Chapter 200: The Rose Factory

In the end, Tang Erda did not pull the trigger.

The factory worker told him that this was the only way he could be promoted to factory worker and then to perfumer, the central instrument in the running of the entire rose factory.

Tang Erda has reason to believe that this amazing heart has something to do with the main quest of this game - [Become a Factory Manager] as well.

He had an uncontrollable, as if induced from the heart, killing intent at the sight of this heart, which was unusual, a bit like something was deliberately moving him to kill, making him a little uncomfortable.

And what if this heart, instead of being a monster as he had judged it to be, was only the heart of a contaminated innocent?

Tang Erda had not encountered this kind of thing before, so he thought for a moment, controlled the sudden urge to kill, and calmly put down his gun, determined to find the source of the game's contamination before making a decision.

Tang Erda, guided by the plant worker, took a bottle of rose liquid, walked up the ladder and poured it down, while the employee guarding the apparatus looked nervously at Tang Erda's hand, which was resting on the sluice gate ready to be pulled down - the noise Bai Liu had made earlier had left a big impression on him.

Tang Erda's drops of the original perfume only glow a light rosy red.

The factory workers and watchmen waiting nearby for the results were disappointed and relieved at the same time - but it was a good result.

It was just too different compared to the previous processor who inspected it.

"You don't have a lot of talent, but it's not entirely hopeless to be promoted to factory worker, as we're short of factory workers with the May Rose Festival coming up." The factory worker who led Tang Erda in raised his head and looked at him, "You'll need to go through another scent paper test, and if you're sure you have some basic talent, you'll be ready to move on."

Tang Erda frowned, "What fragrance paper test?"

Meanwhile, on the third floor, in the factory workers' office.

Bai Liu looked up at the Director of Plant Engineering behind his desk, "The fragrance test paper test means?"

The director of the factory replied, "In order to confirm that you are talented enough to be upgraded to a perfumer, we dare not take the risk again with the instrument, but the paper audit is not as accurate as the instrument, but it can determine a general range."

"However, judging by your destructive power to the instrument, you are likely to break the test paper when it is tested."

He looked at Bai Liu squarely and tapped his fingers on the table, "Although test papers are a precious and non-renewable resource for any perfumer, if your talent is as remarkable as this application, then it is worth the risk of losing one to be tested again. "

A fragrance paper test?

This strange word for quantity caused Bai Liu to raise an eyebrow.

Bai Liu has seen fragrance test papers at some perfume counters in shopping malls, and he is under the impression that they are stiff sheets of paper similar to ph test papers, which are very absorbent and can absorb perfume better and retain the fragrance on them for a long time.

By placing a piece of perfume-stained test paper about ten centimetres in front of the tip of the nose and fanning it, you can better smell the pure perfume, or fragrance, which should be a common device in the profession of perfumer.

But in any case, the word for this type of paper should also be "piece" or "sheet", but rather "piece".

Bai Liu did not ask a rhetorical question, but waited for the plant director to continue.

"Next, if you are physically fine, then we will proceed with the tests." The plant director nodded towards the plant worker who had previously led Bai Liu through the instrumental testing and turned his head back to Bai Liu, "I will then ask this one to take you down to the negative level, where the test papers and Rose's death row inmates are held, for the test paper test."

Having said that, the director handed the factory worker a set of keys and said, "Take him down and have a look."

Bai Liu, a prisoner on death row, knows what's going on.

He had been taught this concept by the group of stragglers before, that prisoners who had committed the death penalty regulations related to the Rose of Dry Leaves, if the Rose Factory was willing to take over and accept some kind of labour from these prisoners in exchange for their right to survive, then these prisoners could be converted to life imprisonment and have their right to life and the use of their life taken over by the Rose Factory at its sole discretion.

But hold the scent paper ...... and the unit of measure for "one" ......

Bai Liu had a vague and unpleasant feeling in the back of his mind, remembering a vision he didn't like very much and the naughty malice of the game's designers aimed at him from the beginning to the end, which made the smile on Bai Liu's face fade.

The factory worker led Bai Liu down and they crossed the long corridor they had walked down on their previous arrival, turning the corner at a very shady bend before reaching the corridor of the dormitory.

There was a wooden door there that smelled completely different from the whole rose factory, not at all fragrant, but with a particularly foul odour.

The factory worker took out a set of keys, picked one out inside and inserted it into the wooden door, which creaked and slowly opened inwards, and a stench of meat and sour sweat from the clothes came out, smelling a bit like methane gas.

The stone walls on either side of the staircase were extremely narrow, and a dull yellow bulb, not very bright, had been installed at intervals, but the illumination was so poor that Bai Liu could not see much more than a dozen metres at most.

As if anticipating this, the factory worker brought a torch with him on the way down and led Bai Liu down by light.

As he walked, the factory worker began to explain to Bai Liu: "This is the negative floor of the factory, where only senior factory workers and perfumers are allowed to enter."

Bai Liu estimated that he had gone down perhaps twenty metres or so before he reached the bottom, where he looked up and saw a structure very close to a prison.

An unspacious pathway in the middle of the wet, dreary ground, with cage-like bars to the left and right, embedded in the wall grid by grid, stretched tightly inwards, and filled with human and ghostly condemned prisoners.

Bai Liu describes them in this way because they are like the stragglers Bai Liu saw in the rose fields.

The condemned prisoners made some slurred noises and seemed to be trying to reach out for Bai Liu and the factory worker who were walking down the middle aisle, but they were too weak to move at all, and they watched as the factory worker walked past with Bai Liu on his back, struggling feebly twice, only to let out a mournful, desperate yell.

The yell even made Bai Liu feel that they were not reaching out to them for help, but were asking them to give him a hard time.

Others were already dead, lying on their backs on the ground with their eyes open and their mouths open, decomposing to the point where only bits of hatching maggot flesh remained, with flies flying around making noises that, unsurprisingly, should have hatched from the maggots on the corpse.

Rather bizarrely, most of the dead bodies here have a contented smile on their faces, if they still retain the structure to make out facial expressions.

It was as if living was a painful and torturous thing for them, as if they had waited too long and too long for the moment of death to finally come to that happiness.

Bai Liu's eyes slowly, frame by frame, skimmed over the condemned prisoners inside who had committed the crime of roses, as if trying to read something in their expressions.

The factory worker seemed to notice Bai Liu's gaze and couldn't help but incline his head in defence: "The factory doesn't have a penchant for mistreating these death row inmates, and when the factory took over the inmates, we would perfume them almost daily to keep them alive - which is better than most flower pickers are treated better."

"Oh, really?" Bai Liu asked indifferently and blandly, "So that makes you philanthropists, giving free perfume to these criminals, why don't you ask them if they want to die, or be taken over by you?"

The factory worker was struck by Bai Liu's unsavoury manner and did not make a sound.

The Rose Factory is definitely not a factory that would do a good job of wasting perfume, and the fact that they did not take over all of the condemned prisoners, but some of them, suggests that something is wrong here - extrapolating from the point of view of profit, certain qualities of those condemned prisoners taken over by the Rose Factory should be beneficial to the development of this factory.

Bai Liu wasn't sure what the "profit" was at first - after all, spending perfume on people with a small workforce wasn't exactly smart business by any stretch of the imagination.

But now he finally understands what this "profit" is.

It took a moment of silence and a sigh for the factory worker to speak with some embarrassment, "...... These death row inmates were specially selected by the factory to have some resistance to rose perfume."

"...... These people, even if they are corrupted by the perfume, do not easily show signs of addiction to it, they stick to themselves, they stick to their roots and would rather die than give in easily to dried leaf rose gas - in fact, the reason they would be caught for their crimes was mostly to develop an antidote to the rose perfume."

After another moment of silence, this factory worker spoke again, "At a time when most people have succumbed to the addictive nature of rose perfume, it is difficult to test the concentration and holding power of a rose perfume specifically through ordinary perfume test papers, except for instruments."

"Because it is difficult for people like perfumers, who are already highly addicted, to screen a perfume by their own reactions to it, most of them have become numb to the scent because of the high concentration of rose perfume they use day and night."

"But as you can see, instruments are precious and we can't activate them to test perfumes all the time."

"At this point, we need people who can resist the rose perfume and are more sensitive to its rejection as experimental subjects, and by the painful reactions of these people we infer the effectiveness of this perfume - we call such people test papers."

The factory worker said as he led Bai Liu deeper inside, "What you saw just now were scrap test papers, they were on the verge of failure, but they could still be used once or twice, but I led you through a special passage this time, and the test paper you used is one of the oldest test papers we have in the factory."

Said this factory worker with a sigh, "These old test papers are also dying, yesterday it was said that for the May Rose Festival, a perfumer tested a bottle of extra perfume and scrapped another one, it has been transferred to the lower periphery, but this one you used this time is the highest quality test paper in our factory, he seems to be in good spirits and his rejection reaction to the rose perfume It's stable too."

Speaking of which, this factory worker couldn't help but sigh: "I've never seen someone so steadily rejecting rose perfume, it's all been so painful and still never changes their rejection of rose perfume, the steadfastness of mind is admirable."

"The May Rose Festival has tested several bottles of the Extraordinary Perfume on him, and although his body has suffered a certain amount of poisoning, organ failure and weakness, the rejection has not changed in ten years."

"I wonder if people like this are really human and too stubborn."

Bai Liu didn't say a word as he looked around at the condemned prisoners, his eyes growing darker and darker before finally saying very softly, "Too stubborn, I think, too."

The factory worker didn't hear Bai Liu's words and turned to him and asked him back, "What did you say?"

This time Bai Liu did not answer him.

The factory worker led him on in, and as the tunnels became darker and darker, the cages to the left and right of the tunnels became larger and larger, and the facilities for living inside became more and more like a room for a person to live in temporarily.

Finally, the factory worker stopped by a separate cage, a larger one, with the bed at the far end, the "incense paper" inside hidden in the darkness, only vaguely visible as the black outline of a hunched human figure sitting on the edge of the bed.

The cage is much tidier than the others, with two old, yellowed clothes hanging on the bars and a table inside with some books, paper and pens neatly arranged, and a few scattered cigarette cases, which are empty.

The factory worker who had led Bai Liu here looked at the cage, which was so clean it didn't look like a dungeon, with a complicated expression, "...... He's cleaned it himself again ...... It's nothing like a man who's been tried on incense for so long to maintain such sanity."

"This is the test scent paper you tested today." The factory worker pulled out the key and inserted it into the lock hole.

Meanwhile, in another tunnel a wall away, another factory worker leads Tang Erda inside and is chattering away, proudly explaining to him the dungeon that is the Rose Factory.

Tang Erda looked at the condemned prisoners in their cages with a frown locked to the point of pinning flies - he subconsciously drew his gun the moment he saw the Rose Drifter-like condemned prisoners, but soon realised that they were not the same as the Rose Drifter.

But this difference made his brow furrow even more.

--These guys, all of them awake despite having been contaminated by the perfume to this extent, were struggling to fight the rose perfume that was corrupting their consciousness.

The factory worker, walking in front of Tang Erda, knocked on the iron door of a cage and said with envy: "You're lucky, it's an old scent tester that's about to be scrapped, it was tested yesterday by a senior perfumer's bottle of Grand Cru. "

Tang Erda turns her head to look inside this gloomy, dark, hazy cage.

There was little light in the dungeon, visibility was minimal and he could only roughly make out a dark figure of a man with his back against the wall, his torso rising and falling faintly with each breath, a stench bordering on decay permeated from the man's body, causing the factory worker to wave the air from his nose in disgust.

The man, or rather the scent-testing paper, had only one arm and half of his face poking out of the shadows, exposed to the faint light and presumably visible, so Tang Erda looked up at the other man's hand and face.

The hands are almost completely cracked, dark, bloodstained lines spreading from the tiger's mouth to the elbows, and the half of the face that is exposed is completely disfigured, cracked and bloody, the light-coloured eyes lolling open and unfocused, staring at Tang Erda from beyond the fence.

For a moment, an unspeakable fear rushed through Tang Erda's mind - this half-face, this half-bloodied face, which he had seen in some nightmarish world line, made Tang Erda's hand shake uncontrollably and spasmodically as he gripped the gun.

Tang Erda's chest was still heaving, but his breathing had almost stopped and he stood motionless, as if frozen, staring straight into the face.

The pistol slipped from his palm and fell to the ground as a point of light.

The factory worker, however, did not notice Tang Erda's abnormality and he inserted the key into the turning hole.

The dusty and rusty door opens slowly in front of Bai Liu and Tang Erda at the same time.

The factory worker moved out of the way so that Bai Liu behind him could see inside the cage and handed him the torch in his hand, inclined his head to indicate Bai Liu to go in and wait outside himself, and explained, "The smell of roses on us is too strong and will interfere with the fragrance test paper, usually one person can go in. "

"When you go in, this incense-testing paper will teach you how to test your talent; he's very skilled now and has a good temper and won't attack you." This factory worker thought for a moment and added, "Although this fragrance test paper sometimes says some very strange things to the people who come to test it, it is generally very cooperative."

Bai Liu nodded to show that he knew. He calmly took the torch handed to him by the factory worker, turned it up to maximum brightness and took one step into the cage.

As Bai Liu walks in, the beam of the torch slowly approaches the bed from the floor, and in the ghastly white glow first appears an old leather shoe that looks familiar to Bai Liu, then a pair of white-washed uniform trousers, and then, sweeping upwards, a man holding the butt of an unlit cigarette, sitting with his head down on the edge of the bed.

The man's face and arms were completely deformed, the joints of his fingers were bare and full of tentacled bone, his breathing was thin to near nothing, his face was pale, his eyes bulging, the sides of his otherwise square and handsome cheeks sunken in as if he hadn't eaten meat in decades, and he was so thin that he was almost a skeleton.

Bai Liu had never seen him like this when they were at their most miserable.

This man was never so hungry as to be emaciated, even when he gave up a lot of food to Bai Liu in the orphanage.

Only one pair of eyes, still unchangingly gentle and firm, in which not a single rose grew.

Bai Liu finally spoke up, pointing his torch at the man's head, his tone not rising or falling at all: " Lu Yizhan, you finally ran out of money to buy cigarettes, didn't you?"

He looked at Liu Jiayi, who was standing in front of him, and then, after a moment of confusion, as if he had suddenly come to his senses, he scratched his head with some embarrassment and said to himself in a silly manner, "Ah, did I just see a vision again?"

"This time it's Bai Liu's voice and Liu Jiayi, the little girl - wow, this Liu Jiayi really looks like Bai Liu." With that, Lu Yizhan reluctantly propped himself up and moved a little closer to the bed, curiously taking a look at the emotionless Bai Liu.

Bai Liu looked at him expressionlessly.

Then Lu Yizhan suddenly curled his eyes and smiled gently, extending his hand, which was already covered with white bones, to Bai Liu: "But even if it's an illusion, I'm still quite happy."

"Because even in the world of illusion, we haven't seen each other for a long time, Bai Liu ."