Racing Death

The rest of the contents were all complaints.

Or simple notes about what he had done that day.

The diary ended two days before Night of the Manor.

To an outsider, it was just an ordinary diary.

The owner had suffered from nightmares and sleepwalking.

Then, all of a sudden, he got better. The diary didn't say how.

But to Tang Luo and the others, the information it contained was extremely important.

"He was possessed by Jack the Ripper."

Chu Chongtian said, "Were the first few victims actually killed by him?"

Sleepwalking. Bloodstains.

"Were his nightmares things Jack the Ripper had experienced? Signs of possession? Or maybe a weakening before possession." Zhou Zhenguo speculated.

According to the theory that the Ripper was growing stronger,

Jack the Ripper had been relatively weak at first.

In other words, he could only give the inspector nightmares and slowly influence him through his dreams.

He possessed and controlled people while they slept.

Later, Jack the Ripper no longer needed to go to so much trouble to possess someone.

The innkeeper had been perfectly normal and conscious one moment, then possessed the next.

Jack the Ripper had probably weakened the inspector's mind through nightmares, then possessed and controlled him.

And those nightmares...

Made it easy to think of what Tang Luo had briefly told them about the Underground Laboratory beneath the Mental Hospital!

"If those were things the Ripper had experienced, then the cold 'ground' was actually the 'operating table' Master Xuanzang mentioned."

"And the Jack he heard was Jack White?"

"The Ripper was one of the organization's test subjects?!"

Chu Chongtian said.

So that was the relationship between the organization and the Ripper?

They weren't two separate entities after all?!

"What about the patients who were still alive?" Zhou Zhenguo asked.

The Mental Hospital had taken in more than a hundred patients.

After Tang Luo destroyed the laboratory, only five patients who hadn't been locked in the underground lab survived.

Most of the others had become test subjects.

They had all died.

The few who remained had been eaten by the Resurrected One and had died as well.

"Those patients who weren't locked up probably weren't test subjects yet," Chu Chongtian said with a frown.

The scenes in the nightmares had clearly shown test subjects being experimented on and dissected.

"Could someone have survived after the organization dumped them as corpses?"

That was the most reasonable explanation.

"Have we been trading wits with a madman this whole time?"

Zhou Zhenguo found it hard to accept.

All along, they had treated Jack the Ripper as a clever opponent.

In the end, they discovered that he was a madman.

Their radically different ways of thinking had made him an exceptionally unpredictable opponent.

Could anything be more frustrating?

"It's not necessarily that he's a madman,"

Chu Chongtian said. "Master, didn't you say that the Ripper Gang had helped the organization kidnap people?"

"Mm." Tang Luo nodded.

"Damn it!"

Chu Chongtian swore, though he wasn't swearing at Tang Luo.

The organization was gone!

And Jack the Ripper had wiped out the Ripper Gang too!

The trail had gone cold again!

They had been just one step away from unmasking Jack the Ripper.

Then they discovered that he had already struck first and cut the trail off.

It felt awful.

It was like having a piece of meat snatched right out of your mouth.

"It doesn't matter. We have records to look through," Tang Luo said.

"Records?"

"Even though the Mental Hospital is closed now, there must be records of the patients it took in," Tang Luo said. "As for the Ripper Gang, if people went missing, someone must have filed a report with Scotland Yard, right?"

That included Old John, who had gone missing.

Someone had also gone to Scotland Yard to file a simple report.

Whether they bothered to search for him was another matter. He was just a widower, so it all depended on Scotland Yard's mood.

The Ripper Gang had probably kidnapped people who lived alone.

There couldn't be any shut-ins living alone in a small town.

Even if they lived alone, they still had to keep in touch with the outside world, work to earn money, and meet their daily needs.

If they went missing for a long time, there was a good chance someone would report it to Scotland Yard.

"Right,"

Chu Chongtian said. "And if someone went missing and then came back, we can be almost certain they were the Ripper!"

"Could Jack the Ripper be the result of their research into immortality? Maybe the organization simply overlooked him!"

Zhou Zhenguo suddenly slapped his hands together as a possibility occurred to him.

A mad organization.

Cruel experiments.

A "supernatural being" born by accident.

Hiding in the shadows, killing bit by bit, growing stronger, taking revenge.

And now, unleashing a storm.

So that was the story!

More importantly, in this world, the God and Demon Walkers were supposed to be racing against time.

The sooner they uncovered the truth, the weaker Jack the Ripper would be.

The longer they took, the worse things would get for the God and Demon Walkers.

Now, Jack the Ripper seemed to have grown unimaginably powerful.

As for why they were still on his hit list, even though Tang Luo and the others had destroyed the organization—

They had, after all, avenged Jack the Ripper.

That was easy to understand.

You couldn't expect a vengeful ghost to keep a clear distinction between friend and foe.

Jack the Ripper had started out killing indiscriminately.

He probably wanted to unleash all of his fury.

"Our encounter on the first night was a warning to finish the mission as quickly as possible."

Zhou Zhenguo said.

They had been in Small City for half a month already.

Of the seven people they had started with,

four had died.

Only the three of them were left.

And Zhou Zhenguo and Chu Chongtian probably wouldn't last a single blow against Jack the Ripper as he was now.

Master Xuanzang was the only one who could fight.

And even he might not be able to anymore.

There was no time left!

This mission was a race against Death!

"Forget it. We'll go to the Mental Hospital first, then Scotland Yard. We have to find the Ripper's true identity as quickly as possible!"

Zhou Zhenguo said.

It was already getting late.

Night would fall soon.

Judging by what had happened before,

Jack the Ripper was active at night.

It was his domain.

They would gather together and wait for Jack the Ripper to appear—fishing for him and all that. With things getting more dangerous and so many people dead, nobody was willing to serve as bait anymore.

But now, they couldn't afford to worry about that.

Even at night, they had to get moving and uncover the truth.

Rather than wait for Jack the Ripper to show himself and kill him, a crude way of completing the mission,

finding Jack the Ripper's true identity was the method that offered them a better chance of survival.

Zhou Zhenguo also didn't think "God and Demon" would set a condition as difficult as "kill the Ripper" for completing the mission.

That would be an impossible task.

In the God and Demon Game, there were no missions that were absolutely impossible to complete, at least in theory.

Just like a normal game, there had to be a way to beat it.

It was only a matter of difficulty—and how many times you died.

Maybe it was just his imagination.

Tonight's darkness seemed to be falling faster than usual.

By the time they reached the Mental Hospital, the sky had almost gone completely dark.

The last fire had turned the hospital into a madhouse.

And what Tang Luo and the others had done

had turned the madhouse into a desolate ruin.

Nobody knew where the few remaining patients had been sent.

To be honest, they weren't sure either.

There had to be patient records in the hospital. The organization might have destroyed them, but they could only search and see.

After being abandoned, the hospital didn't even have a kerosene lamp.

No water or electricity.

Once Tang Luo and the others entered the building, their visibility was severely limited.

Fortunately, they had brought lanterns. They went into the records room and began searching.

The patients' medical records were gone.

It wasn't that the organization was worried about the information leaking. In fact, Thorndike and the others had only kept the matter from spreading widely at the time.

Even if the truth came out, it had nothing to do with Thorndike and the others.

At least, there was no evidence linking them to it.

The records had disappeared entirely because Thorndike and the others wanted to "pick up where they left off."

Since they couldn't get into the basement, they had to look here for information about the patients.

At least some of it had been recorded.

"Found them!"

Zhou Zhenguo shouted. He had found the admission register.

With it, they could learn the patients' basic information, including their home addresses.

The records were fairly detailed.

At a glance, there were more than a hundred names, which matched the number of patients the hospital had taken in over the years.

"Let's go to the underground laboratory,"

Zhou Zhenguo said. "There should be research records there. Comparing them should narrow down the list."

"Wasn't the basement collapsed?" Chu Chongtian asked.

"Probably just part of it, or the passageway. If the whole thing had collapsed, the building would have been affected too." Zhou Zhenguo looked at Tang Luo.

"Mm. I only blocked the passage."

"Master, can you dig it open again? How long would it take?" Zhou Zhenguo asked.

"Not long. About... a minute?" Tang Luo thought for a moment.

After two minutes of walking and one minute of clearing the way, the three of them entered the underground laboratory.

Zhou Zhenguo and Chu Chongtian stopped in their tracks, staring at the Resurrected One's mangled remains on the ground.

"What is that thing?"

Its twisted shape made them forget, for a moment, that they had come to look for records.

"Oh, a product of the research into immortality. They called it the Resurrected One," Tang Luo said. "That Jack let it loose, so I killed it while I was at it."

"While you were at it..."

Chu Chongtian and Zhou Zhenguo both felt the corners of their mouths twitch.

They didn't really know what the Resurrected One was.

But the corpses scattered around them and the shattered electric chair proved it was a full-fledged monster.

And you just killed it while you were at it?

Didn't the monster have any dignity?

"The research records are in these three rooms, one in each?" Tang Luo asked, pointing at the three doors.

Twenty minutes later.

"He's not here. Jack the Ripper isn't among the patients!"

Zhou Zhenguo said.

They had cross-checked the records.

The total number of patients who had died in the experiments, plus those they'd seen that day—patients who hadn't been sent to the Underground Laboratory and were just there to keep up appearances—and the patients killed here by the Resurrected One.

The total matched exactly the number of patients the hospital had taken in over the years.

In other words, Jack the Ripper was someone the Ripper Gang had secretly kidnapped.

Thanks to Mo Ai Mo Li, Surprised Beef Ball, Floating Cloud Business, and May I Ask Who You Are for the tips!

There'll be another update tonight. Please vote for me!