Chapter 137: The Dangerous Heretics Treatment Authority

Tang Erda gazes at Bai Liu in a haze of nicotine smoke.

"But it's amazing that you actually just did an honest job as a game worker for years at a normal company, and got laid off because of your boss's prejudice."

Tang Erda couldn't help but laugh when she said, "When I was looking into this, I wondered if I was mistaken, if there really was an ordinary person named Bai Liu in this timeline, and the real Bai six had somehow swallowed their own game coins and died."

"Maybe it's the bad luck of six in this timeline that Bai died in the game before he could grow into a scary trader, so the game let him die like that in this so-called real world, who knows?"

Tang Erda shakes the ashes off her cigarette: "But soon I knew I was wrong."

"Because I'm in the game, right?" Bai Liu looked at Tang Erda, "You relied on my skills to determine my identity?"

"Yes." Tang Erda chewed on her cigarette, "That personal skill of yours in acquiring souls, I wouldn't be mistaken for it if I turned into dust, it's how you gathered a bunch of psychos just like you and almost wiped out our base outright a few times."

"A bunch of psychos like me?" Bai Liu asked amusedly in return.

Tang Erda scowled at him, "I've wondered in every timeline how you have the ability to find so many people who are as gifted and mentally unbalanced as you are in one way or another, to form your so-called wandering circus."

"And only in this timeline." Tang Erda taps his index finger on the table, and he looks up at Bai Liu, "I've just seen this [wandering circus] of yours take shape for the first time."

"In other timelines, when I met you, you were already very powerful, your origins were only unearthed after I risked my life digging through dozens of timelines, and all I could find was that you lived in that private orphanage, I knew absolutely nothing about the personal information of the mad dogs around you."

Tang Erda's eyes narrowed, "One reason is that these mad dogs you have working for you may be rampant but they are very discreet and it's hard to trace their true identities, and the other is that you have protected them so well that before this timeline, the base only knew their titles and habits, the rest was untraceable, and once they were traced, our side people would be in trouble."

He leaned back on the sofa and lazily twitched his fingers to count, "You should have met all these people, the monkey thieves who help you steal all sorts of secrets, the little killer witches who like to kill men with poison."

"The only person we can identify who has something to do with you is Muke, the inland investor who inherited his father's business and helped you promote your evil, but Muke is a very slippery man who spends three hundred and fifty-six days a year hiding in a sanatorium under the pretext that he is suffering from a heart attack. "

"But now I know all about who they are." Tang Erda's hand clenched around his cigarette rested on the tabletop, the ash drifting to the floor as he leaned in close to Bai Liu, his tone low, "And then I realised they weren't born mad dogs, just had some mental gaps."

"Only you were born crazy, Bai Liu, and you caught the gaps and tamed them with your own hands into mad dogs under you, so that they would bite anyone they saw but you."

"Is that so?" Bai Liu stared at Tang Erda without a ripple, "And do you think I've managed to tame them now? Do you think they'll bite you to death for capturing me, Captain Tang?"

Tang Erda narrowed her narrow, ghostly blue eyes before pressing out the still-burning cigarette caught in her own fingertips on Bai Liu's pale neck.

"The cigarette went out with a hiss, leaving a burn above Bai Liu's collarbone, which caused Bai Liu's breath to catch slightly, but this close proximity also managed to allow Bai Liu to see, in Tang Erda's casually open bodice, a very hideous scar - as if scratched by some fierce beast, with traces of corrosion on it.

It's a bit like the scars left by the combination of Mu Sicheng's monkey claws and Liu Jiayi's poison - and the scars brought out of the game also require a very low spirit value and a shaken will on the part of the person being attacked to leave the scars.

-- Muke The dagger that lowers the spirit value.

"How do you know I haven't been bitten to death?" Tang Erda buttoned his lapel to cover the wound, and with a chilling smile he whispered in Bai Liu's ear, "I killed you, and you killed me, Bai six ."

"But sadly we all didn't make it to death." Tang Erda exhales a puff of smoke in Bai Liu's ear and he laughs nervously low at Bai Liu's choking cough, "We've all been brought back to life."

--------

Tang Erda came out of the room and Su Yang greeted her: "How was it? Did he say what to do about the rose gas?"

"Not yet, he won't talk that easily." Tang Erda dangled the butt of her cigarette a little, "It'll take a while to grind it out and keep him in line."

"Grind for a while, how long is this while?" Su Yang's brow furrowed, " Team Tang, are you sure he can fix this thing?"

Tang Erda tossed the butt of his cigarette into the bin with perfect precision as he swept Su Yang.

None of these people knew what his powers were or why he could predict where many of the heretics appeared, including the conversation Tang Erda had just had with Bai Liu inside the house, and the group probably couldn't understand what they were communicating even if they were in front of the surveillance.

Because such conversations and abilities that would give away the existence of the system and the game are blocked out when spoken by gamers like Tang Erda.

This is a limitation of the game for the player, Tang Erda can only communicate with players like Bai Liu about these things, and with Tang Erda being a timeline traveler, every timeline other people or things change slightly, personality-wise, family-wise, emotionally.

Only Bai Liu is unchanging, ever wicked and ever greedy, steadily, unchangingly present like an anchor that does not disorient Tang Erda, a sailor adrift in the flood of time, and never dismayed by his time-traveling arguments, only calmly, examining him with an amused smile, as if to say, "So the rest of me is so Interesting.

The world is a game in this guy's eyes.

Tang Erda is the one player in the game who keeps reading through the files and starting over, unwillingly trying to beat the perfect ending.

It's ironic that Bai Liu, a strange anchor point, is the only person Tang Erda can talk to about anything.

Others, Tang Erda's colleagues, friends, and Su Yang, he has lost them all an unknown number of times, because the reunion was too painful for him to even touch easily anymore.

Because he's a player, he can't touch anyone, which would bring them into the game - a truth Tang Erda has learned after countless turns.

This particular department of the Dangerous Heresy Bureau, which fights evil, has always been an easy place to breed players, and Tang Erda is not the only gamer on the base.

But these player-players, who know the way of the evil thing, cannot tell the other players, who are not gamers, because of the limitations of the game, that you are not fighting something that has no way of coming, you are fighting a product of a game that has no end to these things, and you run.

When a player dies in the game, the players who are not gamers watch these these players who died in the game log out and die miserably in reality in various bizarre guises. The desperation and scorn of these evil creatures grows deeper and deeper as these normal players are influenced by those who are also gamers and thus develop a violent desire to survive and fall into the game.

Elsewhere in Tang Erda's timeline, by late in the game, most of the players in the Heretic Processing Bureau had become gamers and then died one by one in the game - including Su Yang in front of him.

Tang Erda's gaze is long and distant, passing through many a smouldering death and untold time, and falls slowly on Su Yang's frowning face as he questions him.

Su Yang died trying to save him, in the semi-finals of the tournament.

The team members of the Heretics Directorate who had entered the game met in the game, all of them desperately trying to stop the others from entering the game next, trying to do their duty in the game next - to protect the precarious, unknowingly real world, to protect their teammates, family and friends in reality.

But it's as if there is an invisible hand driving all of this, unbeknownst to them, and they are already living like rats in a sewer, afraid to see their loved ones, afraid to talk to their friends, afraid to kiss their lovers, just standing far away, in the shadows where they can't be found, watching from afar what they are guarding for fear that being a gamer will affect the people they hold dear and involve them in this nasty game that they don't know when it will end. The game is a bad one, and there is no telling when the end will come.

When Tang Erda first entered the game, she didn't even dare to go out to buy food and cigarettes, she ordered takeaway and had it left outside her door for an hour or two before she went to pick it up.

But sometimes, no matter how careful you are, the person you cherish will, because of you, inevitably move on to a future you don't want to see.

Su Yang came to see Tang Erda, who had been cooped up at home and had not been in touch with anyone.

Tang Erda started running around, hiding from Su Yang, changing hotels and logging out coordinates, but Su Yang just kept coming after him, going from place to place. When he realised that all those tricks could be avoided by Tang Erda, Su Yang started to find Tang Erda the stupid way, the dead way.

Finally this Vice-Captain Su was holding up Tang Erda's picture one by one in the street, asking if you had seen my captain.

Tang Erda was standing in the alleyway not far from Su Yang, lighting a cigarette and waiting until Su Yang had gone and it had burned his hand before he came out.

But in the end, Tang Erda met Su Yang in the game.

The moment Tang Erda met Su Yang in the game, the much-younger vice-captain smiled with a brow arched, seemingly unafraid, and said, "Captain, I've finally found you.