In less than a second, a new tag had already coalesced. The moment he became aware of the tag called [Gatekeeper], a voice—or rather, a consciousness, a thought—appeared out of nowhere in his mind—
You witnessed a door open before you. Whether you claim it for yourself, make it public, or leave it alone is entirely up to you.
"A door?" Feng Xue looked at the utterly ordinary room door, baffled. But he had already formed two tags, after all, and with a mere thought, an endless stream of information poured out. For instance, after passing through a door, everyone needed to wait one day before they could use it to travel again. And for instance, if the girl before him died in the Infinite City, the consequences would be horrifying...
He could query a tag's internal knowledge directly, but compared to reading through the browser built into his guild badge, this method was crude and direct, making it difficult to sort out the important points. However, Feng Xue was restraining a girl right now, so he had no time to leisurely take out his badge and look up the details.
But it didn't really matter, because Feng Xue had immediately caught the most important point.
The girl, held in a standard chokehold by Feng Xue, had no idea how the man's expression had changed, but she could clearly feel the arm restraining her body trembling slightly.
"If you don't want to die, keep your mouth shut and listen to me!"
A language she'd never heard before sounded in her ear, yet the girl understood what the words meant. This alone was so unbelievable that she immediately thought of the protagonists in novels who inexplicably learned a strange language after transmigrating.
"Could it be... I've transmigrated?"
Seeing that the girl in his arms had stopped struggling, Feng Xue loosened his hold a little, but he didn't let go completely. If the woman showed any sign of trouble, he would knock her unconscious at once.
As for why he didn't kill her...
It wasn't because she had smooth black hair, nor because her oval face suited Feng Xue's classical tastes. It was because people like her couldn't be killed in this world!
From the knowledge conveyed by the [Gatekeeper] tag, he had more or less understood what the so-called door was—
It was the passage to the Real World that he'd been curious about all along!
The Weird Tale known as the Infinite City existed in the Real World, yet also drifted apart from it. It was like an imaginary number: you could plot it on a graph, but you could never find it on the coordinate axes.
Unlike an imaginary number, however, the Infinite City occasionally overlapped with the Real World. At such times, if someone happened to open something with the [Door] element, it would temporarily create a passage connecting the two worlds. The person who opened the door became the anchor that fixed the two coordinates together.
In other words, this girl was a real person!
Not a "真人" in the Daoist sense of an immortal, but a genuine, flesh-and-blood human being who needed to eat, sleep, and use the bathroom—in the biological sense!
And humans were both the source of [shi] and carriers of vast amounts of it. Because they remained connected to their original world, the [shi] within them stayed fixed while they were alive, making them seem no different from False Things. But as soon as they died, that immense amount of [shi] would immediately run rampant, inevitably mutating into an Omen—and the most terrifying kind of Omen at that.
Feng Xue didn't know how powerful a "top-tier Omen" was, but he knew very well that it was absolutely beyond his ability to handle.
Fortunately, after regaining her freedom, the girl in his arms didn't scream again, allowing Feng Xue to breathe a little easier. He backed up a couple of steps, packed everything that would fit into his Storage Bag, then put whatever wouldn't fit into the backpack he carried on his back. As he worked, he said,
"I'll explain the rest later. There are two things you need to understand right now. First, you've transmigrated. Second, you're extremely valuable to the people here."
"Got it. We're on the run, right? No problem. Should we leave now?"
The girl reacted far more adeptly than Feng Xue had expected. Judging by her expression, she even seemed a little excited.
"So this is what young people in the Real World are like?" Feng Xue couldn't help feeling a little out of touch with the times, but regardless, it was a good thing that she was cooperating.
After gathering up all his belongings, Feng Xue didn't let the girl touch the door. He opened it himself, then swept an arm around her waist and hoisted her over his shoulder like a sack.
At that moment, he couldn't help once again feeling grateful for the choice he'd made back then. If he'd settled closer to the Cross Sword Guild, he might have ended up like that doctor who had turned into a Stitched Monster!
That's right, Feng Xue had now figured it out completely. The woman who had been taken away back then had undoubtedly been a real person from the Real World!
As for why the Manager wanted to capture people from the Real World, Feng Xue hadn't yet managed to find the answer in the Gatekeeper's chaotic trove of information. But he had come across one thing—
People from the Real World—or, more precisely, a passage to the Real World—were a necessary condition for becoming a Weird Tale!
That alone was enough to drive the Managers into a frenzy. And on top of that, the girl was connected to a door that could lead to the Real World?
Even if surviving on the other side of the door consumed a thousand times as much [shi] as it did in the Infinite City, the desire to become truly real was engraved in the deepest part of every being of [nothingness].
They had nothing, so they could disappear at any moment. Even if they had enough [shi], that sense of insecurity still drove them mad.
People lived for peace of mind, and the beings of [nothingness] in the Infinite City were precisely the group of "people" least capable of feeling secure.
"I can walk by myself!" the girl slung over Feng Xue's shoulder like a sack offered quietly.
Feng Xue was quite pleased that she hadn't made a fuss even now. He suddenly grabbed hold of a roadside wall with one hand and vaulted up, carrying the girl on his shoulder as he flipped onto the roof.
As for why he was taking the rooftops instead of the road...
Of course it was because the houses in the Landfill Area had been built with absolutely no order. They were uneven, at varying heights, and that layout let him hide at any moment. If things came to it, he could even find a house with a hole in its roof and jump straight inside.
Watching Feng Xue leap from rooftop to rooftop almost without making a sound, the girl swallowed the question she'd been about to ask. But when she stopped asking, Feng Xue unexpectedly explained in a quiet voice,
"Look north."
"North? Which way is north?" The girl displayed the impeccable sense of direction one would expect from a student whose life revolved around traveling between just two points. Feng Xue simply shifted his position a little, turning her head toward the north. At the same time, the girl saw lights approaching from the direction north of the city.
"Are they coming to kill us?"
"More precisely, they're coming to kill you..."
In a straightforward fight, drawing a blade right away is fine. But the protagonist is an assassin, so when a target is about to yell, the basic procedure is to cover their mouth to keep the noise from spreading, drag them along while sneaking away and hiding behind a door or in a patch of grass, then slit their throat or stab them under the arm to end their life quickly. The protagonist just realized what was going on before he got to the throat-slitting part.
Before you continue