Chapter 343: Hallucinogen
Translator: Atlas Studios Editor: Atlas Studios
“Scram!” Bai Muchuan finished venting his anger on them. “Where is he?”
“Who?” Quan Shaoteng asked in confusion.
Bai Muchuan replied, “Meng Chi!”
“Meng Chi?” Quan Shaoteng raised the volume of his voice and looked at both Cheng Zheng and Ding Yifan who were beside him, as well as Salimu who was busy hacking the system, with a look as though he had just seen a ghost. “Didn’t Meng Chi return to Nanmu?” He was deeply puzzled. “You’ve seen it for yourself that he had left… Xie Wanwan also left right after?”
“…”
This matter could not be easily explained in just a few sentences.
Bai Muchuan deliberated for a moment. “What about those people in this nunnery? The ones who abducted Xiang Wan…”
Quan Shaoteng uttered a reply, “They’re all here!”
“What about their boss?”
“Boss? Which boss?”
“… The one who ordered the abduction!”
“I don’t know which one is the boss!”
“…”
Almost 10 seconds later, Bai Muchuan looked at the clock on the wall and scolded him in one breath.
“Don’t you bleeping know how to ask them?”
Quan Shaoteng heaved a sigh. “… All of them are dead. Who can I ask?”
All of them are dead?
Xiang Wan was shocked!
Quan Shaoteng added, “When we came up to the mountain, we noticed that everyone else is already dead, except for you two!”
What’s with this ominous development?
Xiang Wan quivered in the darkroom and held onto Bai Muchuan’s arm tightly.
“Impossible!”
Even if Meng Chi wanted to die with them, he would have persevered till the end and watch them die first, right?
It did not make sense!
Bai Muchuan asked, “Did someone escape?”
“None!” Quan Shaoteng answered curtly without any hesitation.
From the moment Bai Muchuan went to the nunnery, he and his team had been guarding every possible way out of the mountain.
An hour after the agreed time, Bai Muchuan did not come down and nothing seemingly out of the ordinary happened on the mountain. He brought men up the mountain according to the plan.
When they went up to the mountain, it was very quiet. They were surprised that the other party did not even stand guard anywhere…
In the end…
All they found was a pile of corpses.
Quan Shaoteng went over the details of what they did and what they saw inside his head carefully.
“n.o.body left!” He said firmly, “There were a total of 15 people. None of them left the mountain!”
“… Achoo!” Xiang Wan suddenly sneezed.
When she heard that, she suddenly felt cold.
The 15 kidnappers had died outside…
However, Meng Chi couldn’t have died. Where could he have gone to?
“Something’s wrong! Bai Muchuan, something’s very wrong!”
Xiang Wan suddenly shouted.
“What’s wrong?” Bai Muchuan embraced her and asked her in a low voice.
“We’ve been deceived!” Xiang Wan answered.
“…?” Bai Muchuan lowered his head and tried to look at her expression.
However, it was futile.
He could not see anything.
Only Xiang Wan, whose heart was still pounding with unease, could even let out a bit of utterance. There was also a faint sense of fear rising from her heart.
“He played a time difference trick on us!” Xiang Wan cleared her throat; she managed to come up with a hypothesis amidst her chaotic thoughts. “When you climbed up the mountain, you did not see Meng Chi, right?”
Bai Muchuan nodded.
A second later, he answered, “Yup!”
“That’s right!” Xiang Wan spoke in haste, as if in a hurry. “Actually, when he locked me inside this room and was using me to threaten you, he had already left this place… When you came here, there were only 15 scapegoats left here… They brought you into this room as per Meng Chi’s instructions. Consequently, they must have lost their lives… which was Meng Chi’s plan from the very beginning.”
Xiang Wan was not sure how they died; therefore, she worded it vaguely.
A moment later.
“But,” she added, “in order to let us believe he was always on the mountain, he kept talking to us… There’s one point when I couldn’t quite get it. I remember that he was actually conversing with us… Am I right?”
“Yes!” Bai Muchuan was very certain.
“I don’t know how he did this. In my opinion, at that time, he has already left this nunnery…”
“Well…” Bai Muchuan puffed a breath. “From a technological point of view, this is possible to achieve!”
This could be very simple to achieve, like a simple phone call.
He could be talking at his end, while another person could help connect him to the speaker inside the room.
“Your a.n.a.lysis could be right!” Bai Muchuan pointed at his own head and patted Xiang Wan’s head. “This opponent is, so far… the craftiest I have ever met.”
Opponent? Xiang Wan noticed that he did not mention Meng Chi’s name and was a little baffled.
“Could it be that… he was not Meng Chi?”
Bai Muchuan did not answer her immediately.
He held Xiang Wan’s arm and sat down slowly.
“… Maybe… he’s not,” he spoke in a deep tone.
He was such a crafty person, how could he expose himself so easily?
Moreover, he actually directly admitted his ident.i.ty in front of Xiang Wan?
If he was not afraid of revealing his ident.i.ty, then there was no need to kill the 15 people, right?
It was evident that the 15 people were killed in order to hide something. After all, dead men tell no tales!
When Xiang Wan thought of the meeting and communication with that person, she felt her back breaking out in cold sweat while her legs wobbled, unable to contain the sudden gush of weakness all over her.
She sat beside Bai Muchuan as though the energy in her body had all washed away.
“But… he really feels like Meng Chi!”
“You did not even see his face…”
“His voice…”
“The voice could be synthesized.”
The various versions of synthesized human voices were indistinguishable to most people.
Besides, Text-To-Speech technology was now an existing tool… most would have no problem using it.
Xiang Wan’s brain flummoxed. “The eyes… how do you explain the eyes?”
The only unexplainable thing would most probably be the pair of eyes that had given her a feeling of deja vu.
Nonetheless, if she had to insist that it was Meng Chi, a pair of eyes would not justify her conclusion…
Bai Muchuan consoled her by patting her stiff shoulders. “We’ll know by doing an investigation on Meng Chi!”
“Mm!” Xiang Wan gave a faint response.
She was now sitting against the wall. Besides panting and gasping for breath, there was nothing she could do.
The counter on the clock on the wall kept decreasing.
That voice which was supposed to give them a gentle reminder of their time left on earth was not heard again after Salimu had taken control of the speaker system.
However, as time pa.s.sed, Xiang Wan was starting to feel disheartened…
There was a strong feeling of hopelessness taking over her brain. Contrary to her usual personality, negative thoughts and gloom started streaming in quietly from within her brain, creating an illusion as if her soul had left her body…
Although she and Bai Muchuan were sitting there, it was only their bodies.
As for their souls, one of them was bidding goodbye to her body…
“I feel… strange…” She murmured, “I feel depressed. Is this a kind of Hallucinogen?”
“Mm…” Bai Muchuan’s current condition was really no better than her.
“It’s a terrible drug!” he added, his breathing was heavier than earlier.
However, he did not touch Xiang Wan. Instead, he clenched his fists and hit the wall.
Bam!
No one reacted inside the dark room.
The ones who were outside the darkroom, however, were taken aback.
That blow had left behind a b.l.o.o.d.y mark on the wall.
On the wall as well as the ground that Xiang Wan was unable to see, there were already numerous b.l.o.o.d.y marks similar to this inside the room.
… All of them were created by Bai Muchuan.
In order not to hurt her, this was what he had to come up with, an interim emergency solution…