Chapter 162: The Rose Factory

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Tang Erda within the game opens her eyes.

The sky is a deep night colour, and as you move further into the field of roses, a modern, out-of-place factory suddenly appears in the background of the rural town.

A huge brass still sits at the entrance to the factory, next to which hangs a white lacquered wooden sign that reads [Dried Leaf Rose Factory] in both English and Chinese.

Tang Erda's breath stopped for a moment as he subconsciously looked to the very top of the factory - empty, except for a few fresh roses in beanstalks basking in the moonlight, their petals spreading out in the moonlight, their juices brewing in the rose-coloured fleshy petals with a maddeningly addictive aroma.

This is the same Bai six standing at the top and asking him [Rose, does it smell good? of the factory.

In all the timelines, Tang Erda has never seen this tertiary game.

He knew that the dried rose leaf gas must have a solution in one of the games on the system, but Tang Erda, no matter how frantically she swiped the game, never got to it.

It was as if some presence could block his access to the game, teasing him, so Tang Erda had long since given up hope that he would ever be able to swipe a game related to Rose Dried Leaf Gas.

But this time, after Tang Erda's utter despair, he actually chased Bai Liu into the game by mistake.

[System Alert: Player Tang Erda saw the factory entrance and triggered the game's main quest]

You will have to work hard in the factory and become a top perfumer by your performance. After becoming a perfumer, you can drive out the previous factory manager and become the new factory manager.

[When the perfume factory manager is born, the player who becomes the factory manager passes the game, the game ends when the factory manager is born]

[Now please enter the factory and start working today!

Meanwhile, Bai Liu, hiding behind the factory, is depressed and once again sure of her main mission, next to Liu Jiayi who is drinking an antidote to heal herself, but her face is much better and the gun is no longer bleeding from her body.

After Liu Jiayi confirmed her main quest, she glanced at Bai Liu's not-so-good-looking face and turned around with a bit of squirm to mutter in a small voice: "...... have told you not to enter the third level game casually, I had a hard time getting you back, you came to deliver yourself and gave me a The face ......"

Bai Liu gave Liu Jiayi a glum look: "It's not because of you, it's because of this mission."

"What's wrong with this mission? The level three game card mortality rate is by limiting the number of people who can pass ah, I warned you before coming in ......" Liu Jiayi soon entered a state of thought as well, she put away the bottle of antidote and frowned, "The mortality rate for level three games is between eighty and Ninety, there are six players in this game, only one can survive is normal, but it's not like there are no loopholes to exploit in a level three game."

"But this game is limited to only players who become factory managers can pass, we came in when we looked, there is only this one rose dry leaf gas factory nearby, so the pass conditions are somehow stuck, can only take one step first, but it is understandable that you do not like the main task of the three-tier game, flexibility to reduce the difficulty of elevated ......"

Bai Liu was in a rare state of discomfort, his gaze wandered a bit: "...... another part-time job, why are you still doing social animals after entering the game, I don't like being exploited ......"

Liu Jiayi: "......"

That's why you've become a mourner!!!

Liu Jiayi climbed expressionlessly onto the decorative brass stein and smacked Bai Liu on the back of the head, "Troublemaker, cheer me up! First deal with your chaser, Captain What's-His-Name, he's definitely chasing you into the game, that guy is a strong fighter, you better figure out how to get us through this level 3 game fast!"

Bai Liu is slapped against the wall by Liu Jiayi and is motionless.

Liu Jiayi: "......"

Liu Jiayi grabbed Bai Liu's head and pulled it out, shouting, "Don't play dead to avoid working! You brought me into this game and you're responsible for getting me out! Be a grown man, Bai Liu!"

Bai Liu slowly poked his head out of the wall and looked at Liu Jiayi with a very wan gaze: "Does anyone pay me for working here?"

Liu Jiayi: "...... of course there can't be ah what are you thinking?"

"Oh." Bai Liu slowly buried his head back again and said in a jarring voice, "I'm not playing then, I've just been semi-forced into a very losing ten year deal and now I'm being asked to work for nothing, I need to bleed back, I can't."

Bai Liu has the look of a modern-day Gramophone forced to leave his inheritance to his son, only to find out he's not dead yet - clearly not over Lu Yizhan's ten-year hot pot deal.

Liu Jiayi stepped on Bai Liu's shoulders and plucked the animal out of the room, scolding him as she did so, "Men can't just say they can't work! Get up and work!"

After realising that nothing could bring the depressed animal back to life, Liu Jiayi had to resort to a killer move: "You work for me, I'll pay you a hundred dollars an hour, is that OK?"

Bai Liu, who had his head buried in the wall, turned his head without hesitation, looked straight at Liu Jiayi with his eyes and held out his hand to her, not at all shy: "Deal, pay first and then work."

Liu Jiayi: "......"

Damn, this Bai Liu is just waiting for her to pay and counting her out ......

Is this man so stingy? Counting the money of an eight year old girl?!

Liu Jiayi cursed in his heart, but outwardly he did not move and gave the money to Bai Liu, who took the money with alacrity, straightened his clothes and returned to his human-like appearance as a worker: "Come on, let's go to the factory and check the procedures first."

"Wait!" Liu Jiayi stopped Bai Liu who was walking forward. Liu Jiayi pulled Bai Liu, who was walking forward, and spoke again in a helpless tone, "Are you listening to what I'm saying to you or not, that Captain Tang is also chasing you into the game, you may run into him if you go directly to the factory to get the quest from the NPCs. If you run into him, he'll kill you without saying a word!"

Bai Liu took Liu Jiayi's hand, his expression light: "He wouldn't have killed me the moment I entered this game."

Liu Jiayi was stunned: "Why?"

"The Rose Factory is the stage for a game that someone, or certainly something that may not be someone, has dedicated to Tang Erda and me." Bai Liu drops his eyes, eyes obscure Buming, "In this game called The Rose Factory, there must be hidden that secret that can save all those tainted by the perfume, the same way that the bonus prop of that idol monster book in The Love Orphanage can save a child from blood lingzhi poisoning."

"And Tang Erda thought I had the core of the game's decryption that hid this secret, and he thought I knew how to get through the game, and for that matter, he couldn't bear to kill me until the game was cleared and Tang Erda got what he wanted to get."

"-The antidote to save those he wishes to save is near at hand, and I believe this righteous Captain Tang should not have the same madness as before, and take a thousand men with him to die with me."

Bai Liu commented nonchalantly, with a bit of a teasing-like laugh in his tone, "After all, my life, in the eyes of this Captain Tang, should not be as precious as that lieutenant of his, Su."

He leads Liu Jiayi by the hand through the rose fields of this rustic town, past the factory stills to the open double iron front door.

A wooden plaque hangs over the front door, which reads - [Welcome to the Rose Factory].

Bai Liu took Liu Jiayi's hand and went inside. Inside was a huge, open-air work yard, where fresh roses had just been picked from the fields, and someone was crouching on the ground separating the stems and petals from the piles of roses and sorting them into categories.

On either side of the field were huge, working, copper furnaces that emitted a constant stream of hot, white steam, and by which people were constantly stirring the mixed rose petals inside with steel shovels in what looked like a flourishing workplace, but there was something peculiar about the appearance of the people working, and the hours were not quite right, for it was clearly late at night.

The men at work, dressed in black protective suits with elastic bandages tightening around their wrist collars, white numbing gloves and black rubber tube boots, and wearing black sandy bucket hats, looked less like they were handling roses from their attire than like virus-processing researchers or beekeepers in a dangerous laboratory.

The men stopped Bai Liu the moment he entered with Liu Jiayi in tow.

The staff handed Bai Liu and Liu Jiayi two identical sets of protective clothing, as if they were tailor-made, and raised their heads in hoarse, dry voices, looking straight at the two uninvited guests, even with a certain amount of hatred and caution: "You must wear protective clothing when you enter this place, and you must not let the smell of your bodies contaminate the smell of roses, you understand? You can't let your smell contaminate the smell of roses, understand?"

At this close range, Bai Liu could clearly see that beneath the black veil, the man who had handed him the veil, or the worker who could no longer be considered human, had a deep, huge crack in his face, and then along the crack appeared a black, rotting, outwardly curving sliver of flesh, as if a rose was blooming along the grain beneath his eyes.

And in the eyes of the worker looking straight at Bai Liu was a fading deep red rose with black edges - much like the one on his face.

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Bai Liu and Liu Jiayi looked at each other and silently took the full protective clothing handed to them by the workers and put it on, walking inside as they were guided.

As he walks inside, the worker turns his head to introduce Bai Liu to the three different workshops in the factory, but Bai Liu's attention is clearly drawn to something else.

As the man walked, the face in his protective suit rustled and made the sound of leaves falling as he moved, and then the fall was barred to the soles of his own feet, the smell of mush and blood and wetness faintly permeating the action, but he himself seemed unconcerned, still describing the construction and rules of the factory: the

"...... There are three workshops within the perfume factory, which are the concoction and distillation workshop for the petals you just saw, the purified essential oil workshop where we are now, and the core perfumery workshop, the perfumery workshop you are not yet qualified to go to, only perfumers are qualified to work in this workshop ......"

"We recruit four types of workers here, flower pickers who are responsible for picking roses in season, this is the lowest level of workers, newcomers who have just arrived start here, those with outstanding flower picking performance will be promoted to the petal processing workshop and become processors, processors with good performance will be promoted to the purification workshop and become a full factory worker, only at this level will you be qualified to learn perfumery Knowledge ......"

"And the factory worker who has the best learning ability and the highest talent for perfumery and can make perfumes first can become a perfumer, that's a heavenly honour, tsk, but it's a bit far to talk about that with you newcomers ......"

Bai Liu observed his surroundings while listening to the npc droning on and on about the factory before finally asking, "So what does it take to become the director of this factory?"

This worker stops talking when he talks about how he was promoted to perfumer.

The worker turned his head sharply, the cheekbones of his face visible beneath the black veil after the blood and flesh had been stripped away, and his lowered tone was eerie and horrible: "The factory director? The factory director is not something you can be promoted to become, he holds the core technology of the factory perfume and the method of cultivating dried leaf roses, and it is impossible to pass these things on, you want to become the factory director, wait until you have them too."

Bai Liu asked in a different way, "How many directors have you had?"

"Eight terms." The worker said.

Bai Liu gave a faint oh and asked, "And how did they change hands?"

The worker's face turned hard as he realised what Bai Liu wanted to ask, which caused him to pause eerily for a moment before answering, "...... When the last factory manager disappeared, the next one, who had the perfume recipe and rose cultivation methods, automatically took over."

Bai Liu asks here to stop sagely - it seems that this is still a rebellious way of rotation, the last factory manager who disappeared may not be simple, and the next one who took office will not be too innocent, this [perfume recipe] and [rose cultivation] method is equivalent to the heirloom seal, whoever gets it will take office.

Continuing inside, the low, unseen interior of the factory gradually becomes more spacious to the left and right, with an assortment of aluminium cooling tubes embedded in the walls all around, with water flowing swiftly and rapidly inside.

A long line of distillation and drying apparatus lay on the concrete floor, the casings of these instruments already stained a pale pink that approximated a rose, glistening in the flickering dim light - normal roses are not so corrosive as to colour metal.

Even with Bai Liu in their protective suits, there was a strong rose aroma pervading the air, and in the various installations at work, droplets of rose-coloured oil could be seen flowing slowly through the pipes of the glass installations before dripping from the spout into a beaker the size of a fist.

"We are the only factory in the world that can produce [Dry Leaf Rose Gas] perfume, and the perfume we produce is shipped from here to the whole world, and everyone in the world is crazy about this perfume and can't live without it, but we didn't get to where we are today without a lot of trouble."

This worker inexplicably introduced Bai Liu with a tone of pride and honour, "On the wall to your left you can see the history of our factory, it's all in the local news papers."

Bai Liu's eyes shifted to the left and he saw a whole wall plastered with various old newspapers and placed in a glass window with a number of trophies and some golden awards like [Best Perfume of 202X] and [Top 10 Companies of the Year].

"...... At one point ten years ago, when dry leaf rose gas was still strictly banned, our factory was nearly closed down, but a huge explosion that nearly destroyed our factory completely sent the scent of rose dry leaf gas into a major city in the surrounding area, and overnight millions of people became hooked on The perfume, a good perfume can have such a charm, it brought the factory back from the dead and grew it back to the top!"

"The perfume is now used all over the world, demand exceeds supply and the dried rose leaf gas has become more precious than gold!"

As the worker drones on, Bai Liu, moving forward, sees a familiar face on the wall of newspapers, and he suddenly stops somewhere in the window.

His gaze fell without a second thought on the old, yellowed newspaper taped to the edge of the window, some years old, with the headline prominently printed in bold, black letters on the top left.

[139 workers were injured and 17 police officers who came to investigate the scene fell unconscious after smelling gas at a perfume-processing chemical plant on the outskirts of Mirror City due to a leak caused by inadequate protective measures].

Bai Liu's eyes drifted down to the large black and white news photo beneath the headline, which showed two faces he knew well - both in uniform, lying on stretchers, seemingly delirious, about to be carried to an ambulance, apparently caught in the spotlight by the gases leaking from the perfume factory.

Liu Jiayi also recognised one of the men, her eyes widened slightly as she went to the window and stood on tiptoe to look at the picture of the unconscious policeman lying on a stretcher, she stared at it for a long time before clicking on the system panel.

[System Alert: Does player Liu Jiayi use six hundred points to enable the small TV mute space, the words spoken by you and players within one meter of you will be muted before being broadcast to the small TV the audience is watching.

[System Alert: The transaction has been completed, players can now speak freely!

After Liu Jiayi was done with her treatment, she turned to Bai Liu and her tone tightened, "Isn't this Lu Yizhan, the policeman from ......?"

Bai Liu gave a nonchalant hoot, "The other one's name is Su Yang."

He looked to the date on the paper - it was the day after they entered the date of the game.

The connection between this Rose Factory game and reality is now clear - it's a copy of a game that hasn't had time to log into reality yet, and the way that game logged in was this explosion.

This copy officially begins more than a decade after this explosion, which is now.

The huge spill that triggered the arrival of this copy of the game in reality, the one that began to make dried rose leaf gas popular around the world, happened the day after Bai Liu entered the game.

A game normally takes a day, that means ......

Bai Liu looked at the exact time of the explosion as reported in the newspaper - around 4.15am, basically the same time Bai Liu had just entered the game, no more than ten minutes before or after.

This means that either Tang Erda or Bai Liu are the ones who get through the game, and once they get out, all they see is Lu Yizhan or Su Yang being affected by the explosion, contaminated with dried rose leaf gas, and about to wither away.

Even if the prop reward they got for passing the game might be able to save the contaminated population, this spill that caused mass contamination of the population has already happened.

And the rewards given by the game pass, or the props to save the contaminated people are limited, like the [Blood Lingzhi] rewarded to Bai Liu in the last round, which just happened to save six children.

According to the man behind the curtain's arrangement for them, they must have been refreshed out of the game The Rose Factory after they had cleared it, and it would have been difficult to refresh them out again, i.e. stopping them from getting the props repeatedly.

Not surprisingly, even if they get the prop that can save the contaminated people, that might be just enough to save the existing thousand or so contaminated people.

But if this massive explosion becomes widespread, there is a good chance that there will not be enough props to free the population.

According to Bai Liu's knowledge of Lu Yizhan and Su Yang, both of them are very typical of public justice, and they would never use props that could save them if the general public had not been completely rescued.

This is what the man behind the curtain wanted to see, he wanted to see with a smile - Bai Liu and Tang Erda in front of their most important friends' sickbeds, watching them wither and fade away, unable to do anything about it, even fighting against each other or dying to save their friends' lives An innocent man who becomes the villain his friends scorn.

What a wonderful and brilliant arrangement, laid out without realising it.

Bai Liu remembered what he had heard before he entered the game about Su Yang's visit to the perfume-making factory the next day.

And after all that had happened tonight, Lu Yizhan, the fool, would have volunteered to work with the Third Squad to find out what happened to Bai Liu in order to prove that he had nothing to do with the dried rose leaf gas, to find out what had happened to Bai Liu, and to prove Bai Liu's innocence. -It was the perfect game for whoever was behind it to see.

The chips are tipped on the scales of reality, the players are in the ring of the game and the onlookers are hidden in the abyss and at the bottom of the sea, watching harshly the drama that has been choreographed by themselves.

The show is about to begin - Bai Liu seems to hear someone whispering in his ear in a delighted and frantic manner.