Chapter 72: The Curse of Resentment (7)

The inscriptions on the brass knuckles slowly burned, rising into faint flames that curled around the fist.

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!”

The 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 to be forgotten!”

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

Li Cheng quickly retracted the paper.

“That...”

Stack Qibing exclaimed: “The deceased Sakurai Hara and Fujita Noriko, who vanished twenty-five years ago, were elementary school classmates? And Ishikawa Kenichi—the records say he wasn’t even from the neighboring city?”

Jingzhe Xia Zhi 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 1, Grade 3. Also in her class were Sakurai Hara and Ishikawa Kenichi.”

“Finally, these Jiming 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’s flames reduced it to ash.

“Is this the student roster from Shuijing City Elementary School twenty-five years ago?”

“Every time it rains, the curse attacks. The plum rain season—so that’s what it means.”

“Hao Dong Zhang—throughout lifetimes!”

The script’s timeline was the early 2000s; One Piece had been serialized for some time. Li Cheng casually peeled off the nearly burned-out talisman knuckles from his hand and stowed them in his backpack slot.

Location: inside an unfinished, raw concrete house.

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

According to the Special Affairs Bureau’s legal regulations, if a player knowingly possesses a supernatural ability that could pose major harm to the state or society and fails to report it, that too is a criminal act.

“Sorry, I grabbed the wrong one.”

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

Stack Qibing sighed in relief, put down his phone, and asked: “Why so late?”

Stack 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 terminally ill friend online and wanted to see her hometown’s Sakura for her”—and slipped away from 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 Sanchōme, he mentioned something about Fujita Noriko’s childhood memories.

“So, the information we currently have is this.”

Unaware that Li Cheng hadn’t lowered his voice, Sakurai Yoshimi from across the room heard the conversation and timidly raised her hand.

The killing ground is cruel—instead of a nonstop survival task that demands constant tension, it gives you two awkward, half-safe windows.

These four ordinary people had truly witnessed the supernatural today, and narrowly escaped death.

Yet Shuijing City lies in hilly terrain with abundant moisture transport; excess condensation nuclei instead trigger competition mechanisms that promote rainfall.

Do ghosts really cool down rooms? Then if you kept one at home, you wouldn’t need air conditioning in summer—or even electricity for the fridge?

If a ghost’s cooling ability stacks, couldn’t you bind a group together to produce low-temperature superconducting materials? Let them labor for years in energy, power, medical, and transportation sectors for human civilization—then their accumulated merit could grant them rebirth as humans. Boundless virtue...

“Excuse me,”

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

Stack Qibing was utterly baffled.

Beep-beep—

“My shoes—” Sakurai Yūko stared at her years of hard-earned, barely-worn designer shoes, all destroyed. Grief surged within her, momentarily overpowering her fear.

————

“Me? Just a passerby—Fire Fist Ace.”

Stack Qibing sighed; his clothes were torn in several places, clearly from trouble at the police station.

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

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 had been a precedent: a group of players, during the Cold War of the 1960s, undertook a team mission to hunt a hidden ancient vampire in an urban setting.

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

This was a disposable, cheap item bought on the black market—20 game coins. It allowed contact with incorporeal spirits, its duration inversely proportional to the strength of the malevolent 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 archive room.”

As for Ishikawa Kenichi, the drone found no trace of him—not even a heat signature inside the Sanchōme house.

Considering Ishikawa Kenichi claimed he bore irreplaceable responsibility for the Death Curse, this all becomes deeply suspicious.”

“That’s a good suggestion, but the feasibility is low.”

Stack Qibing said: “The first rain runs from 11 PM to 6 AM tomorrow; the second 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 Xia Zhi said: “Artificial rain suppression boils down to three methods. One: induce premature rainfall before the clouds reach us. But the clouds are already over Shuijing City—impossible.”

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

voluntarily contacted a TV station and publicly demonstrated his so-called “supernatural ability” of accessing items from his backpack slot, even accurately predicting future lottery numbers, football match results, and global scientific breakthroughs.

From a player’s perspective, the Special Affairs Bureau is far more merciful 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?”

Two: over-saturate the atmosphere with condensation nuclei—silver iodide, diatomaceous earth—to force water vapor into countless tiny droplets rather than allowing them to grow, triggering competition that suppresses rainfall.

Today, a forensic examiner was genuinely killed at the police station; two surviving officers were left half-mad, casting another shadow over this small town.

The three players besides Li Cheng gathered to discuss the mission; across the room sat Suzuki Kazuya, Suzuki Yūko, Sakurai Yoshimi, and Sakurai Yoshimi’s classmate Miyazaki Ayaka.

Suzuki Kazuya’s anxious, fearful voice interrupted Li Cheng’s thoughts. He stood before his wife, cautiously asking: “Who exactly are you...?”

Unlike the idiotic side characters in horror films who shout, “This is fake! Special effects! I’m calling the police!” they sat on makeshift cushions, either staring blankly or weeping quietly.

Fortunately, after a day of relentless trials, he’d grown accustomed to Li Cheng’s erratic thinking—he treated him like a clown from the Laughing Troupe, assuming every bizarre act was just for show, and paid it no mind, turning instead to the new documents.

“Based on this world’s weather forecast and my own optimized meteorological analysis program, I estimate Shuijing City will have two rainfalls in the next eighteen hours.”

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

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

As both a Wurm Host and a player, Li Cheng had failed to report his condition to the Special Affairs Bureau—technically, this constituted a crime; this confession was what he’d written ahead of time during spare moments.

Li Cheng kicked off the ground and gave chase, turning his fist into a palm, smashing the wooden shoe cabinet to splinters.

“Huh?” Little Red Riding Hood opened her mouth, speechless. “And then?”

Several other versions were stored under a folder titled “Puppy Patrol Saves the Day, Sheng’s Team Lands in Jail.”

As for the third method: dynamic subsidence—trigger massive artificial rainfall upstream of the precipitation system to drain its energy. To achieve this effect in a short time, you’d need to mobilize U.S. forces stationed in Japan.

Time: night.

Footsteps climbed the stairs; Li Cheng appeared at the stairwell, his player ID glowing above his head to prove he wasn’t a ghost in disguise.

But that would lead to more serious consequences.”

“What’s this?” Stack Qibing glanced at the paper: “Respected Judge, Trial Officers, Prosecutors—thank you for taking time from your busy schedules to read my confession. I, a mere gnat, write this confession from my detention cell with profound remorse, reflecting deeply on my crimes...”

Yet this leniency had its limits.

Ash scattered with the wind, vanishing into nothingness. The chilling atmosphere that had hung over the room since earlier also dissipated.

Seeing both companions turn to her, Little Red Riding Hood grew nervous and quickly waved her hands: “I don’t really understand—I was just guessing.”

“I looked into this city a bit.”

Li Cheng tapped the file: “According to the home addresses listed on the student roster and old maps of Shuijing City, Ishikawa Kenichi’s childhood home was on the hill behind Sanchōme—there’s a reservoir and the old city police station.”

The result? The plot spiraled out of control; both the Soviet Union and the United States mobilized their entire national power to capture these players—even resorting to nuclear weapons.

Tap-tap-tap.

“That... are you talking about my brother?”

Little Red Riding Hood timidly raised her hand and whispered: “Could we use artificial rain suppression to shorten the rainfall period?”

“...” Li Cheng frowned, staring at the spot where the flat shadow had vanished, lost in thought.

“According to my brother, Fujita Noriko was frail and short as a child, always wearing long sleeves, and deeply gloomy. No one except Ishikawa wanted to be her friend. But once, during a sports day, she lost control and urinated and defecated in public. The crowd jeered, and Ishikawa said, ‘Someone like her isn’t my friend.’ The next day, the massacre happened.”

The four players exchanged glances. They all knew: they had to find Ishikawa Kenichi.

(End of Chapter)