Chapter 177: Christmas tree branches?

Shanghai , Nanjing Road.

Blood trickled down the cracks in the bricks of the ground to both sides of the road, quickly outlining a dark brown mark. Some of the blood has long since dried up, others are still warm, and a dozen bodies lie on the ground staring up at the sky with wide eyes.

On the first floor of one of the shops on the side of the road, the tall, burly foreign man looked confused at first when The black tower beeped, and then his eyes went wide as if he had been struck by something violent.

Luo Fengcheng exclaimed, "Jackass!"

Tang Qiao quickly ran up to catch Jackass as she fell backwards, half a step because she was too strong.

The members of the Atak group all looked at Luo Fengcheng in confusion. Luo Fengcheng narrowed his eyes, looked out the window at the calm Nanjing Road and quickly said, "Come on, let's go back to the base first!"

Meanwhile, the 'earthquake' that had shaken the city of Beijing subsided as Xu Yunsheng stopped talking. Not knowing if there would be another 'earthquake', Tang Mo and Fu Wenduo looked at each other and tacitly decided not to enter the building.

The same is true of Ruan Wangshu.

The group met in the shade of the playground and Ruan Wangshu said straight away, "At 5am on 25 May, that was the last hour of play in 'Eve's Game'. Xu Yunsheng looked arrogant and didn't take us seriously, and gave us a challenge letter straight away." It was a letter of notice, but it was a challenge, "in fact she had plans."

At number nine in the time chart, Xu Yunsheng was never a fool.

Tang Mo nodded: "Yes, one hour, if she eliminates us, she can open the reward. If we kill her, it doesn't necessarily open the reward."

" Xu Yunsheng is giving you a challenge, which sounds like it has nothing to do with us people." A lackluster voice rang out.

Tang Mo followed the voice and saw the flat-headed young man who had dodged Fu Wenduo's flying knife.

Ruan Wangshu stared at him grimly and let out a sneer from his throat, "You don't want the reward of Eve?"

The flat-headed youth lost his smile, "What do you mean?"

Ruan Wangshu looked at the other Beijing players in the room: "Isn't the reason you agreed to cooperate and come here for the reward of Eve? In the whole of Beijing, the only way to get the Eve reward is to eliminate Xu Yunsheng and Ning Zheng. There are only two of us, and we only have two chances. In six days, we want to kill Xu Yunsheng and Xu Yunsheng wants to kill us." He pointed to himself and the three Tang Mo, "But there must be many returnees who will also take advantage of the chaos and look for opportunities to kill us. It's none of your business? ...... Other returnees can take advantage of the chaos to kill us, and you can also look for opportunities to kill Xu Yunsheng."

The flat-headed young man looked unchanged; that was the idea he had in mind, only to be nudged out of it.

No one expected Xu Yunsheng to issue such a challenge until now. She appeared to be challenging the Tang Mo four on her own, but in fact, her voice was heard throughout Beijing. Countless returnees heard her words and would have jumped at the chance to ambush her that day on the East Third Ring Road.

Xu Yunsheng used himself as bait to hook the four Tang Mo men. With the four Tang Mo's, he will hook all the Beijing returnees who want to open the reward. At the same time, ambitious Beijing players are bound to be there. In the midst of the chaos, Xu Yunsheng has a better chance of winning.

Chen Shanshan's voice was calm, "This duel is said to be Xu Yunsheng against us, but in reality it is simply a battle between the Earth players and the Returnees. To be honest, there are over five million Earth survivors and only 320,000 returnees, but I don't think we are stronger than them."

No one refuted Chen Shanshan's words.

Tang Mo : " Xu Yunsheng is actually protecting himself by setting a time limit of one hour. An hour of fighting is still manageable, any longer and this war between returnees and survivors will be difficult to manage."

Practising Yu Zheng, who had been watching from the sidelines, said, "There really are no fools among the returnees."

Xu Yunsheng is not stupid. She used to only kill meat pigs, and now she's so arrogant to lay down a challenge. It's not that she's crazy, everything is under her control.

The men discussed the matter for a while longer and arranged to meet in six days' time at the third ring in the east. They tacitly agreed not to ask each other where they were going to hide; every extra word they said risked giving away their lives. They had only formed an alliance for the time being; they had never been friends.

Tang Mo Before he left, Ruan Wangshu suddenly asked, " Tang Mo, when you cleared The black tower level 1 hard mode before, The black tower said you were in China 2. Do you know Jackass, the official player in China 2, who started Eve's bonus ......?"

Tang Mo said faintly, "I don't know."

Ruan Wangshu looked at him slyly and hooked the corners of his mouth, "...... good."

The four men immediately left the 80th Form.

Ruan Wangshu did not know that the burly foreign man who was following Tang Mo was Jackass, but he sensed that Tang Mo must have known Jackass.

Finding a secluded residential building, Tang Mo looks directly at Chen Shanshan and gets right to the point: "Jackass-Clan, is that Jackass's full name? Is there a second player by that name in Shanghai?"

Chen Shanshan shakes his head: "It's Jackass. I didn't think Jackass would be the first player in China to open the bonus. Brother Tang Mo, it's now 13:51pm and The black tower has just reported 13:19pm. That's not Eve's game time."

Fu Wenduo : "Eliminating returnees outside of game time also gives you a bonus from the other side?"

Chen Shanshan hesitated for a moment and said, "I don't know. But my intuition tells me it's best not to try."

It was a quiet old neighbourhood, and Tang Mo found an empty house. Tang Mo poured the water on his wrist, which had been cut by the debris on the ground when he was carrying Chen Shanshan and jumping off a building.

The four of them are seated around the dining table, which happens to be a table for four in this household.

Tang Mo's fingers tapped on the table and after a moment he looked up, " Eve's reward, does this pop-up game feel similar to that surprise copy of Father Christmas, six months ago?"

Fu Wensheng recalls: "The surprise copy of Father Christmas, I remember that copy didn't give us any extra rewards at all. Everyone was forced to enter the copy and at the end of the game, the players who grabbed the Christmas branch at the beginning got the reward and those who didn't got no reward. Brother Tang , are you trying to say that Eve's game could be the same as this one?"

Tang Mo nodded and shook his head again, "That's not what I meant. I was just wondering what happens to the returnees if they can't open the rewards, and what happens to the Earth players if they can't get the rewards ......?"

Fu Wensheng : "What happens?"

Fu Wenduo said indifferently, "Not very good."

Tang Mo glances at him subconsciously.

Chen Shanshan pursed his lips, "Well, it's not great. Maybe this Eve reward is like a Christmas branch, it's not forced on every player. In fact, players can't have them all either. The returnees only have a chance to open the reward by eliminating 45 Earth players, in addition to finding the right way to open it. The odds of that are low, but maybe they can find the right way. Yet on the other side ...... Earth players have only 100 chances."

Fu Wensheng : "I know that there are only a hundred players on the time chart."

Tang Mo added: "And the time charts are fixed and no longer change. In other words, Earth players want to win this game and start the Eve reward, provided we have that reward. Worldwide, with over five million Earth survivors, even if we kill all the returnees on the Time Leaderboard, only one hundred players will get the reward."

In fact, Tang Mo had already realised that Eve's game was not a punishment game.

There is no penalty for failing to pass the game, only a loss of reward. Like "Cinderella's Food Chain Game", this game, called "Eve's Game #315", keeps reminding players that there is no penalty for failure and a reward for success. However ......

"I want this reward."

Chen Shanshan looked at Tang Mo in amazement.

Fu Wenduo's lips curled up, "Well, I want that reward too."

Tang Mo raised an eyebrow at him: "There are only two chances in the whole of Beijing, one for Xu Yunsheng and one for Ning Zheng."

Fu Wenduo : "Exactly two."

Tang Mo did not speak again.

This guy is really arrogant, Xu Yunsheng is not even a tenth of his arrogance.

In his mind, Tang Mo's face was all smiles.

Any ambitious player who wants to attack the tower and become more powerful is unlikely to give up the Eve reward. This is not a Christmas branch, this is a rare reward. Open the reward and get something that must be much more powerful than a Christmas branch.

The crowd discussed this for a while longer and returned to the topic they had started with.

Tang Mo : " How on earth did Jackass get Eve's rewards and turn them on?"

Neither Tang Mo nor Fu Wenduo had a clue about this matter, so they turned their attention to the short-haired girl.

Chen Shanshan looks calmly at the table, her eyes closed, as if she is thinking about something. Tang Mo waits quietly for her to answer.

In that short minute, Chen Shanshan's mind flashed through countless fragments. She imagined herself as Luo Fengcheng, in the character of her teacher, and in relation to her teacher's usual style of strategy, she imagined what she would do if she were Luo Fengcheng in the face of the upcoming The black tower 4.0 and the information that Jackass brought back from Beijing.

Chen Shanshan suddenly opened his eyes: "I'll join up with the other Shanghai players and just ambush them."

Chen Shanshan pulls a map out of her backpack and flips it open to a map of Shanghai. She stares at several districts in the centre of Shanghai with a torch-like gaze. Finally, she takes a pen and draws a circle on Nanjing Road. She said, "Before I left Shanghai, my teacher had caught a transparent person who said that Nanjing Road was a forbidden area and that most transparent people did not dare to enter, but the person disappeared before he could say why."

Having been away from Shanghai for over a month, Chen Shanshan has learned more and more about the Transparent People. She quickly analyses: "No-go areas, because there are powerful players here! Just like Xu Yunsheng, most of the returnees who saw her were killed by her, so there must be a powerful returnee on Nanjing Road who uses Nanjing Road as a stronghold!"

Tang Mo was direct: "Willow Dash, Willow Plain! Time Ranking #53 and #59."

Chen Shanshan: "That's them!" She draws a small circle on the map and circles The black tower hovering over Nanjing Road, "Any returnee who can use Nanjing Road as a stronghold must be very arrogant and uncaring. When the black tower was updated, they must have been on Nanjing Road, or even underneath the black tower. The teacher would have ambushed them here and attacked them. It was in this battle that Jackass killed one person and gained his reward."

" How Jackass turned on the rewards."

Chen Shanshan : "I don't know."

The four men deliberated for a while longer, but still did not come up with an answer. But they did discover another important thing.

Tang Mo laughs: "All the other copies of Eve games should be as safe as the Cinderella copies. There's no penalty for failure and a reward for passing. The rewards aren't always great ......" Tang Mo thinks of the small, broken pumpkin, "but it's better than nothing. It's six days where we can do some preparation and engage in some games at the same time."

As Tang Mo had guessed, the four of them went into two more copies after that. Once they encountered a team full of Earth players, and once they encountered a returnee with very little rest time.

There are rewards for passing the game and no penalties for failure.

Tang Mo was given two props that looked pretty useless.

Fu Wenduo: "That's what The black tower facilitates for returnees. This game, where violence is forbidden, is the only way for the weaker returnees to eliminate us and open up the rewards."

Tang Mo : "But they didn't manage to knock us out."

The black tower gives the opportunity, it's up to the individual to take it.

Soon, six days passed.

At 00:00 on the night of 24 May, Tang Mo and his team were ambushed on the top floor of a tall building next to the East Third Ring Road. The view was wide enough to take in the 10 kilometre-long elevated road. They had been waiting upstairs for twenty-eight hours, and the earlier they arrived, the less they had to worry about being ambushed.

At 4am on 25 May, it was pitch black on the elevated Third Ring Road in Beijing.

A chilly evening breeze blew across the road, and the elevated road was littered with crashed and abandoned vehicles. The smell of abandoned desolation permeates the darkness and Tang Mo is patient as he stares unblinkingly at the long stretch of elevated road, waiting for the first person to appear.