Qi Yifang heard Liu Jiayi suddenly say that and looked completely baffled.

“What, what time?!”

Liu Jiayi grabbed Qi Yifang’s wrist and broke into a run.

“With your level of intelligence, you won’t understand it for a while. If you want to clear the game, then come help me!”

Qi Yifang, dragged along and forced to run: “???”

Even if I really don’t understand, Little Witch, saying it that bluntly is way too discouraging!

Liu Jiayi’s gaze remained fixed as she ran, and irritation rose inside her.

Such a simple riddle. She actually hadn’t thought of it until Bai Liu reminded her just now!

The [True End] route of this game—she should have realized it was a collection game the moment she saw the keyword “dismemberment,” just like The Last Train to Blast Off.

Rose Factory had a decryption branch buried beneath its simple upgrade branch, and the clues for that decryption branch were the direct leads to collecting Tawil’s body parts!

The hint she had obtained was—

[Before true death arrives, the time on your body is unique and irreversible.]

In this game, there was only one thing that suggested both true death and irreversible time.

It was the newspaper display case recording the major events of Rose Factory throughout the years, the one she and Bai Liu had seen when they first entered the factory!

Every expansion and development of Rose Factory had been accompanied by the deaths of countless people. It could be called a literal path of bloody development. For the people of this game world, that was true death, and that was irreversible time.

But for outsiders like her and Bai Liu, this time was false. It could be reversed. It could be changed.

However, if they died in this game, the time on their bodies would also freeze there, becoming one of Rose Factory’s death incidents, recorded in the newspapers and posted on that wall.

That was the key point!

Panting, Liu Jiayi found the display case she had seen earlier near the main entrance of Rose Factory.

Newspapers were pasted neatly inside the case.

Liu Jiayi stared at the newspaper wall, her eyes narrowing slightly. She began counting softly from top to bottom while using a marker to mark the dates and times where death incidents had occurred.

After Liu Jiayi finished marking all the numbers, Qi Yifang looked at those dense numbers representing death, and a numb chill crept up his back.

It hadn’t seemed like much before they were filtered out. But once Liu Jiayi filtered and organized them, Qi Yifang also noticed that something was wrong.

The distribution of these numbers representing time was strangely neat in its rows and columns. The shape faintly resembled a square.

“As expected, it’s like this.” Liu Jiayi took a step back. She looked at the wall she had drawn on, her expression grave as she exhaled. “The range of rows and columns where death dates appear is 400 by 400.”

“Exactly the acreage of the Rose Factory flower fields.”

“Sixteen thousand.”

With the decryption having reached this step, everything was already very clear.

Tawil’s dismembered body was buried beneath the flower fields, and every number on the newspaper wall corresponded to a plot of the flower field.

Now the question was—

Under which number, or which numbers, had Tawil’s body been buried?

There were ten numbers from 0 to 9.

Which number would that psychopath who buried Tawil have chosen?

Or would he have chosen several from every number to bury him under?

Was it his birthday?

Was it the year he obtained his foster parents’ property, his wife’s property, or the year he bought the statue?

What number held special meaning to him?

No!

There were too many numbers!

There were no special marks in that man’s diary, and no typical number that performance-style serial killers liked to repeatedly display!

There was no way to judge!

Liu Jiayi’s face tightened. She gritted her teeth and scrutinized the entire wall of numbers again.

Deafening sounds of battle came from outside the window.

The first-floor display case where Liu Jiayi stood was very close to the place where Bai Liu and Tang Erda were fighting. The intensity of the battle made the space around Liu Jiayi feel as though it were shaking. The lights and walls trembled violently, and dust and debris kept falling from the wall, as if the entire place would collapse completely in the next second.

Thinking in that kind of environment was clearly not easy.

Especially when she knew that her teammate, Bai Liu, was fighting someone whose panel values were dozens of times higher than his.

Even Qi Yifang, an outsider who had no idea who was fighting whom, couldn’t help becoming alert and wary. He took out his Weather Forecaster and looked around.

“What’s that noise?”

Liu Jiayi took a deep breath.

Against the backdrop of violent tremors, she discarded all her complicated thoughts and closed her eyes.

No.

Her line of thinking was wrong.

She shouldn’t consider the problem from the perspective of a psychopathic big boss inside a game.

That was the conventional decryption mindset, but it wasn’t suitable for Rose Factory.

Because this game wasn’t simply a game.

Rose Factory was a game specially prepared for Bai Liu by someone, or by something.

Bai Liu had already told her that.

Everything designed in this game, including this psychopathic first-generation factory manager, existed to stimulate Bai Liu and achieve some purpose belonging to the designer.

If she thought from this perspective—

What number would the person behind the scenes choose to bury the body of someone who held special meaning to Bai Liu?

Debris rustled down past Liu Jiayi’s face.

Qi Yifang shouted anxiously at her, “Little Witch! This building won’t hold much longer!”

Liu Jiayi opened her eyes.

“It’s six!”

Bai Liu’s former name.

Bai Six!

“Qi Yifang, help me record the coordinate numbers where the number six appears on the left!” Liu Jiayi roared at Qi Yifang amid the chaos. “I’ll record the ones on the right!”

Qi Yifang coughed, covered his mouth, and made an OK gesture.

As sand and stones kept falling, he used the Weather Forecaster to shield the top of his head and leaned close to the display case, memorizing rapidly.

On the right, Liu Jiayi pressed herself against the right-side display case. Her eyes moved rapidly as she muttered under her breath, also memorizing at high speed.

Just as their speed memorization was nearing its end, an earth-shaking explosion suddenly erupted from the corridor beside them.

A twisted, human-shaped object crashed through the corridor wall and slammed into the ground of the open-air plaza, smashing out a huge pit.

Along with the crisp sound of limbs fracturing, the person who had been smashed into the ground let out a heart-rending cry of pain.

Very soon, blood seeped from all seven orifices of the person in the pit.

His chest cavity had caved in. Slowly, he turned his head, his pupils dilating as he died.

Liu Jiayi’s pupils contracted sharply as she turned her head.

She saw that the person who had just died in the pit had a face familiar to her.

He wore the uniform of the Dangerous Heretic Management Bureau. His pale-colored eyes were deathly still and lifeless, and his face was bloodless. His limbs had snapped and twisted inward in a strange posture.

The work ID on his chest was soaked in blood, but Liu Jiayi still recognized him.

This person was Su Yang.

—

Time rewinds to fifteen minutes ago.

In another corridor across the open-air plaza, Bai Liu leaned weakly against the wall with his hands raised in surrender, standing face-to-face with Tang Erda, who was pointing a gun at him.

“I admit defeat. How about a halftime break?” Bai Liu leaned lazily against the wall. He looked at Tang Erda, who was aiming the gun at him, with a half-smile, then reached out and pushed Tang Erda’s gun aside. “Captain Tang, can you rest for a while before beating me again?”

“You can’t use this gun for the time being anyway. How about putting it away?”

Bai Liu’s injuries were severe.

Internal bleeding seeped from the corners of his mouth after being beaten, and his face was scraped from being dragged. However, there were no gunshot wounds. They were all injuries caused by physical impact.

Tang Erda did not want to resolve him so easily with a single shot.

Perhaps even this former Third Branch Captain himself had never expected that he would actually choose the method he had once loathed and hated most to treat his enemy.

But no matter how he tortured Bai Liu, he could not see pain identical to his own on Bai Liu’s face.

Bai Liu remained calm.

He even looked at him with a smile.

Clearly, Bai Liu was the one being tortured. But every time Tang Erda threw a punch, every time he struck Bai Liu heavily in the abdomen and the face, every time he heard the other man’s muffled groan of pain, Tang Erda seemed to suffer ten million times more than Bai Liu.

Tang Erda felt pain because he was torturing someone.

And he felt anger because an innocent person was being tortured for no reason.

This had been his original intention in choosing to become a member of the Dangerous Heretic Management Bureau. Even now, after he had gone mad, it was something he could not change.

And now, anger and pain intertwined indistinguishably on his face.

In Tang Erda’s deep blue eyes, as he stared straight at Bai Liu, there lived a monster named Bai Six.

Even being a bad person required talent.

Unfortunately, Tang Erda did not have that talent.

Bai Liu tilted his head back against the wall and lowered his eyes to look at Tang Erda, whose breathing was heavy and whose expression was twisted.

“Captain Tang, let yourself go.”

“You aren’t good at doing things like this.”

Every expression on Tang Erda’s face vanished in an instant.

He looked up indifferently, used his left hand to clamp around Bai Liu’s wrist, and swung his entire body to the side.

Landing.

Folding.

Lifting the bone.

Treading down.

Tang Erda knelt condescendingly on Bai Liu’s broken shinbone. With his left hand, he locked Bai Liu’s jaw and forced it upward.

“It hurts a lot, doesn’t it?”

Bai Liu was covered in cold sweat from the pain, but his expression remained calm.

“Yes. It hurts quite a bit.”

“It doesn’t seem like something you could do.”

Tang Erda’s expression couldn’t help twisting again.

“This is the interrogation method you once used on Su Yang!”

“When he was transported back, almost every bone in his body had been snapped! You left a tape inside his stomach telling me—”

The roses in his eyes bloomed more and more intensely, but his voice carried hatred carved into the bone, and tears.

“You said the things I fucking did to you were just child’s play.”

“You said you would personally come and teach me.”

“This is what fucking counts as interrogation!”

—

Author’s Note:

This was indeed done by Bai Six.

He has also done many other bad things for no reason. Simply because he felt like playing, he went and tortured people.

Bai Six is a typical psychopathic pleasure-seeker, and that includes torturing Tang Erda.

He simply enjoys torturing people whose universal values are very firm, people who are good, people whose behavioral logic is different from his own. Then he slowly watches the other party degenerate, become bad, and finally destroy themselves.

Originally, Tang Erda did not know how to do any of this.

He was forced and taught by Bai Six.

Bai Six simply likes seeing Tang Erda go mad like this. That is why, in every world line, he targets Captain Su and then sends his “results” to Tang Erda to see, driving him insane.

To put it simply, what Bai Six likes torturing most are good people like Lu Yizhan.

If Lu Yizhan were to encounter a completely mature Bai Six, he would be the next Su Yang.