Chapter 55

The talismans on the brass knuckles burned slowly, rising into faint flames that curled around his fists.

Under the flame's influence, every punch Li Cheng landed on the flat shadow sent up plumes of black smoke; as he struck, he muttered incantations.

"Si Dong Quan, thoughts surging like a spring!"

His fist struck the shadow's chest, slamming it into the faux-wood floor, sending shards of concrete flying.

The flat shadow struggled desperately, sliding along the ground like an eel, darting toward the TV cabinet.

"Nian Dong Jian, never forgotten!"

Li Cheng thrust both arms forward, piercing straight through the TV and into the shadow's chest. The shadow's body shattered, tore free the brass knuckles embedded in its chest, and shot toward the shoe cabinet.

Li Cheng quickly retracted the paper.

"That..."

Duizhan Qibing exclaimed: "The deceased Sakai Hara and Fujita Noriko, who vanished twenty-five years ago, were elementary school classmates? And Ishikawa Kenichi—records show he wasn't even from the neighboring city?"

Jingzhe Xiazhi pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and asked: "What's the weather forecast for tomorrow? Can you pinpoint every rainfall cycle precisely?"

Li Cheng pointed to one line: "Pay attention here. Fujita Noriko, Class One, Grade Three. Her classmates included Sakai Hara and Ishikawa Kenichi."

"Finally, these players—all died. We only deduced the ending from diaries found on their irradiated corpses, transported back to real Earth."

"What exactly are you?" Li Cheng narrowed his eyes, studying the shadow. The figure remained expressionless, staring straight at him as the talisman flames reduced it to ash.

"This is the list of elementary school students from Shuijing City twenty-five years ago?"

"Every time it rains, we're attacked by the cursed resentment. The plum rain season... that's what it means."

"Hao Dong Zhang, generation after generation!"

The script's timeline is the early 2000s; One Piece has been serialized for some time. Li Cheng casually peeled off the nearly burnt-out talisman knuckles from his hands and stowed them in his backpack slot.

Location: inside an unfinished, bare-bones house.

After several chases, the entire room looked as if it had been demolished—ruined beyond recognition. The flat shadow was finally caught by the neck by Li Cheng.

According to the Special Affairs Bureau's published laws, a player who becomes aware of a supernatural ability that could pose major harm to the state or society but fails to report it is also committing a crime.

"Sorry, I grabbed the wrong one."

Distant sirens wailed; blue and red police lights flashed through the streets, appearing especially frantic.

Duizhan Qibing sighed in relief, put down his phone, and asked: "Why so late?"

Duizhan Qibing shrugged: "The killing ground allows players multiple ways to complete the mission, but this task has restricted our range—we're not allowed to leave Shuijing City. Better not entertain any shady tricks."

"???"

After delivering the Suzuki couple to the rendezvous point, Li Cheng fabricated an excuse—"I met a critically ill friend online and wanted to see her hometown's Sakura for her"—then left the group to wander the city, promising to return before the rain came.

On the night his brother, a real estate agent, returned from visiting the house in San Dingmu, he mentioned something about Fujita Noriko's childhood memories.

"So, the information we currently have is this."

Because Li Cheng didn't lower his voice, Sakai Yumemi, on the other side of the room, overheard the conversation and cautiously raised her hand to ask.

The killing ground is cruel—when it's a survival mission requiring constant tension, fine, but it gives you two awkward, half-safe windows instead.

These four ordinary people have now truly witnessed the supernatural, having narrowly escaped death.

Yet Shuijing City lies in hilly terrain with abundant moisture transport; excess condensation nuclei instead turn competition into a force promoting rainfall.

Do ghosts really cool rooms down? Then, if you kept a ghost at home, you wouldn't need air conditioning in summer—or even electricity for your fridge?

If a vengeful ghost's cooling ability stacks, couldn't you bind a group together to produce low-temperature superconducting materials? Let these ghosts contribute to human civilization in energy, power, medicine, and transportation—labor for a few years, accumulate enough merit to reincarnate as humans—immense virtue...

"Excuse me,"

She and her brother had a large age gap and lived with her brother and sister-in-law in the house left by their parents.

Duizhan Qibing was utterly baffled.

Di wu di wu—

"My shoes—" Sakai Yumemi stared at her years of hard-earned, barely-worn designer shoes, all destroyed; grief welled up, momentarily overpowering her fear.

————

"Me? Just a passerby, Fire Fist Ace."

Duizhan Qibing sighed; his clothes were torn in several places—he must've run into serious trouble at the police station.

He wanted to draw the attention of the national government, prompting high-level forces to help him hunt down that vampire.

Later, when the reservoir expanded, his home was demolished, and he himself left the city after third grade—right around the time of the Fujita family massacre.

There was a precedent: a group of players, during the Cold War of the 1960s, undertook a team script mission requiring them to hunt a hidden ancient vampire in the city.

He glanced out the window; the plum rain stopped as suddenly as it began. Li Cheng strode out of the room: "You two are now cursed. If you don't want to die, follow me."

This item was a disposable, cheap purchase from the black market—costing 20 game coins—its effect: allowing contact with incorporeal spirits, duration inversely proportional to the strength of the evil entity encountered.

207.246.103.16

"Correct. These aren't online—I broke through the firewall and found them directly in the elementary school's archives."

As for Ishikawa Kenichi, the drone found no trace of him, nor any thermal signature inside the house in San Dingmu.

Considering Ishikawa Kenichi claimed he bore undeniable responsibility for the death curse, this all becomes deeply suspicious."

"This suggestion is good, but the feasibility is insufficient."

Duizhan Qibing said: "The first rain is from 11 PM to 6 AM tomorrow; the second is from 8 AM to 5 PM. In other words, if we don't want to move in the rain, we only have two windows."

Jingzhe Xiazhi said: "Artificial rain suppression boils down to three methods. One: trigger premature rainfall before the clouds reach us. But the clouds are already over Shuijing City—impossible."

The mission wasn't too difficult to begin with, but a self-assured new player, seeing several teammates die,

voluntarily contacted a TV station, publicly demonstrating his so-called "supernatural ability" of item storage and retrieval on air, even accurately predicting future lottery numbers, football match results, and global scientific breakthroughs.

From the player's perspective, the Special Affairs Bureau is far more benevolent and lenient than certain national agencies. At the very least, it doesn't quietly kidnap and assassinate players to transfer their talents to internal members.

That is: from now until 11 PM, and tomorrow from 6 AM to 8 AM.

Little Red Riding Hood blinked, bewildered: "More serious... consequences?"

Second, over-saturate the cloud with nucleation agents—silver iodide and diatomaceous earth—to convert as much water vapor as possible into tiny droplets, rather than allowing droplets to grow, creating a competition mechanism that suppresses rainfall.

Today, a forensic examiner truly died in the police station; the two surviving officers were left half-mad, casting another shadow over this small town.

The three players other than Li Cheng gathered to discuss the mission; on the other side of the room were Suzuki Kazuya, Suzuki Yūko, Sakai Yoshimi, and Sakai Yoshimi's classmate Miyazaki Aki.

Suzuki Kazuya's anxious, trembling voice interrupted Li Cheng's thoughts. He stood before his wife and said carefully, "Who exactly are you?"

Unlike the idiotic side characters in some horror films who shout, "This is all fake, special effects! I'm calling the police," they sat on temporary mats, either staring blankly or sobbing.

Fortunately, after a day of trials, he had grown accustomed to Li Cheng's erratic thinking—he treated the man like an outcast from a circus troupe, assuming every bizarre act was just performance, and paid it little mind as he picked up the new file.

"Based on this world's weather forecast and my own meteorological data analysis program's optimization, I estimate that Shuijing City will experience two rainfalls over the next eighteen hours."

He cleared his throat to mask his embarrassment and pulled out another file.

Li Cheng sat down with a smile, took a file from his backpack slot, and placed it on the ground.

As both a host of the insect master's infection and a player, Li Cheng had failed to report to the Special Affairs Bureau; in a sense, this already constituted a criminal act, and this confession was something he had written ahead of time during spare moments.

Li Cheng kicked off the ground and chased relentlessly, turning his fist into a palm and smashing the wooden shoe cabinet with one blow.

"Huh?" Little Red Riding Hood opened her mouth, unsure what to say. "And then?"

There were several other versions, all stored under a folder titled "Wang Wang Squad Does Great Deeds, Sheng Sheng Squad Sits in Jail."

As for the third method, it was dynamic subsidence: triggering massive artificial rainfall upstream of the precipitation cloud system to dissipate the weather system's energy. To achieve this effect within a short time, only the U. S. military stationed in Japan could be mobilized.

Time: night.

Footsteps climbed the stairs to the upper floor; Li Cheng's figure appeared at the stairwell, his player ID glowing above his head to show he was not a ghost in disguise.

But that would lead to even worse consequences."

"What's this?" Duizhan Qibing glanced at the paper. "Respected Judge, Trial Members, Prosecutors, thank you for taking time from your busy schedules to read my confession. I, Master Pi Fu, write this confession from my detention cell with profound remorse, reflecting deeply on my criminal acts…"

Yet this leniency had its limits.

Ash drifted away with the wind, vanishing into nothingness. The cold, oppressive atmosphere that had hung over the room since earlier also dissipated.

Seeing her two companions turn to look at her, Little Red Riding Hood grew inexplicably nervous and quickly waved her hands. "I don't really understand it—I was just guessing."

"I looked into this city a bit."

Li Cheng tapped the file with his finger. "According to the registered home addresses on the student roster and old maps of Shuijing City, Ishikawa Kenichi's hometown is on the hill behind San Dingmu. There's a reservoir and an old city police station there."

The result was that the plot went haywire; both the Soviet Union and the United States poured their entire national resources into hunting these people, even resorting to nuclear weapons.

Tap-tap-tap.

"Um… are you talking about my brother?"

Little Red Riding Hood timidly raised her hand and whispered, "Could we reduce rainfall artificially to shorten the rainy period?"

"..." Li Cheng frowned slightly, staring thoughtfully at the spot where the flat shadow had vanished.

"According to my brother, when she was young, Fujita Kiko was thin and short, always wore long sleeves, and was gloomy. No one except Ishikawa wanted to be her friend. But once, during a sports day, she lost control of her bowels and bladder in front of everyone. The crowd mocked her, and Ishikawa said, 'Someone like her isn't my friend.' The next day, the massacre happened."

The four players exchanged glances and came to a mutual understanding. They had to find Ishikawa Kenichi.

(End of Chapter)