Wei Zhi had escaped.
Although a Bellringer Knight had seen him appear somewhere in the west of the city, it was far too difficult for a group of ordinary NPCs to keep up with a player controlled by a Grand Scholar.
In any case, Tusnat was the home ground of the Scholarly Council. No matter how numerous the people from the Twilight Church were, they could never match the Grand Scholars who had operated here for years in their familiarity with the local geography and terrain.
When Cheng Shi received the news, he showed no surprise. The Grand Scholars would of course struggle a little. If the other side had simply waited to die, that would have been what worried him. Then he would have had to wonder what new trap those old men who believed in Truth were digging.
The situation had already shifted from a real confrontation to a game of wits in the void between the two sides. Everyone knew that the key factor determining the experiment's success was not either side, but Wei Zhi, who had fled. So there was no longer any point in blindly attacking the Grand Scholars. The most important thing now was to find the final piece of the puzzle needed to restore the Truth Limit.
The other players returned one after another and gathered around Cheng Shi. He once again explained everything to the few who had begun to understand, then, under the group's various gazes, collected the remains of the other four Grand Scholars, excluding the two whose corpses Wei Zhi had devoured.
At the beginning of the trial, Square and Round, Meng Youfang, and Hu Xuan had each taken one corpse. They all returned them now, except that Hu Xuan had gotten pregnant while returning hers. This left Cheng