In the brightly lit bedroom, the two looked at each other.
“?”
It was indeed exactly like this…
But Huperion felt that if Viscount Augustin was controlled by Lan Qi, that would be the real serious problem!
She had already understood Lan Qi’s hidden words.
This guy wanted to personally go and rescue Viscount Augustin.
And then control Viscount Augustin.
To obtain a sixth-rank vampire experimental subject at his mercy!
You are not a traitor, but the things you’re doing surpass a traitor!
“Stisela, in the next few days you’ll have to wrong yourself by staying in this room. In our live broadcast we cannot expose the fact that you have become our companion. On the surface we are still mortal enemies. But every day we will bring you three meals. If there is anything you need you can also tell us.”Lan Qi spoke to the priestess Stisela.
Stisela obediently nodded.
Although she knew that challengers could not possibly directly trust her, Lan Qi’s words made her feel very comfortable and at ease.
“Huperion, let’s walk and talk.”
Lan Qi was already holding his notebook and walked to the bedroom door. His fingers lightly grasped the doorknob on the doorframe, gave a light pull, the ancient hinge let out a faint creak, the thick door quietly opened, and a gust of midnight cold air from the castle corridor rushed toward them.
“Mm.”
The two walked out of Room 203, the large door slowly closed and locked behind, the carvings on the back of the door casting mottled shadows under the corridor light, as if telling the sediment of years of this era.
In the second-floor corridor, the wall lamps poured down warm yellow light, the soft light shining on their bodies, stretching their shadows very long.
“What exactly do you want to do…?”
Huperion walked in the castle’s second-floor corridor and asked Lan Qi.
They walked side by side, under the black wooden floor was endless silence, one could hear their own heartbeat.
“You think, sealing a vampire viscount once counts as one merit, right?”
Lan Qi tilted his head, smiling as he looked into Huperion’s eyes and said.
“…?”
Huperion’s gaze froze slightly.
“Yes, that’s right.”
She knew, generally speaking, completing such a key reversal step in a more complicated process would count as an achievement in the final evaluation of the Shadow World, and would correspondingly increase the total score.
Take for example the last time at the Purgatory Corridor Academy when they reached the most exaggerated SSS rating, Lan Qi had done a huge number of abnormal achievements impossible for normal challengers.
This time their team had definitely also completed some extremely bizarre achievements, but even Huperion herself was not certain whether the final rating would be SS or SSS.
In a normal challenge, an A-level or S-level score was already the peak. To go higher, it had to be by making the entire Shadow World absurdly outrageous.
Huperion felt Lan Qi might want to make one final sprint, get a big score, and ensure he securely grabbed an SSS.
But compared to the achievements Lan Qi and Frey had already obtained, even if there were still a few scoring points left to dig from Objective 2, how much more impact could it even have on an overall score that was already exaggerated enough?
“Huperion, you know too, right? Vampires in the daytime will hide in a safe place, seal themselves in a coffin to sleep, to ensure they are not touched by even the slightest sunlight and also not dug out by enemies.”
Lan Qi carefully explained to Huperion.
“I know.”
Huperion thought a bit and nodded.
This indeed was common knowledge already mentioned at the very beginning of the Shadow World.
Vampires themselves could perform sealing techniques, able to protectively seal themselves.
“Then, if we can train the viscount and the coffin together into a fully automatic sealing cycle machine, letting him under my command repeat the process of ‘unseal’—‘seal’—‘unseal’ for four days straight, wouldn’t that mean I sealed the viscount tens of thousands of times?”
Lan Qi spread his hands proudly, smiling as he explained.
If each time he sealed a vampire viscount counted as one merit, then after four days, wouldn’t he be boundlessly meritorious!
“…?”
Huperion stared at Lan Qi’s emerald-green pupils, eyes widening.
Her lips parted, but her throat could not produce a sound for a long while!
Seeing the pure smile on Lan Qi’s face, Huperion was certain Lan Qi had proposed a crazy merit-farming method for boosting evaluation scores!
So it turned out all the achievements they had accomplished earlier in this Shadow World were just foreshadowing, the real score-farming feast was only beginning now.
Just like this, the corridor was terrifyingly silent.
They passed one bedroom after another. Glancing through the windows, they could see outside the forest under the moonlight, like a sleeping giant beast, mysterious and tranquil.
The rows of portraits along the wall, those landscapes and portraits in the paintings seemed to dance with their footsteps, their gazes carrying curiosity, leisure, even seriousness.
Since Huperion had come to this Shadow World, because Lan Qi was at her side, she had hardly been afraid.
Now because Lan Qi was at her side, she was extremely afraid.
“Lan Qi…”
“Mm?”
“Nothing…”
The two arrived at the staircase. Their palms brushed across the carved banister, the traces of years etched in stone rough and cold.
After they had earlier identified the traitor, the focus had shifted to confronting the Saint of Destruction and Count Parocas, so they had no longer cared about the identities of the werewolf and the witch.
Now, aside from Huperion who was already known as a witch, to unseal Viscount Augustin, they also had to find the werewolf.
Huperion increasingly felt Lan Qi had in just five minutes walked the entire life’s road of two traitors in history.
Silence continued.
They stepped down the staircase paved from whole stone blocks, each step making tiny echoes, like the heartbeat of the castle in the deep night.
Very soon, the two of them arrived at the third floor, a breeze drifting in through an open window in the corridor, bringing the fresher, colder night air from higher up.
“Lan Qi, I keep feeling this doesn’t really seem like merit…”
Huperion, who had been hesitating to speak, finally tactfully expressed her thought.
“Are we really going to make Viscount Augustin do sit-ups for four whole days…”
Huperion muttered quietly.
She was doing her utmost to save Lan Qi’s humanity.
She remembered the first time she met Lan Qi, at least he still seemed like a person.
Even at the third-round entrance exam, when they first cooperated, Lan Qi was still within the animal category.
Ever since that trip to the Purgatory Corridor Academy, Lan Qi had begun to dash wildly toward an unknown direction.
Now the illness seemed to have worsened again.
She did not dare imagine, once Lan Qi infiltrated the Resurrection Church and then experienced the remaining two Shadow Worlds of the Blood Moon Catastrophe series, what he would become…
“Don’t worry, by then the specific work will be handed over to the great poet and the clergy to do. We just need to rescue Viscount Augustin and then deliver him to the clergy. The work done by clergy, the merit is directly issued by the Goddess of Fate, officially certified.”
Lan Qi explained with sound reasoning.
Although perhaps some merit would be taken as middleman fees by the three clergy, but official channel, genuine goods are worth trusting.
“When we’ve developed the fully automatic Viscount Augustin cycle device, we can also record it in the report On Ecological BaLan Qi and Vampire Governance.”
Lan Qi even expectantly rubbed his hands together, feeling this Shadow World truly was full of gains.
“?”
Huperion hearing this, once again froze.
She covered her face with both hands, gradually beginning to sob a little.
For more than ten years she had worked hard to be recognized as human by the people of Ikerite, and in the end, because of encountering Lan Qi, her dream shattered in a single day.