Then, all floors fell into relative silence.

Fatty, 007, and the remaining bodies on Keke's floor could obliterate on their own, but they took no action for now, planning to destroy the bodies on their floor just before the countdown ended.

Once Chu Changge had directed Old Liu to move all the bodies to Room 406, he didn't continue to transfer bodies. Instead, he went to execute the newly released task.

They now had to complete tasks as quickly as possible to unlock the locations of all the bodies in the building.

Renle Mountain was also well aware of this. They needed to know what the upper floors required; only then would they have a bargaining chip. With this in mind, he began researching the new task assigned to his floor.

The bodies in the building were no longer being moved. During this period, everyone's priority was completing tasks.

However, they found that as time went on, the frequency of receiving tasks decreased, and the tasks became increasingly challenging.

Oddly, players on the fifth and sixth floors seemed to have no bottleneck, completing tasks with relentless speed.

"What's going on with the fifth and sixth floors?" Renle Mountain had long noticed that the pace of task completion on the fifth and sixth floors was off. "They're receiving tasks at such a high frequency."

The instance was issuing tasks to the players on the fifth and sixth floors at an outrageously fast rate, as if it didn't want the people on these floors to have any rest at all.

At this point, the countdown had only one hour and twenty minutes left, and the locations of 44 bodies had been unlocked in the building.

Of course, the vast majority of tasks were completed by the players on the fifth and sixth floors.

Funnily enough, the minor tasks in this instance were quite childlike. Gu Mian was assigned games like playing house, hide-and-seek, and rolling dice, as if he were being transported back to his childhood.

Because of his ill fortune, he had hardly experienced any group games as a child.

In fact, he had once played hide-and-seek in the orphanage when he was very young. That time, Chu Changge, dressed in a small floral skirt, had been in charge of seeking.

Back then, the moment Chu Changge covered her eyes and started counting, Gu Mian happily darted off with the other children to find a hiding place.

With hide-and-seek, of course, the more secluded the hiding spot, the better.

Unfortunately, Gu Mian ventured down a remote alley and, missing his footing, fell into a well whose cover had been removed.

Another child fell in with him.

Presumably, because he had chosen too remote a place, they remained in the well, their cries for help going unanswered for a long time.

The sun outside gradually slanted westward, and the sky grew darker and darker, until the round moon rose high above them. 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

The child who had fallen in with Gu Mian was already weeping so much he could barely speak, his shoulders still heaving with sobs.

Just as Gu Mian's stomach was grumbling with hunger and he thought, Damn it, I'm going to starve to death here, a shadow suddenly loomed over the well opening.

He looked up and saw Chu Changge's head appear at the rim of the well, perfectly silhouetted against the moon.

Chu Changge's head blocked the screen, forcing Old Liu to move a few steps to the side to see the obstructed area.

Old Liu felt uneasy. Brother Chu has been standing in front of the screen for quite a while, and I have no idea what he's thinking.

Old Liu worriedly counted on his fingers. "We're missing two mutilated bodies and one beheaded body. The beheaded one isn't a problem; we have one downstairs. But the mutilated ones…"

They didn't have any.

Chu Changge stared at Gu Mian's location on the fifth and sixth floors.

So far, twelve bodies had been unlocked on Gu Mian's floors. But among these, none were the beheaded or mutilated corpses Chu Changge needed.

Previously, when the seventh and eighth floors had asked Gu Mian for help with mutilated bodies, Gu Mian must have used two such corpses to form a tri-link with them. However, one of those two mutilated bodies had not been unlocked on the screen.

Excluding that one mutilated body, which was eliminated without being unlocked, only three corpses remained on Gu Mian's floors that had yet to appear on the screen.

Unless these three bodies turned out to be two mutilated ones and one beheaded one—a perfect match for their requirements—they would still need to cooperate with the people on the first and second floors.

Chu Changge hadn't interacted with Renle Mountain before but had heard about him from Fatty. He was fairly certain that this Renle Mountain was on the first or second floor.

However, Chu Changge couldn't be sure if there were other people with Renle Mountain on the first or second floors.

007 and Keke are quick-witted, Chu Changge thought. If they were matched with Renle Mountain on the same floor, they would definitely have prevented him from moving the bodies initially.

Only an idiot would have foolishly allowed Renle Mountain to move the bodies around.

So, the person on the same floor as Renle Mountain is likely his other follower... and Fatty.

Chu Changge walked over to a charred corpse and said to Old Liu, "Move this charred body to Room 403."

Old Liu was taken aback. "Move it to Room 403? Why not to Room 303 to directly form a tri-link with the ones downstairs?"

Moving it to Room 303 would form a tri-link and eliminate it immediately, Old Liu thought, confused. He couldn't understand why Chu Changge didn't want to do that.

"No," Chu Changge said without further explanation.

Old Liu grumbled under his breath. I've never been very bright, he thought. Oftentimes, even when people explain things at length, I still don't get it. Over time, he had become a quiet executor, simply following orders without questioning why.

He approached the charred body, squatted down with his back to Chu Changge, and began dragging it towards Room 403.

He used to do heavy manual labor in a factory, so dragging a corpse wasn't too difficult for him.

Little Saint Qi Tian had worked as a steel carrier in the same factory. After Global Gaming started, Little Saint Qi Tian once asked him, "Old Liu, we both used to do manual labor in the factory, right? It had nothing to do with a hardware store. Why did you pick a name like that?"

"Ha! Back when there was no work at the factory, I'd ride my tricycle—the one missing a side mirror—around, looking for odd jobs. But I'm getting old, and they only wanted young, strong lads for temporary work. I'd be up at five in the morning, searching for anything. Sometimes, I'd look until noon and still find nothing. Out of desperation, I'd pedal from one market to another.

"The midday sun was brutal, practically peeling a layer of skin off me. My shirt would be soaked through with sweat. I'd have drunk all the water in my bottle long ago and be dying of thirst, but I still couldn't bring myself to buy a one-yuan bottle of water from a roadside stall.

"Then one time, I passed by a hardware store and saw the owner. He looked about my age, sitting comfortably on a lounge chair in front of his shop, fanning himself with one hand and holding an ice lolly in the other. He looked so content, just blissful.

"That's when I thought, Wouldn't it be wonderful if I had some spare cash to open a hardware store too? I could enjoy life just like him."

From that day on, opening a hardware store became his most cherished dream.

Afterwards, every time he passed by that hardware store, no matter how tired he was, he would stop and watch for a while, imagining himself sitting by the entrance, leisurely fanning himself.

At those times, a wistful, foolish grin would always spread across his face.

Later, when Global Gaming began, as he was choosing his nickname, he instantly recalled that image of himself fanning away and eating an ice lolly. With a heart full of simple yearning, he depicted his dream:

"Old Liu of Victory Hardware Store"