Old days, dice and investigator's manual

"I was so stupid, really."

"The boss?"

"Asa, I have treated you well, how could you betray me? Don't you really remember everything that happened in the past?"

"Well……"

"And you, Brutus?"

"Huh? Isn't my name Jacob?"

Carlo closed his eyes, regretting that no one had been able to catch his joke.

Then he opened his eyes again, got up from the ground, and said, "Hey Asa, while I can understand the stress response, you really didn't hold back with that kick."

Isaac was a little embarrassed: "Sorry, it was just a conditioned reflex..."

"If it were an ordinary person, that kick aimed at my head just now, even with 11 units of force, would have broken their neck." Carlo stretched his shoulders.

Li Jiehao looked around and asked, "So, boss, why are you lying on the ground? I thought you'd been assassinated!"

"I tried this ring on." Carlo gestured with his chin toward the ring in Isaac's hand.

Li Jiehao asked, puzzled, "Do you need to lie on the ground and pretend to be dead to try on a ring?"

"It wasn't faking death; I was genuinely dead for a while," Carlo said. "Let Asa explain the specific reasoning behind it."

Isaac placed the ring on the table and briefly reiterated his previous reasoning, from the initial speculation about the ring's function to the symbolic meaning of the pattern, then to the seam on the inner ring, and finally the new speculation that arose.

Li Jiehao was stunned: "...So this thing is a trap, and whoever wears it is doomed?"

"That's one way to put it. To verify this hypothesis, I tried it myself."

"Then why are you still wearing it? What if it really gets completely drained?" Li Jiehao exclaimed in alarm.

"It's okay, I have an invincibility cheat."

"Huh? There's such a thing?"

"An invincibility cheat?"

"Hmm, you could interpret that as me not being that easy to kill."

Li Jiehao muttered, "An invincibility cheat... do you think I might have one too? Like some kind of perk for transmigrators?"

"You can try dying once, and let Asa use his 11 points of strength to hit your head too."

"No, no, no!"

Carlo dusted off his clothes: "But after trying it myself, I confirmed some things, and my guess was mostly correct."

"The ring does indeed function as predicted. After wearing it, an almost imperceptible force seeps in from the ring, giving a stimulating sensation that makes one's mind clear and body feel light, as if one has just had a good night's sleep."

"Those who are unaware of the situation will not realize that this is an enhancement brought about by the ring, and will find it difficult to detect anything unusual. They will only feel that their mental state has improved a lot after wearing it, and they are not as tired. Those who are aware of the situation will consciously sense it and then discover that it is indeed an enhancement brought about by the ring."

"Then they started extracting life force."

"Yes, but in a state of rejuvenation, it's hard to notice that your life force is being drained. You still feel energetic, and you're being drained without even realizing it. Moreover, the cause of death will be very natural, such as cardiac arrest or organ failure. On the surface, it will look like a normal death, and no one would suspect that it was a ring that caused it." Carlo took the ring.

Isaac noticed a problem: "Boss, why did you lie down so quickly? There should be a process from when you put it on to when you're completely drained."

"Because I actively poured my life force into the channel established by that ring."

"Isn't that courting death?" Li Jiehao's eyes widened.

"I need to confirm where that life force ultimately flows to. Passively waiting is too slow and it's difficult to pinpoint the location. So I simply reversed it and sent a large wave of life force along that suction force to make the path more obvious, so that I could track down the destination."

"The price is that I'll die for a short while. But once I take off the ring, the continuous loss of life will stop, and I'll be able to recover my health and revive."

"You can play like this? This is cheating..."

Isak was more concerned with another question: "What were the gains after actively instilling this idea?"

"There were gains, of course. This ring is connected to a certain being in the Wasteland. The life force it extracted was transferred there, and I've pinpointed its location in the Wasteland." Carlo sat down in the chair. "Your next question is, what is the Wasteland?"

"What is the Wasteland..." Li Jiehao was stunned for a moment, "Huh? You mean Er Qiao? Was this part of your plan?!"

"You can think of it as another world related to the present, a space filled with all sorts of chaotic things. The origins of many extraordinary phenomena lie there, including some so-called deities—specifically, I won't go into details yet," Carlo explained briefly. "In short, now we have a lead we can trace."

"So what do we do next?" Isaac asked.

"What can we do? Drag them out of the wasteland and beat them up?" Carlo shrugged. "Not to mention whether we can successfully drag them out, even if we do, it's hard to say whether three people and a dog can beat them. We'll probably have to shake Vilka's hand."

"Who is Verka?" Li Jiehao was confused again.

"A very important person."

"Eh..."

Isaac processed the information he had just received: "This ring connects to a being in the wasteland. The person who pawned the ring to the pawnshop must have known its true purpose and deliberately put it on the market so that unsuspecting people would wear it and supply nourishment to that being in the wasteland."

"And they even chose Vista as the location for their operation. They're really going all out," Carlo said. "But there's one thing we can't explain right now: is Morzul the mastermind behind this?"

"If the circulation of this ring is Morzul's own will, to nourish His resurrection, then why did the unclean spirit summoned by Jacob convey Morzul's message that the ring was 'lost' and that he needed to retrieve it?"

Li Jiehao realized, "Right, if this ring was deliberately released by Morzur's men, then why would they send me to retrieve it? That's like contradicting my own brain!"

Isaac speculated, "According to what the boss said before, there aren't many followers of Morzul left in the Ghoul Cult. So, assuming the Ghoul Cult is the mastermind, could their actions... not be aimed at resurrecting Morzul, but rather at using Morzul for something else?"

In other words, the party that gave Li Jiehao the order to "recycle the ring" and the party that released the ring into the market do not seem to be the same group of people. Moreover, the former's power seems much weaker, otherwise they wouldn't have entrusted someone like Li Jiehao, who doesn't have much strength, with the important task of recycling the sacred object.

Moreover, the original owner of Li Jiehao's body, Jacob Hammill, seemed to have obtained the tome from a member of the Ghoul Cult, and the tome's contents contained rituals pointing to Morzur, who should no longer be able to respond to prayers...

"There's a lot to sort out, anyway..." Carlo put the ring back in his pocket. "Now that things have come to this, let's eat first."