All my body’s functions stopped at this moment, and I knew I had been too enthusiastic.
My heart rate must have broken the meter, and I could still hear it hammering in my chest even after I had stopped so abruptly. Then, a wave of nausea surged up.
I was getting a little old. By the time I had started physical training, my prime had already passed. In the words of Black Glasses, there was no way to exercise your internal organs.
At this moment, the person I had just subdued woke up and started struggling.
He wasn’t very strong, but I didn’t have any remaining strength to subdue him again, so he managed to push me aside.
I looked at him, and was surprised to find that it was actually a woman in front of me. She was seventeen or eighteen at most, and had a radio hanging from her chest.
“Who are you?” She definitely wasn’t Lu Sha—who I knew had to be a man—and she was way too young to be Seven Fingers.
The girl looked at me, and I saw she had a strange appearance. Her forehead was very big, and she looked very young, but her figure had already matured.
Was she Seven Fingers’ daughter or mistress? I went to check her fingers, but she swiftly put her hands behind her back.
“Let me go. Let me go back.” She pleaded.
“What the hell? Didn’t you put us in here?” Through my anger, I saw the girl point to the radio on her chest and then point to the surrounding walls.
I didn’t know what it meant, but I suddenly heard the time on the radio.
Seventeen sixteen.
The girl’s face changed and she turned and ran.
I would probably only be able to move in fifteen minutes. As she ran away, my stomach convulsed and I tried to catch one of her hands. I missed, and by the time I looked up again, I saw her shadow disappear at the end of the passage.
As the adrenaline faded, the pain from where I had sprained my back before started to spread after doing such strenuous exercise. I leaned against the wall, panting and coughing while darkly cursing in my heart.
I made several attempts to run after her once I caught my breath, but found that I could no longer run.
Except for the dim gas lamps on the walls, it was too dark to see anything clearly, and my eyes became blurred due to the physical exhaustion.
What’s going on? Between Seven Fingers, Lu Sha, Xiao Hua, me, and now a girl, we can even play “Three Kingdoms Kill” (1) now. It seemed like this woman couldn’t say anything here. She pointed to the radio and then pointed to the wall. What did it mean?
I held the wall, got up, and turned on my phone’s flashlight function. Fortunately, it was a knockoff, so it should be able to endure for a while.
Where was Xiao Hua?
This was a completely blank cement corridor, with no details or decorations. I looked up and found that the ceiling was so high that I couldn’t see it. It was a bit like that back tunnel in the Xisha underwater tomb where both sides would close in, only this one was equipped with gas lamps.
It was a bit like a gap between two giant buildings.
I went forward with the help of the wall, but had only made it a dozen steps before I saw the girl lying on the ground. I had obviously really hurt her earlier.
Ah, Wu Xie, Wu Xie. After training so hard, and learning your skills, you fought for the first time and defeated an underage chick with a slight advantage.
I really wanted to find a piece of tofu and hit myself against it until I died.
When I lifted her up, she burst into tears and cried out, “Please, let me go.”
I looked into her eyes and frowned. This definitely wasn’t acting. Even her snot was coming out.
Who the hell are you? I wondered.
At this time, I saw a light in her clothes. When I fished it out, I found that it was her iPhone. There was the face of a popular young idol on the screen saver, and a prompt saying she had received a message. The content of the message had been pushed to the notification bubble, and I could see it without having to unlock the phone. It was a short message sent by a garbled number that said: “Take this radio to the fourteenth staircase. Return to the original place within five minutes of hearing the time. Don’t let anyone find it. Then you can leave.”
I flipped through her phone and found a lot of chat records between her and her friends and boyfriend. She was called Tang, and there was a pattern formed by two symbols after her name, which must have been a common way for people to decorate their names now.
She was an ordinary person.
I frowned and picked up my knockoff phone, but I hadn’t received any text messages.
I leaned the girl against the wall, wiped her nose, and said, “I’m not the one who locked you up here. Please calm down and tell me how you got here first.”
When the girl looked at me, a big snot bubble appeared and she cried out, “How can I believe you? Let me go, I don’t have any money.”
I raised my knockoff phone: “Have you ever seen such a powerful murderer use such a cheap phone?”
Little Tang looked at my phone, and I could tell her thoughts had entered a chaotic state. After a long time, she stopped sobbing, and was just about to talk when her phone suddenly lit up again. She and I looked at the screen at the same time and saw a new message: “Don’t trust him.”
Fuck, I said to myself, this bastard even wants to engage in psychological warfare. The girl pushed me away and stumbled to the depths of the passage.
At the same time, my cheap phone finally sounded. The first text message had come. I gave up chasing her and turned to my phone.
It was also a garbled number, and the content of the text message said: “Find me and I’ll tell you how to save him.”
<Extra 3.8> <Table of Contents><Extra 3.10>
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TN Notes:
(1) It’s a Chinese card game based on the Three Kingdoms period of China and the semi-fictional 14th century novel “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” by Luo Guanzhong. Wikipedia info here.
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Tiffany’s Extras:
MereBear's Translation 