[Escape Room] Being Honest with Each Other

As they walked into the inner room, Ren Yi noticed that Lu Zihan was unusually "dignified" today. He held his head high and chest out, stared straight ahead with a piercing gaze, and walked as steadily as a gliding statue.

Once they were out of Lu Qing's sight, Ren Yi couldn't resist giving him a gentle nudge with his elbow. "Old Lu, what's with you? Why are you being so serious?"

But to his surprise, the slight nudge made the tall, burly Lu Zihan stagger. And then...

Thud!

To Ren Yi's astonishment, a round object dropped straight to the floor and rolled over twice.

"Don't touch me! My head!" someone shouted. The voice came from the "ball" on the floor: Lu Zihan's face, which was written all over with embarrassment.

"You... pfft." Ren Yi held it in for three seconds before completely losing it.

If you saw a talking head on the floor, you might scream in terror. But if that head belonged to your best friend, you wouldn't be able to resist laughing.

"Don't laugh! Pick me up already, you bastard!" Lu Zihan's head cried out in grief and indignation. At the same time, his body groped around on the floor in a panic, like a headless chicken.

He was literally searching the floor for his head.

Ren Yi fought back his laughter and quickly scooped up Lu Zihan's head, carefully setting it back on his neck.

The moment they touched, the flesh at the severed edge wriggled rapidly like a living thing, joining and healing. In the blink of an eye, it was smooth and good as new.

"What's going on with you? Are you a Flying Head Demon?" The corners of Ren Yi's mouth rose out of control again.

"You're still laughing?" Lu Zihan said fiercely as he carefully turned his neck from side to side, as if adjusting a newly installed part.

"Pfft, hahahahaha!" Ren Yi laughed even harder.

By the time he finally recovered, Lu Zihan had managed to straighten his head. Ren Yi examined him in amazement and asked, "Are you going to be okay?"

"I'm fine." Lu Zihan curled his lip. "My head's just a little heavy. It's not very stable when I take Humanoid Form, so it keeps falling off. My mom said it'll be fine once I level up again and strengthen it."

"Oh..." Ren Yi drew out the word, his curiosity thoroughly piqued. "So what does your true form actually look like? Give me a hint."

Lu Zihan shot him a chilly sidelong look. "Want to see? Fine. We both transform."

"No problem!" Ren Yi agreed without hesitation. "I'll count to three, and we'll do it together. Three, two, one!"

The two of them released the restraints on their "Humanoid Forms" at the same time.

Before Ren Yi's eyes, Lu Zihan's body rapidly swelled and changed shape.

His skin turned an iron-like blue-black, and he shot up to nearly three meters tall. Muscles bulged across his limbs, and two enormous, menacing bone blades burst from his elbows, extending outward with a cold gleam like the grim reaper's scythes.

Most striking of all was his head, completely enclosed by an angular metal mask. Only a narrow red visor remained over his eyes, where two fierce points of light flowed like blood.

Meanwhile, to Lu Zihan's senses, Ren Yi's position was replaced by a suddenly rising mass of pale mist, its patterns constantly shifting.

Countless soft, bizarre, indescribable tentacles dangled from the mist, silently winding and writhing as if they had lives of their own.

Something seemed to pulse slowly at the mist's core, giving off an aura that instinctively induced dizziness and unease.

Then two anguished accusations rang out at once:

"Damn it, how can you fly?"

"Damn you, you really do have hands!"

After meeting honestly in their "true forms" for the first time, the two young men quickly felt a subtle frustration over their mismatched "art styles," on top of their shock at each other's highly "distinctive" forms.

"...Once we enter the Instance, neither of us should speak," Ren Yi suggested earnestly after a moment's silence.

"Agreed." Lu Zihan's voice came muffled from inside his helmet.

With that, Ren Yi opened his panel without further ado and turned it toward Lu Zihan.

"All right, we've seen each other's true forms, so let's be a little more honest about the rest."

[Name: Ren Yi]

[Level: E (progress: 37/100)]

[Rules and abilities: ammunition type. Can cast illusions after absorbing positive emotions caused by himself. Ammunition capacity: (1/1). Successfully loading ammunition once counts as one feeding.]

[Family: Ren Man]

[Occupation: Youngling]

[Status: energy stable]

Doctor Lin had already registered the rules and abilities field.

As for the extra progress points, those were thanks to Ren Yi's "tireless" community service over the past two days. By chatting with and helping the elderly male and female anomalies in the residential complex, he had managed to milk... obtain a full thirty-six points of Positive Emotions.

Unfortunately, the same individual couldn't provide progress more than once before he leveled up again, and Ren Yi had completely exhausted his contacts. Otherwise, he felt he could reach A-rank in no time.

"Good grief, is your rule meant to make the participants laugh inside an Instance? Does the Alliance have Energy Crystallization of this type?"

Lu Zihan frowned at first, then cried out, "Wait... how is your progress so fast, you beast?!"

"My rule may be a bit abstract, but it levels up fast." Ren Yi shrugged in his anomalous cloud form, then urged him on. "What about yours? Hurry up."

Lu Zihan reluctantly brought up his own panel.

[Name: Lu Zihan]

[Level: E (8/50)]

[Rules and abilities: rule-trigger type. Those who contradict him die. If an individual contradicts him within a fifty-meter radius centered on his true form, he can immediately teleport behind that individual and behead them. A successful beheading counts as one feeding.]

[Family: Lu Qing, Zhou Xun, Lu Zi, Lu Ying, Lu Hong... (thirty-seven family members omitted below)]

[Occupation: Youngling]

[Status: energy stable]

Ren Yi's gaze was first overwhelmed by the family list that filled the screen.

The Lu family was flourishing.

He searched for quite a while before finding Lu Zihan's rules and abilities.

"So, you're a professional contrarian?" He raised his white, tentacle-like eyebrows.

At the same time, he noticed that Lu Zihan's total progress requirement (50) was lower than his own (100). Was it because the rule was more dangerous and harder to carry out?

As for those eight progress points, Old Lu certainly couldn't use that ability inside the Alliance, so he could only have absorbed a Rule Crystal.

Over the past few days, he had also learned that an anomaly with the same rule had to sacrifice several times as many feeding opportunities to condense a single Rule Crystal.

For anomaly cubs, apart from the one the Alliance basically provided for free for their first feeding, the rest had to be supplied by their families.

Old Lu really was a low-key rich kid.

"Look carefully. As long as someone contradicts me, I can chop them," Lu Zihan protested.

"In your current form, it doesn't look like you can disguise yourself as one of the participants, does it?" Ren Yi asked, looking at Lu Zihan's head.

"I..." Lu Zihan mumbled, "If I shout a few more times, they'll contradict me out of fear, won't they?"

"Then what if you run into someone who keeps saying, 'Yeah, yeah, you're right'? Won't you be done for?"

"Then I can still... just chop them." Lu Zihan patted his helmet with the back of the blade on his arm, making a dull clanging sound to demonstrate his strength.

Ren Yi looked at the other young man's three-meter-tall steel body. True, even without his rule, physically sending someone to the afterlife was pretty reliable.