Chapter 371: Lin Sanjiu the Tyrant
Translator: Pluto Editor: Vermillion
Thickets of branches and leaves receded quickly from Lin Sanjiu’s peripheral view as she sprinted forward. The plastic gra.s.s plain squeaked with the friction from her every step. The forest floor was rugged and fraught with obstacles. Each time Lin Sanjiu jumped over a rotten log or a large rock, she would instinctively look up to the sky.
The leaves of the thick canopy of the forest broke the sky into a million small pieces. The yellow dot above her appeared and disappeared through the small fragmented openings in the canopy. Lin Sanjiu almost couldn’t be sure of its exact position.
She took a deep breath, looked up, and cast a sweeping gaze across the sky. At the same time, she ran continuously without stopping for even a moment. She had been chasing after the yellow bird for almost ten minutes now.
Throughout this chase, Lin Sanjiu had climbed over mountain ridges and jumped across streams. To keep up with the yellow bird’s flying pace, she did not even have the time to observe her surroundings. She didn’t dare to even attempt to change direction or lose focus. To catch up with the bird, Lin Sanjiu even extended her skeletal wings and rammed through the walls of the houses belonging to several cartoon characters. This was the only way she could somewhat keep up with the yellow dot. However, before she could let out a sigh of relief, she found herself stepping into this particular forest.
Lin Sanjiu noticed a sudden dip in the ground ahead as the forest suddenly headed for a depression. Noticing the terrain change, Lin Sanjiu paused for half a second. She took a quick glance at the terrain in front of her. Without even stopping to take a breath, she leaped down the slope and landed on a thick patch of fallen leaves.
Before she could stand straight and look up at the sky again, a loud roar rang out within the depression, “Monster!” A huge shadow lunged at Lin Sanjiu the very next second.
As Lin Sanjiu channeled all her effort into chasing that yellow bird, she had deactivated her hypersensory state long ago. Consequently, that attack came as a shock to Lin Sanjiu. Startled, she opened her skeletal wings and raised them upward. Her wings managed to block her attacker’s saber simultaneously.
“You monster,” the person snarled. He tried to pull his saber free but failed. This made him even angrier. He tugged the reins of his horse and it immediately reared, neighing. “How dare you show yourself in my kingdom!”
Lin Sanjiu had to admit that the man’s horsemans.h.i.+p was incredible. Even though the man’s saber was trapped within Lin Sanjiu’s intricate cage-like wings, he managed to pull it out with the momentum of his horse’s movement. After a few skull-numbing sounds of metal sc.r.a.ping against metal, the man’s saber was freed from the gap between Lin Sanjiu’s wings.
The young man with blond hair was wearing a set of exquisite leather armor and a thick fur coat. After he judged the situation, his face turned a crimson red. He dropped his slender saber decisively and pulled a heavy single-handed sword from his back.
“I am not a monster,” Lin Sanjiu replied. The man in front of her was unmistakably a cartoon character. It was easy to infer that he was a prince considering what he said. Logically, Lin Sanjiu was reluctant to fight such a meaningless battle. She quickly looked up at the sky and barked back at him, “Can’t you see? I am human! I am in a hurry!”
The man, who seemed to be a prince, was not convinced. He pulled the reins of his horse and charged toward Lin Sanjiu with his one-handed sword. When Lin Sanjiu noticed that her yellow target had gotten a lot further from her, she felt an unquenchable rage. She extended her skeletal wings fully and swung them downward in a vicious arc.
“This character doesn’t seem that powerful, a single attack should be sufficient to make him back off.” With this thought in her mind, Lin Sanjiu couldn’t resist looking at the distant sky once more before pulling back her wings. However, before she could spot the yellow dot, a few red shadows suddenly appeared before her eyes. A split second later, her face was covered by several warm droplets of an unknown liquid.
Lin Sanjiu turned her head, nonplussed. At that exact moment, Lin Sanjiu spotted the prince struggling as he fell off his horse. His chest had been punctured. Thud. His body fell into a heap of fallen leaves. Leaves rained down from the nearby trees following the impact from his fall.
“He’s dead? Just like that? Isn’t that a little too easy?”
Lin Sanjiu stared in a daze at the body on the ground for a few seconds. After she came to terms with the fact that he wasn’t breathing, she immediately remembered something. Abruptly jolted from this intermission, she ran a few steps and searched through the sky anxiously.
That yellow dot had long disappeared without a trace.
“d.a.m.n it!” she cursed. Lin Sanjiu kicked the tree beside her as if to release all her pent-up anger. The tree bark made multiple cracking sounds and a crack slowly formed on the tree, starting from the exact spot her kick landed. If she had used her full strength, she would have snapped the tree.
Lin Sanjiu withdrew her leg, feeling kind of pathetic. She quickly strode to the corpse.
The prince’s horse had run away the second his owner fell to the ground. The blond young man lay on the ground motionlessly. Blood slowly dyed his white fur coat which was lined with golden thread. According to the man’s outfit, he probably wasn’t a posthuman. This attraction was different from “Time Travel”. In that attraction, the plot characters’ outfit hid the players’ original outfit. However, in this arena, there wasn’t any sort of roleplay.
After observing the corpse, Lin Sanjiu stood up straight once again and made a deep inward sigh. She had followed the yellow bird without paying attention to her surroundings so she did not really know where she was right now. As she lost the bird, she didn’t even know what to do next. And this was indeed troubling…
“Oh dear, you killed the prince!”
Someone called out from the top of the slope. That person’s loud voice pierced through the air behind her. Lin Sanjiu cursed silently once more before turning her head with a sullen expression.
A person with a disproportionately large head was lying down as he peered over the slope. He covered his mouth with one hand as tears spilled from his eyes. Under the man’s scraggy and curly hair, his round bulbous nose was extremely eye-catching, “You… you really killed the prince. My G.o.d!”
Before his voice even faded into the background, he bounced up, revealing his pair of stubby legs.
“Wait, is this…” Just as a thought flashed in Lin Sanjiu’s mind, six other similar faces appeared above the slope.
“What should we do?” one of them cried out with a high-pitched voice. “She killed the prince.”
“Without the prince,” another dwarf continued, almost as if they were singing a musical, “who would play his role? Who will save our princess?”
“Poor princess,” the third dwarf immediately shouted. “Does this mean we’ll just have to bury her?”
“No. No, we can’t,” the remaining dwarfs cried out in unison, “Whoever killed the prince will have to take responsibility for her!”
Lin Sanjiu stared at the dwarfs, stupefied. After a long time, she could only utter a single “Huh?”
“Take responsibility? How?”
“Come up here!” The first dwarf pointed at Lin Sanjiu belligerently. However, when Lin Sanjiu jumped up the slope, he retreated a large distance away from Lin Sanjiu, along with his companions, fumbling. Noticing that the winged woman did not attack them, he stuck out his head and called out to Lin Sanjiu, “Look! Our princess is there!”
Even without the dwarf, Lin Sanjiu already noticed that a crystal coffin had appeared in the forest. Lin Sanjiu found herself on the same path which led her to the depression. Somehow, in such a short time, seven dwarfs and a crystal coffin appeared without even any prior signs.
” Could this be a fixed event that happens because I chose the yellow bird?”
Even if Lin Sanjiu had that question in her mind, she couldn’t find anyone who could answer her question. Lin Sanjiu let out an inward sigh before she looked down at Snow White who was lying in the crystal coffin.
The young lady lying in the coffin looked a little blurry through the reflective, crystalline coffin cover. However, her snow-white skin, raven black hair and crimson red lips were still very distinct. At the very least, this Snow White did match her usual image rather reasonably.
The seven dwarfs surrounded the coffin promptly, lying on its edges. Seven pairs of slightly bulging large eyes stared at Lin Sanjiu.
“What do you want me to do?” Lin Sanjiu wiped her face and sat down on the ground looking exhausted. Now that she was sitting, the dwarfs were almost at eye level her.
“According to our cartoon, we need at least one princess and one prince for the story to proceed,” one of the dwarfs explained, however, Lin Sanjiu could not tell which of them spoke. “Now that both the princess and the prince are dead, you only have two choices: You can either wear Snow White’s dress and we can bury her. The second would require you to rescue the princess on behalf of the prince. Of course, you can also choose to skip this portion altogether and directly buy ‘the yellow bird’s location’ from us. It would cost 70 stamina points.”
Lin Sanjiu stared at them with wide eyes. She looked at the princess and then at herself.
“Other things notwithstanding… Your standards for the role of Snow White is pretty darn low,” Lin Sanjiu scratched her hair profusely and felt conscious of the stench of sweat and dirt on her hair. Grinning, she smacked the coffin and declared, “I will wake her up!”
The dwarfs exchanged looks of distress. It took a few moments before they replied her in unison, “That… is rare.”
“Rare? Most people would choose this choice, right?” Lin Sanjiu thought to herself, feeling a little puzzled. After all, she only needed to wake Snow White on behalf of the prince. After Snow White woke up, this would be none of her business…
Even though Lin Sanjiu had already made her decision. She couldn’t help feeling a little unsure of her decision after she opened the coffin.
The seven dwarfs didn’t make a single sound. They stared at Lin Sanjiu motionlessly with their black eyes.
The sunlight shone directly into the crystal coffin. It gave Snow White’s fair skin and black hair a resplendent glow. Lin Sanjiu froze for a moment as she recalled the plot of this fairytale. Following which, she placed both her hands around Snow White’s skinny neck. She tightened her grip slowly.
“What are you doing?” one of the dwarfs asked her with a horrified look.
“A slice of poisoned apple is stuck in her throat, right?” Lin Sanjiu was baffled. “If we can save her like that, why would we wait for the prince?” another dwarfed questioned with widened eyes.
After this short conversation, Lin Sanjiu also discovered something strange. No matter which part of Snow White’s throat she pressed, it didn’t seem like anything was stuck. If she couldn’t find the poisoned apple, how was she going to save this princess?
“How can I save her?”
“How should we know?” the seven dwarfs answered her all at the same time.
With her hands still around Snow White’s throat, Lin Sanjiu remained dazed for quite some time. She had already been traveling through apocalyptic worlds for four years. On top of that, as an adult, she rarely thought about Snow White’s story even when she was in her own world. After she strained her brain for a long time, she finally regained a rough memory. She pulled her hands back.
Lin Sanjiu had already forgotten the exact situation in the story… However, she remembered that the prince was certainly stunned by Snow White’s beauty…
After hesitating for a few minutes, Lin Sanjiu slowly bent forward. She softly touched the petal-like crimson red lips with her own lips.
After waiting for a second, nothing happened.
Just as she a.s.sumed that her memory was wrong, she heard a sudden cough. That immediately proved that Lin Sanjiu had gotten it right. Snow White suddenly curled her body like a shrimp. With an expression of intense pain, she opened her mouth. After taking a shallow breath, she turned her head to one side and spat out a piece of apple.
The piece of apple which Lin Sanjiu couldn’t find, no matter how she pressed, was surprisingly large. It was half the size of Lin Sanjiu’s fist so Lin Sanjiu couldn’t imagine how Snow White could even swallow that in the first place.
Seeing the dwarfs quickly surrounding Snow White, Lin Sanjiu stood up and let out an inward sigh of relief.
With that, this was none of her business anymore, right?
“Hey, dear customer,” the dwarf standing furthest from the coffin called out to her when he saw her standing up. “Do you want this piece of apple?”
“What?” Lin Sanjiu eyed the dwarf. As she stared at him with slight disbelief, the dwarf rubbed the poisoned apple against the corner of his s.h.i.+rt and raised it up, “It is 15 stamina point. Do you want to buy it?”
Before Lin Sanjiu could say “no way”, she quickly swallowed her words.
“What can I do with that?” Lin Sanjiu found a large leaf which she could use, before she gingerly took the piece of apple from the dwarf, wrapping the apple with the leaf.
“I don’t know,” the dwarf replied audaciously. “You can keep it as a souvenir. Coming here isn’t easy, you can bring it home and stare at it.”
This “buying option” was different from all the other situations.
If it was 15 stamina points, Lin Sanjiu did have enough stamina points… Lin Sanjiu scrutinized the piece of apple with a little saliva and her interest slowly grew.
“Alright, I’ll take it.” After she said that, the piece of apple immediately turned into a card and disappeared into her palm. “Oh, so you guys also accept stamina point via that wrist wave.”
Right after Lin Sanjiu commented, the shortage of dwarfs suddenly retreated backward as if they were startled. They moved so suddenly that they even knocked down the dwarf who collected the stamina point from Lin Sanjiu. Lin Sanjiu looked up and found herself staring straight at Snow White. Snow White was standing in the coffin.
“Are you the person who killed my prince?” The princess’ lips curled upward. She narrowed her crystal blue eyes. “As my lips had touched the poisoned apple, they are also poisoned. The only person in this world who is immune to that poison is the prince. I guess this is karma.”