Chapter 201: The Rose Factory

The iron gate swung open, and Tang Erda, standing in front of it, did not move.

It was as if he had transformed into a wooden statue for a moment, or rather, at the moment he wished he were just a wooden statue.

The factory worker gave him a couple of puzzled pushes, but Tang Erda was too big for him to push, when the 'incense paper' inside the cage suddenly moved its fingers and made a slight motion towards him.

The lax eye leaning against the wall of the "scent paper" struggled to focus on Tang Erda, who made a very faint, questioning, hoarse sound: "...... Captain?"

With such a soft thud, Tang Erda, who had been sunken in place, was hit by a shot so hard that he almost had to grit his teeth and grimace to keep his expression in check.

Tang Erda, whose eyes are scarlet and who is holding on to the wall to steady himself, is not looking too hard at the man in the cage, or at the incense paper.

Something drained Tang Erda's strength, leaving him exhausted, bruised and disfigured, so that he could only rely on external objects to support his body, stumbling, step by step, into the cage that had always trapped him, trapped Su Yang.

Tang Erda walks up to the scented paper, and it is at this moment that he sees the other man's full face clearly.

Su Yang's whole face was in 'bloom', the roses in his eyes were as lush as if they were from a field of flowers, his face was covered in lines of spilled flesh, and he wore the uniform of the deputy captain of the Bureau of Dangerous Heretics, even with his badge.

The work photograph of Su Yang on the work badge is stained with blood and looks dirty.

This face, and this working photo, reminded Tang Erda of the time Su Yang was shot by the Joker, when the team's heart-rending screams still seemed to echo in his ears.

Tang Erda looked at the video recording of Su Yang's death with a blank expression as if out of her body, and her mind was malfunctioning, echoing one phrase over and over again - if only I had been next to Su Yang.

--I wish I had been caught with Su Yang, I wish I had been caught instead of Su Yang, I wish I had been Su Yang.

If only I were the one being tortured, the one hurting, the one dying.

--Why does it have to be Su Yang every time, every time?

It had to be the most important person that he, a coward for so many timelines, was too afraid to tell, too afraid to look at squarely, too afraid to look more than once and say a word?

Tang Erda closed her eyes, the bruises on the back of her hand holding the wall, and she was almost unsteady on her feet

There is a very faint, very faint light in Su Yang's eyes, he doesn't seem to feel the pain he is in, his epidermis jagged face is purely innocent, and he seems to want to smile at the trust and joy of seeing Tang Erda, the captain.

But the cut skin and muscles prevent Su Yang from smiling.

Then the corners of his mouth curved halfway down and dropped helplessly, and only his tone remained pleased: "It's really you, Captain!"

Su Yang tried to lift his hand to reach Tang Erda's coat, but failed several times and his hand trembled with the effort.

Once again, as Su Yang lifted his hand to reach him and was about to drop it, Tang Erda finally half-crouched down in silence, and very gently, with his shaking hand, he placed it lightly, at a distance, over the back of Su Yang's hand in a void.

Su Yang gasped weakly and leaned against the wall dying, half-closing her eyes and smiling at him, before suddenly turning her hand to hold Tang Erda's.

Tang Erda took a deep breath to suppress the overwhelming emotions, and for the first time in this timeline, he did not reject Su Yang's closeness, but shook him back. His voice was hoarse and hard: "Well, the captain is here to get you out."

"No, you can't ...... get me out of here! Cough, cough, cough--" A somewhat exasperated, and helplessly amused look appeared on Su Yang's face.

As he had done on every previous occasion with Tang Erda, he seemed distressed by his captain's reckless resolutions, but ultimately remained patient to persuade the other side.

Su Yang's speech sounded broken due to her rapid breathing: "It's useless if you help me out, I'm really dying."

Su Yang's eyes droop and her tone drops: "My family, my parents, my team members didn't make it, they all withered away, and now I'm the only one left, but I won't last much longer."

"I'm just resigned to it, resigned to not being able to do anything in front of this thing, I'm too much of a loser." Su Yang's tone was in a slight trance as he looked up, the rose extraordinarily clear in his light-coloured eyes as he clutched Tang Erda's hand that was trying to pull away, "But you, Captain, are different! You are the one chosen by the prophets! You can surely change all this!"

At this moment, Tang Erda seemed to have all the memories of the timeline wrapped up in this one sentence.

[Captain! You can do it!

[Captain, I believe in you!

[Captain, ahem, as long as you live, there is hope for us!

Countless, all, different Su Yang with bloody, broken, pale, scarred, or bloodied faces, all gazing at him with the same bright look of relief and hope, called him Captain.

Then the next moment he died laughing for him, his soul all but dissipating into the light in an instant, with no trace of him.

Tang Erda's consciousness blurred as he watched Su Yang's face watching him anxiously, and for a moment he felt he was no longer accepting Su Yang's mandate and trust, but a desperate curse and a turning away.

Su Yang shifted his body forward with difficulty, he leaned on Tang Erda's shoulder and lowered his voice, "Captain, listen, there is no point in saving me from going out anymore, you have mixed up here, you should be promoted to factory worker already, followed by promotion to perfumer, there is an antidote to rose perfume, but the antidote is only known to each factory manager. "

"Once you've been promoted from perfumer to factory manager, you'll know what the antidote is." A little out of breath at this point, Su Yang leans back to rest on Tang Erda's shoulder, then quickly continues, a smile in his voice, "That's when you'll be able to save these contaminated people."

Tang Erda couldn't tell you exactly how long she was quiet before she spoke hoarsely, "...... What about you?"

Su Yang does not speak, but leans quietly against Tang Erda's shoulder, her chest rising and falling slightly with her eyes closed.

Their understanding did not require them to say much, both of them understood what Su Yang had decided to do - Su Yang decided to sacrifice himself for Tang Erda's testing so that Tang Erda could be successfully promoted to factory worker.

This is the equivalent of having Tang Erda kill Su Yang herself to save the rest of the game.

Even if this Su Yang is just a game character, just a fake Su Yang, Tang Erda can't do it.

"But Captain ......" Su Yang leaned on Tang Erda's shoulder and opened his vacant eyes, whispering as if muttering, "I'm impossible to save, I'm addicted. "

"Captain, be a man and look on the bright side, things like death ...... humans are all going to die." Su Yang's tone had a little, casual, indifferent laugh in it, as if he was coaxing Tang Erda generally, "If I have to die, I hope my death will mean something to you."

"I'm actually really glad that I got to see you before it wilted completely, because it at least means that my self-torture of struggling painfully for so long as if I was a fool, not willing to give in to the rose perfume, has meaning." Su Yang turned her head on Tang Erda's shoulder and gazed at him very gently, "My meaning is that I waited until you, Captain."

Tang Erda could see the cracks on Su Yang's face deepening and peeling away, blood seeping from the edges, reflecting in his pupils as Su Yang became more and more like a rose.

It is becoming more and more like a monster.

He had never seen life fly by so clearly in a human body.

Su Yang looked at Tang Erda supplicatingly.

Little by little, Tang Erda released Su Yang's grip on his hand, then shook the hand he had voluntarily let go of in an empty grip, his head bowed, his expression unreadable, his voice hoarse to the point of being almost inaudible: "...... testing, what's it going to be?"

Su Yang smiled from the bottom of her heart, "Thank you, Captain."

"That's right." Su Yang seemed to remember something important and his face turned grave, "Captain, do you remember the living heretic Bai Liu that you caught and then escaped from back then? When you leave here later, if you have the chance to find him, please make sure to kill this man."

"This is the man who blew up the factory we went to test on the day he escaped from the Bureau of Dangerous Heretics."

----------

In another cage, one wall away.

After Lu Yizhan had managed to figure out that he was really Bai Liu, who had become Liu Jiayi, the two of them chatted without tension.

Bai Liu lifted his eyes to look at Lu Yizhan sitting across from him: "I blew up the Rose Factory?"

"Yes." Lu Yizhan didn't seem to feel like he was talking about anything very important either, his body and tone relaxed as he lay back on the bed, his hands behind his head, "I also the other staff of the Bureau of Dangerous Heretics saw it, and I'll go with my ten years of knowing you to the extent that I can vouch for the fact that the man standing above the Rose Factory, the one who claimed he was going to blow this factory up, was sure it was you. "

"You said you were going to set off an explosion, leak dried rose leaf gas and destroy the world, and I had several conversations with you and finally decided that you were the right you I knew." Lu Yizhan said with his face turned upwards.

The timeline of The Rose Factory, a game set ten years after the real world.

Bai Liu sorts out Lu Yizhan and the timeline of what he said.

The explosion that triggered the spread of dried rose leaf gas around the world occurred the day after Bai Liu escaped from the Bureau of Dangerous Heresies.

On the same day, Lu Yizhan and Su Yang, the deputy head of the third detachment of the Dangerous Heresy Bureau, both arrived at the Rose Factory to investigate the forcibly closed but secretly reopened factory - something Bai Liu had read in the factory's newspaper, and something that was consistent with the reality Bai Liu had surmised. It was also largely consistent with what Lu Yizhan had just told him.

Bai Liu raised his eyebrows after hearing only a few words from Lu Yizhan about what happened afterwards.

Lu Yizhan said that when they arrived at the factory, they searched all over the premises for what appeared to be a stockpile of dried leaf rose gas, and that the whole factory was particularly odd, with all the equipment, but the people seemed to have disappeared into thin air.

They searched until the early hours of the morning, finding nothing but a few iron pots bearing the remains of the rose exercise and a distillation apparatus.

At this moment Bai Liu appeared out of nowhere, as if from the sky, on the roof of the Rose Factory, holding a large lama from somewhere, with one hand in his pocket and shouting lazily to the crowd below -

Lu Yizhan said, while using his hands to imitate the scene with a big lama: "I am Bai Liu, a sociopath, because I have been laid off for more than a month, I can't find a job and I have no money to earn, I am very sad and I think the world will end with me, so later I will detonate this factory and make the rose dry leaf gas leak, so that everyone end with me."

Bai Liu was eerily silent for a moment, then asked rhetorically, "And then the Rose Factory exploded?"

Lu Yizhan nodded honestly, "Well, then you disappeared completely, and because of that, for a while the Dangerous Heresy Agency put a bounty on your head of sixteen million dollars, and I was a bit moved."

Bai Liu squints at Lu Yizhan lying on the bed: "You don't think I did the explosion?"

If Lu Yizhan was sure that Bai Liu had caused the explosion, he would have jumped up from the bed and shot Bai Liu on the spot as soon as he walked in as long as he could move.

But the fact that Lu Yizhan is still calmly lying in bed talking to Bai Liu proves that Lu Yizhan thinks the explosion had nothing to do with Bai Liu.

Lu Yizhan was quiet for a moment before speaking, "I'm sure it was you who shouted from the roof of the Rose factory to blow it up, and I'm also sure that less than fifteen minutes after you said that, the Rose factory exploded in this perfume spill that endangered everyone."

Then Lu Yizhan gave a very clueless speculation: "But I don't think you did this."

Bai Liu asked, amused, "Why?"

Bai Liu rarely doubted Lu Yizhan's assumptions about him, and Lu Yizhan probably knew him better than he knew himself, and would never lie to him.

Lu Yizhan said that the man standing on the roof was him, Bai Liu, so Bai Liu guessed that it was really him.

Lu Yizhan looked up at the top of the cage for a moment, as if in a daze, before replying to Bai Liu: "It's very unprofessional and subjective, I'm sure you wouldn't do something like that."

Bai Liu scowled at him, "I never knew you could trust my character?"

Lu Yizhan gave a slow "eh" and turned his head to give Bai Liu a light look: "Not for that, I can't believe your character."

If it weren't for the strange lines on Lu Yizhan's face, their conversation would be as quiet as a normal gag.

Lu Yizhan looks at Bai Liu: "But I believe in your ethics of trading, you made a ten year hot pot deal with me yesterday, no need to go and destroy the world when you haven't even had a meal yet, what a loss, I don't believe you could do such a thing."

"Hmm." Bai Liu glanced at Lu Yizhan, "I feel the same way though, but the others don't, do they?"

Lu Yizhan smiled and turned his head back, his tone emotional: "Indeed, I was the only one of the factory personnel who went there that day who felt that way, and the speculation was too subjective to convince them, which is why the high reward for you followed."

"It's a pity that they didn't last, they all left one by one." Lu Yizhan's expression finally turned complicated as he let out a long sigh, "It seems that there is only one person left in this world who can still hold on to believe in you, and those who hate you."

The person who believes Bai Liu is obviously Lu Yizhan, and if Bai Liu is correct, the person who hates him would be Su Yang - who is most likely to be the person to whom Tang Erda's incense paper is addressed at this point.

Lu Yizhan went on, "I've been thinking about the ten years I've known you here, trying to find in it clues as to what you really are that would corroborate my suspicions that you wouldn't have set off the Rose Factory, and the other guy kept emphasizing the evidence, emphasizing that he saw you set off the factory with his own eyes. "

Lu Yizhan's eyes looked straight up at the ceiling and his tone became soft and light, as if he was talking to himself, "What kind of person are you that becomes the only reason for our survival."

"And late in the memory, I was beginning to wonder if you existed, if you were just a friend I'd conjured up because I was too lonely here, a murderer, a kind of self-compensating salvation to stay sober - knowing you existed, I at least got through it with some hope. "

Bai Liu sidelined his head calmly, "So?"

Lu Yizhan gave Bai Liu a grumbling look: "At least have some sympathy for me, I'm so miserable."

After a moment of silence, Lu Yizhan smiles: "So for a while whenever someone came in to test a perfume, I would ask them - do you know Bai Liu and what do you think of him?"

"Probably because I was so cooperative in trying the incense and they basically answered, I got many, many answers about [Bai Liu], but none of them could convince me that you really existed or describe anyone I knew."

Lu Yizhan sat up with difficulty on the edge of the bed, he took two deep breaths and looked up at Bai Liu: "Now it's your turn to answer my question, do you know Bai Liu?"

He looked straight at Bai Liu, who was standing by the bed, and said, "What kind of person do you think Bai Liu is?"

"I know Bai Liu." Bai Liu looked calmly at Lu Yizhan, who was gasping for breath, and said, "He is a shameless, despicable, empathy-free, uncompromising, unconventional socially conscious, unconventional in his values, and does not accept the abduction of universal moral subterfuge. to say the least, a rather dangerous character."

"Uh-huh." Lu Yizhan nodded solemnly, "It's the Bai Liu I know. That's right, go on."

Bai Liu gazed at Lu Yizhan for a long time before saying, "He is indeed your friend, so even if he were such an asshole, he would have kept his deal with you - I wouldn't have detonated the factory, and if the man standing on the roof of the Rose Factory was indeed me, then there should have been some kind of circumstances compelled me to say that and make that choice, but I wouldn't do anything to go against the deal."

Lu Yizhan was stunned for a moment and then he smiled heartily: "Yes, that's what I believe too."

Bai Liu stepped forward, "OK, enough of your nonsense, teach me how to test."

Lu Yizhan flinched for a moment and laughed helplessly, "You're being too cruel Bai Liu, I just heard that factory worker say that your guy's talent is likely to test me to death at once eh!"

"You may die here." Bai Liu scanned Lu Yizhan, "But the real you won't die, want to make a deal with me? I can stop the explosion that's already happened and save you and the others."

Lu Yizhan looked at Bai Liu for a long time, though he didn't seem to understand what Bai Liu was talking about, nor did he know how Bai Liu could have managed to stop what had already happened -

--But he knew that at least 50 per cent of the deals this Bai Liu man was talking about were things he could have done himself.

"Yes!" Lu Yizhan replied in one breath, his eyes glowing, "What's the deal?"

Bai Liu: "Treat me to twenty years of hot pot."

"With the previous ten years, that's thirty years! That's too many!!!" Lu Yizhan screamed, "Look at me now, I'm not even sure I'll live that long!!!"

Bai Liu glanced at him, "Then try to live to that point in order to make this deal with me."

Lu Yizhan was dumbfounded as he looked over at Bai Liu, who had an indifferent expression, and couldn't help but laugh.

Caring people are so roundabout - and really in person.

--------

Su Yang grabbed Tang Erda's hands, a look of remorse rarely seen on his face: "Captain, every day that I and the rest of the team have been here, we have regretted that we did not take your orders seriously. ..."

His light-coloured eyes filled with tears and his voice was dry and broken: "So many people would not have died because of Bai Liu's revenge, because something like this leaked and spread!!!"

"Captain, if only I could have stopped this from happening in the first place, it's all my fault ......"

As if overwhelmed by some extremely heavy responsibility and emotion, Su Yang slowly bends down in front of Tang Erda.

It was as if he had aged dozens of years in an instant from remorse and self-recrimination, the bones in his spine bulging like beads on his excessively thin back, too bony to stand upright.

Tang Erda clenched his fists - it was too late for the Su Yang in front of him.

But it was still too late for him.

As long as he gets through in time to find the antidote and kill Bai Liu - the one he saw, the Su Yang who was in so much pain she wanted to die - none of this will ever happen again.

Tang Erda mentally calculated the time when the game ended and the time when Su Yang had just told him that Bai Liu had triggered the explosion, and he couldn't help but stare - it was the equivalent of Bai Liu going to the factory and triggering the explosion immediately after passing the game.

You have to kill Bai Liu in the game to do it!

He already knew that the antidote would be available when he became a factory manager, Bai Liu couldn't stay any longer!