Chapter 223: Reality

In the night, a huge motorbike with tawny trim swept past, raising a lot of dust.

They were getting closer and closer to the plant that was about to explode.

The factory where the rose perfume was found to be secretly made was built on the outskirts of the city, at the exact moment when Su Yang and his team were going to investigate.

Su Yang holds the special gun of the Bureau of Heresy against his side as he cautiously peers in with his back against the factory door.

After looking around at both sides Su Yang stepped out, lifting his collar and speaking into the small microphone above him.

"No one, safe."

At the same time an answer came from his headset.

" Team Su, we don't have one on our side either, safe."

"Zone 2 is also safe."

"...... Zone 3 is safe too, Team Su so strange ......" the voice in the headset paused hesitantly, "It doesn't even look like anyone is working, the ground's all dusty, and the latest footprints are all our own."

"The last time we came to inspect this factory, it wasn't like this, this time it's like it's been abandoned for years ......"

Su Yang's eyes were clear and calm: "Don't panic, it's possible that a new heresy has appeared with the dry leaf rose, or that this new heresy has given rise to the dry leaf rose."

"That would be the ability of this heretic."

Continuing his search, Su Yang stepped over the piazza covered in withered leaves and came to the processing clerk's dormitory, where he gazed at the old, unnatural door and without hesitation kicked at the gaping hole in the bottom of the door where the dampness had caused it to buckle.

The corpses lying on the dormitory beds opened their eyes, their twisted limbs rising to their feet, their rotting eyes turning to look at the shaking door, which was about to be kicked open, and moved their limbs towards the bed, moving towards the door with only their white bones.

Meanwhile, on the ground floor of the factory.

The team held their noses as they made their way through the foul-smelling replica level of the prison, scanning the neatly arranged iron cages one by one with mixed eyes as a member of the team behind them held up a night camera to carefully film the structure inside the factory.

The greenish screen of the night camera sheds an unsettling light on this dimly lit underground.

"...... These cages are built to hold something ......" one of the team took a few steps inside with wrinkled brows, "And we came here a month ago When we seized this factory, it wasn't like this at all."

"Yes." Another member of the team agreed, "Not only that, we've been having people in our midst monitor the place closely, this factory isn't functioning at all, I don't know what they're still producing and shipping perfume through."

As they spoke, they moved inside.

Inside the cage at the end of the basement level was a huge, three-metre high, four-person thick, cylindrical glass cabinet vessel, the unclosed opening of which was emitting rosy smoke, and which, when viewed from the inside, was filled with the brightly coloured perfumed liquid of dried leaf and rose gas.

There is a heart counting down on the glass case with less than ten minutes remaining on it.

If Bai Liu had been here, he would have estimated that this amount of perfumed liquid would be enough to pay the entire staff of the Rose Factory in the game for a year.

Dried leaf rose gas is a flammable and explosive liquid, a portion of which explodes and spreads the fragrance of the rose to a whole city of still-sleeping mirrors nearby.

Even if Bai Liu had figured out how to tackle the dried-leaf rose with blood lucerne branches, there would have been a fair number of less tolerant dried-leaf roses that would have wilted as a result in the early days of the disaster, before all order was established and functioning.

--for example, mothers who are still breastfeeding and newborns who are just one month old.

The group of players cautiously made their way to the end of the cage when someone twitched his nose and frowned, "...... I smell a very strong scent of roses."

The words instantly put all the team on alert as they raised their torches and searched the dungeon carefully, walking countless times in front of the glass vessel that bore the huge rose liquid.

But something strange happened, it was as if they couldn't see the glass cabinet and could even pass right through it -

--It was as if they were in two different dimensional worlds from this glass cabinet that was about to explode.

"...... Strange, I do smell it, but why can't I see anything?" The team looked to the empty last cell, wrinkling their brows in confusion beyond belief, but eventually chose to turn away.

The team headed towards the exit on the ground floor, they switched on their comms and broadcast to Su Yang, " Team Su, you can smell the roses on the ground floor, but there is nothing on this floor."

Behind it, the heart countdown skipped a second, dropping from 9:00 to 8:59.

On the ground floor of the factory, outside the processors' dormitory, Su Yang kicks open the door.

Su Yang walked into the dusty dormitory floor and looked around warily with his gun in his hand before finally pinning it to the back of his waist.

He wrinkled his brow at the empty dormitory and lifted his collar to inform, "One floor of dormitory floor, I didn't find anything here either, but I just smelled a very strong smell of decomposing bodies ......"

"I thought I'd find the dozen missing employees here for a month, and no sign of them ......" Su Yang sighed, then perked up again, "No news can be good news, too. Maybe they're still alive."

"Let's all get our heads up and in addition to searching for the apparatus used to secretly make rose perfume in this factory, let's also be on the lookout for the dozen or so employees who were found to have disappeared from the employee list when we came to search this factory a month ago ......"

"Most of these employees are mobile high-risk people who come to work abroad, no one will notice if they go missing, they might still be alive, have the team ready to rescue them at any time ......"

As she speaks, Su Yang walks outside.

In another space behind Su Yang, a dozen pairs of rotting, maggot-ridden eyes stare at him motionlessly.

Eight minutes and forty-seven seconds until the explosion.

"Eight minutes and forty-seven seconds to go." Looking at the time on the dial, Bai Liu calmly informs.

"It's as fast as it can go!" Mu Sicheng gritted his teeth, his motorbike tyres almost scraping fire on the cold hard ground from the high speed spin, and he cursed in his haste, "Shit! If it's an explosion of that scale in the game, it should take a very large container of perfume, so why can't the people who went to check it out see anything!"

"It's impossible not to see." Bai Liu said blandly, "In an effort to minimise the danger of the Rose perfume, the Heresy Handling Bureau investigation has crossed the line to prevent it from coming for me."

"Normally not to mention a bottle of rose perfume, normally they wouldn't have missed a single rose seed."

Mu Sicheng was stunned: "Then why ......"

"Because the being who planned the game The Rose Factory to land in [reality] has a world authority above theirs, it's like ordinary people can't hear anything about the game in this world." The night wind blew Bai Liu's forehead hair back and swayed as he raised his eyes to the factory not far away, "These ordinary people who want to protect others can't see or touch the world related to the game."

"The game designers gave that factory manager a fabricated [inner world] that hid the real Rose Factory in order to protect the factory from being able to run properly in [reality]."

Mu Sicheng exhales a cool, cold breath: "It's the same design as the Rose Factory game, isn't it?"

"Yes." Bai Liu squinted at the fierce night breeze, "From what I understand, Tang Erda, they are monitoring these factories that could potentially produce perfume 24/7, yet this factory continues to produce rose perfume for export under this monitoring, which is illogical in itself."

"Unless they're making the perfume in the inner world and then flipping it over to sell it in reality, so it's completely untraceable, right?" Mu Sicheng asked rhetorically.

Bai Liu: "That's right."

Bai Liu continued, "Not only that, but the in-game newspapers state that before the explosion, members of the Bureau of Heresy Processing repeatedly searched the factory, but instead of issuing any notifications for the city's citizens to evacuate urgently, they simply stayed in place until the bomb exploded."

"It proves they didn't see anything of a dangerous nature."

"Most likely." Bai Liu looked up at the approaching factory, "- all they saw was an empty factory that had been flipped out as a front."

"There won't be anything in there,"

"Team Su, it's an empty factory." After searching the entire factory, the team reported back to Su Yang, "There's nothing in there."

Su Yang's brow furrowed as he looked up at the factory, faded and old in the night, with a deep sense of foreboding growing.

He turned back to the car to retrieve some special night vision devices for another search, but the moment he opened the door, a hand reached out to Su Yang as if he had expected him to return for them.

Su Yang looked at the person sitting in the car and was stunned, "Why are you here? I thought I told you to stay at the Heresy Bureau and get some rest?"

Lu Yizhan, who was sitting in the back seat of the car, scratched his head and said with a bitter smile, "Captain Su, I thought about it, this is related to Bai Liu, if he really did it, I, as a public official around him, did not take responsibility for supervision and could not be blamed, so on second thought, I still came along."

Lu Yizhan lifted his eyes, exhaled deeply and looked towards Su Yang: "Please, Captain Su, let me search with you!"

Su Yang was silent for a while, but finally, helplessly defeated by Lu Yizhan's gaze that was almost staring him through the eyes, he nodded: "It's an empty factory, there's no danger, come if you want."

Lu Yizhan breathed a sigh of relief and got out of the car to follow Su Yang, who was preparing a second search, into the factory.

6 minutes and 31 seconds until the explosion.

The motorbike hummed to a steady, sideways turn and stopped in front of the factory.

A quick glance at Bai Liu reveals several vehicles with Dangerous Heresy Bureau signs parked in front of the factory.

Bai Liu rode in one of these cars on his way to the Heresy Bureau and was impressed by the creepy octopus sign.

Bai Liu and Mu Sicheng find a place to hide as soon as they get out of the car - the Heretics are patrolling outside and now that they are both escaped heretics and criminal robbers, they are both wanted by the Heretics and will only be arrested on sight if they show themselves.

Now being arrested is second nature, Tang Erda can help with that, but dealing with being arrested is a waste of their time.

"How do I get in? Break in?" Mu Sicheng looked to Bai Liu who glanced at his electronic watch and grimaced even more, "Only six minutes left!"

Bai Liu's eyes fell immovably on the factory: "Walk right into it."

He touched the reverse cross and the system coin returned by Tang Erda at his collar.

[System Warning: Props not related to core desires are prohibited in reality - Zilla Zilla - Ban - Stop - -]

The rebellious electric zing faded.

[System Alert: Does player Bai Liu use the Transcendental Prop (Reversing Eye)?

[This item provides a glimpse of the hidden evil truth]

[OK.]

Bai Liu removes a glass marble-shaped eye with a rose floating and blooming in its centre, which he holds up between Mu Sicheng and himself.

"Close your left eye and look into this eye, and we can enter the inner world of the factory."

Before Mu Sicheng had time to think about Bai Liu's intentions in asking him to do this, he subconsciously closed his left eye in obedience to his words.

The rose in the eye blooms slowly, dazzling the eyes as the otherwise lush landscape around them withers faster, the howls of rotting corpses and the skulls of who knows what appear at their feet.

Mu Sicheng took a deep breath as he covered his head and pushed the eyeball away and took two steps back.

Mu Sicheng, who had just raced for so long without any discomfort, now just looked at the eye for a second and felt a little sick to his stomach - a feeling of mental contamination.

They entered a dark and realistic [inner world].

Bai Liu did not feel affected in the slightest as he gathered his eyes and turned to look at the factory behind him - the factory, which had been empty and silent, was now lit up, with shadows, human and ghostly, coming and going in the dim light, carrying dustpans for the delivery of roses.

-- Exactly the same scene as in The Rose Factory.

Bai Liu took Mu Sicheng's wrist and ran inside: "Go."

"Wait! Do you know where the bombs and perfume are kept?!" Mu Sicheng tried to pull Bai Liu back, "At least identify the location so we can rush in, otherwise this isn't a giveaway?"

"I'm guessing it's the cage at the far end of the dungeon on the ground floor." Bai Liu, who was running, looked back at Mu Sicheng for a moment. "Someone told me."

Mu Sicheng was dumbfounded: "Who told you that?"

Bai Liu had little expression on his face: " Lu Yizhan, a fool."

"Hey! Hey! How come I don't know when he told you! Was it during the time when Hearts was blocked? Tell me about it, Bai Liu!"

Bai Liu doesn't say a word, doesn't care about the screaming Mu Sicheng, just pulls him towards the factory.

Within the game of The Rose Factory, Lu Yizhan, who serves as a scent tester, is imprisoned in the last cage of the prison on the ground floor.

And Lu Yizhan, the fool, if he was caught with a group of people after the bombing, must have applied for his own detention in the most fragrance-contaminated, aroma-infested place in order to protect the others, and to suffer the most severe torture instead.

-- and is there a more polluted place in the whole of the Rose Factory than where it exploded ten years ago?

Bai Liu didn't think so, and I guess this guy Lu Yizhan didn't think so either.

--so he was held in that place where the explosion took place for ten whole years.

Bai Liu bypassed the factory guards and entered through the back door. As he passed through the corridor Mu Sicheng sharply put down a few shambling carrion before turning the corner and walking to the entrance to the basement level.

Mu Sicheng turned on the light of his mobile phone torch and shone it on Bai Liu as they walked down and they made their way in until they reached the last cage.

A huge, glass vessel opening continued to billow out a light pink smoke, and the entire cage was filled with the wafting aroma of roses.

The countdown on the glassware has reached four minutes.

"What do we do with it?" Mu Sicheng covered his mouth and nose and asked Bai Liu in a jarring voice, "Do we move it out? Or just smash it up?"

Bai Liu gazed at the vessel for less than a second and spoke calmly, "It's too late."

"What's too late?!" Mu Sicheng's mind wandered as he subconsciously looked at the countdown on the bomb, "Isn't there more than four minutes left?"

Bai Liu's eyes moved down to the bomb at the bottom of the glassware: "It's no use smashing it, the real bomb is not this timed one, this one is just a [lighter], and the real bomb is these perfumed liquids, and these gases that are bubbling out."

"Dry leaf rose gas, these perfumes would be some kind of liquid gas analogue, even if we smashed this glass jar or got rid of this bomb, as long as the liquid was still there, the explosion could still go off without a hitch as long as someone brought in any little spark."

"If the game designer had to make this factory explode tonight, then he could have used anyone in this factory to do so using the large amount of perfumed liquid in this factory, and we can't guard against that."

At this point, Bai Liu is still not panicking: " - unless all the original perfume stored in this factory is consumed at once, they can always create an explosion from the inner world and then flip to the real world at the moment of the explosion. "

Mu Sicheng let go of the hand covering his mouth and nose, his face tense: "What then?"

"Evacuate the people." Bai Liu raised his eyes, "And then preemptively blow up this factory."

------

Tang Erda has commandeered a passing, high-end private car, which Muke is now driving at full speed to the factory.

Muke and Liu Jiayi were in the back seat of the car. The owner of the requisitioned car was reluctant to lend it, but Muke gave him a credit card for over three million dollars and bought the car outright, so Tang Erda and the others could make a quick trip to the factory.

"Still can't get through?" Muke looked anxiously in the rearview mirror.

Tang Erda said quietly, "I don't think we'll be able to get through, they're always switched off when they're on a mission, if we want to contact them we'll have to go back to the Directorate headquarters and use the radio FM that intervenes with them."

"It's too late." Liu Jiayi countered the offer without thinking, " Bai Liu they should be here, give them a call and ask what the situation is there."

No sooner had Liu Jiayi's words left his lips than Bai Liu's call came through.

He called Tang Erda: "Captain Tang, is there any way to disperse these citizens within the blast range in a short period of time?"

"A city-wide air-raid alert." Tang Erda replied quickly, but soon he clenched his fists, "But that one requires a lot of evidence of an imminent high risk situation to activate, my privileges are only for dealing with heretics in the Bureau, I can't activate that level of alert."

"But we can't prove it, we can't even prove to these people who aren't in the game that the factory is about to explode because it's in-game content and we'd be silenced if we said it, right?" Bai Liu asks rhetorically.

Tang Erda leaned helplessly against the back seat of the car, "...... Yes, they are completely deaf."

"The explosion ...... is still going to happen, isn't it?" Tang Erda asked hoarsely as she raised a hand over her eyes.

Bai Liu answered him honestly, "Yes."

"But maybe it's just an explosion." His voice remained calm and collected, not a ripple in it, "Just now Captain Tang, you said that if someone could prove that something extremely dangerous like a rose gas explosion would happen, then this alarm could be activated, right?"

Tang Erda slowly sat up straighter, realising that Bai Liu seemed to have found some kind of solution, but he couldn't think what it was.

"Yes." Tang Erda breathed raggedly, "Whatever the method, they simply won't receive the message you're trying to send, and will even think they're going crazy telling people to run."

"How are you going to prove that such terrible things as you have witnessed can really happen?"

Bai Liu's voice took on a lazy chuckle as he said, without a word, "Captain Tang, who has the privilege, remember to fish me out."

Then he simply hung up, leaving a bewildered Tang Erda behind.

--------

The wind hunts in the night as dawn approaches.

Bai Liu is finishing up his black trench coat that doesn't quite fit him.

After he smashed the glass jar and threw the time bomb far away and exploded it, they, the two outsiders, were indeed spotted by those Rose Factory people in the inner world.

Bai Liu and Mu Sicheng are discovered and chased around by the employees who, at the same time, are working feverishly to create a second explosion from a stockpile of rose perfume - exactly as Bai Liu had predicted.

To stall for time, Bai Liu left the fast-moving Mu Sicheng in the inner world to disrupt the staff preparing for the second blast, while he logged out of the inner world himself and was responsible for moving the city's population out of the blast zone.

Mu Sicheng asked Bai Liu and Tang Erda the same question before Bai Liu went out into the world - how are you going to convince these people that this is going to happen?

To convince these ordinary people who are not in the game that their world is a brutal game with monsters everywhere?

Especially since you've been banned.

The temperature in the real world was a little cold, so Bai Liu wore a trench coat that he had taken from the inner world to protect himself from the cold.

Bai Liu takes a step from the hidden stairwell at the back of the factory towards the top floor of the Rose Factory, a large red and white plastic loudspeaker that looks like it was used for staff training shouting hanging from his right wrist - the same one Bai Liu took from the inside world.

The moment he made it to the top floor, he was spotted by the team below who were closely inspecting the factory.

"There's a figure on the roof!"

"Is it the absconding factory manager! Hit the high beams over and see who it is!"

"Level 1 alert!"

Two unmistakable beams of high beam light swayed and were positioned on the figures on the top floor. Bai Liu squinted at the glare directed at his face, but he did not move and remained smoothly on the highest rooftop.

The cold night breeze blew Bai Liu's hair down the side of his face and the hem of his long, ill-fitting trench coat, the morning dew lingered around him, and the scent of roses fell on the soles of his feet.

The people below had recognised who he was.

"- it's Bai Liu!!!"

"How did he get here?! Alert the processing bureau! The fleeing heretic 0006 has appeared at the factory!"

" Team Tang says he is very dangerous! Has the power to control all heretics! What is he doing out here?!"

Su Yang and Lu Yizhan looked up in disbelief at Bai Liu, who seemed to have fallen from the sky.

Bai Liu, with that usual smile on his face, held up that loud speaker to his lips, "Good morning, everyone."

"Well, before I escaped, I decided to do something befitting my status--" Bai Liu lifted his eyes and his smile thickened in the growing wind, "-- -as a laid-off worker who has been identified as an anti-social personality, how can you not get back at society?"

"I lost my job, my friends, everything I had for no reason - and couldn't find anyone responsible for it, and had to be branded a monster and imprisoned in a cage by you."

"How could I not retaliate?" Bai Liu hooked the corners of his mouth and whispered, "I've decided to give you a taste of what it's like to become a monster too."

"I have decided to blow up this entire factory, to let the dried leaf rose permeate the world and to make all of you my slaves."

After a few seconds of stagnation, someone shouted at the top of their lungs, "- Contact the city, sound the air-raid siren and get all residents to retreat out of the blast range!!!"

"Someone is maliciously spreading the gas addictive substance!!!"

Su Yang looked creepily at Bai Liu, standing on the top floor with one hand in his trench coat pocket.

The man was smiling at him amusedly through the morning breeze and the waning night, and said to him in a casual, languid manner with his mouth.

"The scent of roses on you, does it smell good, Captain Su ?"