Fox's smile widened as far as it could. He walked to the hall's entrance and opened the door.
The Mask Corridor from before came into view.
"This way, please."
Fox stepped through the doorway and beckoned. "Please follow me."
Lin Jie followed him inside. "Isn't this where I first arrived?"
The familiar corridor, the familiar dark red torches.
The familiar walls covered in hideous masks.
There, Fox had falsely claimed to be an angel and tried to trick Lin Jie out of his ring.
Fox put on an apologetic expression:
"Sorry I lied to you before."
"When I said these masks were the souls of humans from the mortal world, I was actually just making things up."
Lin Jie's tone was cold. "I noticed something was wrong back then. Sure enough, hardly a word out of your mouth can be trusted."
Fox kept up an ingratiating smile. "We're about to become colleagues now, anyway. Let's let bygones be bygones."
"These masks are actually symbols of our identity as Administrators."
"Every Administrator has to put one on before taking the job."
"Now, please choose a mask that interests you."
Lin Jie stepped forward.
Previously, Lin Jie hadn't had time to examine them closely. Only now did he notice that, apart from their hideous expressions, these masks had another thing in common-
Most of them depicted animals.
Everything was represented, from large animals like lions, tigers, and elephants to small ones like dogs, cats, and rabbits.
No wonder these Administrators all had animal forms.
Lin Jie walked up to a mask and stopped.
This animal had a piercing gaze, and two long antlers extended diagonally upward, looking imposing.
A stag.
Lin Jie pointed at the mask and turned to Fox. "I'll take this one."
Fox followed him over, grinning. "All right, let me see."
When he saw the mask Lin Jie was pointing at, his smile suddenly froze.
He opened his mouth wide, wanting to say something, but closed it again after a long moment.
"Just as expected, just as expected... This is fate..."
Seeing Fox's reaction, Lin Jie asked in confusion, "What, is there a problem with this mask?"
"I can choose another one."
"No!" Fox waved his hands repeatedly, his expression still stiff. "This one it is!"
He stepped forward, took down the stag mask, and placed it on the floor.
Fox crouched down, murmuring words that sounded like an incantation.
A cloud of black smoke instantly rose from the mask.
As Fox's chanting grew louder, the black smoke grew thicker.
Finally, the stag mask stirred.
The stag's eyes opened.
They stared ahead, dark and hollow.
Fox picked up the mask and handed it to Lin Jie.
"All right. Once you put on this mask, you'll be one of the Administrators."
"From now on, you'll be our companion."
Lin Jie took the mask.
The stag mask had a hideous expression, its mouth gaping wide.
Its pitch-black eyes stared fixedly at Lin Jie, making him very uncomfortable.
"Brother, maybe you shouldn't put it on after all," Lin Zhi said quietly beside him. "I keep having a bad feeling."
"Let's just go play the games. I feel like there's something fishy about these Administrators."
Lin Jie gently stroked his sister's head:
"The danger of the games is plain to see. We can't take any more risks."
"Don't worry. Your brother's hard to kill. I'll be fine."
Fox chimed in from the side, "What's there to be afraid of? There's no danger. We all went through this."
"Hurry up and put it on!"
Lin Jie hesitated no longer. He raised the mask and turned it around.
Then he slowly brought it toward his face.
Boom!!!!
A violent explosion struck, knocking everyone down.
The walls collapsed with a crash, and the vast number of masks hanging on them came tumbling down.
The stag mask in Lin Jie's hands flew off somewhere, too.
The ceiling was blown away, revealing a sky full of stars.
Artillery fire and gunshots rang out one after another.
The shouts of a crowd also came from the distance.
Lin Jie pushed aside the layer of masks that had fallen on him and shouted:
"Lin Zhi! Lin Zhi, are you all right?"
A head poked out of a pile of masks nearby:
"Brother, I'm fine!"
Lin Jie struggled to his feet. Ignoring the scrapes and bruises on his body, he rushed to his sister and pulled her out.
"Are you hurt anywhere?"
Lin Zhi shook the rubble out of her hair, then shook her head. "Thanks to these masks cushioning me, I'm not hurt."
Fox, farther away, wasn't so lucky.
He was buried in rubble, with a huge rock pinning his legs.
Fox coughed twice, spat out a mouthful of bloody saliva, then kicked away the rock on top of him. "What's going on?"
In the distance, beyond the end of the corridor, a chorus of shouts drew steadily closer.
Fox's expression shifted from confusion to shock. "Oh no, it's the Resistance Army!"
He quickly opened a portal and was about to step inside.
Lin Jie stopped him. "Wait, where are you going? What's the Resistance Army?"
Fox chuckled and shook off Lin Jie's hand. "Looks like there's no chance of having you join the Administrators today."
"But the Oracle told me we'll definitely meet again."
"I'll be going on ahead!"
The Oracle?
Leaving those cryptic words behind without explanation, Fox plunged into the portal without looking back and vanished into thin air.
Lin Jie looked toward the far end of the corridor.
That was where Lin Jie had first arrived in this world.
Back then, everything around him had been pitch-black. When he opened his eyes, Fox was the only living thing he could see.
Now it seemed that it had probably just been a small, enclosed room with no light source.
At this moment, the room had been blasted open, and cold wind howled through it.
Through the cracks in the room, he could see the world outside.
It was nighttime outside, and a bright moon shone over a stretch of wilderness.
So this pitch-black room wasn't the entire world,
and beyond the houses where the death games took place, there was a larger world?
Lin Jie took Lin Zhi's hand, stepped over the broken wall, and passed through a gap in it.
They emerged outside the room.
A wasteland.
He saw an army.
A group of people wearing hard armor and carrying firearms were charging toward them.
Lin Jie noticed that the soldiers' hard armor was uniformly white.
An army in white armor.
Opposite the army, a small group of "animal-headed" Administrators dressed in black like Fox were still putting up stubborn resistance.
The leader of the white-armored army stood on a boulder, raised his submachine gun, and shouted:
"Attack!"
The army launched an all-out assault.
The "animal people" were defeated under the white-armored army's fierce offensive. They didn't hold out long before they began opening portals and fleeing inside.
After defeating the animal people, the white-armored army kept using grenades to blast open the outer walls of the surrounding little houses.
Yes, there were many identical, low little houses nearby.
The small room Lin Jie had just been in was only one of those many low houses.
There were also plenty of people as confused as Lin Jie inside those low houses, stepping out of the ruined buildings and looking around.
Now Lin Jie understood.
Countless people had been taking part in death games in different rooms.
And the army had blasted the rooms open, forcibly putting a stop to it all.
After approaching, the white-armored soldiers draped clothes over those people and helped them onto trucks.
The army's leader also wore white armor and led a squad of soldiers forward in an orderly advance.
As he slowly drew closer, Lin Jie got a clear look at him.
He was powerfully built, with a thick brown beard.
"Big Beard" kept directing the soldiers to look after the people around them, then steadily approached.
He came up to Lin Jie and his sister.
"General, this is the last house," a soldier beside him reported.
The bearded general nodded and extended a hand toward Lin Jie and his sister:
"I'm here to save you!"