Desperadoes Have No Way Back

"Won't you use an umbrella? I have another one here."

"Brother, today's rain feels so soft against my skin. I'm an intermittent rain addict. Usually at a time like this, I'd want to open a bottle of noble rot wine."

"What pretentious poverty. All I have to treat you with is Nutrition Express... Want some Evolution Potion?"

"Give me some."

A hazy drizzle of pale gold hung suspended without falling. Time had been paused, leaving the waters of heaven and earth unable to sound together. Smoke veiled the towering buildings, their pointed rooftops hooking the edges of golden threads.

It was night now, without stars or moon. The sunset had long since sunk into the forest of glass curtain walls across the river in the new district. Neon lights presumably lacked the power to dye the rain streaks in the sky; every raindrop was like amber preserving a fragment of daylight.

A light snow from the clear northern sky had even begun to fall at low altitude. It too hung suspended without descending, merely decorating the night sky like Stars of Bethlehem, white wind chimes, and snowy colored lights hung on a Christmas tree.

After the golden rain came a pure, cold-white palette. Once blended together, this sort of weather made for an excellent little drink to wash away the smell of work, suited for people finishing a busy day in the city to take a few sips before looking out from above at the distant rolling waves.

The rooftop on the highest floor of the Universal Building was filled with the rich fragrance of braised pork intestines and grilled chicken wings.

"Are we not in reality right now?" Lu Mingfei watched the scene with his umbrella clamped beneath his armpit, a little yellow grease still at the corner of his mouth. After taking a sip of Nutrition Express, he felt somewhat dazed.

The atmosphere here was more like a fairy-tale version of Binhai Town.

Not long ago, things had been fairy-tale unbelievable too. Both sides of the commercial street had been lined with shops selling braised pork intestines, grilled chicken wings, and all kinds of ice cream. Every drink in the supermarket beverage cases had turned into Nutrition Express. He and Lu Mingze had smoothly bought everything they wanted, found an abandoned building whose elderly guard allowed them inside, and met smiling faces everywhere along the way.

It was simply getting whatever they wished for. They could do anything they wanted, and the whole world was offering them kindness.

Judging by Lu Mingfei's eighteen years of rotten luck, he was basically the God of Misfortune incarnate. How could something as wonderful as the Goddess of Luck gently waving at him possibly happen? It would already count as good manners if she did not curse him for bringing bad luck and kick him twice.

The double orders of non-spicy braised pork intestines had already been wiped out by the two Gluttonies. One last grilled chicken wing sat in the middle of the greaseproof paper, and both Lu Mingfei and Lu Mingze's gazes drifted toward it now and then.

At this moment, they were peerless swordsmen. Listening to the fine rain patter against withered bamboo, they held their sword hilts and gave each other a casual, composed smile, waiting for the other to reveal an opening before delivering a stylish killing blow.

"Yeah. I never intended to hide it from you. We're dreaming right now," Lu Mingze said. "We're in a dream world I created. It isn't Urd's Dream; the pace here is much slower."

"If you choose to stay here, I'll explain the rules to you right away. I'll give you an hour to think it over slowly. Of course, you can't stay in my dream world for too long either, just long enough to catch your breath... Seven days at most."

After thinking for a moment, he added, "You remember Chen Wenwen, right? In the dreams I make, you can do whatever you want. The other two girls at Shilan can be candidates too. Of course, that's only one-thousandth of the perks. I feel that, with your current personality, you'd rather stay up all night playing StarCraft and take a hot bath. We can also go for a walk first in a little while."

Stretching his legs over the edge of the rooftop, Lu Mingze closed his eyes contentedly and snapped his fingers. Then he pointed at a bronze door he had created in midair. "That leads to the game dungeon world. Once you get tired of playing in my world, you can go anytime. Choose: rest for two days in reality, or rest for seven days here with me."

The bronze door's bolt loosened, and the half-rotten door floated in midair after opening.

"Can I really do whatever I want in your dream?" Lu Mingfei raised a brow with a chicken bone between his teeth, like a wolf in the wild with oily green eyes. "Sorry, Zeze, but I have no lofty ambitions. I only want to snatch your last chicken wing. Your long-winded strategy of distracting me with nonsense has already been exposed."

"I'll defend it with all I have, Brother, just as a fairy-tale knight protects a duke, protecting this final wing." Lu Mingze sat up straight like an alert meerkat.

"A fairy-tale knight is supposed to protect a princess, isn't he?"

"It's all the same. If you had absolute power, who knew how many knights would cling to your legs and beg to protect everything you had... Fast-paced revenge is a shortcut to gaining authority and power. In that respect, Sidney Sheldon was once one of the world's greatest storytellers."

"Sidney Sheldon?" Lu Mingfei felt a little uncertain. The name sounded familiar. Although he had spent a year hanging around the literature society, he was especially uncultured and blindly conformist in some areas.

The overall reading taste of the Shilan Literature Society leaned toward works like The Lover, with the occasional detective mystery novel Zhao Menghua liked. He himself had no interest in either genre.

Of the three books he had seriously read, two were Soviet literary works from before the 1950s. Since he had to lie next to Deadpools at night, he needed to hypnotize himself during the day by saying, I'm not scared, I'm not scared, Lu here is a tough philosopher who understands suffering.

"I thought you remembered that author." Lu Mingze downed the Evolution Potion in one gulp, his expression unchanged as though he were drinking mineral water. "There was a plot in one of his novels where a guy woke up in the morning with amnesia and discovered that a thirty-five-millimeter film negative bearing the password to a Zurich bank safe-deposit box had been implanted in his inner thigh. Inside the box were guns, ammunition, and four million dollars... That was where his story began. You especially liked that part. When you woke up from dreams in middle school, you repeatedly checked your inner thigh."

Lu Mingze had deliberately fused parts of the different novels The Bourne Identity and Memories of Midnight, because people who first read them often mixed them up. Sometimes, human memory deceived itself.

"Now that you mention that plot, I remember it. I skim through novels and don't really remember authors' names. You really are the worm in my stomach. But since you know me so well, you should understand—"

Lu Mingfei spoke lazily. "Understand that I won't rest."

Lu Mingze looked at Lu Mingfei seriously, like a good younger brother worried about his elder brother. "But you still have eleven dungeons to clear. Are you trying to grind yourself to death? The real devil now is the pride in your heart, not me."

Lu Mingfei scratched his head. "If I slack off, I'll collapse sooner or later, right? Plenty of remarkable people can balance work and rest, but I can't do that at all. My only supervisor is myself. I can't lie to myself."

"Back when I couldn't hold a gun steady and my hands shook, someone told me what his kendo teacher had taught him: 'Have you decided to grip the sword hilt? Since you've decided to hold it, don't let go. The day you let go is the day you die.' Thinking about it now, he was right. I already have enough trouble, so I might as well stand at the edge of a cliff and listen to the tsunami. Fighting to the death might actually let me live like a human being."

"How did you reply to him back then?" Little Devil was not curious about which person at Genji Heavy Industries had said those words. From beginning to end, there had only been one person he cared about.

"What else could I say? Back then, I really longed for happiness and a normal life. With my legs trembling, I said, 'I'm holding a gun, not a sword. Cold weapons and firearms have different temperatures, so the principle doesn't apply.'"

"Things are different now."

The hand Lu Mingfei used to stroke Little Devil's hair began circling around. It felt truly soft and smooth. He ruffled that meticulously groomed black hair into a bird's nest.

"What reason could you possibly argue with a criminal?"

The moment he finished speaking, Lu Mingfei had already risen, brushed off the dust, pulled out two Desert Eagles, and leaped from the rooftop. He clamped the final chicken wing between his teeth and fell toward the bronze door leading to the "Grand Escape and Tokyo Tower Dungeon."

To welcome his arrival, the ancient winding patterns inside the bronze door lit up with a dark golden glow. At the point where the patterns converged, a black vortex of distorted time and space appeared.

Lu Mingze sighed, then jumped after him, adjusting himself into a relatively elegant "You jump, I jump" pose.

[Challenger attention: Normal Mode has been activated. In this mode, dungeon monsters receive no base stat bonuses.]

[New dungeon "Grand Escape and Tokyo Tower Dungeon" is about to arrive. The dungeon mission is to do as you please... No mission.]

[Detected that the challenger possesses a "cheat." Warning issued.]