Chapter 27 (1/2)

Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio

Zhang Heng felt relief after that. He kept feeling that something was off as soon as the two of them had met. However, due to the influence of the Marker, some details in his mind were sealed away. As such, he was only able to sense, by instinct, that something wasn’t right, yet he was utterly unable to figure out what was wrong when he was trying to figure things out.

What felt wrong was that… Angelina was speaking Chinese the whole time.

That was what made him feel something was off, to begin with. She was a westerner, yet she was able to speak fluent Mandarin as if he was born in Huaxia. Furthermore, while she had impeccable command of Chinese, he realized that it shouldn’t also mean that the four behind her should be able to speak Chinese as well.

However, it was Angelina who was communicating with Zhang Heng the whole time, while the four behind them never found anything out of place, as if they were puppets, to begin with. That itself was absurd.

That was the greatest flaw in the trick the Marker played on him.

That flaw became even more glaring afterward, as Zhang Heng found himself unable to remember anything about those four at all, as if they had been some background characters of no importance in the first place. More importantly, he never realized that the behaviors of those four were out of place, as if the four of them were never there, to begin with. It was only when he recalled that there were four more of them around, and then turn his head around, that he would find the four standing behind him without making a sound.

However, while such flaws should have been easily detectable, Zhang Heng could only feel that something was vaguely off due to the Marker’s influence. It felt as if he was in a dream, keeping him from figuring out and discovering things with logic like how normal people would.

It was just like how people could barely realize they were dreaming, while they were dreaming.

What snapped Zhang Heng out of the trance was the greatest oversight from the Marker—it didn’t realize that his right eye had been modified by the Dimensional Star, that he had long had the ability to see in complete darkness. When he stared into the training ground for simulating space combat, he saw only darkness through the glass and nothing else. It was then that he truly realized something.

He had been put under the Marker’s spell right after he arrived at the plane.

He felt himself going limp at that thought. The Marker had laid two traps for him, with the first trap being his initial encounter with Angelina, where she told him that there was still a safe haven to be found in the base. Regular folks would have most likely agreed to stay behind. They were in a terrifying world filled with necromorphs after all, and a place devoid of danger and filled with an endless supply of food would feel like heaven.

It was too bad that the Marker couldn’t recognize that Zhang Heng wasn’t a human from that plane, and, as such, that trap didn’t work.

The second trap came in the form of Angelina’s seduction, later. It was fortunate that Zhang Heng was able to resist and keep his guard up against her the whole time, or he would have only fallen deeper and deeper into the illusion of the Marker, eventually leading to the collapse of his mental defense, going crazy and killing himself.

In that case, the peculiar phenomenon of him running into a huge number of necromorphs when he first came to the plane, yet seeing none of the necromorphs around as soon as he met Angelina, could be easily and completely explained.

Zhang Heng was only in a dream the whole time. Be it that particular necromorph from before or the octopus that was able to squeeze itself into the ventilation ducts, everything had been a dream and none of them existed.

The necromorphs had all been absorbed by the Blood Moon, and the entire planet had long been rendered a dead piece of rock devoid of life.

It was fortunate that, while the Marker had the ability to induce hallucinations and even make people kill themselves, its intelligence was nowhere near that of humans. While it could enthrall humans with illusory traps, said traps couldn’t be made completely flawless.

That fact was made very clear with Angelina’s example. While her design looked strikingly real, the Marker was unable to enhance her effect on him after designing her, and make the other four men just as lifelike as well. As such, the four western men simply behaved like puppets, devoid of any sense of presence.

Zhang Heng peered into the training ground after clearing his mind out. He then found the space beyond the glass to be bright as day, instead of being pitch-black.

A huge spherical plaza sprawled before his eyes outside the glass, yet the top of the training ground had been opened by some unknown entity, making it lose its weightless state completely.

Sunlight shone into the deepest depths of that training ground through that opening at the top. The bottom was in ruins and there were even weed-like plants found around the place. If there was anything that stood out, it was the huge artificial construct about five meters in diameter that remained standing in the ruins.

The design of that construct was very eerie, as it seemed to be formed by two very thick and long strands twisted around one another in a helical shape. Zhang Heng could see some weird runes that he had never seen on the strands, and those were definitely not scripts that originated from Earth.