A brave man may not live, but he cannot die

Chapter 229 CST Monday UTC+8: 3:13 PM
The black parrot is the magical creature that Amamiya Nene transformed into after taking the Druid potion.

"Quick! The antidote!" the parrot said in Tamulan, in the voice of Amamiya Nene, "This is the fourth level of the Abyss!! That person is an Abyss Transcendent!"

Quinn wasn't surprised; he had already guessed it.

“There is no antidote.” He spread his hands. “Finding you is already a stroke of luck. Don’t worry, I remember what he looks like. No one should be paying attention to me. I’m safe for now.”

"Where's my wand?"

"We can't go back to our original form, so what's the point of worrying about a wand? Just like last time, we both fell down, and we even have identities from the Abyss." Quinn picked up the inspection certificate, waved it at the parrot, and asked, "Can you understand this?"

Amamiya Nene shook her head.

"I can't understand what they're saying at all. It seems to be the language of Dad's hometown?"

"Don't understand?" Quinn frowned, thought for a moment, and said, "Then it seems that you haven't been too deeply affected by the Abyss. Is that your problem, Amamiya Nene? You were with them when they fell last time."

“Blame me? I’ve been to the abyss many times, but it only happens when I’m with you—” Amamiya Nene gritted her teeth.

"Didn't you say everything would go smoothly after the divination?" Quinn asked speechlessly, "How did you do the divination?"

"For matters related to my father, of course we should use divination methods related to him."

Miss Parrot began her lesson: "When I was little, my dad liked to play a lottery with me. There were ninety prizes in a box, and the odds of winning the grand prize were 0.8 percent. That meant the odds would increase with each draw, and you were guaranteed to win after ninety draws. He named this divination method 'Rice Pool.' I won the grand prize after only ten draws. Doesn't that mean I'm lucky?"

"Is the jackpot named Gan Yu?"

Wow, how did you know?

"Because you and your mother both love wearing black stockings." Quinn laughed angrily. "Didn't your father tell you that this kind of divination method is prone to yielding wrong results?"

"Did we go astray?" Amamiya Nene exclaimed excitedly after clarifying the situation. "We've gone straight to the fourth level of the Abyss! Now we can go look for clues about my dad!"

The little parrot sneakily strolled over to Quinn's side and gently rubbed its head against him: "I'll let you play with Sweet Rain when we get back~ Come on, come on~"

“No, it’s off track.” Quinn sighed. “In this timeline, your father probably wasn’t even born yet, or he was just a baby. There are no clues to be found.”

"Timeline? How do you know he's not here?"

"Because Ganyu was officially launched at 6 PM on January 12, 2021."

"?"

Quinn said helplessly, "It's 1999 now. Your dad was probably around the same age as me when he traveled through time."

"How did you know that?" Amamiya Nene was completely baffled.

"Because those who love to use Genshin Impact memes are young people like me who are unhappy with their lives."

Quinn stopped speaking in abstract terms and started packing his bags: "I was originally planning to research the Abyss while searching for you, and then leave once I found you. Since I'm so lucky, I might as well just leave."

".withdraw?"

The Abyss Layer is the deepest layer recorded since humanity began exploring the Abyss. As a lair of superhuman beings, perceived by the world as polluted and fraught with danger, anyone capable of reaching this depth is either a mage or a mid-to-high-level superhuman. The way back is to wait—

After a period of time, the abyss layer will "rise" and become a fall layer with an exit passage.

The "falling layer" doesn't mean that people will fall into the abyss, but rather that after a period of time they will fall back to the fourth layer—which is the "dawn" time in Jianghai City, the abyss that Lin mentioned.

This was knowledge that was absolutely forbidden, but as someone who had personally experienced the Falling Layer incident, Quinn learned about it from Lynn's evening arcane classes and the various books in the Whale Corpse Library.

"If you don't drink the antidote for seven days, you're doomed, aren't you?" Quinn packed the biscuits and instant noodles from the box into a bag. "Seven days is not enough time for the fourth level of the abyss to rise. We have to find our own way out."

Hearing this, Amamiya Nene was also a little scared.

"How do we find it? No one but a hero can freely traverse the abyss. Do you know the way?"

"Nonsense." Quinn wished he could wear Wu Jing's gym teacher's jacket. "If Jianghai City is the abyssal layer and Beibu Gulf City is the subsurface layer, then the distance between the third and fourth layers is about two thousand kilometers."

"Two thousand kilometers?!" Amamiya Nene exclaimed in surprise. That was equivalent to the diameter of the Kingdom of Ron. "Does your world have airships?"

Quinn gave a sneer at the primitive man.

“Yongzhou City has an airport. The flight takes about three hours.” Quinn paused, a vague unease creeping into his heart as he thought of the abnormally large sun in the sky.

"Forget it, let's not take a plane, let's just drive. In this day and age, there are highways, but I don't need to sleep. It'll only take two or three days to get there by national highway."

Quinn packed the food and opened his collar to Ningning, the parrot who was drinking water: "Come on, if we're quick enough we can take a look at your dad's neighborhood. But don't get your hopes up too high, that neighborhood might not even be there."

The parrot turned a blind eye to the trendiest Hong Kong style of the 1990s.

"It's so stuffy! Isn't there anywhere else I can hide?"

"I'm an undercover police officer now, not a teaching assistant at the academy. Where would I get a breathable robe?" The two stared at each other for a while before looking down at a bulging area that wouldn't arouse suspicion and had a small zipper for ventilation.

Knock knock knock, there's a knock on the door.

"I'd rather die than do that!"

Before Quinn could say anything, the parrot flew into his coat over his chest, forcing him to hunch his back and make his bulging chest less noticeable as he walked past the door.

The person knocking on the door was Lan Naniu from the Guangxi Provincial Narcotics Enforcement Team. His dark face was full of polite smiles: "Comrade Zhang, the leaders of the Municipal Bureau would like to invite you to dinner and a couple of drinks tonight. You've come all this way to try some of Guangxi's sashimi, so as not to delay your mission. What time would be suitable for you?"

Quinn was somewhat wary. Although the policeman who wanted to buy Amamiya Nene, who was suspected of being an Abyss Transcendent, was not in the team for this operation, since the Sequence Nine of Gluttony's Fate was a [Public Servant], he dared not underestimate the number of Abyss Transcendents who were lurking in the team by impersonating them.

However, he didn't suspect anything too much. After all, he hadn't revealed anything, and he had disguised himself when he saved Amamiya Nene. In this era, social interactions were common sense in the workplace. As a policeman dispatched from a municipality, it would be abnormal if the local leaders didn't organize a dinner party for him.

"Oh dear," Quinn said with a troubled expression, "can we postpone this until tomorrow night?"

"Sure!" Lan Na Niu nodded. "Not convenient tonight?"

Quinn pointed to the opposite side of the room: "That kid's got a lot of fat, never ridden a train before, I bet he'll sleep until tomorrow morning. Make him drink a couple more drinks to apologize tomorrow."

Lan Na Niu laughed heartily, handed Quinn a cigarette, which Quinn took and tucked behind his ear. He then handed Lan Na Niu a "Hengda" cigarette from his pocket. The two lit each other's cigarettes, closed the door, and said goodbye.

After the footsteps outside the door faded away, Amamiya Nene poked her head out and said, "That stinky smoke."

"You still inhale that stinky stuff?"

Quinn threw the cigarette into the toilet; it was the first time in his life he had ever smoked.

"Tch, you don't need to care about my cigarettes, because I'm not going to be your wife."

"Parroting".

Quinn took the cigarette that Blue Bull had given him, which was tucked behind his ear, and tried to open the Demon King's Eye. But just like last time, the Demon King's Eye was almost ineffective in the abyss, leaving only an extremely chaotic vision.

Is there something wrong with this cigarette?

The parrot closed its eyes, brought its beak close, and seemed to be trying very hard to sense something.

Although the physical body is altered, mental power is part of the soul, and its quality is not affected by Druid polymorphism.

"The interference on the fourth level of the abyss is terrifying. My mental energy can't even stray too far from my body. Should I be okay?" she hesitantly assessed. "I haven't sensed any signs of any mysterious presence."

Quinn nodded slightly upon hearing this, but still threw the cigarette into the toilet and flushed it away.

"What does he want with you?"

“It’s nothing important.”

He casually added, "Anyway, they're all fake, so we don't need to pay attention to them."

Quinn locked the door, hung up a "Do Not Disturb" sign, wrapped Amamiya Nene up, and quietly went down the emergency staircase, finally climbing out of the window.

No one in the entire hotel knew he had left.

Quinn didn't choose to drive the police SUV; instead, he planned to get away from the hotel first and then steal another car to drive away.

He needed to buy some water, so he walked a little further and found a small shop. An old woman was sitting in front of the shop, basking in the sun. The shop was filled with all kinds of handmade food, which was delicious and inexpensive.

Quinn picked up a case of Master Kong cigarettes in blue packaging and was about to pay when he noticed a red telephone on the counter.

With the telephone line plugged in, the green light, indicating a normal signal, remained quietly lit.

"A case of water? 16. Anything else?"

Quinn looked at the phone.

How much does a long-distance call cost?

"Five minutes, three minutes."

He picked up the phone, and after hearing a click, his fingers trembled slightly. He dialed the area code for the suburbs of Jianghai City, followed by a phone number.

He moved slowly. He knew he wouldn't make a mistake, but he would still look up to check the numbers he had entered after each key was pressed, his eyes never blinking.

"Quinn," the parrot on his chest whispered to him, "are you trembling?"

"I'm homesick."

He pressed the last number and stood quietly in the shadow of the small shop, where the sunlight never reached.

(End of this chapter)