Chapter 386: Floor

A slightly different familiar teleportation sensation washed over his entire body, and the young man named Fu Ding Hua Long yanked open the zipper at the top of his anti-G suit, blinking as he adjusted to the change in light around him.

This place looked like a floor of a modern office building—black, white, and gray checkered carpet on the ground, round ceiling lights embedded in the ceiling, wooden walls and frameless glass used as partitions to separate out a series of cubicles.

The only two problems were that the floor had no power and was extremely dim, with only a green emergency light in the corner glowing, and the air was unusually turbid.

While Fu Ding Hua Long surveyed his surroundings, he drew a brownish-yellow scroll from the void with his palm.

He summoned two armored door-gods from the scroll, flanking him on the left and right.

Not stopping there, he flipped the scroll and plucked out birds one by one, scattering them outward to scout the surroundings.

In fact, as a senior operative of the Special Affairs Bureau, Fu Ding Hua Long did have small swarm reconnaissance drones issued by the organization, but he still preferred to use his own paintings.

First, the reimbursement process for swarm drones was a hassle; second, as a literary young man, he thought pulling things out of a scroll was very cool, giving him a feeling of being Magic Brush Ma Liang.

The birds scattered apart and, in the blink of an eye, located a life signal on the other side of the floor.

Crimson Racer?

The Crimson Racer, wearing his signature motorcycle helmet, stepped out of a cubicle and waved at Fu Ding Hua Long from afar.

The few Pokémon following him were Primeape's final evolution 【Annihilape】,

Cyndaquil's evolution 【Typhlosion】,

Pidgeotto's evolution 【Pidgeot】,

and Pikachu.

So-called people climb higher; now at lv18, the Crimson Racer was, big or small, a mid-level officer of the Thousand-Throated Beast—his former superior had died just two days ago, reportedly because during a dungeon mission, his greed got the better of him and he snuck into Godzilla's nest to steal eggs, got discovered, and was tragically squashed to death with one butt-sit.

Transmitted back to the real world in the form of corpse. zip.

Having risen to management and shouldering the famous Pokémon Pikachu, the Crimson Racer was in high spirits as he stepped forward to greet Fu Ding Hua Long, "Just the two of us?"

"And me."

A relaxed voice rang out from the other side, and a blonde woman clad in heavy, rugged armor stepped out of a cubicle, accompanied by the scraping sound of metal plates on her armor.

She was around twenty-five years old; in her armor she stood nearly two meters and two centimeters tall, looking down at the Crimson Racer and Fu Ding Hua Long. Her fine features were slashed diagonally by three vicious scars, matching her battered armor.

Of course, the most eye-catching thing was still the weapon on her back—a stone coffin covered in moss and wrapped in large amounts of rusted iron chains.

"Bai Ma Mu Bei?"

The Racer and Fu Ding Hua Long spoke in unison, their eyes half startled and half delighted.

Unlike the two of them, who had major guilds backing them, this lv29 Bai Ma Mu Bei was a household name across the entire player forum.

She came from an ordinary family in Eastern Europe, a police officer by profession. Hating the damage the mafia had done to her homeland, when she had just become a lv5 rookie, she relied on assassinations to take out over a dozen mafia bosses and corrupt bureaucrats in her city.

After becoming famous overnight, she leveled up rapidly, and rejected all recruitment from major guilds (including local Eastern European guilds),

always operating as a lone-wolf mercenary, actively taking commissions, and using the bulk of her earnings to build her homeland, especially looking after the old, weak, sick, and disabled.

Righteous and generous, helping the distressed and relieving the needy—she could be called the Timely Rain of Eastern Europe, Romania's Hu Baoyi, and in a battlefield environment where everyone had eight hundred schemes, she was remarkably reliable.

"It's me."

Bai Ma Mu Bei waved her hand casually, looked around, and asked in confusion, "Since when did the Killzone's security guards have so much free time that they replicated a real-world office building?"

Security guards would use technology similar to 3D printing to mass-produce buildings, but most of the time they only built the outer shell, rarely replicating down to the desks, old desktop computers, and water dispensers inside the office building like this place did.

"My gut says this place probably wasn't built by the security guards. Look, there are even fingerprints on the desk."

Fu Ding Hua Long recalled the birds he had released earlier and walked to the floor-to-ceiling window with a solemn expression, looking outward.

Outside the window, dense black floccules drifted like snow; visibility was very poor. Looking down, he couldn't see the bottom of the building at all, only vaguely hearing what seemed like faint, mournful wailing.

"Analyzing the current situation—communications, poor."

Fu Ding Hua Long took out his walkie-talkie, turned the knob, and the walkie-talkie emitted a noisy static sound.

The communications system had been set up with help from the Whale Song Guild and was already the highest technical level in the Killzone. If it still didn't work, it proved there was something wrong with the surrounding environment.

"Specific location, unknown. But the radar pointing to the secret treasure is still usable."

Fu Ding Hua Long took out his portable radar and tested it; on the green screen, an arrow pointed toward twelve o'clock.

Having a direction was good—using triangulation, they could quickly determine the exact distance to the secret treasure.

The closer they got to the treasure, the more friendly players they would encounter.

"As for how to get out."

Fu Ding Hua Long thought for a moment, then threw a punch at the floor-to-ceiling window.

With his 8-point Strength attribute—comparable to a top athlete in the real world—the floor-to-ceiling window didn't budge in the slightest. It didn't even make a sound.

The two door-gods standing behind Fu Ding Hua Long now stepped in, swinging their bamboo-segment steel whips and four-ridged double maces, smashing heavily into the floor-to-ceiling window.

This strike was enough to split stone and crack monuments, yet unexpectedly, it still failed to break—or even scratch—the window.

Fu Ding Hua Long's expression was a little strained, while the Crimson Racer beside him directed his Pokémon to attack the ceiling, the floor, and the emergency exit door on the same floor.

Same result—no effect at all.

The building material making up the entire floor was some kind of extremely sturdy unknown material. No matter how the players attacked, it wouldn't collapse or be damaged.

'Does it have to be like this? Kind of embarrassing.'

Fu Ding Hua Long and the Crimson Racer exchanged a glance. Although they weren't at Bai Ma Mu Bei's lv29 level, they were at least elites of major guilds,

and if they couldn't even walk out of the spawn point, it would truly be a bit awkward.

"How about I give it a try?"

Tombstone didn't mean to mock them; she casually unslung the coffin from her back and slammed it heavily onto the ground with a clang.

"Wait a moment,"

Fu Ding Hua Long's mind raced as he returned to the office desk and carefully observed the residual fingerprints.

Strictly speaking, there are three types of fingerprints. The first is patent prints, meaning finger patterns visible to the naked eye.

The second is plastic prints, meaning prints transferred after touching objects like ink or paint.

The third is latent prints, composed of bodily secretions such as sweat, oils, cholesterol, proteins, etc. Although invisible, they can be collected through chemical reagent treatment.

The fingerprints on the desk were composed entirely of dust patterns, with no biological traces whatsoever.

"What does that represent?"

Hong Zhihu was rubbing his chin when he heard a low male voice from outside the door: "It represents full coverage with a semi-trailer, it represents flying low to the ground, it represents acquittal."

A powerful sense of déjà vu welled up inside him, and Hong Zhihu's expression instantly turned pained — in his memory, only one person would talk like that in this kind of situation.

But out of the rigorous attitude befitting a Special Affairs Bureau operative, he still asked: "Who are you?"

To prevent the situation of "a rule-level monster standing outside the door, where answering will trigger an instant-death trap," Hong Zhihu specifically kept his guard up. Rather than speaking himself, he used a writing brush to draw a tape recorder with keyboard text-input and text-to-audio functions, then used the recorder to ask the question.

"Who am I?"

The voice outside the door murmured: "In November 2020, a photographer posted a short video on a short-video platform, and I went viral overnight: not only am I handsome, with a shy smile, but what attracted people most was my clear, innocent gaze.

I appeared very bashful during livestreams, and my Mandarin wasn't fluent enough — I kept saying simple phrases like 'thank you,' 'cheese snow leopard,' 'mama sheng de,' and netizens kept shouting 'so cute!'"

So you're the one called Top Needle, huh?

Hong Zhihu and Crimson Racer's expressions couldn't have been more pained. As a paper crane was slipped in under the door crack from outside, Li Cheng activated 【Familiar Swap】 and also arrived at the office floor.

"Good evening."

Li Cheng offered a greeting, looked around, and said: "Judging by the furnishings of this office building, matching the time and location of the real world, it should be some summer after 1992, in the English-speaking region of Canada."

(End of chapter)