A familiar voice.
Someone was pounding hard on the alloy gate. Steel beasts roared within the cells. Newcomers, welcome to Prison No. 18!
Qing Chen sat up from the hard bed, a faint smile appearing at the corners of his mouth.
He silently repeated to himself, Newcomers, welcome to Prison No. 18.
For some reason, the moment he crossed back, Qing Chen genuinely felt the excitement and joy in his heart.
There were people he knew here, rules he knew, and hopes for the future.
It was as though he had always belonged to the Inner World rather than the Outer World.
There were no past events here that he did not want to remember, nor was there anyone he needed to worry about.
He only needed to keep moving forward. Every direction was a new one.
He lowered his head to look at his arm, then froze.
Return countdown: 160:20:09.
Subtracting the time he had spent sleeping, this countdown was actually seven days!
It was too unexpected. Qing Chen had already become used to forty-eight-hour countdowns, yet the rules had suddenly changed.
Why?
What was the pattern?
It seemed the rules of crossing still needed further exploration.
Qing Chen walked to the alloy gate. It opened in response, as though it had been precisely waiting for him.
When the prisoners outside in the corridor saw him, they all bent slightly at the waist in greeting.
Compared with the Outer World, this place felt more like his home turf.
Standing in the corridor, Qing Chen greeted Lu Guangyi from afar. Lu Guangyi immediately understood.
After all the prisoners had lined up and gone downstairs, Lu Guangyi immediately began taking control of the new prisoners.
He knew that was what Qing Chen wanted.
Although doing so would send the other two factions into a rage, and conflict might break out over it someday.
But he had entered Prison No. 18 to clear the way for Qing Chen.
A vanguard had to possess a vanguard's resolve. A pawn that had crossed the river could not retreat.
Success meant survival; failure meant death. A lifetime of glory had to be bought with one's life.
At that moment, Li Shutong also tacitly permitted Lu Guangyi's actions. He seemed to want to see what Qing Chen intended to do.
Seven new prisoners had arrived today.
When Lu Guangyi rounded up the new prisoners, six of them seemed to be repeat offenders and simply chose to accept their fate.
Experienced prisoners all knew that they only had to endure it. If they resisted, they might suffer even more.
However, when Lu Guangyi tried to catch the last new prisoner, the man kept dodging him.
Yet this prisoner did not have a single mechanical limb. With the physical fitness of an ordinary person, how could he outrun those steel beasts?
Just as Lu Guangyi was about to grab him, the new prisoner panicked. "Don't touch me! Why are you grabbing me? Get the hell away from me!"
As he ran and dodged capture, he kept cursing. "Don't mess with me! I'll slap you to death, you idiot!"
Qing Chen: "???"
That authentic Chuanzhou dialect left him stunned. There were no dialects in the Inner World—everyone spoke Standard Mandarin!
It was not just Qing Chen. Even Lu Guangyi and the others looked utterly baffled. "What the hell is this bastard saying? Can any of you understand him?"
They looked at each other. "We can probably understand some of it, but not all of it."
When the entire world spoke with the same accent, a dialect seemed all the more out of place and abrupt...
Qing Chen quickly realized it. This guy was a time traveler!
Because Qing Chen himself spoke Standard Mandarin, and Standard Mandarin was also relatively common in Luo City, he had never realized that dialects were actually the greatest hidden danger exposing the existence of the Outer World...
At that moment, Qing Chen could even imagine what those time travelers carrying dialect accents would face.
But how had this guy, with his full-on Chuanzhou dialect, crossed into Prison No. 18? According to the pattern Qing Chen and He Xiaoxiao had previously summarized, only nineteen cities across the country had dense concentrations of time travelers, and each time traveler seemed to arrive at roughly the same location. So only people from Luo City should have crossed to City No. 18.
Could the pattern he had summarized be wrong? Were the landing points random?
No, there had to be special circumstances.
He glanced at the three people downstairs: Li Shutong and the others had clearly changed expressions, all of them becoming grave.
Qing Chen felt that as long as they were not fools, they would definitely notice something from these successive anomalies.
It was only a matter of time before people of the Inner World learned about the Outer World. There were simply too many time travelers!
Watching the faraway commotion, Li Shutong turned to Lin Xiaoxiao and said, "Go capture him and interrogate him carefully. Include Huang Jixian and Liu Dezhu from before. I think they may have come from the same place."
"Understood," Lin Xiaoxiao said gravely.
That unique Chuanzhou dialect allowed Li Shutong to connect every strange event that had occurred recently.
This time, he did not stand by and watch. He directly sent Lin Xiaoxiao into action.
The moment he spoke, the man from Chuanzhou collapsed and fell into a nightmare.
Lin Xiaoxiao walked up to Lu Guangyi and said calmly, "Move aside. Hand him over to me."
Yet even when facing someone like Lin Xiaoxiao, Lu Guangyi still forced himself to say, "Only if our boss gives the word."
As he spoke, Lu Guangyi turned to look at Qing Chen, who was still standing in the shadows of the third-floor corridor.
The prisoners were stunned. Wasn't Lu Guangyi himself the boss? How did he have a boss too?
Only then did the prisoners around Lu Guangyi understand that Qing Chen was not merely a lucky young man who had happened to meet Li Shutong.
He himself was a true god.
His surname was Qing, and he was Lu Guangyi's boss!
At that thought, quite a few prisoners who had once targeted Qing Chen immediately shuddered.
As long as someone lived on the Eastern Continent of the Inner World, no one could ignore the Qing Consortium, that enormous entity.
This was an era in which everyone could only live beneath the shadows of the five great consortiums.
When nothing was happening, everyone could indulge themselves to their heart's content.
But when they truly encountered one of those enormous entities, they would remember the fear of having once been dominated by the consortiums in their lives.
No one could escape it.
Lin Xiaoxiao looked at Lu Guangyi and smiled. "You know who my boss is, yet you still dare stand in my way. You've got some backbone. Not bad."
Qing Chen did not want to make things difficult for Lu Guangyi either. He nodded, signaling him to let them pass.
Lin Xiaoxiao pushed through the crowd and carried the man from Chuanzhou away in one hand.
Qing Chen watched as the heavy alloy gate on one side of the prison slowly lifted for Lin Xiaoxiao, then slowly closed only after he had passed through.
It seemed Li Shutong and the others could come and go freely within Prison No. 18!
But if they could come and go freely, why did they not leave?
He slowly walked downstairs and sat opposite Li Shutong. "Where did Lin Xiaoxiao go?"
"Something unexpected happened." Li Shutong pulled Big Cat into his arms and slowly said, "Although I still don't understand what kind of accident it is, it should be something beyond my imagination. In the past, if people of unknown identity appeared around me one after another, I would think someone had devised a meticulous plan to get something from me. But this time seems different. They have no plan, and it seems they also... have no brains."
Qing Chen was silently speechless for a long while after hearing that.
At that moment, Qing Chen realized that he did not have much time left.
Leaving aside that fellow from Chuanzhou, Liu Dezhu alone definitely would not be able to withstand Lin Xiaoxiao's interrogation.
First, Liu Dezhu was merely a student raised in a greenhouse. His willpower was not strong.
Second, Lin Xiaoxiao possessed the mysterious ability to induce nightmares. During an interrogation, that ability might make someone reveal the truth without even realizing it.
The exposure of the Outer World was inevitable, and it would happen soon.
But there was nothing he could do.
He had the score for Canon, but he knew very well that when facing someone as decisive and ruthless as Li Shutong, a single score could not salvage anything.
Qing Chen could only wait.
Thanks to Fo Ju Hao Zi Ji for becoming this book's Silver Grand Alliance Leader. Boss, you're generous. May your fortune be as vast as the Eastern Sea and your life as long as the Southern Mountains.
Before you continue