Chapter 244: He Won’t Steal Your Heart, He’ll Just Steal Your Body: Don’t Mess With a Cat Demon
Translator: Pluto Editor: Vermillion
“I’ve already told you all you need to know. Seeing that I don’t have a choice, could you please show me mercy?” Zhu Mingchun’s trembling voice seemed to echo in Rena’s mind. She bit her lip and looked at the unconscious man on the ground. She looked a little hesitant.
After Lin Sanjiu caught Zhu Mingchun off guard and knocked him out, she wrote to Rena in a half-persuasive, half-commanding att.i.tude.
“Under this circ.u.mstances, either you’ll die or he’ll die. There is no alternative. If you don’t have the heart to kill him now, in the future, he’ll be a ticking time bomb. We don’t know if he heard my name…”
Seeing Lin Sanjiu spending effort to write the long sentences, Rena finally nodded. She sighed and she bent over. Picking up Zhu Mingchun’s legs, the teenage girl said in an almost sighing manner, “I know what you mean. This is indeed the best method. I am not a soft-hearted person. But, I’m going to kill an unconscious person now. This feeling… just isn’t the same as killing someone in combat…”
Lin Sanjiu could understand that feeling. When she was in Hyperthermal h.e.l.l, she felt the same way when facing Chen Xiaoyuan, who was working with a duoluozhong. From a certain angle, Rena, who was raised in the Twelve Worlds Centrum, was somewhat similar to her past self. However, she didn’t know when she gradually got a little… numbed to all this.
If a person treats her as an enemy or attempts to kill her companions, Lin Sanjiu realized that she could decide whether to kill that person in a few seconds without feeling much.
“Is this good or bad?” Lin Sanjiu “patted” Rena and consoled in words, “I told you to kill him. It’s not your fault.”
Zhu Mingchun must die. This was not only because he posed a great danger to Lin Sanjiu’s team, but also because Rena needed the numbers on his back. Lin Sanjiu couldn’t help thinking back to the moment when Rena broke Zhu Mingchun’s legs. The man screamed painfully as tears rolled down his cheeks, “It’s a pocket dimension. The numbers indicate that a person is in a pocket dimension!”
“What?” Rena was stunned when she heard this. She looked at Lin Sanjiu and demanded, “Give us more details!”
“It’s like this…” Zhu Mingchun, who didn’t think twice when he attacked others, was surprising susceptible to pain. He drew a breath and said, “If you use a pocket dimension sensor to scan this area, you wouldn’t find anything unusual. Because, because this is still part of Kisaragi Station World. It doesn’t work like other pocket dimensions which are independent s.p.a.ces.”
After he tried to negotiate his way out of things, Lin Sanjiu attacked his stomach, so his att.i.tude changed and he cooperated with them.
“How is it still a pocket dimension?” Rena stared at him, puzzled.
“It’s true. At first, I couldn’t believe it as well… but this is a pocket dimension. It just emerges by descending upon a person! It’s true. It can be proven by the numbers…” Zhu Mingchun spoke in a jumble. He switched topics very quickly and Lin Sanjiu had to patiently hear what he said before she could get the general gist of things.
According to him, each person who had entered the pocket dimension would have a number on his or her back. This wasn’t a random phenomenon, but the pocket dimension was extending throughout the various districts.
“The pocket dimension had already covered a radius of a few hundred kilometers around here. Anyone that enters this district would definitely have a number on their back,” Zhu Mingchun said, full of confidence. “So… so… we looked for you guys… This was Derik’s idea.”
Rena ignored the man’s excuses, she was only interested in learning the answer to her questions, “If that’s the case, what do the numbers mean?”
Zhu Mingchun gazed at her for a moment and hesitated before answering carefully, “It indicates how many lives you have. Each time you receive an attack that can kill you, the number on your body will drop by 1… If you have 5 on our back, you can endure 4 lethal attacks. Even if you are badly hurt, you wouldn’t die if your number isn’t 0. And, and—”
The skull and the teenage girl focused their full attention on him.
“And?” That part was more or less similar to Lin Sanjiu’s conjecture, and therefore she was more interested in the next part of what Zhu Mingchun had to say.
“Oh, everytime your number is reduced, the number on the back of your attacker would increase by one,” Zhu Mingchun stammered. However, Lin Sanjiu had a bugging feeling that those words weren’t what he wanted to say initially.
“This explains why you people try so hard to deceive us,” Rena laughed coldly.
“I’m telling you the truth. This is all Derik’s idea!” Zhu Mingchun shouted pleadingly. However, his expression wasn’t as eager as his voice, “If you let me go, I promise I won’t cause any trouble for you guys again. Let’s survive this pocket dimension harmoniously. Isn’t that better?”
His words reminded Rena about something. “Hey, what are the conditions to complete this pocket dimension?”
Zhu Mingchun paused for two seconds and replied, “It will be completed once you stay in the pocket dimension for 180 days. You might think that it is an easy task. However, the pocket dimension is affecting more and more people each day. New people appear with numbers on their back each day in this region. These never-ending stream of people may attack you, so 180 days won’t be easy.”
Lin Sanjiu and Rena exchanged glances. After Rena saw Lin Sanjiu simplified sentence, she turned to ask Zhu Mingchun, “In the beginning, we have 4 on our backs. Is this the same for others?”
It was only then that Zhu Mingchun withdrew his curious gaze from Lin Sanjiu. Evidently, he couldn’t tell what she was, “Yes, yes! Everyone’s the same!”
Before he even finished his sentence properly, Lin Sanjiu struck his carotid artery at the back of his neck without any warning. As she didn’t know the exact point that would make someone faint, she struck him quite a few times, at a lightning fast speed. With the effects of the almanac page, he finally fainted.
“What—” Before Rena could finish shouting, Zhu Mingchun hand felt limp. A small metal case that he had been holding for some unknown time felt to the ground noisily. Her expression changed instantly.
Zhu Mingchun thought that no one had noticed his little actions but Lin Sanjiu had already seen what he was doing from the scanned image created by her higher consciousness.
After both of them discussed the various strange aspects of the pocket dimension they were in, Rena pulled Zhu Mingchun’s legs. She attempted to pull him to Reno’s side. Observing Reno’s wounds, his number was probably very low. The only thing they could do now was to let him kill Zhu Mingchun so that the number “8” on the man’s back could be transferred onto Reno.
However, when the two people looked behind, they were stunned. Reno, who wasn’t far from them, had fainted again. Yet, that was not what shocked them. A bicolor black-white cat, with a silk bow tie, was backing away from them, pulling Reno’s feet. He was in the same position as Rena. Before they knew it, he had already dragged Reno for some distance.
The cat suddenly found himself staring at two other people. n.o.body moved.