Chapter 223: Reality

In the night, a huge motorcycle with tawny trim swings by, kicking up a lot of dust.

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

The factory that was found to be secretly manufacturing rose perfume was built in the suburbs, and now, at this very moment, it's time for Su Yang and her team to go and investigate.

Su Yang held the Heretic Bureau's special gun to his side, and with his back to the factory door, he cautiously peered in.

After looking around, Su Yang steps out, lifts his collar, and speaks into the small microphone above him:

"No one, it's safe."

At the same time an answer came from his headset:

"Team Sue, we don't have one on our side, either. It's safe."

"Sector 2 is also safe."

"...... Sector 3 is safe too, Team Su is so weird ......" the voice in the headset hesitantly paused, "It doesn't even look like anyone is working here look, the ground is covered in ash, the latest footprints are our own."

"The last time we came to inspect this plant, 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 likely that a new heresy has appeared that accompanies the Dry Leaf Rose, or that this new heresy has spawned the Dry Leaf Rose."

"That would be this heretic's ability."

Su Yang continued his search downward, stepping through the leafy piazza to the processor's dormitory, where he stared at the old, dysfunctional door of the dormitory, and without hesitation, stretched out his foot and kicked it against the crack at the bottom end of the door, which had buckled due to the humidity.

The eyes of the corpses lying on the dormitory bed opened, they twisted their limbs to stand up, their rotting eyes rolled to look at the rickety door that was about to be kicked in, scooting their limbs towards climbing out of the bed, and moving towards the doorway with only their white-boned hands.

Meanwhile, the basement level of the factory.

The team pinched their noses as they marched through the smelly, unearthly prison replica layer, scanning the neatly arranged iron cages, one by one, with complicated glances, as a team member in the back held up a nighttime video camera to carefully film the structure of the factory's interior.

The green screen of the night camera shed an unsettling light on this dimly lit underground.

"...... These cages are built to hold who knows what ......" one of the team members wrinkled his nose and took a few steps inside, "And a month ago when we came here to when we seized this factory, it wasn't like this at all."

"Yes." Another member of the team chimed in, "Not only that, but we've been keeping people in our midst to keep a close watch on this place, and there's no way for this factory to function at all, so I don't know what they're still producing and transporting the perfume by."

They talked as they walked inside.

Inside the cage at the end of the basement floor, there is a huge, three-meter-high cylindrical glass cabinet vessel as thick as four people's hugs, and the openings of this vessel that are not closed are emitting rosy-red smoke, and when you look inside, this vessel is full of brightly colored dried leafy roses and Wa Si perfume liquids.

There was a time bomb taped to the glass cabinet that was counting down with less than ten minutes remaining on it.

If Bai Liu were here, he might 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 Wa Si is a flammable and explosive liquid, a portion of which explodes, spreading the rose's aroma to an entire nearby city of still-sleeping mirrors.

Even if Bai Liu had figured out how to fix the dry leaf roses with blood reishi branches, there would be a fair number of dry leaf roses that were less tolerant that would wither as a result in the early days of the catastrophe, before all the order had been established and functioning.

-such as mothers who are still breastfeeding and newborns who are just one month old.

The group of team members carefully made their way to the end of the cage when someone moved their nose and frowned, "...... I smell a very strong rose scent."

The words instantly put all the team members on alert, and they lifted their flashlights and searched the dungeon carefully, walking countless times in front of the glass vessel that held the huge rose liquid.

But something strange happened, it was like they couldn't see this glass cabinet, they could even go right through it-

--as if they and this glass case that was about to explode were in two different dimensions.

"...... Strange, I do smell it, but why can't I see anything?" The team looked to that empty last compartment of the cage and wrinkled their brows in confusion, but ultimately chose to turn away.

The team headed toward the exit of the basement level as they turned on their comms and broadcast to Su Yang, "Team Su, you can smell the roses on the basement level, but there's nothing on this level."

Behind it, the countdown to the time bomb jumped a second, from 9:00 to 8:59.

On the first floor of the factory, outside the door to the processor's dormitory, Su Yang kicks the door open.

Su Yang stepped into the dusty dormitory floor and looked around warily with her gun, eventually pinning it to the back of her waist.

He wrinkled his brow at this empty dormitory and lifted his collar to inform, "One floor of the dormitory building, and I haven't found anything here either, but I just smelled a very strong odor of rotting corpses ......"

"I thought I could find the dozen or so missing employees here, and it's been a month with no sign of them ......" Su Yang sighs, then perks up, "No news can be good news, too. Maybe they're still alive."

"Everyone raise your spirits, in addition to searching for the instruments that secretly make rose perfume in this factory, we should also pay attention to searching for the dozen or so employees who disappeared from the employee list that we found when we came to search for this factory a month ago ......"

"Most of these employees are itinerant at-risk people who come from out of town to work, no one would notice if they went missing, they might still be alive, get the team ready to rescue them at any time ......"

While talking, Su Yang walked out.

In another space behind Su Yang, a dozen pairs of rotting, maggot-ridden eyes stared at him without moving.

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 informed.

"It's already the fastest speed!" Mu Sicheng gritted his teeth, his motorcycle tires almost rubbing fire on the cold hard ground from the high speed rotation, he cursed anxiously, "Shit! If it's an explosion of that scale in the game, it should require a very large container for the perfume, why can't the people who went to check it out see anything!"

"It's impossible not to see." Bai Liu said faintly, "In an effort to minimize the harm of the rose perfume, the Heresy Treatment Bureau's investigation has crossed the line into precautionary efforts to catch me."

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

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

"Because the existence that planned the game 'Rose Factory' to land on [Reality] has a world authority above them, it's like ordinary people can't hear any words about the game in this world." The night wind blew Bai Liu's forehead hair back and swayed, he raised his eyes to look at the factory not far away, "These ordinary people who want to protect other people can't see or touch the world related to the game."

"The game designers pinched an [in-world] for that factory manager to hide the real Rose Factory in order to protect the factory from being able to function properly in [reality]."

Mu Sicheng exhaled a breath of cool, chilling air, "It's just like the design of the game Rose Factory, isn't it?"

"Yes." Bai Liu squinted from the fierce night wind, "From what I understand, Tang Er hit them with 24-hour surveillance of these factories that could potentially produce perfume, yet this factory is still able to continue to produce rose perfume for export under such surveillance, which is illogical in itself."

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

Bai Liu: "That's right."

Bai Liu continued, "Not only that, but the in-game newspaper wrote that prior to the explosion, members of the Heresy Disposal Bureau repeatedly searched the factory, but instead of sending out any notification for the city's citizens to evacuate urgently, they simply stayed in place and searched until the bomb exploded."

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

"Most likely." Bai Liu looks up at the approaching factory, "-that what they see is just an empty factory that's been turned over for a front."

"There won't be anything in there,"

"Team Su, this is an empty factory." After searching the entire factory, the team reported the results to Su Yang, "There's nothing inside."

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

He turned around and went back to the car, ready to fetch some special night vision devices to search again, but the moment he opened the car door, a pair of hands reached out and handed it to him as if they had expected Su Yang to come back for the night vision devices.

Su Yang looked at the person sitting in the car with a start, "Why did you follow me here? Didn't I tell you to stay at the Heresy Treatment Bureau and get some rest?"

Sitting in the back seat of the car Lu Yizhan scratched his head and smiled bitterly, "Captain Su, I thought about it, this is related to Bai Liu, if it is really what he did, I as a public official around him, did not have the responsibility of good supervision, it is difficult to resign from the blame, so left and right, I still came with."

Lu Yizhan lifted his eyes, exhaled deeply, and looked towards Su Yang : "And please, Captain Su, let me join the search!"

Su Yang was silent for a while, finally, he helplessly lost under Lu Yizhan's gaze that was almost going to stare him through, and nodded, "It's an empty factory, there's nothing dangerous about it, so if you want to come, you can come."

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

Six minutes and thirty-one seconds until the explosion.

The motorcycle hummed to life and came to a steady, sideways stop in front of the factory.

Bai Liu swept a glance over and saw several vehicles with Dangerous Heretics Bureau logos parked in front of the factory.

On the way to the Heretic Treatment Bureau, Bai Liu rode in one of these cars and was impressed by the weird octopus sign.

Bai Liu and Mu Sicheng looked for a place to hide as soon as they got off the bus - the Heresy Handling Bureau's men were patrolling outside, and the two of them were now an escaped heretic and a criminal who had robbed a prison, both of whom the Heresy Handling Bureau wanted to arrest, and they would only be arrested on the spot if they showed up directly.

Being arrested is all secondary now, Tang Er fight can help deal with it, but dealing with being arrested is going to waste their time.

"How do you get in? Break in?" Mu Sicheng looked to Bai Liu, who glanced at his spreadsheet and his face sank even further, "Only six minutes left!"

Bai Liu's eyes fell immovably on that factory, "Walk right in."

He touched the reverse cross and system coins on his lapel that Tang Er had returned from the fight.

[SYSTEM WARNING: The use of props unrelated to core desires in reality is prohibited... zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip... -]

The countering current nuisance gradually faded.

[System Alert: Is player Bai Liu using the extraordinary prop (Reverse Eyeball)?]

This item allows you to see the hidden truth of evil.

[OK.]

Bai Liu removes an eyeball in the shape of a glass marble, with a rose floating and blooming in the center of the eyeball, which he holds up between Mu Sicheng and himself:

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

Before Mu Sicheng had time to think about Bai Liu's intentions for making himself do this, he subconsciously followed his words and closed his left eye.

The slow bloom of roses in their eyes was dizzying, and the otherwise lush landscape around them withered at an accelerated rate as the howls of rotting corpses and the skulls of who knows who appeared at their feet.

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

Mu Sicheng, who had just raced for so long without any discomfort, now just looked at this eyeball for a second and felt a little like vomiting - a sickening feeling of being mentally contaminated.

They entered a dark and real [in-world].

Bai Liu did not feel affected in the slightest, he put away his eyes and turned to look at the factory behind him - the originally empty and silent factory was now brightly lit, with shadows of unknown people and ghosts coming and going through the dim light, holding dustpans for transporting roses.

--exactly like the scene in The Rose Factory.

Bai Liu pulled Mu Sicheng's wrist and ran inside, "Go."

"Wait a minute! Do you know where the bomb and perfume are kept?!" Mu Sicheng tried to pull Bai Liu back, "Let's at least be sure of the location so we can rush in, otherwise isn't this a gift?"

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

Mu Sicheng stayed dumbfounded, "Who told you that?"

Bai Liu had no expression on his face, "Lu Yizhan, a fool."

"Hey! Oi! I don't know when he told you! Was it during the Heart blockade? Why don't you tell me, Bai Liu!"

Bai Liu did not say a word, did not care about the screaming Mu Sicheng, just pulled him towards the factory.

Within the game of Rose Factory, Lu Yizhan, who serves as a scent-testing paper, is held in the last cage in the prison on the basement level.

And Lu Yizhan, the idiot, if he was caught with a group of people after the explosion, then this guy must have applied for himself to be imprisoned in the place with the worst perfume contamination and aroma infringement in order to protect the others, and suffered the harshest torture in place of the others.

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

Bai Liu thinks it's gone, and I guess Lu Yizhan thinks it's gone, too.

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

Bai Liu bypasses the factory's defenses and enters through the back door, Mu Sicheng neatly putting down a few shambling carrion as he passes through the corridors before turning the corner and walking in front of the entrance to the basement level.

Mu Sicheng turned on the light from his cell phone's flashlight and shone it on Bai Liu as he walked down, and they worked their way in, all the way to the last cage.

A huge, glass vessel opening constantly sent light pink smoke out, and the entire cage was filled with the intoxicating aroma of roses.

The countdown on the glassware had reached four minutes.

"How to deal with it?" Mu Sicheng covered his mouth and nose and asked Bai Liu in a jarring voice, "Move it out? Or just smash it?"

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

"What too late?!" Mu Sicheng was confused, he subconsciously looked at the countdown on the bomb, "Isn't there still 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 isn't this timed one, this bomb is just a [lighter], and the real bomb is these perfumed liquids, and these gases that are bubbling out."

"Dried Leaf Rose Wa Si, these perfumes are supposed to be some sort of liquid Wa Si analog, and even if we smash this glass jar or get rid of this bomb, as long as this liquid is still there, the explosion can still go off without a hitch if someone brings any little spark."

"If the game designer had to make this factory explode tonight, then he could have done it using any one of the people in this factory using the large amount of perfume liquid in this factory, and we can't beware of that."

Having said that, Bai Liu was still unperturbed: "- Unless all the original perfume liquid stored in this factory is consumed in one go, 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 tightened, "What then?"

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

------

Tang Er commandeered a passing high-class private car, which Mu Ke is now driving at full speed towards the factory.

In the back seat of the car sat Mu Ke and Liu Jiayi, originally the owner of the expropriated car was not willing to lend, but Mu Ke directly dumped a credit card of more than three million dollars to him, the car directly to buy, Tang Er hit them to quickly rush to the factory side.

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

Tang Er hit a deep voice: "It shouldn't be possible to get through, they're all switched off when they're on a mission, if we want to contact them, we have to go back to the Handling Bureau headquarters and use the wireless FM that intervened them."

"Time is running out." Liu Jiayi countered the proposal without thinking, "Bai Liu and the others should be there by now, make a call to them and ask what's going on over there."

As soon as Liu Jiayi's words left his mouth, Bai Liu's phone called.

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

"Citywide air-raid siren." Tang Er hit replied quickly, but soon he clenched his fists, "But that one would require a great deal of evidence of an impending high-risk situation to activate, and my prerogative is only for dealing with heretics in the Bureau, I can't activate an alert of that level."

"But we can't prove it, we don't even have a way to prove to these people who aren't in the game that the factory is about to explode because it's in-game, and we'll be muted if we say it right?" Bai Liu asked rhetorically.

Tang Er hit leaned helplessly against the backseat of the car, "...... Yeah, they're totally deaf."

"The explosion ...... will still happen, right?" Tang Er hit asked hoarsely as he raised his hand to cover his eyes.

Bai Liu answered him honestly, "Yes."

"But maybe it's just an explosion." His voice remained calm and serene, not a ripple in sight, "Just now, Captain Tang, you said that if someone could prove that something as extremely dangerous as a Rose Wa Si explosion would occur, then this alarm could be activated, right?"

Tang Er hit slowly sat up straight, he realized Bai Liu seemed to have found some kind of way, but he couldn't think of what that way was.

"Yes." Tang Er hit breathing raggedly, "Either way, they simply won't receive the message you're trying to send, and may even think it's madness to tell someone to run."

"How are you going to prove that such horrible things that you have witnessed with your own eyes can actually happen?"

Bai Liu's voice took on a lazy smirk as he said without a trace, "Captain Tang with privileges, remember to fish me out."

Then he simply hung up, leaving a bewildered Tang Er to fight.

--------

The wind hunted in the night as dawn approached.

Outside of Riworld Bai Liu is organizing his black trench coat that doesn't quite fit him.

After he smashed the glass cylinder and threw the time bomb/bomb far away to explode, the two of them outsiders were really spotted by those Rose Factory people in the inner world.

After stopping the factory people from making this explosion to popularize the rose perfume, Bai Liu and Mu Sicheng are discovered and chased around by these employees, and at the same time, these employees are also working intensively to make a second explosion using the stockpile of the original rose liquid-exactly as Bai Liu had expected.

In order to stall for time, Bai Liu left the fast-moving Mu Sicheng in the in-world to cause trouble for the employees who were preparing for the second explosion, while at the same time, he logged out of the in-world himself and was in charge of getting the people of the city to migrate out of the zone affected by the explosion.

Before Bai Liu logs out of Riworld, Mu Sicheng asks Bai Liu and Tang Er the same question - how are you going to convince these people that this is going to happen?

Convincing these ordinary people who aren't in the game that their world is a brutal game filled with monsters?

Especially since you're still banned.

The temperature in the real world was a bit low, Bai Liu wore a trench coat taken from the inside world, not knowing who it belonged to, to protect himself from the cold.

Bai Liu takes a step from the hidden stairwell at the back of the factory toward the top floor of the Rose Factory, with what looks like a large red-and-white plastic loudspeaker used for employee training shouts 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 crew below who were closely inspecting the factory.

"There's a figure on the roof!"

"Is it the absconding plant manager! Hit the high beams and go see who it is!"

"Level one alert!"

Two bright, unmistakable beams of high beams wavered to be positioned on the silhouettes on the top floor, and Bai Liu squinted at the glare directed at his face, but he didn't move, remaining steady on the highest rooftop.

The cold night wind blew Bai Liu's hair down the side of his face, and the hem of the long, ill-fitting trench coat he was wearing, the morning dew seemed to haunt him, and the remnants of the scent of roses fell on the soles of his feet.

The people below had recognized who he was.

"--It's Bai Liu!!!"

"How did he get here? Quickly notify the Disposal Bureau! The fleeing Heretic 0006 has appeared at the factory!"

"Team Tang says he's very dangerous! Has the ability to control all heretics! What is he doing by appearing here?!"

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

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

"It's like this, before I escaped, I decided to do something befitting of my status-" Bai Liu lifted his eyelids, his smile thickening in the progressively fierce wind, "- -As a laid-off worker who has been identified as an anti-social personality, how can I not take revenge on society?"

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

"How could I not retaliate?" Bai Liu hooked up the corner of his mouth and said softly, "I decided to let you all have a taste of what it's like to become monsters as well."

"I've decided to blow up this entire factory, so that the Dry Leaf Rose will permeate the world and 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 sirens, and have the entire population evacuate out of the blast area!!!"

"Someone is maliciously spreading gas addictives!!!"

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

The man was smiling at him sardonically through the morning breeze and the fading night, idly and languidly mouthing words to him:

"Do you smell good, Captain Sue, with the scent of roses on you?"