Artifact Report

Chapter 200 Jin Xueli: Everyone is very calm

"and many more!"

Pushing open the back door, Jin Xueli stepped into the darkness.

In the dark and damp alley, there was a faint smell of a garbage can not far away; apart from them, there was no one else in the alley.

A man and a woman in front heard the call and turned around - somehow, they stopped after going out and did not move forward. At this moment, they were only one or two steps away from Jin Xueli.

When she called them, the two turned around with a dazed look on their faces, as if they had just woken up from a dream; it was as if they had stood outside the door and been in a daze for a few seconds before Jin Xueli went out.

These two people seem weird.

Is it due to environmental reasons?
The pale sensor light on the back door seemed to be about to break down and could not illuminate anything. Instead, it made the two of them look a bit ghostly, as if there was some invisible black fog lingering around them like a ghost.

...I guess it doesn't look much better to me.

"Are you looking for us?" The soft-white man who looked easy to bully asked cautiously, "Do we know each other?"

"I don't know her," Jin Xueli replied - at this time Megan also walked out beside her, and the back door closed behind them with a "bang".

"Do you have a fake you want to sell?" she asked the slender woman. She had seen that the thing belonged to that woman at the bar.

"She's interested in your fake image," Megan added, "That's great, you can go back and talk."

"...Megan?" The genius who was a M seemed unsure. He stretched his neck forward a little and asked with narrowed eyes.

After the back door was closed, it was dark all around and neither of them could see each other's face clearly - the other person might not even know who was chasing them.

“It’s me,” Megan said.

With the staff of "Against the Light" present, there should be no suspense about this matter: the other party would undoubtedly go back with her happily to negotiate the price and make a deal with Chai Si. However, just as Jin Xueli was about to turn around and open the door, she heard the woman ask, "Can we do it another day?"

"Huh?" Jin Xueli was stunned. "Why?"

"I'm sorry," she said, smiling sheepishly. "It's a little inconvenient here right now. If you're in a hurry, how about we talk somewhere else?"

Jin Xueli remembered that when she was in the bar just now, she gave people a gentle and kind feeling - now when she spoke, it was indeed steady and warm, and it made her feel close to her.

"Okay," Jin Xueli agreed immediately. "Wait for me. The person who wants to buy something is actually my companion. I'll go get him."

"Then please hurry up,"

Standing under a line of half-real and half-virtual "XX" characters in the air, the woman spoke softly.

"No problem, he's right behind," Jin Xueli turned around and stretched out her arm to open the door, at the same time a thought came to her mind belatedly.

...XX?

What XX?

Why did two strange letters appear above the woman's head?
The thought flashed through her mind, and she lowered her eyes and found that her hand was holding the handle of the back door.

There didn't seem to be anything strange about this—she was going to open the door anyway.

But the strange thing was that she didn't have time to move her feet.

Logically speaking, she should be a little distance away from the door; she should take at least half a step forward to reach the door...

Jin Xueli's gaze followed her hand all the way up and she quickly understood.

It turns out that it was broken at the elbow.

The forearm and upper arm had separated at some point, and the forearm and hand were floating leisurely in the air, hooked on the door handle.

There was no blood or flesh at the broken part of her upper arm, as if there had only been a round piece of skin there naturally.

……what?

Faced with such an unusual situation, what surprised Jin Xueli was that she was not surprised at all.

She turned her head back again - it was the first time in her twenty-eight years of life that she turned her head so easily and smoothly; she did not feel the pulling of her skin and muscles, nor was she restricted by bones and tendons, as if her neck had become a piece of melted butter.

No, more like no neck.

Jin Xueli felt her head floating lightly in the air, facing the man and woman behind her again. Her body was still facing the back door, standing in the distance.

A man, a woman, and Megan beside her, saw what happened to her, and no one seemed surprised - because no one screamed or questioned.

There was also "XX" floating above Megan's head, but the man had "XY" above his head.

Ah, it turns out to be chromosomes.

……Why is this so?
Jin Xueli seemed to catch something out of the corner of her eye.

She turned in that direction and found a gray-white cloud floating quietly in the air next to her ear.

Just like the dialogue box of a character in a comic book, the gray-white cloud stretched out into a long tip, the end of which was pointing at her, as if it came from her body.

There are also words floating in the cloud and fog dialogue box.

(Emotions. Emotions at this moment: panic, fear, confusion, surprise, doubt, bewilderment)
Looking more closely, there is a misty "dialogue box" floating around each person, and the emotions written in it are all similar.

"Who knows what's going on now?" Megan asked calmly.

"I don't know," the woman said in a soft, emotionless voice. "This is really new. This is the first time I've seen anything like this."

In the misty dialogue box beside her ear, in addition to various emotional nouns similar to Jin Xueli's, there is another word, "novelty".

"Oh, look,"

The man raised his head and said, as he did so, he also floated up from his body. "There are more things in the air..." (Passage, jumping off the tall building)
(Passage, crashing into the large screen)

(passage, sea water)
(Passage, slapping the ceiling while leaping into the air)
Four heads swayed and floated in the air, and no one spoke for a while.

As long as no one claims their own path, no one will know which path belongs to whom; although at this point, concealing the path actually has no meaning, it can only be regarded as a habit of hunters.

"Rather than saying it's increasing, I think it's more like our own things are being thrown into the air," the woman analyzed.

"Indeed," Jin Xueli agreed.

"When you can't feel your emotions, even if you know intellectually that the situation is wrong, you don't have the motivation to get rid of it," Megan said.

"Well, your emotions are just floating around your ears, not in your head, so you can't feel them," the weary-looking man replied. It didn't make sense that the letters on his head weren't XM.

His tone made it sound like they were in a rather boring meeting: "It turns out that pure reason alone isn't enough to motivate people to take action."

Jin Xueli felt that since their heads and bodies had been separated, it was hard to say how much rationality they had left.

"Oh, my illusion," the woman suddenly whispered.

It's called a cry, but it sounds very dull.

Jin Xueli followed her gaze and found that a long black snake-like shadow was loosely stretched out from the torso of the woman who ran away from home alone; she didn't expect that in addition to the lipstick, she had another illusion wrapped around her body.

Looking at it this way, the lipstick also floats beside her.

The man exclaimed, "Ah!" and stopped talking halfway through, "It's a good thing you didn't..."

There was an additional word "worry" in the emotional dialogue box between her and the man.

But when she spoke, it sounded exactly the same as before, without any worry at all: "...Can you open the door?"

Jin Xueli realized that she was talking to herself.

"My vision is having trouble right now. It feels like my head is like a balloon floating in water. It doesn't quite obey my commands, and I can't look wherever I want. I imagine it's the same for you guys, right?"

Jin Xueli wanted to nod, but she was indeed right, so she responded instead.

"From the corner of my eye just before I looked up, I seemed to see that our bodies were still leaking a lot of things. Saying 'leak' might not be accurate, but I don't know how else to describe it... It's like we're melting."

"Are we becoming...pieces of each other?" Jin Xueli guessed.

"possible."

This speculation was obviously unanimously recognized by everyone.

If this continues, if the thinking and cognitive abilities are separated from the language processing abilities, the few of them will no longer be able to communicate.

"If we could get the door open, maybe we could ask for help from the bar," Megan said.

Although there is no emotion to motivate me, it seems that it is not impossible to force myself to work hard.

Jin Xueli said "I'll try" and turned her head towards the back door - she turned too far and was facing the alley, and then she took a lot of effort to turn back little by little.

I feel the need to look back out of habit, after all, my hands and head are no longer connected to the same body.

She didn't know how the bioelectric signals generated in her brain could cross the physical distance and cause the distant hand muscles to contract and exert force; she could only repeat "open the door" silently like a monk chanting, and imagine herself pressing the door handle in her mind.

After going through this thought several times in her mind, Jin Xueli felt that two or three minutes had passed, but the door was still motionless.

"Come on," the tired man's encouragement did not give anyone any strength.

Jin Xueli wanted to refuel, but she didn't know how. She tried her best in her head, but her hands remained in the distance, watching the fire from afar.

But she still forced herself to keep trying - it turned out that action was so dry and difficult when there was no emotion to motivate her - she didn't know how many times she tried, but the door handle suddenly sank down and the door was opened a crack.

"That's great," Megan said calmly.

No, that's not right...

The door was not opened by her. Jin Xueli suddenly realized that the door was pushed open from the inside.

The person pushing the door only opened it a crack and then stopped.

She tried to float her head towards the crack in the door, wanting to see clearly who was behind it.

“…There’s no one outside the door.”

Through the crack in the door, "Han Liuyue's" black eye, which looked like a pore, happened to meet Jin Xueli's gaze.

However, from the snow-white surface that was only as wide as a crack, it was impossible to tell whether she was lying or whether she had seen Jin Xueli.

"Go out and take a look,"

Chai Si's voice echoed from behind "Han Liuyue." "They might have gone far away. You should search carefully."

He still used the tone of giving orders to his subordinates; it was a pity that the person in front of him was no longer his subordinate.

"I won't," Han Liuyue said. "It's none of my business whether they live or die."

For a few seconds behind her, no one spoke.

"...Then get out of here," Chai Si finally whispered, "Let me go."

　How should I put it? Fortunately, everyone's emotions are stable in this chapter, because I've been up all night for three consecutive days, and I'm also suffering from menstrual cramps. Now I'm exhausted and my heart is dead. Even if you asked me to write a chapter with a lot of emotions, I wouldn't be able to do it...

　　PS: The third chapter of the Silver Chapter Extra Instance has been updated. It’s in the related work section before the main text. I wrote too many words in just 24 hours...

　　
　
(End of this chapter)