Chapter 860: Chapter 818: Is This Not a Martial Arts Game??_1
Without a doubt, the interior of the Teaching Workshop was of exceptional, luxurious refinement.
After all, it was officially managed, attending to high-ranking officials. The courtesans were not only beautiful, impeccably dressed, of high class; they were often proficient in music, skilled in singing and dancing, and had a tragic background, plus a lingering charm that evoked pity.
“How does this place resemble a prison at all?” Ivan was thoroughly baffled.
“Could it be that they don’t get wages for working here?” he tried to comprehend, “Then it really is a cruel form of punishment.”
“Of course not.” His Uncle immediately shook his head, denying his assumption, “The Teaching Workshop is managed by officials appointed by the royal court; their wages are allocated each month, and withholding wages seldom happens.”
“What?” Ivan was shocked once again, “So they are civil servants?”
Ivan tried to follow the logic and reached an absurd conclusion—
In ancient Huaxia, could someone become a civil servant just because a family member committed a crime?
His instincts told him that his conclusion was incorrect!
However, despite how hard he thought, his head itching from the effort, he still couldn’t figure out where he went wrong.
*
This is where the value of higher education comes into play.
Unlike Ivan Ivanov, who is more brawn than brains, Turner managed to understand this logic smoothly, thanks to the NPC’s explanation and Cloud Dream’s annotations. He figured out what the Teaching Workshop was.
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However, precisely because of his relatively comprehensive knowledge, he experienced an even more profound “cognitive shock” from a different perspective!
The shock was—
These splendid buildings, captivating dances, melodious music, and even this entire city…
All emerged more than 1300 years ago!
What was the situation in North America back then?
Were the native tribes fighting each other with crude stone and bone weapons, with hardly few iron tools to be found in the whole tribe?
But wasn’t that a fact he learned during the “Monster Tavern Contest”, an event that occurred on this land 4600 years ago?
Leaving a gap of a full 3300 years?
This astonishing time span left Turner so shocked that he was nearly speechless.
So much so that he followed the NPC and toured around the Teaching Workshop without any notice of the case clues. It was only when the “uncle” handed him a temporary badge and asked him to find the clues himself did he snap back to reality, realizing that he was in a woman’s boudoir.
This was precisely where the missing person had evaporated from.
Even though Turner felt clueless, since he was already there, he patiently began to search the room.
But unquestionably, this place would have been thoroughly searched by the previous investigators; if there were any clues, they certainly wouldn’t have left them for the players to find.
Turner searched and searched, even tearing apart the brocade quilts on the bed, still finding nothing.
Not wanting to give up, he squatted down and painstakingly examined the ground, hoping to find blood spots or something of the sort—he did watch some detective series on TV after all.
Thus, he continued to search, until he felt a crick in his back and his eyes began to sting, yet he found no traces.
Until he arrived at the southwest corner of the room, he suddenly felt cool at the nape of his neck and subconsciously touched it.
When he looked at his fingers, he found that they were stained red!
What had dripped down was actually a droplet of blood!
Turner quickly looked up at the ceiling and noticed a black figure—its body black like ink and details unclear, except for a bloody mouth.
And this shadow, the moment Turner looked up, abruptly opened its hideous bloody mouth and lunged towards him!
“Fuck!”
Caught off-guard, Turner violently fell backward and instinctively lifted his arm to shield himself!
Yet, the next moment, his hand did not register the anticipated pain.
Turner, still terrified, slowly lowers his hand, only to find that the mysterious black shadow has disappeared.
With his heart pounding, he slowly scans the room, trying to find traces of the shadow, but finds nothing, not even the blood on his hand had disappeared.
It seemed as if the scenario just now had ensued due to him squatting for too long, causing dizziness and visual hallucinations.
But by taking a quick look at the live broadcast room, the screens full of “fuck!” “wtf!” “wocao!” would tell him that it was not a hallucination.
“What on earth is that?!” Turner was both shocked and confused, “Isn’t this a martial arts game revolving around cold weapon combat?!”
He had spent quite a while to have a basic understanding of the term [Martial Arts].
And then all of a sudden, Cloud Dream pulled this on him??
And it happened when he was entirely focused on finding clues…It almost scared him to death!
At this moment, the system prompt popped out again——
[Player triggers special events, awakening the innate skill…]
[Awakening completed, you have obtained the innate skill —— Spiritual Vision]
“Spiritual vision?” Turner opened the character panel, and indeed, under the category of [Martial Arts], he saw this special skill——
[Spiritual Vision]: Concentrate your mind in a highly focused state, and see what is invisible to the ordinary people.
“????”
Turner is questioning the game system even more now!
But this didn’t prevent him from taking a deep breath to calm his emotions, and then focusing his mind, trying to enter the [Spiritual Vision] state.
In the beginning, it wasn’t going very well, and it wasn’t until 5 minutes later that he successfully entered this state, immediately feeling like everything in the room had “pixelated”.
It was kind of like…the dream at the start of the game!
And in this pseudo-real perspective, where he had been squatting just now, there now lay a bloody lung!
“What the hell!”
Turner was taken aback and stepped back three steps.
He turned his head to observe other parts of the room and immediately spotted a new scene by the window – a dark figure penetrating through the window, jumping into the room, crouching on the floor.
Then, in the middle of the room, a third scene appeared: The dark figure pounced on a man, opening his clothes, opened his chest, tore out his bloody lungs and then—
Very carefully, holding the lung, went to the southwest corner of the room to put it down and then returned to the already dead man’s body and began to gnaw frantically at his chest!
“Fuck!””
“The missing man…was eaten?” Turner couldn’t believe it.
The missing man’s uncle, one of the NPCs, just told him that they suspected the missing man had eloped with one of the Teaching Workshop’s official courtesan.
As such, he thought: this was a romantic tale of star-crossed lovers in the Tang Dynasty who managed to break free from family and bureaucratic constraints to pursue their freedom of love.
And now all of sudden, it turned into a horrifying horror film!
He was eaten by the dark figure??
What about that woman?
Don’t tell me she was eaten as well??
Turner’s head started to tingle.
The development of the story was simply too outrageous, making it very difficult for him to digest it all at once.
Additionally…how on earth was he going to explain this to the NPCs?
“Could it be…” He looked at the lung in the southwest corner of the room and had a terrible idea.
Hesitant for a few seconds, he walked over, controlled his urge to vomit, and stretched out his hand to try and touch the lung part. He wanted to see if he could pick it up.
Maybe he could use that to finish the task?
But, he didn’t know if it was fortunate or unfortunate: His hand went through the image of the lung, and he didn’t touch anything.
At this moment, he had reached the limit of [Spiritual Vision], he could feel his forehead sweating and his mind becoming dizzy, unable to maintain it any longer.
In the blink of an eye, this special sensory ability disappeared like smoke, and the room returned back to its previous normal state.
All that was left was Turner, standing on the spot, his mind full of confusion.
“What on earth is going on with this case?”
“A case of a psychopath serial killer? Cannibal from the Tang Dynasty? But why didn’t he eat the lungs?”
“Was it because it didn’t taste good?”