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Chapter 108: Enemies

The bark of the tree was sturdy and bumpy like a rock face, making it easy to climb.

Gao Yang had put quite a lot of points into his Agility, making his body lighter and more agile. Soon, he outpaced Officer Huang and Old Wang and reached where Cheng Xin was last seen. With a push of both hands, he vaulted onto a side branch.

The branch itself was about one meter wide, so it was effectively a path itself. Looking ahead, Gao Yang saw a dense web of paths like this, crisscrossing to form a large, complicated maze.

White Rabbit, War Tiger, and Qing Ling were standing on a branch not far from him.

Gao Yang ran up to them, wondering why they had stopped chasing after the man, but then he came to a halt in shock.

It turned out that they had caught up with their target. Cheng Xin lay still on the branch with his back to them. Judging by his rigid body, he must be dead.

“He’s dead?” Gao Yang felt a prickling sensation spreading through his scalp. “Who killed him?”

“No clue,” White Rabbit said coolly. “When I caught up with him, he was already dead.”

“Did you examine the body?” asked Gao Yang.

“He died of poison,” War Tiger said.

Gao Yang’s heart sank and considered Cheng Xin’s profile. His eyes were bulging, his skin was covered in dark purple vessels, and his lips were blue.

Gao Yang couldn’t help but shout, “Wait, he was killed by Spider Venom!”

“Yes.” War Tiger nodded. “He got killed by his own venom.”

“He killed himself?” Gao Yang found that hard to believe.

“I’m not sure.” White Rabbit took off her white gloves. “I searched him and didn’t find a Rune Circuit on him.”

“Cheng Xin! You son of a...”

Old Wang cursed as he and Officer Huang caught up to them, but the rest of his words got stuck in his throat when he saw Cheng Xin’s body. Flabbergasted, he said, “He, he’s...dead? Or did you kill him?”

“He seemed to have killed himself,” Gao Yang explained.

“No way that’s true!” Old Wang said incredulously like it was the greatest joke in the world. “I know Cheng Xin. The bastard values his life. Even if there’s only a sliver of hope, he would cling to it for survival.”

“He was killed by Spider Venom.” War Tiger shrugged. “He couldn’t have killed himself with his own venom accidentally, could he?”

“What?” Old Wang jogged up to them and checked Cheng Xin’s face closely.

“Fuck! What the hell is going on!” Old Wang was on the verge of a mental breakdown.

Gao Yang was getting agitated as well. The moment they stepped into the subway train, things had been going against common sense and contradicting themselves. He looked around, realizing with confusion that the elevated maze of crisscrossing branches seemed different somehow. Then he noticed what the change was: the light was growing dim.

Taking a closer look, he saw that the white energy within the branches were moving downward toward the roots.

“Something’s wrong.”

Even Qing Ling was getting anxious. She turned to Gao Yang, hoping that he could come to a reasonable explanation.

Think, think quickly.

If things aren’t making sense, it’s best to think outside the box.

A thought flashed through his mind, and Gao Yang caught it, his eyes glinting. “Gu Ling was killed by gunshot.”

“She was.” White Rabbit nodded.

Gao Yang turned to Old Wang. “On your team, was there anyone other than Gu Ling who used guns?”

Old Wang shook his head. “No.”

“Did Gu Ling kill herself too?” Gao Yang asked on purpose.

“Gu Ling didn’t kill herself,” White Rabbit said immediately. “I told you. No one would shoot their own chest to kill themselves, and they certainly wouldn’t holster their gun afterward.”

“That leaves us with only one possibility. It’s the most obvious answer, but the one answer we least want to be true.” Gao Yang turned to War Tiger.

After a pause, War Tiger smiled. “They were killed by themselves.”

“I told you it wasn’t suicide...” White Rabbit trailed off and exclaimed, “That, that can’t be!”

“Hell, that’s insane!” Officer Huang caught on as well.

“What?” Old Wang was the only one still in the dark, and he asked anxiously, “Stop talking in riddles. What the hell is going on?”

Everyone exchanged a look. For a moment, they were reluctant to acknowledge the truth.

Gao Yang took a deep breath and looked around. “Look at the tree. Doesn’t it remind you of something?”

“What?” asked Old Wang.

“An hourglass,” said Gao Yang.

“True.” Qing Ling’s eyes flickered. “What’s flowing inside the tree looks like glowing sand.”

Gao Yang wasn’t sure if the jittery feeling inside him should be attributed to excitement or nervousness. He nodded and said, “The sand is flowing toward the roots. That’s why it’s getting darker and darker here, while it’s getting brighter below us.”

“What does that mean?” Old Wang was even more lost.

“Have you considered what the Rune Circuit hidden in this Rune Cave might be, Old Wang?” Gao Yang asked the key question.

Old Wang was bemused for a moment, and he muttered to himself, “An hourglass, the looping subway train, and the differing passage of time...”

“Ah!” he exclaimed. “Time-Space! It’s the Time-Space Rune Circuit!”

“That would explain everything.”

War Tiger added, “Time and space follow different rules here, which led to all the strange things we’ve observed. As for the hole in the tree...”

“That must be the core of the space,” Gao Yang boldly speculated. “The Rune Circuit was probably inside, but it was taken.”

“Who else could have taken it?” Old Wang said urgently. “There’s no one else beside us. Cheng Xin and the others are all dead.”

“Not necessarily.”

Gao Yang crouched down and flipped Cheng Xin’s body over. He broke into goosebumps when he lifted the dead man’s shirt.

His speculation was proven true.

“Look!” Gao Yang’s voice trembled. “This Cheng Xin doesn’t have a wound on his abdomen.”

War Tiger snapped his fingers. “Case closed. This isn’t the Cheng Xin we saved.”

Old Wang finally realized what was happening. Face pale, he staggered backward and almost fell off from the branch. “Stop, stop speaking nonsense. You can’t be suggesting that there’s another Cheng Xin, can you?”

“It’s not just him. It’s also Gu Ling and all your other teammates,” Gao Yang paused, “They probably all had duplicates.”

Old Wang’s knees buckled, and he fell to his knees, clawing at his short hair, “Ah, ah...”

“Old Wang!” Officer Huang quickly helped him up. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m, I’m fine. But my head is a mess...” Old Wang’s face twitched, and his pupils dilated. He grabbed Officer Huang as he rambled, “I saw everything, Old Huang! I saw all of it!”

“What did you see?”

“Cheng Xin, Gu Ling, and everyone else died, but then they came back alive. How did that happen? Ugh...” Old Wang knelt down again, feeling like his head was going to explode.

While they talked, the white energy in the branches were quickly depleting, and the area around them was getting darker. They could barely see their own hands.

“Fire, Gao Yang,” said War Tiger.

Gao Yang raised both his hands and conjured two fireballs to light up their surroundings. The golden light overtook the faint chilling white glow, and everything came into clearer view.

Gao Yang spotted something on a branch not far from them. Heart thumping, he called everyone’s attention to it. “Over there!”

Gao Yang hurled the fireball on his left hand in that direction.

The fireball cut through the darkness and illuminated all the dense webs of branches on the way. Hanging on the branches were human corpses. At a glance, there were at least a few dozen of them.

Each was killed in a different way. Some by blade, some by gunshot, some by poison, and some by elemental damage. None, however, seemed to be killed by monsters.

Their faces were so familiar yet so very foreign. It was apparent that they had been through a perverted, chaotic, relentless fight to the death.

“No, no, it can’t be...”

Old Wang shook his head in vehement denial, almost breaking down then and there.

They all knew what they were seeing. The bodies were all replicates of Cheng Xin, Gu Ling, and the other three members of the second team.