Mist (Web Novel CN)-Chapter 14: Chapter 14

Ouroboros

Chapter 14

“Advisor Ji, how do you feel? You don’t look well today.”

Tang Le, a new teammate, one of the round-faced twins.wo

He looked a little shy. Upon hearing his answer, his reaction was much like that of a straight man.

“I see.” He said awkwardly, “Advisor Ji, don’t be too nervous. The transition this time is the same as your previous missions and the mission is also very simple. We should be back by tomorrow.”

…….

The next second, Tang Le’s neck was bloody, splattering all over his body and flowing down his black combat uniform. The ‘7’ symbol on his chest was stained crimson red.

His eyes were dull, and it gradually turned grey and turbid. Behind him were zombies gnawing at him as well as the seemingly endless black wall: “Advisor Ji……We can’t go back——-”

The scene shook. Blinding white light suddenly appeared.

The sky and ground cracked, shattered and collapsed.

There was a harsh siren.

【Illegal transition detected!】

【Illegal transition detected!】

Amidst the violent shaking, someone grabbed his shoulders: “Jian Jian, calm down!”

A blank piece of paper and a pencil was tossed in front of him. That person squatted down beside him and said to him, “Here, do as teacher said, okay?”

The room was eerily quiet. Sun shone through the window, falling onto the table. A small hand held the pencil and started to right the first number in the centre of the white piece of paper.

“Look.” The teacher spoke gently, “We start at 1 and slowly write until we can’t write anymore on this paper. It doesn’t matter if it’s wrong, you don’t need to think and you don’t need to remember. That’s right don’t be afraid. Keep writing…. keep writing until you feel better…….”

“Bang, bang, bang!”

Gunshots rang.

Someone fiercely pushed him out the window while blowing off the heads of an oncoming tide of zombies with Shen Mian. When that person looked back, his eyes were furious: “Don’t speak nonsense and leave now!! I’ll hold up the fort!”

…….

In the speeding car, dust scattered up behind it.

“Sacrificing yourself is a foolish act and shouldn’t be done again. There is nothing more important than surviving. There are still many other things our team needs to do, no need to rush to your death.”

“Do you understand?!”

……..

The car rolled over. A large hand reached over.

The palm was pieced with glass shards and still dripping with blood.

He reached out towards that hand.

The moment he held it, the other party’s dark eyes narrowed, “Advisor Ji, I think you have a lot of things you haven’t told me the truth about……How many times have you experienced our current situation?”

……

“Looks like we’re both not crazy.”

Everything was still.

Before Ji Yushi’s eyes was the flawless and white interior of a capsule. The transparent panel in front of him was showing garbled characters and outside the glass window was a dense forest and a dark grey sky.

“Bzz.”

With a soft sound, a robotic arm grabbed a bag of nutrient solution and foolishly handed it over.

Badump badump.

Badump badump.

When swallowed by the darkness, what did he think about just before his death?

He couldn’t remember.

All that remained was the heart still beating violently in his chest.

Disregarding the dizziness and weightlessness he was feeling, Ji Yushi pressed open the safety lock almost without a second thought and weakly climbed out of the capsule.

Cold early morning wind blew past.

Seven capsule compartments glowed faintly in the middle of the quiet forest.

Three or four teammates stood not far away. They seemed to be talking about something and were a little agitated, as if they were complaining about the wrong time coordinates.

On the other side, the door to the capsule closest to him opened. The young man appearing from it had a poor expression and he had his hand covering his mouth as he tried to clamour out of the capsule.

“Thud!”

The door to the capsule was kicked closed.

“Cap Song!!” Li Chun’s muffled voice could vaguely be made out from the airtight capsule, ““Bleagh—-”

“If you want to vomit, vomit in your own home.”

The man passing by wore a black combat uniform which outlined his pair of firm and long legs. His actions were particularly domineering but also reassuring, “Who told you to fucking slack off and only sit on the pendulum twice during this long vacation.”

The three other people gathered not far away initiated their teasing mode.

“Is Chun’er throwing up again? How many times has he been caught by Cap Song now?”

“Can’t blame him. Even the girls are better than him at the thrilling rides in amusement parks. The pendulum only has to go up once to make him vomit three times.”

“No wonder. The simulation can no longer help him.”

On the other end, Duan Wen who was in his early thirties was busy debugging the main control panel. One could tell from his voice that he had smoked far too many cigarettes, “Cap Song! Our equipment seems to be locked!”

Song Qinglan, “I know.”

He walked over unhurriedly, leaving Li Chun alone in the capsule, suffocating himself with his stench.

When he was about two or three steps away from Ji Yushi, Song Qinglan suddenly stopped and turned his head.

Because of the other party’s height, Ji Yushi felt that the other party was almost looking down at him.

Song Qinglan’s expression was deep and his dark eyes were filled with strong spirit. He said without hesitation, “Advisor Ji, I think this is my first time seeing you smiling.”

Ji Yushi: “…..”

He subconsciously looked down.

The fluorescence from the capsule illuminated his face.

Ji Yushi could faintly see from his reflection in the glass a small, almost imperceptible arc at the corners of his lips.

“Looks pretty good.” Said a low male voice.

He looked back with astonishment but the person who had just made that remark had already proceeded on, leaving only a tall and straight back.

“The main control panel is offline, and the command centre cannot be contacted. The capsules also don’t work. It seems to be because of the electromagnetic waves here. The magnetic field here seems a little different but it’s still not certain. Perhaps the transition just now had something to do with it. Right now, all that we can use is the communicator. We’re basically trapped…..here.” Duan Wen finished speaking but he seemed to have noticed something. He frowned, “Did I say this before?”

Song Qinglan patted his shoulder, “You have.”

Duan Wen squatted there racking his brains to remember.

This scene seemed to feel familiar to him but he couldn’t pinpoint why.

“Can’t remember?” Song Qinglan approached Zhou Mingxuan and motioned for him to open the weaponry storage, “Take your time and think.”

The rest of the people: “……….”

Song Qinglan looked at the neatly arranged weapons and proceeded to pick out a military knife.

At this moment, footsteps sounded in the forest.

In the dim lighting, a cold light flashed across in Song Qinglan’s hands and a dark shadow fell to the ground not far away.

Everyone: “!!!”

Even Ji Yushi was stunned. This person’s accuracy was beyond his expectation.

The teammates used their flashlight to examine the corpse. They quickly fell into discussion about the other party’s blue-green blood vessels, grey eyes as well as his rotting flesh and were inwardly shocked.

This drifter killed by their captain didn’t look human, but didn’t Cap Song kill him too quickly?

When Li Chun finally came out of his capsule, Song Qinglan gathered everyone up.

“Anyone else who has a sense of déjà vu, think over it carefully.”

Song Qinglan’s eyes swept across everyone’s faces. His tone held rare sternness, “This time, no one should die on me.”

“Choose your weapons. Pick the most lethal ones and take everything you can. When we get out, we’ll look for a car first.”

Li Chun was still a little dizzy after vomiting.

While everyone was confused, he asked first, “Cap Song, where are we going? Is this a new mission?”

Song Qinglan calculated the time difference in his mind and turned to the leftmost side of the squad.

There stood the elegant and handsome Ji Yushi who had been dropped into the team by those at the top.

“Advisor Ji?” Song Qinglan asked, “Do you have any suggestions?”

“Go directly to the bookstore.” Ji Yushi’s clear voice sounded, “I have a clue I wasn’t able to check.”

Song Qinglan revealed a short smile.

Then, with a resolute attitude, he said calmly, “Good, I was also thinking that. Go to the bookstore first and check the clue you wanted to look at and then we will work out the black wall’s pattern of movement. From that, we find the so-called mission objective.”

The two sung in chorus with each other with strong tacit understanding.

Everyone else was at a loss.

Song Qinglan said: “I’ll slowly explain on our way there.”

*

Everything in the park was exactly the same as how it was originally; garbage, corpses and bloodstains.

Hearing about the black wall and zombies, some team members were silent while others were in disbelief. For some of them, it seemed impossible to have already happened before. Especially for Tang Qi, most of the things that had happened later did not have his involvement so it was very difficult for him to have a sense of déjà vu.

Duan Wen could vaguely remember some scenes and Zhou Mingxuan also felt a little familiar.

Song Qinglan guessed that this may be related to the training everyone had gone through before.

After the Tianqiong system was invented, many special forces preparing to enter it and become a Guardian was required to participate in a Time Witness Program.

To combat the side effects of forgetting or confusing reality as a result of time travel, they had undergone a very long period of repeated memory training. This was also why Song Qinglan could guess what kind of medicine Ji Yushi was taking.

At present, the people who had some form of impression of their previous two experiences were those who have participated in the Time Witness Program and have received training for it. As for Li Chun, Tang Le and Tang Qi who joined Tianqiong later, at that time the Time Administration Team had already released a new invention; just taking nutrient solution developed by them could give them enough relief from those side effects. As a result, they probably became dull to this and may probably never sense any feeling of déjà vu.

As for Ji Yushi, it was obvious.

He was someone with no ability to forget.

Was this really a good thing, or a bad thing?

“So every time we die, it will start again?” Zhou Mingxuan asked, “This kind of death, is it when a certain person dies or when the whole squad dies?”

“Should be the whole squad.”

The speaker was Ji Yushi.

Probably because he had constantly been in a highly alert state and not had a chance to rest —- From the time they first restarted the mission until now, and the fact that he didn’t have a good night’s sleep before departure, to Ji Yushi who remembered everything, he probably hadn’t slept for almost twenty hours.

The bruised bump on his forehead from the impact in the car when it crashed into Runjin Building was gone with the mission restarting but the faint blue tings under his eyes were still there. Among this group of steel straight men, he looked like he could be blown over by a gust of wind.

“According to the message, the mission rule is death elimination.” Ji Yushi said, “But the Tianqiong system also set up a time anchor for us——“

“Time anchor?” Song Qinglan was surprised Ji Yushi knew about this.

The time anchor was something that had been banned from a long time ago by the research and development team.

It could be used to mark a certain time coordinate as an anchor point and when it detects that the necessary condition is triggered, time would return to that anchored point.

The emergence of this time anchor had resulted in serious time paradoxes; for example, allowing someone to live forever within a certain period of time or making a historical event never happen, eventually resulting in a time bubble to form in that timeline and affecting the normal timeline.

As a result, time anchors were banned in their time and very few people knew about it.

Ji Yushi: “Yes.”

He briefly explained what a time anchor was to the others and continued, “This means that when the timeline restarts, we will always return to the park. I believe the death elimination meant that in each cycle, those who have died become discarded chess pieces and the remaining are to continue with the mission. Once it detects that the entire squad have perished, the mission would restart. This is done in order to ensure that the mission is completed, even if only one person is left to complete it.”

“Fuck.”

“That’s just too cruel!”

“Does the person who came up with this have any humanity in them?!”

“I don’t know about that.” Ji Yushi said, “But if we don’t complete this mission, the cycle may continue for eternity.”

When he said this, Song Qinglan glanced at him

Duan Wen then spoke up, “Then the mission mode you mentioned. Did that Ouroboros mean this?”

Song Qinglan also thought this.

And he also talked about it with Ji Yushi before.

“It’s possible.” Song Qinglan said, “In any case, it’s okay to get a general understanding of this for now. We need to figure out what this chaser of darkness is.”

Everyone had already reached the location where they found the park management office but this time they no longer needed to go in again.

Ji Yushi however stopped in place, “Cap Song, do you want a car that can crush everything?”

Song Qinglan found that he had already grown used to Ji Yushi’s habit of suddenly raising a topic.

With Ji Yushi saying this, there must be one.

Song Qinglan couldn’t control his bad-mannered mouth: “I can have it if I want it?”

Everyone: “???”

“Yes.” Ji Yushi’s beautiful profile was very soft under the morning light, “Park management office. There is a spacecar key on the table.”

*

Sure enough, a brand-new spacecar was parked behind the park management office.

The spacecar key was different from the identification card a small car would need and very easy to identify. They didn’t notice it before because firstly, they didn’t think about driving a spacecar around the city during the first two cycles and secondly, it was concealed under a pile of newspapers and takeaway boxes.

Song Qinglan didn’t remember such details but Ji Yushi remembered it very clearly.

The spacecar was eight metres long and five metres wide and it had an extremely hard metal shell outside. Able to reach a speed of 300km/hr, it was a real monster crushing machine.

This kind of car also existed in their time. After setting it up, it does not require a driver and it takes a special channel to generally transport materials. To put it bluntly, it was a driverless, high tech version of trucks from a century ago. Because of the large space, some also use it as a mobile home and hence the name spacecar.

“Advisor Ji!” Li Chun jumped up and looked around, “I have the feeling of inexplicably winning a big prize! This thing is awesome!”

Tang Le said to Tang Qi, “If there are zombies, do you think it can crush a hundred of them?”

Tang Qi: “Probably.”

Song Qinglan looked at the time on his communicator and ushered, “Hurry up.”

There were also several thick tree trunks in the car.

After studying the controls, Duan Wen turned car on and dropped them out, the trunks making a loud boom as it landed.

In the distance, several zombies were attracted over by the sound and began to frantically rush over.

“Bang, bang, bang!”

Zhou Mingxuan looked through the scope and used his laser gun to shoot several down.

Zombie heads exploded and blood and brain matter scattered across the ground.

Following the gunfire, more zombies rushed out from hiding. The sky had brightened.

Seeing real zombies right in front of them, the teammates were so shocked they temporarily couldn’t calm down. Only now did they realise that how much of a reality Cap Song and Advisor Ji’s words from earlier were.

Throwing all their equipment into the car, everyone got on.

The moment the door closed, a black wall suddenly appeared in the sky.

“Quick!” Someone urged anxiously.

Ji Yushi was very calm. He quickly and accurately entered the destination into the control panel. When Duan Wen saw that it was entered successfully, he pulled the start valve and the spacecar immediately shot out like an arrow.

The black wall swallowed up the forest, half the park and everything in its path.

The spacecar sped out of the park.

It rushed onto a main road.

It was like an invincible tank, ignoring the obstacles and crushing the zombies swarming on the roads into pulp, spraying blood around it the entire way.

“Yooo!!!”

“Awesome!!”

The group of young men couldn’t help but get excited, as if they finally found an outlet.

At a speed of more than 200km/hr, the spacecar approached an intersection. Suddenly, there was a loud bang and the car shook. “Boom——–”

A small car had suddenly rushed out from the other end of the intersection and was crushed completely by the spacecar.