The Trial Game of Life

Just as Zheng Yingying was thinking about killing the Boss, Tang Cuo’s coffin opening had come to an end.

After the coffins of Pao Qi’s father and the murderer had been split apart, no physical Bosses appeared. They were all soul light balls, and Tang Cuo fought them one by one. Pao Qi’s father was easy to deal with, but the murderer was a murderer after all, which took him a lot of effort.

Immediately after absorbing their souls, Tang Cuo had to spend some time to calm himself, but the harvest was very rich. The murderer’s soul light ball increased his Intelligence by ten points. Up till now, his Intelligence points had risen from 65 to 104.

By the time he cleared this dungeon, his Intelligence points probably would’ve exceeded his Strength. After breaking past the 100-point mark, Tang Cuo could clearly feel that he had more control over his magic.

And opening these two coffins also helped him directly lock down the identity of the deceased.

This wasn’t only because of the elimination method, but also because of the fact that when absorbing the soul light balls, Tang Cuo could see fragments of their memory and thus learn the real situation at the scene.

That day, the rain at Xishan Road was heavier than that of the day Yi Ping came to her dad for moneyThe full expression, ‘今天的雨跟依萍找她爸要钱那天一样大’, came to popularity in 2017-18, which refers to a classic raining scene in the Chinese drama ‘Romance In The Rain’..

The bright yellow taxi rushed onto the NMV lane, smashed into the trash can on the side of the road and made a sharp U-turn. When the situation was that conspicuous, no matter how heavy the rain was, it couldn’t be covered up, not to mention the police happened to be nearby.

Very soon, the police sirens rang, and the murder forced Pao Qi’s father to step on the accelerator. At the moment he was about to die, which, ironically, brought a vibrant touch to his mundane life, Teenager Deeply In Love suddenly glanced at the murderer’s feet that were clad in a pair of rain boots.

The purchasing agent said that there was only one pair of these shoes in the whole of China! And he gave that pair to Mo Mo!

Teenager Deeply In Love’s eyes widened as his gaze moved to the fruit knife that the murderer was pointing at his waist. Being reminded of the meeting between him and Mo Mo on Xishan Road, the boy took a deep, cold breath.

At this point, although the murderer was busy keeping Teenager Deeply In Love at knifepoint, most of his attention was on the police car behind. Seeing the police turn on the engine, the murderer muttered a curse and took out his cell phone.

Perhaps he wanted to contact someone to arrange a way out, but as soon as he pulled out the phone, he saw a notification on the screen. As his jaws dropped, the facial recognition unlocked the phone. All of a sudden, his expression became very strange — he was both shocked and petrified.

In the next second, he quickly clicked on the notification, ignoring the police chasing closely behind. His knife pointing at Teenager Deeply In Love was slightly loosened.

That was a piece of news about the killing on Xishan Road, the earliest case of stabbing that took place at the intersection. The murderer was staring intently at the news even though it actually had nothing to do with him. After overcoming his initial shock, Teenager Deeply In Love also leaned over to peek at the phone screen.

The second he laid eyes on the photos of the scene in the news, he spotted the deceased’s description as well as the murderer’s.

It was always uncertain whether the information on the Internet was true or false. The unverified news spread in such a short period of time assumed that the murderer, who happened to appear at the scene, was responsible for the stabbing incident.

In the eyes of Teenager Deeply In Love, it was the murderer who killed that innocent girl, and that girl was — Mo Mo!

The victim was 173-centimeter tall, with long black hair and clad in a white dress, a pair of high heels and a shoulder bag with a teddy-bear pattern, looking exactly the same as the photo Mo Mo sent to him earlier! [T/N: In case you’re confused, Mo Mo is a boy, not a girl (the author seems to hint that he’s a crossdresser).]

In an instant, as though a lightning bolt had struck his mind, his sanity burst. Beside the shock and tears, there was rage in his wide-open eyes.

“You killed Mo Mo, you killed him!!!” His fuse was blown, and his anger made him forget both his fear and the knife at his waist. He pushed the murderer away, grabbed his shoulder and back collar aimlessly and slammed the murderer into the car door.

Being occupied with the news, the murderer didn’t expect that this ordinary passenger in a taxi, a boy who looked as weak as a chicken and was being held at knifepoint, would suddenly explode.

“Bam!” The strong force aided by the boy’s anger had the murderer’s head severely hurt. Perhaps it was also a twisted coincidence, for although the car door wasn’t knocked open, the window glass shattered into pieces.

The broken shards pricked into the murderer’s head. In a blink, the heavy rain poured in through the broken window, became wrapped in blood and glass shards and struck Teenager Deeply In Love’s face.

The boy was stunned.

Even when the glass shards flew across his face and drew bloody scratches on his cheek, he didn’t react. He stared blankly at everything in front of him, seemingly refusing to believe that he caused this scene himself.

Pao Qi’s father was also stupefied, and the car lost control in an instant. If it slid a bit further, it would hit the bridge pier.

But at this moment, the murderer reacted. Paying no mind to the blood dripping all over his face, he grabbed Teenager Deeply In Love’s collar, opened the car door and dragged the person outside. The second he jumped out, the front of the car hit the bridge’s guardrail. After a thunderous clang, the car failed to stop its momentum and plunged into the river.

“Clash —” The taxi sank into the water.

In the memory of Pao Qi’s father, the momentary weightlessness and fear almost squeezed his throat, making him unable to breathe. But the rear door was open, and the heavy rain was mercilessly smacking the back of his head. The cold touch made him come back to his senses.

The only gift his daughter gave him when she was young was a safety charm, which he still hung in his car till today. He glanced at the charm from the corner of his eye, thought of his daughter and suddenly felt courage surge in his heart. He unfastened the seat belt, pushed down the back of the chair and crawled backward without any fear.

The front of the car was already submerged in the water and he couldn’t open the front door. In a hurry, he saw the back door open and climbed to the back. At this point, the river water was pouring in behind him. He grabbed the broken car window, ignored the glass shards poking into his palm, pulled and kicked with all his might, and finally, he broke free from the car.

On the other side, the murderer grasped Teenager Deeply In Love and rolled on the road, completely ignoring the taxi that had fallen off the bridge. He grabbed the boy and asked: “What is your relationship with Mo Mo? Tell me! Why are you on Xishan Road?!”

Teenager Deeply In Love was almost dizzy from being shaken back and forth, and as the heavy rain hit his face, he almost couldn’t open his eyes: “Let go, let go of me! You’re a murderer! You killed Mo Mo!”

“You shut up!” The murderer threw a punch, sending the back of the boy’s neck kissing the ground and hurting it horribly. Amidst the pain and fury, the boy’s sensibility went off again and he started brawling with the murderer.

The murderer had dropped his knife inside the car, so the two unarmed men started beating each other up in the most primitive way.

As Tang Cuo watched the memories while enduring the shock caused by the soul light balls, his brain twitched and his eyebrows couldn’t help but crease.

The two fought until the scene became really unsightly. One punched the other and the other kicked him back, but overall, the murderer had the absolute upper hand. The emotion he conveyed to Tang Cuo was seriously hysterical.

The word ‘Mo Mo’ obviously stimulated him, especially when Teenager Deeply In Love yelled out “You killed Mo Mo!”. His mood fluctuated so tremendously that it set off a gust of wind and rain on Tang Cuo’s spirit ocean.

Teenagers Deeply In Love didn’t know the truth, but the murderer did. He didn’t stab that boy on Xishan Road. He just passed by while pushing the live streamer’s corpse and stood from a distance to take a look.

The crowd was too tight and the rain was too heavy. He didn’t see the boy’s face at all. He just gazed at the scene indifferently and looked down at the ignorant crowd around him with a high-and-mighty posture as usual.

But what did this boy just say?

Mo Mo was dead?

“Shut up! Shut up!” He used all his force to hit harder and harder, wanting the boy to close his mouth.

Teenager Deeply In Love was almost killed by him, but the police arrived in time to pull the two away and subdue the murderer. The onlookers hid away in their cars or in the surrounding shops, carefully watching the scene. Many people held up their cell phones to take pictures and videos, but no one had the guts to come out.

“Mo Mo is my younger brother! How could I kill him?! He can’t die, you’re lying!” The murderer was pressed to the ground by the police, his teeth grinding against each other and his eyes still staring intently at Teenager Deeply In Love.

Teenager Deeply In Love was lying on the ground with blood dripping from the corner of his mouth, and the others didn’t dare to touch him at all. Hearing the murderer’s voice, he looked over, gaped at those fierce but desperate eyes like that of a beast, and said with all his remaining strength: “You, you’re lying… Mo Mo is such… a good person… Why does he have a… brother… like you…”

After speaking, he coughed in pain. A policeman came to help him block the rain and anxiously called for an ambulance, completely cutting him off from the murderer’s line of sight.

As the murderer was handcuffed, he heard those words and his eyes widened. He remained quiet for a few seconds. Just when the police thought the murderer was finally caught, he suddenly yelled in despair and struggled to charge towards Xishan Road. In a blink, the force that burst out was so fierce that the murderer broke free from the restraints and ran out.

He just escaped from Xishan Road, yet now he wanted to go back again.

The two policemen hurriedly chased after him, and quickly, they forcefully slammed him to the ground. They tightly thrust him down, not allowing him to take even a single step forward. The murderer shouted and grappled, his eyes fixed in the direction of Xishan Road intersection: “Let me go there! Let me see him!”

“Let me go!”

“Let me go there!”

“Mo Mo!”

The more he struggled, the harder he was pressed on. The heavy rain drenched everyone’s clothes, and the blood and water mixed into the rain, flowing off the bridge like a curtain of beads, ready to wander aimlessly in the river.

“Mo Mo…”

“Please let me go over there, let me see him for the last time…” 

His scream turned into pleading.

It had been only a short distance of one or two kilometers since he broke into the taxi and escaped here. But he couldn’t move even for a hundred meters now, let alone one kilometer.

At this point, the murderer was arrested, but the deceased was neither Pao Qi’s father nor the seriously injured Teenager Deeply In Love. It was that innocent passerby who was mistaken as the stabber’s girlfriend, the earliest case at Xishan Road.

After stabbing someone to death, perhaps because of the panic and realisation that he had killed the wrong person, the guy dropped the knife, turned around and ran away. It just so happened that he had exactly the same escape route as the murderer. The only difference was that — he ran on his legs instead of taking a taxi, and he didn’t move fast.

The more he ran, the mushier his legs became, especially after he heard the police siren. He couldn’t run anymore and got caught in another panic, and eventually, he sat down on the bridge. There was a frustrated young man by the bridge who was drunk, and seeing him in such anguish, the drunkard grasped his shoulder and acted as though they had known each other for a long time.

The drunkard said that life was too difficult and he was completely lost, so he wanted to jump into the river.

“Look, even the sky is crying for me.” This was what Tang Cuo saw in the cell phone of another onlooker at Xishan Road. Inside everyone’s stories, the frequency at which the word ‘cry’ appeared was second only to the particles and the pronouns ‘you’, ‘I’ and ‘he/she’.

As the guy gulped down the drunkard’s liquor, his throat started burning and he finally felt a little warmth. As his senses came back to him, he thought deeply and became afraid once more, then he stood up to continue to run away.

At this moment, an out-of-control taxi rushed along the stone bridge and rammed into both him and the bridge guardrail, sending him flying towards the river. It happened so fast that he couldn’t even scream.