Infinite Puzzle City

Chapter 734 Encountering a Strange Tale
With a method in place, the rest becomes much easier.

Xiao Ran led Gu Xintang around to the other side, not worried about encountering those demons.

As long as I don't enter their space-time, even if we're face to face, these guys can only stare at me helplessly.

With a complete map of the Ghost City, Xiao Ran led Gu Xintang through the palace.

Avoiding the points that would allow direct entry into the "future" timeline, the two walked straight to the gates of the Forbidden City.

"Go out through the left-hand gate later. Remember to walk backwards. You should be able to get out quickly. Once you're out, go find Shao Hongzhang and give him this. He knows what to do."

Xiao Ran took out a piece of yellow paper and wrote down a series of information coordinates on it. This thing would allow them to leave smoothly after he sealed off Ghost City.

Before Xiao Ran and his group entered the imperial city, they had already used the tiger demon's sense of smell to find Shao Hongzhang.

To prevent any unforeseen circumstances, he specifically left the tiger demon by this guy's side, so there was no fear that Gu Xintang wouldn't be able to find him.

"And you, are you okay on your own?"

Gu Xintang looked at Xiao Ran. On the way to the city gate, Gu Xintang had also seen many strange things.

For example, as they walked through the corridor, they saw some headless palace maids walking by. Although these maids had no heads, their movements were perfectly synchronized.

Occasionally, they would even pick up rotting heads from the ground and try to put them on their own heads. In addition, there were empresses and imperial concubines whose bodies had turned into a pile of rotten flesh, their bodies writhing along the palace walls like a lump of putty.

It's clear that this place is definitely not a safe place.

“I naturally have my own methods, but it won’t work with Shao Hongzhang. Although he is the supervisor, he is actually a complete weakling. This time, the commotion is so big that it’s easy for him to cause some trouble. So he needs an expert like you to protect him.”

"Alright, leave this to me, don't worry."

Gu Xintang nodded, then took the yellow paper from Xiao Ran's hand, carefully put it in his pocket, and then quickly retreated step by step out of the palace gate according to the method given by Xiao Ran.

After Gu Xintang's figure disappeared into the darkness of the left palace gate, Xiao Ran took a deep breath, her eyes as cold as iron. Without pausing, she also retreated towards the right palace gate in the same strange manner.

One step... two steps... ten steps... with each step, the soft ashes beneath his feet rustled.

Occasionally, stepping on half-hidden bones produces a faint, crisp sound. In the corner of my eye, the remnants of the palace wall flash past rapidly, twisted like the skeleton of a dying beast.

Finally, the uncomfortable, muddy, scorched earth beneath my feet was replaced by a harder, more rubble-strewn stone path. The invisible, viscous sense of temporal and spatial separation around me vanished abruptly.

Xiao Ran suddenly turned around!

The scene before my eyes instantly shifted from the oppressive, dilapidated but still recognizable ruins of a palace to a complete inferno.

There were no towering palace walls, no rows of halls, no winding corridors. As far as the eye could see, there were only endless stretches of charred remains and crumbling ruins!

As far as the eye could see, the earth was covered by a thick layer of black soil mixed with white bone fragments and ash, like a filthy shroud. The collapsed, massive beams were twisted and deformed, like giant bones broken by immense force, leaning obliquely into the ruins, revealing their charcoal-black cross-sections.

Even more shocking were the scattered, already "skeletonized" corpses. Some were twisted and embedded in the collapsed walls.

The traces of the fire were everywhere, covering every stone and every inch of soil, turning this once-hearted empire into a desolate wasteland exuding the stench of decay and death.

The sky above was gray and heavy, like a huge, filthy shroud pressing down, freezing despair upon the ruins of this place called "Chang'an." This was the most real and cruel appearance after Huang Chao's great fire had burned everything to the ground.

"call……"

A chilling wind, carrying ash and debris, swept in, bringing with it a bone-chilling cold and a lingering stench.

But there was no emotional fluctuation in Xiao Ran's eyes. He merely glanced around at the devastated world, confirmed the direction, and then took a step without hesitation.

The three-dimensional ghost city in my mind was running with perfect clarity.

Countless energy pathways, spacetime nodes, and phase superposition regions lit up and flowed in his mental world like a network of light. The entire abnormal spatial structure of the Ghost City was clearly visible to him.

The central axis! The core hub controlling the overlap and separation of the three spacetimes, its location shines with the most dazzling red light on the map, like a beating heart, pointing about thirty miles to the east. The City God Temple!
Xiao Ran took a deep breath of the stale air mixed with the smell of burnt blood, his figure transforming into a blurry phantom as he unleashed the full power of the Nameless Footwork.

The broken walls, charred beams, and rubble beneath his feet were like flat ground. With each step, ashes rose and were instantly left behind; his speed was so fast that he almost created a whistling sound in the deathly silent ruins.

The ruined city was crystal clear in his mental landscape, and the route leading to the City God Temple was the brightest "central axis." Thirty li, at this inhuman speed, should have been swiftly shortened.

However, just as he crossed a fork in the road, he suddenly found himself back at the starting point he had already traversed.

"We've come full circle?"

Xiao Ran was taken aback. In the diagram in her mind, there didn't seem to be any manholes or pipelines on this road. Just as Xiao Ran was feeling puzzled...

"Thump...thump thump...thump thump thump..."

A sudden, rhythmic tapping sound pierced the deathly silence of the ruins without warning.

The sound was very soft, with a peculiar rhythm, like the sound of a rattle drum, or like knocking on a door...

Xiao Ran suddenly stopped, like a galloping horse abruptly halting in place. He whirled around, his eyes flashing with a chilling light, his pupils slightly contracting in heightened alertness.

In the middle of an empty, broken street.

The pale moonlight shone down, falling on that small figure.

A little girl who was about seven or eight years old.

She wore a pale yellow, old-fashioned but clean padded jacket and pleated skirt, and her hair was styled into two small buns, each tied with a faded red ribbon. She lowered her head, and in her delicate pink hands she held a rattle drum, which she was striking slowly and clearly.

Thump...thump thump...thump thump thump...

Her movements were stiff, with a mechanical quality that didn't seem like that of a child. With each strike of the rattle drum in her hand, Xiao Ran felt as if the space around her seemed to distort further.

The little girl seemed to sense Xiao Ran's gaze; she stopped tapping and looked up.

Her face was porcelain white, devoid of any color, like a finely crafted porcelain doll. Her eyes were large and round, as black as an abyss, empty without a trace of the light a child should have, only a pure, unreflective blackness, fixed intently and unblinkingly on Xiao Ran.

She grinned, revealing a smile that was less of a laugh and more of an arc forced by the muscles at the corners of her mouth, showing two rows of excessively fine white teeth, and uttered a childish voice that was somewhere between innocence and emptiness, devoid of any emotional fluctuation:

"Big brother, do you want to play games with me?" The girl's sweet voice echoed through the deathly quiet street, carrying an unsettling, theatrical-like resonance.

As her words fell, an invisible yet extremely clear force of "rules," seemingly etched into the depths of his soul, suddenly enveloped Xiao Ran. The air thickened like glue, pinning him to the spot. Xiao Ran's heart tightened, and he instantly understood his situation—the rules of the supernatural tales had been established, and forcing his way in or refusing to comply was clearly futile.

"What game?" Xiao Ran asked in a deep voice, his sharp eyes scanning the changes around him.

"It's a very simple game,"

The little girl giggled, her voice still innocent and naive, but the smile looked incredibly eerie against her pale face. She raised her free little hand, and a small beanbag made of faded floral fabric appeared out of thin air.

“Let’s play… beanbag toss!” The little girl’s dark eyes curved into crescents, and the upward curve of her lips was fixed like a mask.

"Throwing beanbags?" I think I used to play this game a lot when I was in elementary school. It doesn't sound like it's that difficult.

"Alright, let's play beanbag toss then. You go first, as the guest is the host." Xiao Ran gestured for them to go first.

"Then I won't be polite."

A smile gradually appeared on the girl's face. She slowly raised the sandbag in her hand and casually threw it at Xiao Ran. The sandbag was small, no bigger than the palm of her hand, and Xiao Ran hadn't taken it seriously.

But unexpectedly, the sandbag, which was no bigger than the palm of a hand, suddenly transformed in mid-air, growing to the size of a millstone and hurtling head-on towards Xiao Ran...

(End of this chapter)