Chapter 217: Afternoon Meeting
The comments were all mocking at the same time as everyone endured this meaningless meeting.
However, at that moment, under the sound of his voice—
Squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak.
Right in front of Shen Yu and the others, Ho Zijing, who had been speaking, gradually transformed into an unintelligible squeak.
The bright surroundings started to shake, and before their eyes, the sound of intertwined leaves began to echo.
"Hey!"
Realizing something was wrong, Shen Yu quickly looked at the others, and all of them immediately lifted their feet off the ground, their hands pressed against the desks.
"Russell, Russell, Russell!"
After another blur in front of their eyes, they found themselves suddenly sinking.
When they came to their senses again, several of them were now in a towering, dense forest.
Ho Zijing was still making squeak, squeak sounds, but he was no longer human.
He had turned into a large, muscular monkey with a thunderous beak, yellow fur all over, crouching on a tree branch.
Although it was called a monkey, this thing was over two meters tall, with triangular eyes and a vicious expression.
With every jump, the tree trunks beneath him shook violently.
"Squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak!"
Ho Zijing’s voice became more frequent.
Rustle, rustle, rustle.
In the swaying shadows of the trees, several large monkeys jumped out from the tree trunks.
There were four or five of them, leaping from tree to tree, surrounding Shen Yu and the others.
Creak, creak.
The giant monkeys’ claws were long and sharp, tearing the surrounding bark into pieces.
At least a dozen black shadows stood high in the trees, looking down at Shen Yu and the others, constantly making squeak, squeak noises.
But interestingly, no matter how much they screeched or shook the tree trunks, they never attacked Shen Yu and the others directly.
Swing, swing.
Looking back at Shen Yu and the others’ situation, they had suddenly gone from sitting in chairs with their hands propped up on desks to hanging by their hands from tree trunks suspended in a dense forest.
Tap, tap, tap.
With their feet kicking the leaves in the air, their hands desperately gripping the tree trunks, Shen Yu stared at the monkeys above, his eyes narrowing.
"Is this a mountain baboon?"
"That’s right. It’s a mountain baboon, the largest and most powerful type of monkey. This thing is even stronger than the black-spiked wild boar."
"No, less."
Shen Yu curled up his legs, holding tightly onto a tree trunk with his arms and legs, his face remaining still.
"Now I finally understand why Lin Wan told us not to let our feet touch the ground."
"She meant, don’t fall from here and die."
"Stop talking. Yaning, did Lin Wan tell you how long this afternoon meeting is going to last?"
The branch Yaning was clinging to was already making cracking sounds.
She looked at the distance between herself and the ground, more than ten meters below.
At this height, if she fell, even with a body enhanced by an SSS-level talent, she would be smashed into a bloody mess.
"She didn’t say, but we can’t touch the ground."
"I think she doesn’t expect us to climb like monkeys, does she?"
"Climb along the tree trunks?"
Shen Yu pondered as he gazed at the dense forest.
Actually, there were many disordered tree trunks crisscrossing nearby.
If they really wanted to go down, hugging a main tree trunk would make it easy to descend to the ground.
But what did touching the ground really mean?
Shen Yu blinked, his gaze shifting to Mo xian behind Wen Lan.
The guy at this moment looked like a dead body, hanging motionlessly on the tree trunk.
"Hey, I remember you said the Fat Alliance team was dead. Why don’t you have Mo Xian get down to check?"
"I said before these animals’ abilities might not be as simple as they seem."
Wen Lan didn’t answer but just stared fixedly at Mo xian.
Time jump.
Puff.
The corpse lying on the tree trunk exploded at its chest.
A cavity the size of a lead ball opened in Mo Xian’s chest, and his eyes, which had no pupils, displayed a vision of the future.
Ace’s body fell straight to the ground.
After a thunderous crash, he shrank by several inches, solidifying on a tree root.
Puff, puff, puff.
But strangely, the already dead body sprouted black and white fur all over.
The fur densely covered his body.
Mo Xian’s body began to fill out, his arms and legs stretched thin and spread out.
"Moo!"
Until finally, the dead man turned into a cow, instinctively lying on the ground and mooing.
Squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak!
The mountain monkeys, who had been watching from above, immediately began to descend.
With a thud, thud, they landed on the cow’s back.
Their claws, as sharp as steel knives, tore through the cow’s back, ripping out flesh and devouring it.
Buzz.
The vision of the future flashed by, and Wen Lan naturally didn’t dare to skip time.
She looked at the scene she had just witnessed and said truthfully to Shen Yu,
"No. I used Mo Xian’s ability to predict the future. Once we touch the ground, we’ll accelerate into becoming animals, animals that even lose their sense of self."
"What? You mean you just predicted the future?"
Hearing this, Shen Yu looked suspiciously at Mo Xian’s completely shattered chest, his expression thoughtful.
He figured it out.
Before, during the battle on the fifth floor, Mo Xian kept disappearing and reappearing.
It seemed to be a spatial ability.
Now that he thought about it, maybe he could fast-forward time, thus reaching a certain point in time.
So every time he moved, he moved with him.
"T.S.K."
"What an exaggerated ability!"
But Shen Yu’s ability was even more exaggerated.
Shen Yu thought for a moment and then looked up at the top of the tree trunk.
"Then, if going down doesn’t work, what about climbing up?"
"Ha! Up, up! Deputy team leader, you mean we climb up?"
"Not down, but up."
Upon hearing this, everyone stared blankly at the top of the tree.
Rustle, rustle, rustle!
The ten or so mountain monkeys were still stomping on the tree trunks, causing the leaves at the top to fall down with a rustling sound.
Climbing up?
No normal person would think of climbing up through so many mountain monkeys to reach the higher levels.
Only Shen Yu had received Lin Wan’s hint.
Otherwise, it would be a deadlock right now.
"And Shen Yu, using the information gained from riding the coattails, you figured out the way out of the deadlock in the dungeon."
"No wonder Long Ao values him so much."
"This guy really knows how to play with low-level talents."
"There are only trash dungeon participants, but no trash talents."
Wen Lan stared fixedly at Shen Yu, her eyes flickering with light.
"Ding."
"Goddess Wen Lan’s favorability toward you: Five."
"Current favorability accumulated: 32 points."
Hmm.
A system notification sound rang by her ear, and Shen Yu looked at Wen Lan with suspicion.
It added favorability again, just like that.
What kind of self-strategy was this?
Shen Yu did not care about Wen Lan’s gaze.
𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖
While hugging the tree trunk and rubbing upward, he looked again at Mo Xian’s corpse.
"Hey, can this thing still see the future?"
"You want to see whether going upward is safe?"
Wen Lan clearly guessed Shen Yu’s intention.
After Shen Yu nodded, she did not hesitate.
"Time leap."
Puff.
The next moment, Mo Xian’s corpse hanging on the tree trunk had its chest explode again.
His whole upper body was still lying on the trunk.
The lower body, with a Honglong sound, broke away from the upper body and fell heavily to the ground.
Boom!
The sound of the fall came.
Everyone watched the lower half of the body hit the ground.
Their faces all turned cold.
Because after that half-body fell to the ground, it actually, visibly turned into half a cow’s body.
The remaining upper half of Mo Xian’s body completely lost the ability to move, lying on the tree without moving at all.
"Wang, wang, wang."
The last time-leap image came.
"Susu, susu, su, su."
A group of people clung tightly to the tree trunks, shuttling through the dense branches, pressing their heads tightly against the trunks as they crawled.
"G-G-Z!"
A dark roar echoed in the sky above.
Shen Yu took the lead and crawled past a mountain sprite.
That mountain sprite stared at Shen Yu, its nails curling, raised in midair, as if it would scratch open Shen Yu’s head at any moment.
But Shen Yu simply ignored everything, climbing up along the trunk all the way, finally disappearing into the dense tree crown.
Seeing this scene, everyone felt relieved and climbed quickly toward the sky above.
"This time, can be skipped."
"Time leap."
"Why?"
After completely squeezing out the last time leap of Ace’s corpse, a burst of space twitching passed before everyone’s eyes.
They were shocked to find that although they were still hugging the big tree, they were no longer in the middle layer of the trunk.
Instead, they were in an open green top layer.
"Holy crap!"
"What happened?"
Ning Su stared blankly at the thick tree crowns, then lowered his eyes to look at a group of mountain sprites under the crown, staring upward.
A burst of shock crossed his face.
"We weren’t just saying we would climb up?"
"How? How is it now?"
"It is time leap."
"On my palm, there are many more wounds, and I feel very tired. This was not there just now."
"It is like a segment of memory was pulled out of my mind out of thin air, but the burden that segment of memory gave me is still there."
"This is exactly like skipping a segment of our time."
Chu Chang’an looked at his scratched wrist, thoughtfully.
He looked at Wen Lan.
"Right? This is time leap."
"Can’t tell."
"The Jochi Squad also has capable people."
"If you ask me, compared with the Feihi Squad..."
Wen Lan heard this and was just about to say something.
"Why?"
"Why?"
"Why?"
Suddenly, the green sea above the tree crown flickered at high frequency.
The vision became blurry again.
"It’s coming. We should be returning to reality."
Shen Yu warned.
The hands hugging the trunk suddenly loosened.
The empty feeling under his feet became solid.
In a daze, he blinked again.
He was suddenly in a corridor.
"Hmm."
His sight moved along the surroundings.
This was a long, narrow corridor.
The walls of the corridor were full of oil paintings.
There were paintings of beautiful people and also sketches of buildings.
In short, strange shapes and totally different styles of paintings were everywhere.
There were also countless rooms along the corridor.
The doorways of these rooms were all open, revealing empty rooms inside.
The walls were also covered with hanging paintings.
"Is this an art exhibition?"
Yaning’s unbelievable voice came.
She was confused.
"It should not be."
After the noon meeting time ended, shouldn’t they have returned to the third-floor space?
How could they come to an art exhibition?
"Hey, look carefully."
Shen Yu quickly walked to the end of the corridor and pointed at the seventh-floor mark at the top of the wall.
His face turned pale in shock.
"Level seven."
"This is the client we found before. The Dragon Exhibition Area on Level Seven."
"But why?"
"Why did we climb through the woods and end up here?"
"We should be on Level Four, Level Five, or Level Six at worst."
"How is this Level Seven?"
Ning Su was equally confused.
Everyone stood there on Level Seven for a while.
Until—
Swish, swish.
In the silent, empty corridor, the sound of a blade scraping against paper suddenly echoed.
Immediately—
S S S S S.
Strange grooves, like those made by a knife, appeared on the wall.
Buzz, buzz, buzz.
These knife marks appeared erratically, with no logic or reason, crisscrossing the corridor.
Instantly, sand and dust exploded.
Puff, puff, puff.
The walls and ceiling filled with flying debris, and the sound of blades cutting continued.
The marks shifted randomly, some moving forward, some backward, some upward, some downward.
"Damn it! What is this?"
"Hey, Wen Lan—"
Shen Yu instinctively wanted to ask Wen Lan,
"Can you still use Mo Xian’s ability?"
He didn’t understand the principle of Wen Lan’s talent.
When he turned around—
Buzz!
The sound of a blade ringing through the air.
Shen Yu stared wide-eyed, unable to believe what he was seeing.
"I... I..."
Puff, puff, puff.
A diagonal knife wound suddenly appeared across Wen Lan’s chest, cutting through her shoulder and abdomen.
Her upper and lower body exploded into a mist of blood, splitting apart and falling to the sides.
"Ah, ah!"
She just stared blankly at herself, torn in half, collapsing into a pool of blood.
Gurgle, gurgle, gurgle.
Warm blood splashed into Shen Yu’s eyes.