Demonstration… resurrection?!

Those words made Jiang Ye’s heartbeat skip a beat, and he thought to himself that Li Ku really knew how to handle things!

However, the administrator would of course not agree to such a presumptuous request.

Still, the old thing’s thick skin was one thing, but when faced with Li Ku’s bold request, he wasn’t angry at all.

He smiled faintly and explained patiently:

“If you mean having me demonstrate by resurrecting another player from this burial ground, that wouldn’t be difficult.”

“But if you mean having me personally demonstrate my own resurrection… that’s probably not so easy to achieve.”

“I already said, the most crucial step for a player resurrecting from the burial ground is opening the coffin.”

“If I don’t go and open those resurrection coffins, the player will remain trapped inside and can’t come out.”

“And when I resurrect myself, even inside the coffin, I can’t open it from within.”

Li Ku thought for a moment, frowned, and confirmed, “You mean if you want to personally demonstrate resurrection… you’d first need someone to open the coffin for you?”

“You can’t open the coffin even with your administrator proxy badge?”

The administrator shook his head with an inscrutable expression: “Of course not.”

“Moreover, I think you might have misunderstood—”

“My ability to open coffins for resurrecting players does not stem from my administrator identity.”

If the administrator identity can’t open coffins, a proxy administrator certainly can’t either.

Li Ku nodded, then asked directly: “Then what do you rely on to open coffins?”

The administrator raised an eyebrow and fell silent.

His meaning was… not telling.

Li Ku accepted that; such information indeed couldn’t be casually revealed.

However…

“You said just now that having you demonstrate resurrecting other players from this burial ground isn’t difficult?”

“Then could you demonstrate resurrecting another player for me?”

“…”

The administrator fell silent again, his face expressionless except for a faint hint of reluctance.

After a pause, though, he nodded and emphasized to Li Ku:

“You did promise that if I demonstrated a resurrection method, you’d agree to venture into the Underground Palace.”

Li Ku nodded: “My word’s my bond.”

The administrator nodded again, and his gaze shifted to the other players present.

His eyes lingered for a long moment on Jiang Ye and “Ji Zixuan,” both covered by the Salvation Domain.

But he didn’t ask more, and instead said to everyone:

“Then it’s simple. Please help dig up the grave mound.”

Li Hongbin and Gong Cheng had personally experienced resurrection from coffins before, so digging graves didn’t faze them at all.

The three cannon-fodder players from Apartment 4869 were surprised, but mostly relieved to be alive.

Just with those few people, they began grunting and digging up the graves.

One of the unlucky guys was literally shredded into meat paste by an out-of-control monster unearthed from a grave.

Flesh and blood splattered the soil around the mound, then seemed to be absorbed by the black-gray earth…

For players like Li Hongbin, Gong Cheng, and Li Ku—accustomed to gore—this scene was nothing; they barely glanced at it.

For amnesiac Jiang Ye, this sight should have been stomach-churning and terrifying…

But he looked numb, as if used to it, showing no strong reaction.

Instead, what drew his attention more than the cannon-fodder player’s death was the administrator putting the unearthed monster into a small black box.

Li Ku noticed this too and asked the administrator outright: “Did you just kill the monster? Or are you storing them?”

The administrator answered without hesitation:

“We simply put the monsters into an urn. After this round of the Novice Apartment ends, we hand them over to the apartment boss. It has its benefits.”

Li Ku followed up: “What does the apartment boss do with the monsters?”

The administrator didn’t answer further.

Gong Cheng, who wanted to curry favor with Li Ku, quietly sent him a private message:

[The Doomsday Apartment where the apartment boss is located has a profession called monster raisers. They can raise monsters to help players awaken Glyph Pattern Abilities.]

[The apartment boss collecting monsters might be for that purpose.]

[Of course, there may be other reasons—for example, monsters can seize players…]

Hearing Gong Cheng’s suggestion made Li Ku think of the cardboard box monster theory.

If veteran players help some monsters seize players when they arrive…

Then maybe the apartment boss runs that business too.

While Li Ku pondered, he forwarded Gong Cheng’s information to Jiang Ye.

Jiang Ye wasn’t too surprised or curious about the apartment boss collecting monsters.

What intrigued him more was the black box the administrator used to store monsters…

It did look like an urn, as the administrator said.

But Jiang Ye felt that urn was oddly familiar.

Maybe he’d seen it before his amnesia?

If Jiang Ye hadn’t lost his memory, he would have recognized it immediately—

That urn was the exact same thing Jiang Ye’s Ji Zixuan clone had seen in the Grand Auditorium, using Hate Memory on those newbie boys’ memories.

In that identical scene, a boy had held up the exact same urn…

Unfortunately, Jiang Ye couldn’t remember, so he only felt that the urn looked familiar.

Before he could think more, Li Hongbin dug out a coffin from one grave mound.

The pitch-black wooden coffin was faintly inscribed with strange runes that no one could decipher, giving it an unsettling, eerie aura.

Li Hongbin exclaimed outright: “I dug one up!”

The administrator hadn’t joined the digging.

He stood off to the side like an overseer, watching.

Only when the coffin was mostly unearthed did he give Li Ku a look, then walk over to the resurrection coffin.

Li Ku followed to see how he would demonstrate opening it.

The administrator kept up the suspense and told Li Ku:

“You all can try opening it yourselves, to see the coffin’s peculiarities.”

Li Ku thought it made sense; if the administrator opened it himself, it wouldn’t underscore how difficult it was.

So…

He suggested to Li Hongbin and Gong Cheng, “Why don’t you two try first?”

Li Hongbin thought: The administrator said the coffin is special, so an ordinary person can’t open it. What’s the point of trying? It would just make us look foolish.

He couldn’t say that out loud, of course, so he made a few half-hearted attempts and verified by force that the coffin couldn’t be pried open.

Because of previous conflicts with Jiang Ye on the top floor, Li Hongbin also invited Jiang Ye: “Big shot, why don’t you try opening it too?”

His tone when calling someone “big shot” was dripping with sarcasm.

Jiang Ye, a one-man against weaklings, had no real ability here.

He certainly couldn’t perform Clone Fusion in front of the administrator now!

And whether fusing with Ji Zixuan or the Guan Ce clone, it likely wouldn’t open the coffin.

So Jiang Ye ignored him and asked Li Ku, “Why don’t you try your black threads?”

When those words came out, the administrator’s pupils flickered—clearly suspicious.

Could Li Ku’s bizarre black threads extending from the fissures really force a coffin open?

Li Ku’s expressionless, paralyzed face showed no emotion.

He didn’t respond to Jiang Ye, and instead fixed the fissure-eyes’ gaze on the coffin…

Then two black threads shot out from the fissure-eye.

Jiang Ye guessed that since Li Ku’s black threads carried odd spatial power…

Maybe they could forcibly tear the coffin open by manipulating space?

However…

Li Ku’s black threads did force the coffin open, but not by spatially “cutting” it in the way Jiang Ye imagined—

The moment the two black threads wrapped around the coffin…

The faint special patterns on the coffin’s surface began to flow!

Eerie black energy, as if guided, surged toward the points where the threads coiled!

In an instant, the coffin’s patterns were entirely absorbed by the black threads! 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

As every rune on the coffin vanished into the threads, the coffin’s unnatural, sinister aura instantly became ordinary.

It looked like a large charred black wooden box…

At the same time, with the runes’ disappearance, the coffin’s “soundproofing” vanished too, and obvious knocking and human cries for help rang out.

“Help—someone come save me? I’m not dead!”

“Chao-ge? Lin Shen? Jiang-lord? Anyone come save me QAQ”

?

The voice sounded lacking dignity.

Yet Li Ku felt a strange familiarity with it…

He retracted the black threads, stepped forward, and pushed the seemingly mundane coffin open with ease.

The cries cut off abruptly, and a totally ordinary youth climbed out.

He looked terrified and wary as he stared outside the coffin. At sight of Li Ku, his eyes brightened with a little joy, but fear still dominated.

When he saw Jiang Ye, his eyes widened and burst with undisguised delight:

“Jiang-lord! Jiang God! My dear family!!”

“…”

Family??

There’s only one Jiang here, so Jiang Ye naturally recognized that the totally ordinary youth was calling him…

But the awkward part was, Jiang Ye was amnesiac and didn’t know this person at all!

Still…

If this person recognized him, maybe he could help recover some memories?

The youth—this totally ordinary unlucky guy Wan Xin—noticed immediately that Jiang Ye’s look was unfamiliar.

That reaction made him freeze.

He quickly glanced down at his own body, then at the prison watch on his wrist.

He instinctively reached to remove the prison watch.

But his hand froze.

He hadn’t forgotten Lin Jing’s warning—the watch is what keeps you alive; you can’t take it off!

So he stopped and hurriedly explained to Jiang Ye:

“Big shot! It’s me! I’m Wan Xin!”

“This prison watch faked my appearance identity!”

“If you don’t believe me, ask Li Ku!”

“Li Ku! When I introduced myself earlier I said my name was Wan Xin, you should remember, right? I wouldn’t lie then!”

Wan Xin was emotional and desperate to win Jiang Ye’s trust.

Here, Jiang Ye seemed like the only pillar he could cling to…

Li Ku of course recognized Wan Xin’s appearance.

What surprised him was that this youth who followed Lin Jing actually knew Jiang Ye.

And his attitude toward Jiang Ye was even more intimate than toward Lin Jing…

Beyond that, Li Ku was more shocked by another question—

“Why… were you inside this coffin?”

“How did you get into this instance through a hidden passage? Or what else happened to bring you here?”

“Were you the only one who came here? Or were Lin Jing and the others also trapped in other coffins?”

Li Ku instinctively suspected that Lin Jing and the others might also be buried in this graveyard, in other coffins yet to be dug up.

If they could regroup with the team they had before, they might have a much better chance of clearing this instance.

Of course, being reunited with Wan Xin was a pleasant surprise for Li Ku…

Only compared to Lin Jing and Wang Lingling, Wan Xin’s strength and demeanor… umm, seemed several levels lower.

Wan Xin didn’t notice Li Ku’s slight disdain.

He was already thankful Li Ku showed him no hostility.

Faced with Li Ku’s barrage of questions, he obediently answered truthfully.

In short, he didn’t really know what had happened to him…

He had followed Lin Jing and the others down into the Blood Pool.

They followed an iron chain in the pool, descending downward.

For some reason, the bottom of the pool seemed to tremble; the chain they held went berserk, thrashing like an iron serpent in the blood.

Lin Jing seemed to know something and told them to hold tight to the chain.

Wan Xin was carried by the chain, his body tossed like a flying dragon, his head spinning until he almost blacked out, and then he found himself in an elevator space.

Fortunately, all five of them holding the chain were there.

This process matched how Li Ku, Lin Dong, and the others had entered the Blood Pool Elevator.

After that, Wan Xin was led by Lin Jing to explore the Blood Pool Elevator.

Their exploration process differed from the two groups of Lin Dong and Li Ku.

According to Li Ku, Lin Jing first questioned the Blood Pool Elevator’s floor logic—

This Blood Pool Elevator seemed to operate opposite to the red-lit elevator.

The red-lit elevator runs upward with increasing floor numbers.

The Blood Pool Elevator runs downward with decreasing floor numbers.

If they used the red-lit elevator’s floor counting, they should have started on floor 99.

But in the Blood Pool Elevator, it displayed floor 1.

Lin Jing led them out of that first-floor Blood Pool Elevator and into a large hexagonal palace space.

The space was huge and empty, seemingly with no exploration value.

But Lin Jing said the hexagonal space looked like an individual cell of the Void Mirror Palace.

Though the walls didn’t resemble mirror walls, Lin Jing insisted the value of exploring the hexagonal space lay in its six walls.

So he proposed—they should drip blood on the walls to see if they could break through.

Naturally, the task of dripping blood fell to Wan Xin, the unlucky guy…

Lin Jing justified it by claiming Wan Xin’s blood was special, making him the best candidate to try.

Regardless of reason, with Wan Xin’s strength, he couldn’t refuse Lin Jing.

So he obediently picked a wall and prepared to drip his blood…