldn’t move, but her mind had already recovered.
“Stop hitting me,” she said, her mouth recovering before her limbs. She called for the Painting Woman to stop, somewhat helplessly adding, “I’m inside the prop. Even if you hit me, I can’t feel the pain.”
So external attacks couldn’t wake her up. In fact, severe injuries might cause her to be further assimilated by the prop.
“But you can talk, though,” the Painting Woman said, insisting her method was effective. “I helped, didn’t I?”
“Thank you,” Yan Jiayu said earnestly. “When we get back, I’ll treat you to something good to eat.”
The Painting Woman nodded, took off her donkey head mask, and tossed it aside, planning to have a meal before looking for the Tumbler.
Xu Huo shared what he knew about the Tumbler with the others, but unfortunately, neither Zhu Bu nor the other had ever seen one.
“It seems we’ll have to search more thoroughly,” Zhu Bu said. “The situation inside the castle might be different from the Circus City. After dawn, the puppets and living props might all start moving.”
“Rest for ten minutes before we act again,” Xu Huo said. He felt fatigued and checked his body, only to find that the toxin hadn’t been completely removed. Instead, it was gradually worsening over time.
Yan Jiayu couldn’t eat, and the others weren’t in the mood to, so they only replenished some water. Only the Painting Woman cheerfully rummaged through her backpack, pulling out snacks she had prepared in advance.
“Is this an Instance Authorization?” Hongxi asked, pointing to a scroll sealed in a transparent box.
The Painting Woman quickly grabbed it and stuffed it back into her backpack, saying to Xu Huo, “This is mine.”
“I know.” It was just a fake Instance Authorization. Originally, he had bought the authorization prop from Old Sir Xi, but that old man had been stubborn, insisting on perfecting the authorization. In the end, he racked his brains but couldn’t find a solution, so he just wrapped it in a disposable prop box, pretending the problem was solved.
As a result, he was too embarrassed to hand the item directly to Xu Huo, so he secretly slipped it to the Painting Woman, fulfilling the agreement.
The Painting Woman treated this prop as a bonus and kept it in her backpack.
“It’s just a prop I bought for fun,” Xu Huo said, glancing at it before looking away and drinking water wearily.
“You don’t look right,” Yan Jiayu said, studying him for a moment. “It’s getting worse. Do you have any antidote?”
Xu Huo nodded. “I’ve already taken one.”
The antidotes he carried were all diluted. If the King Fungus’s effects weren’t enough, one or two antidotes definitely wouldn’t cut it.
“I still have two antidotes,” Zhu Bu said, pulling out a finger-sized box.
Xu Huo took it but didn’t plan to use it immediately. Different potions might conflict with each other, and he didn’t want to take the risk here. Since his condition wasn’t severe yet, he could wait until they got out.
“Aren’t you poisoned?” Yan Jiayu asked them and Qi Cong.
Zhu Bu and the other had Space Evolution power as a safety net. When passing the big skeleton monster, they only assisted from the sidelines and didn’t engage in close combat, so they were fine.
As for Xu Huo, he had no idea when he got poisoned, so he couldn’t be sure if the black smoke was the only toxin during close combat, or if there were other pathways. It was normal that Zhu Bu, the other, and Qi Cong were unaffected.
As for Yan Jiayu and her group, they were even less likely to be affected.
Ten minutes passed quickly. Xu Huo and the others prepared to look for the Tumbler. Short on hands, they retrieved Ji Ji Bird and the Peacock midway. Unexpectedly, Dai He was still alive, and he had even seen the Tumbler.
Dai He was severely injured, with half the bones in his body crushed. When Xu Huo and the others found him, he was lying breathless in a water tank, pretending to be a fish. After pulling him out, they learned that after Xu Huo was dragged away by the Stilt Walker, he quickly got separated from Ji Ji Bird and the other, and stumbled into a storage room.
That storage room was filled with Tumblers of various sizes.
Not finding any living props, he decided to hide there for a while, planning to leave after the Stilt Walker was gone. But somehow, after a while, he felt drowsy and nearly fell asleep. Just as he was about to doze off, he suddenly woke up with a start. When he looked ahead again, the Tumblers had turned into colossal giants, and the entire room’s space had expanded dozens of times. He was as insignificant as an ant inside. Soon, a Tumbler rolled over and crushed his body.
He was incredibly lucky. The Tumblers were about to crush him to death when suddenly a bird call rang out. The Tumbler standing in the center of the room stopped rolling toward him, jumped up, and ran toward the door.
After that Tumbler left, the room returned to normal, and Dai He narrowly escaped with his life. But when he came out, the Tumbler was gone. He couldn’t find the source of the bird call either. Finally, he crawled to the water tank, surfacing every now and then to breathe.
Xu Huo looked at the Painting Woman. They hadn’t heard any bird call before.
The Painting Woman thought carefully. She had seen both real and fake birds, but none of them made a sound.
Dai He imitated the sound, and the Painting Woman finally understood. “That’s not a bird call. It’s a peeing whistle.”
There was a room next to the tower on the first floor, with a large water tank above it. But that tank wasn’t connected to the castle’s pipes. When the puppet whistled, water would be released from above. The last time she came, the person who brought her said it was a peeing whistle.
The Painting Woman didn’t see anything wrong with it, so she kept using that term.
The sound of the water tank draining had attracted the Tumbler away, which meant something had happened near the tower.
After resting, they went down to the first floor, planning to leave the main building and head to the tower to check the situation.
There were many moving puppets on the first floor. Even the Painting Woman could easily be spotted. Zhu Bu and the others had left a communicator upstairs, playing music at regular intervals to attract the puppets.
But that only lured away the patrolling puppets. The ones working remained, and those who had finished their tasks simply stood still, as if they were lifeless.
They had to give them work to do.
Xu Huo knocked down a few trees, poured oil on the stairway corridors, and smeared several windows, making the puppets busy. Then he opened the Spiritual Gate.
Perhaps because the castle was filled with a variety of living props, there weren’t as many interference and detection devices inside as outside. So when they opened the door, no alarm was triggered.
Yan Jiayu forcefully twisted open the door to the room corresponding to the water tank. A stench of decay, long-sealed and fermented, poured out!