Chapter 07: Corruption

Liao Tianhua found it difficult to type with one hand, and since Xia Mi could not hear him, he used voice-to-text to send a message: [There is no time to lose, we must act quickly. You are a point of Qing within the Zhuo, the only person inside the Corruption who can communicate with the outside world. Based on past experience, as long as you can see me, you can construct a channel to let us in.]

Xia Mi: [How do I build the channel, Captain?]

She had already switched to calling him “Captain” with lightning speed.

Liao Tianhua wore a helmet that did not leave a single strand of hair exposed, making it impossible to read his expression.

Nevertheless, he expressed his protest via text: [Just call me Liao Tianhua or Comrade¹ Liao.]

Xia Mi: [Understood, Captain Liao.]

Xia Mi listened, but only partially.

Liao Tianhua did not have time to argue over titles. The situation was critical, and they needed to resolve the Zhuo corruption incident in Building 6 of the Xingfuli Apartments as soon as possible. Everything else was trivial.

He told Xia Mi: [The principles behind this are very complex, so I won’t explain them all now. In short, the specific method to build the channel is for you to reach out and grab my hand. By pulling me into the Domain of Zhuo, you can create a temporary passage that will allow the team members behind me to enter together.]

Several more fully armed, helmeted heads leaned out of the helicopter, waving at Xia Mi.

Xia Mi waved back, walked toward the helicopter, and stood beneath it, reaching her hand up toward Liao Tianhua.

The helicopter’s ladder extended downward. Liao Tianhua stepped onto the rope ladder, gripping it with one hand while reaching out to Xia Mi with the other.

The distance was slightly too great. Liao Tianhua intended to climb down another rung, but he saw Xia Mi jump directly into the air, swinging her hand forcefully toward his.

Liao Tianhua hurried to reach out and grasp her hand.

In addition to bringing the team inside, Liao Tianhua had another mission for this channel construction: to rescue Xia Mi, the only normal person left in the apartment building.

Fighting the Zhuo was an extremely high-risk endeavor. Even for his team members, entering meant a narrow escape from death, and the failure rate was high.

But as long as the channel was successfully built, they could at least pull Xia Mi out of the mire and return her to normal society.

Liao Tianhua reached accurately for Xia Mi’s hand.

Xia Mi’s jump height was perfect, her hand aiming straight for his.

Their hands met in mid-air, passed right through each other, and caught nothing but empty space.

Xia Mi landed on the ground, staring at her hand in confusion. “I can’t touch you?”

Beneath his helmet, Liao Tianhua’s face turned pale. The thing he feared most had finally happened.

Xia Mi pulled herself together and said, “My conviction must not have been strong enough when I jumped. Wait, I’ll recite the Party Constitution² while I jump.”

So, she accurately recited the Party Admission Oath and jumped. Since Liao Tianhua did not coordinate his movements this time, Xia Mi simply grabbed for the helicopter’s ladder, but again, she passed right through it.

Undeterred, Xia Mi said, “Maybe I recited it wrong. It’s fine, I brought the book.”

She pulled Mao Gai³ out of her backpack. She jumped while reading aloud, but still, she caught nothing.

Xia Mi: “Maybe my heart isn’t sincere enough. After all, I have a lot of distracting thoughts, I’m not exactly a warrior of steadfast faith. But it’s okay, the book is neutral and objective!”

This time, she jumped while holding Mao Gai. The book passed right through the helicopter’s ladder.

No contact.

Liao Tianhua, the helicopter, and Xia Mi were like parallel lines that could never intersect.

Xia Mi wanted to try other methods, but her phone vibrated.

Liao Tianhua: [Don’t bother trying. It’s impossible to build the channel now.]

Xia Mi asked, puzzled: [Why?]

Liao Tianhua hesitated for a moment before telling Xia Mi the cruel truth: [You have already begun to undergo Zhuo corruption. You can no longer build a channel.]

Xia Mi was defiant: [I haven’t touched any of the corrupted areas. I’ve been very careful.]

Liao Tianhua: [As long as you are inside the Zhuo, you will slowly be corrupted. Not touching corrupted people only slows down the process, it cannot be avoided.]

Liao Tianhua felt a wave of sadness. The last normal person in this building had also been corrupted.

He claimed he wanted to save everyone, but in the end, he had not been able to save anyone.

They had the power to clear the Zhuo within this Domain, but because they could not enter, they could only watch helplessly as the entire building fell.

This was the first time Liao Tianhua had faced Zhuo on such a massive scale. In the past, the Corruption usually only affected a single house or one family, involving fewer than ten people. Those Domains were not so sealed off, allowing them to find a crack to enter. The consequences were not as dire, and the fallout from a failed mission was not as widespread.

This time, Building 6 had 11 floors, with 30 rooms per floor and an average of 2 people per room. 330 rooms, 660 people.

Hundreds of lives. It was too heavy a burden.

Liao Tianhua felt a deep sense of powerlessness.

After seeing the message, Xia Mi lowered her head in silence. Liao Tianhua wanted to comfort her, to encourage her, but the words would not come.

At this moment, any words felt like a lie.

He saw Xia Mi keep her head down for a while, then she suddenly opened her backpack and pulled out bread, bottled water, and a laptop.

Xia Mi sat on the ground, placing the laptop on her lap. With one hand, she began taking large bites of the bread, while with the other, she opened the computer and skillfully navigated to a mini-game platform.

Liao Tianhua watched Xia Mi, bewildered.

He could understand eating the bread. It was three in the morning, and after struggling for half the night, Xia Mi had exhausted a huge amount of energy. It was normal to eat to replenish herself. But why was she playing a game?

After being sealed by the Zhuo, there was no internet in this building. What kind of game could she play? Was she playing an offline mini-game before she died?

He watched as Xia Mi opened a game called Hani Apartments and started from the beginning.

While fiercely swallowing half a piece of bread in one gulp, she controlled a game character named Xiao Mi and killed a mosquito in the game.

“I finally found you!” Xia Mi said resentfully.

She downed a bottle of water in one go, her hands moving skillfully over the keyboard.

She rapidly explored the rooms, found an axe, and used it to drive away a transparent figure hiding in the room before hacking apart a Mosaic Monster that had run out from next door.

After hacking through the Mosaic Monster, the axe leveled up. Xiao Mi gripped her new weapon and shattered the door to Room 710. She stormed inside, unleashing a whirlwind of slashes against the room full of mosaics. She dragged the Mosaic Monster from Room 710 all the way into the stairwell and up to the Rooftop.

Liao Tianhua: “…”

He didn’t understand why Xia Mi was playing a single-player game, much less how she had turned a fleeing i-type character⁴ into the final boss of a survival horror game. Most of all, he didn’t understand why he was hanging from a helicopter watching her play it.

Xiao Mi dumped the Mosaic Monster from 710 by the Rooftop entrance. Then, she used her axe to smash open the Rooftop door and rushed out to begin a search.

Liao Tianhua suddenly realized that the Rooftop Xiao Mi had entered was a miniature replica of the Building 6 Rooftop!

Xiao Mi circled the area to familiarize herself with the terrain before coming to a halt at a specific spot.

It was directly beneath the helicopter.

Xiao Mi swung her axe and jumped, aiming a heavy strike at the exact spot where Liao Tianhua was positioned. She struck again and again, and again!

Hitting a specific target with a jumping aerial attack was difficult. Xia Mi mashed the jump key so fast her fingers became a blur!

Every time Xiao Mi swung her axe, Liao Tianhua felt a phantom pang of pain.

It felt as if every blow was landing directly on him.

Xiao Mi missed every time, but Xia Mi was not discouraged. She repeated the jump and the three-hit aerial combo over and over. Finally, after more than a hundred strikes, a crack appeared in the game’s version of the helicopter’s position.

Out dropped a machine gun, a grenade, a Protective Suit, and a piece of paper.

“I knew I could find weapons on the Rooftop. It just takes some technique,” Xia Mi said.

She closed her laptop, picked up the physical axe resting on the floor, and looked at Liao Tianhua.

Liao Tianhua: “…”

Xia Mi smiled. “Captain Liao, it’s fine. The axe won’t actually hit you. It won’t hurt.”

Liao Tianhua could not hear her words, but he saw a look of absolute, do-or-die determination on her face.

He admired her fighting spirit, but he really didn’t want to be the one on the receiving end.

He wanted to tell her to stay calm so they could figure something out together, but his voice could not reach her.

Before he could even pick up his phone, Xia Mi had already moved with lightning speed. She jumped, swung the axe in a wide sweep, and brought it down in a powerful vertical cleave!

Her movements were identical to Xiao Mi’s in the game.

The axe passed right through Liao Tianhua’s waist. Even though it phased through him as before, he felt an inexplicable surge of pain.

This was probably what they called phantom limb pain.

Xia Mi jumped and slashed, continuing the mechanical motions over fifty times.

She grew tired, her body drenched in sweat. She fished a piece of chocolate out of her backpack, swallowed it in one gulp, downed a bottle of water, and went back to swinging.

Liao Tianhua had calmed down now that he understood her intent.

He didn’t know what kind of holy terror this game was, but his job now was to prepare the items that had dropped in the game and coordinate with her actions.

The game had dropped a machine gun, a grenade, and a Protective Suit. Liao Tianhua knew these were weapons meant to deal with the Zhuo. These were not ordinary weapons, like Xia Mi’s axe, they were Zhuo-corrupted reinforced gear.

The machine gun had to be the perfectly corrupted one they had brought, which could generate its own ammunition. The grenade was surely the one that had absorbed enough energy to purify a massive amount of Zhuo.

The Protective Suit was nothing special, it was the same kind his team wore, designed to prevent Zhuo-corruption while being fireproof, waterproof, blast-resistant, and proof against low-level physical attacks.

These items shared a common trait: they were all products of Zhuo-corruption. Like Xia Mi’s axe, they existed in the space between the normal world and the Zhuo, meaning they should be able to pass through the gaps in the Domain.

Liao Tianhua ordered his team to ready the three items. If Xia Mi really could cleave open a path, the opening would likely be incredibly brief. He had to seize the moment to throw the weapons in.

But what was the piece of paper? They didn’t have any Zhuo-corrupted paper on them.

Before he could figure it out, Xia Mi struck the same spot for the ninety-ninth time.

In that moment, a flash of intuition hit Liao Tianhua. A powerful sense of crisis washed over him. He realized that if he did not move now, Xia Mi’s next strike would transcend space and dimension to cut him clean in half.

He scrambled up two rungs of the ladder. Xia Mi’s hundredth strike whistled past just below his feet. Liao Tianhua watched as the axe clearly severed the rope ladder beneath him.

Now! At that exact instant, a spatial rift wide enough for Zhuo-corrupted objects to pass through appeared!

Liao Tianhua threw the three prepared items through the rift just in time. He even tried to see if he could jump through himself.

Unfortunately, the moment the items went through, the rift snapped shut.

The window of opportunity had lasted only a second.

Xia Mi picked up the three items and smiled.

Liao Tianhua immediately sent her a message: [I couldn’t find the paper. What does the white paper symbolize?]

Xia Mi replied: [The text on the laptop screen was a bit small, so you probably couldn’t see it clearly. That paper had Guidelines for Handling Supernatural Incidents written on it.]

Liao Tianhua had an epiphany: [I understand. The paper is just a symbol. It represents my information. I can use text messages to give you intelligence on the Zhuo and tell you how to deal with it. I’ll provide remote tactical guidance.]

Xia Mi replied with a smile: [Captain Liao, do you think I can earn a Third-Class Merit⁵ before I even officially start the job?]

Hope flared in Liao Tianhua as he replied: [I have high expectations for you, Xiao Xia!]

Translator’s Notes