The World Below Surface
Chapter 20: Time is Up

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[What's that?] He Lou asked wordlessly with his mouth.

Lu Yan was silent and shook his head.

From the sound of it, it sounded like a zombie, but he couldn't be sure for now.

He had deliberately sent the message about Li Fang Zhi and the curse to that senior sister Li. If she was in cahoots with that Master Lin, they would have come over as soon as they received the message. And if she was going against the grain with Master Lin, it was reasonable to say that Senior Sister Li would have delayed a little longer.

Now, there was only the sound of the zombies jumping around, but their conversation could not be heard. Could it be that ...... something had happened to her?

The beating above his head continued. He looked at the time on his wrist, didn't know what to count, and wordlessly said to He Lou: [First you, then me]

[What?] He Lou was a bit confused.

Lu Yan didn't intend to explain much and repeated the gesture: [First you, then me. You run down, I go up]

In the darkness of scarlet, he stared into He Lou's eyes, eyes that He Lou could easily associate with the look of a wolf staring deadly at its prey.

But he could be sure that Lu Yan's prey was not him at this moment.

Then who could it be?

Just as the words left his mouth, the beating sound on the roof of the building changed.

The familiar brass bell rang out, but it was different from the one they had heard. Harsh, sharp and urgent, and with it, the jumping sound was hurried.

Objects falling, brass bells ringing, hissing, the toothsome clash of metal ...... The two ambled silently, unmoving.

The 405 was inaccessible. They returned to the bottom of the bed where He Lou had previously hidden but found Feng Chu Chu's head. They dug a hole there to reach the sealed-up 404 downstairs. Then drilled a hole through the floor of the 404 to get to the mezzanine, where countless bodies had once been piled.

Upon entering, the overwhelming stench of rotting blood overwhelmed the two men. Still, they had to endure it to survive. After taking their bearings, they crawled a little to the bottom of room 405 and waited for time to pass without moving.

The noise died down.

The young man carried his sword and looked around.

He had placed Ran no Yu in the room, and almost everywhere was plastered with her pretty face, looking at him with a smile. He gazed at the smiling face, tried to calm his breathing, reached up and brushed his hand over his own face, hiding the grimace of his green-faced face under the clean-cut look of a teenager, and reared his smile.

"Lu Yan! He Lou?"

"Are you still alive?"

"I've sorted things out, you can come out now."

Lu Yan and He Lou crouched in the mezzanine. Even their breathing slowed to a languorous pace, not taking a breath in the face of Master Lin's anxious search for fear of being discovered.

He Lou was still a little uncertain, but Lu Yan knew she had believed the message he had secretly sent to that senior sister Li earlier.

Master Lin should have believed it, too. After all, Li Fang Zhi's corpse downstairs was not a fake.

No woman's voice was heard, and Senior Sister Li was not there? So who was he fighting with just now? Anyway, he did not believe that the other party wanted to remove Lan Zhi Yu.

No matter which floor the teenager went to and how he asked, all he got was silence. Time passed, with nearly an hour to go.

This time, perhaps, was Lan Zhi Yu's deadline, and the teenager's voice was no longer warm and fierce, one more intense than the next.

"Come out now!!!"

"I know you are still alive, come out quickly!"

He forced himself to hold back his anger and found his way from upstairs to downstairs but found nothing.

Where could they have gone?

Unable to calculate where they were, the teenager found his way from upstairs to downstairs, his eyes angry to the point of filling with blood.

He could see from the corpse of Li Fang Zhi downstairs that the curse was real and bizarre, and he could not break it. He could only pin his hopes on replaceing a suitable carrier again. If he couldn't replace it again, Lan Zhi Yu would have to stay in this body and never set foot outside the flat again.

How could he possibly endure that?

But now, the whole city was gone, but his substitute's Jumping Undead had also been destroyed. It would be difficult to get out of the city within the time limit.

"Where are you? Come out!!!" The roar from outside became even more desperate, almost hissing. It was easy to imagine what the other side was going through.

Fifty minutes to go.

"Come out!!!" He slashed his sword at the other room, panting slightly, his chest heaving violently.

He had a feeling that those two must still be inside this flat.

To replace them ...... they had to be found!

Yes ...... if they were in this flat, how could he not replace them?

They must be hiding there! The floor that he had set up by the hand of the puppet was able to keep everyone out of sight ...... he wondered how they got in? He was even concealed.

After calming down, the teenager sank and returned to the fourth floor, plunging his sword into the ground.

He Lou was still tense, waiting for the countdown when suddenly, a little crumb fell from his ear. A sword grazed straight across his cheek the next second before retracting upwards.

The floor poked open, and the teenager's face appeared in the hole.

"Found you guys." He grinned a little.

......

The room was dimly lit, and the smell of blood was thick and sickening. The yellow paper was rustling from the chilly breeze blowing from the flat earth. The bright red runes seemed to be dripping blood.

The beautiful faces of the women all over the walls and houses gradually smiled at the sound of the brass bells, and their dark eyes focused a little on the man in the formation.

A gathering, and a thousand other blood threads condensed from their own blood, connected to the eyes of each beautiful painting.

That was He Lou.

In the past could still calmly analyze the great mind a faint, nothing can think. Only the body's blood gradually cooled, even limbs a little stiff, wet, and cold.

How much longer ......?

After they were discovered, the teenager, who was already covered in bruises, had no time to make false accusations about them. After Lu Yan gave a low bellow, He Lou was suddenly blessed to react to what Lu Yan had said. He drew his legs to flee downstairs.

Unsurprisingly, the teenager caught them back, but he was trapped in the middle of the spell. Lu Yan was placed to one side and looked at what was happening in front of him with a face full of horror.

A cold and icy aura gradually attached itself to him, and everything in front of him began to look unclear. The delicate face of the woman sitting face to face with him faded a little, and her long hair slowly became shorter. Her face was so beautiful that it did not look like a living person gradually regained life.

In contrast, the shadow behind He Lou slowly grew long hair, her figure gradually became slender, and her facial lines softened a little.

The young man's face showed joy.

He Lou was so dazed that it was hard to think about anything else. As he struggled to open his eyes, he saw Li Fang Yu, sitting opposite him, suddenly let out a scream of pain and raised her hand to a death grip around her neck with such force that her tongue spat out in a moment. But then she uncontrollably closed her teeth in a deadly grip and bit down on her tongue.

Within moments, the bloody half of her tongue fell out, and her whole body fell to the ground. The expression on Ivana's face was horror, and she did not understand what had happened until she died.

The residents were not allowed to leave the flat during the mission, Lan Zhi Yu could go, but Li Fang Yu had broken the rules.

Seeing this scene, the teenager was even more confident of the curse's existence.

Luckily, it was fortunate that he had discovered this in time and was still able to remedy the situation.

He gazed at He Lou, who was gradually changing in the field, with a look of madness and joy.

Fifteen minutes to go.

The nails slowly grew longer, the chest gradually bulged, and the skin grew whiter ......

"Ahhhhhh-"

As if suddenly stimulated, Lu Yan, tied up and put aside as reserve food, leapt up and fled towards the door. Despite his frightened face, he was still careful not to touch anything he shouldn't.

The young man was in a tight spot and had no time for him, so he let him go and returned to his business. A short time later, he glanced out the window and saw the other man flying away from the flat, almost out of sight!

So he was the one who wasn't controlled by the curse!

The teenager's mind exploded into a blank, and his eyes were wide with anger. He raised his hand to stop the formation and leapt gently from the high building to chase after him.

He recalled that after he and He Lou had agreed on the forum, He Lou claimed that someone would pick him up at the block's entrance. Only for Lu Yan to simply wait at the bottom of the apartment building, saying he didn't want to be in the sun. It was because of this that he didn't suspect too much.

However, no matter how clever Lu Yan was, he would not have anticipated this step. He was just in the habit of acting like everyone else in front of some key people. Even in the past few days, he had entrusted the enthusiastic young couple on the ground floor to go out and buy clothes.

It wasn't until today that Lu Yan decided to take advantage of this and take a gamble.

He won the bet.

Lu Yan tried his best to dodge, but he was quickly caught up by the teenager and brought back.

He Lou, in the centre of the formation, returned to normal little by little, not knowing whether it was because of the cold or something else. His pale paper-like face was tinged with the colour of a living person. He slowly opened his eyes.

Sitting opposite him was Lu Yan, tied up with five flowers.

He said a word wordlessly, which He Lou read through his muzzle.

[Five more minutes].

The chilly aura gradually transferred to Lu Yan, and the teenager was unwilling to give up faster and faster. His eyes flushed red.

Hold on a little longer ......

The teenager again increased his speed, and the blood threads wrapped around the man's body became denser and denser.

[Two minutes to go]

"Ahhhhhhh - why?!" The more anxious he was, the more likely he was to make a mistake. The teenager had inadvertently hooked a blood thread in the wrong place, and it was clearly just a silk thread. Yet the breakage of that thread seemed like a harbinger of the collapse of his decades of effort that had been reduced to nothing.

In a fit of rage, he ripped the thread out.

How could he accept it? He had waited for decades for this day to come, so how could he accept it?

A fragile thread of blood drawn from his body was broken off, but Lu Yan could not help but let out a stifled grunt. Followed by the capillaries all over his body seeming to rupture at the exact moment, turning his entire body into a bloody man.

[One minute to go]

Despite this, he continued calmly counting the seconds in his mind to calculate.

"Death to all of you...... she can't come back, death to all of you!!!" The teenager had fallen into a frenzy, not even looking at Lu Yan, who had dropped to the ground holding his breath and pretending to be dead. He raised his sword and went after He Lou.

Twenty seconds...

He Lou was thrown to the ground.

Ten seconds -

A sword pierced his waist, and He Lou felt a lightness in his body, and when he looked down, his body was severed and split open.

Blood flowed into a river.

In the next second, He Lou disappeared.

Time was up.

The whole world seemed to change. The city that was dead suddenly had more sound. All the wounds on Lu Yan's body quickly healed as if he had never been hurt. Even the flat room, smashed and pitted beneath their feet, was instantly restored to a clean state, with the charms, blood threads, and posters ...... all gone.

It was late at night, and Lu Yan stood frozen in the empty room of the flat, pulled open the door and headed for the lift.

Two memories played in his mind. One told him he was just an ordinary resident who had come to the building at the request of a friend looking for a place to live to help see how the empty room was. The other memory, however, told him that everything was a lie.

The lift doors opened, and the twin sisters stood inside, their mouths curving in identical lines as they smiled quietly at Lu Yan. The lift lights flickered as if inviting him in.

Lu Yan didn't bother and took a step backwards.

The sisters waited for a moment. They jumped out of the lift on their own. Their bodies were linked together by their long hair, their hands clasped together so tightly that they could not be separated. With that position, they jumped, one after the other, into the 405.

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