At the same time, all the headmasters in the command center were also discussing the “murder” that had taken place in Nine Dragon Pagoda, because this wasn’t what the second elimination match was supposed to be. According to the original plan, a limited number of pearls would be left on the 700,000 steps for the second match, and those who managed to grab a pearl would move on to the next round.
Now, the rules for the elimination match had changed, and a student had been harmed. The headmasters present were naturally anxious. The most agitated of them all was Liu Tian, headmaster of Titan High.
“President Qi… If the body lying there was created with the Construction Spell, then where is our school’s Zhu Hanyun now?” Liu Tian had been in the dark all this time, and he plucked up the courage to ask President Qi the question.
“Headmaster Liu, rest assured, Student Zhu is now very safe and under protection. Besides, the rule for this round is that as long as the killer is caught, everyone can qualify for the next round. It’s just that the murderer is still lurking among the students, which will test their deduction skills. Now, we can only wait and see. If we act rashly, it will only alert the enemy,” President Qi said.
The headmasters present were still baffled by this explanation.
After hearing President Qi’s words, however, their uneasy hearts relaxed somewhat.
It seemed that this was a plan the higher-ups had put in place earlier on. In that case, it naturally wasn’t proper for them to inquire too deeply into it.
Sitting at the back of the conference hall, the headmasters gazed at the images being broadcasted from Nine Dragon Pagoda on the big screen in front of them; for a period of time, each of them was lost in their own thoughts.
At that moment, a slip of the tongue would be their downfall. As headmasters, they should rack their own brains to decipher the higher-ups’ objective rather than ask outright.
“Old Chen, what are your thoughts?” Sitting on the other side, Headmaster Li Qingxi of No. 1 Devil-Subduing High stared at the screen and smiled slightly, as if he had already picked up on something.
“Why are you asking me, Headmaster Li, when you already have the answer?” No. 60 High’s Headmaster Chen chuckled and said, “Your school’s Gao Tianming is really good, and he’s the captain of the team this time as well. It looks like he’s your prized student.”
“Gao Tianming is indeed a promising seedling. After he graduates from high school, I’m planning to personally visit his place and accept him as my disciple.” Hearing Headmaster Chen’s praise, Headmaster Li Qingxi was instantly full of pride.
It was only when he came back to his senses that he realized that this wily old fox Chen Tianxiang hadn’t answered his question, so he asked again, “Old Chen, don’t change the subject. Tell me what you think. I want to see if your thoughts are the same as mine!”
This sort of behavior was a little like two top students comparing answers after an exam.
As the star support player back in the day, Headmaster Chen’s view of the general situation and his understanding of the overall setup far surpassed that of the other headmasters, which was also the reason why Headmaster Li Qingxi insisted on knowing his opinion.
Zhu Hanyun’s “death” was clearly a situation that had been arranged by the higher-ups; furthermore, it was clearly targeted at someone in particular.
Naturally, they couldn’t draw a conclusion purely based on just what they were seeing, but factoring in the first elimination round, Headmaster Chen suddenly had a wild thought.
There were so many ways to test the students, but why had the higher-ups insisted on having them climb 700,000 steps?
There was only one answer.
“Hypnosis.” Finally, Headmaster Chen pointed out the “key” to the heart of the entire setup.
Hearing this, Headmaster Li Qingxi heaved a long sigh of relief in his heart.
They had pretty much the same conjecture.
There was no reason for the students to climb the 700,000 spiral steps other than to hypnotize all of them.
Of course, there were some students who hadn’t been hypnotized.
They were the students of No. 1 Devil-Subduing High, Titan High, Balance Flame Middle School and No. 60 High. They had all used their own ways to reach the top without climbing the stairs.
For hypnosis to work, it often took special mental suggestions given in a specific environment. Besides, it wasn’t easy to hypnotize hundreds of students in one go.
So this was something that probably had been arranged prior to the start of the competition.
As for those students who had directly reached the top in the first round without being hypnotized, Headmaster Chen speculated that they had probably been hypnotized individually through other means.
In short, everyone was clearly under hypnosis (except for Wang Ling, Wang Zhen, Liu Qingyi, Gu Shunzhi, Zhenyuan and Fang Xing, who were all faking it…).
Then what was the next step after hypnotizing so many students? As star support, Headmaster Chen naturally had his own guess. “Dream maker.
This was yet another keyword.
When he heard this, Li Qingxi was hugely relieved. “Sure enough!”
Their thoughts were a complete match at that moment.
Naturally, the next step after hypnotizing so many students was to construct a dreamscape! And there was only one person present who could do this! That was President Qi, who was known as Wisdom Saint!
So everything that everyone was seeing now was a fabrication!
It wasn’t just Zhu Hanyun’s corpse!
At present, all the eight hundred student participants in Nine Dragon Pagoda, including Zhu Hanyun himself, had in fact fallen into a dream after the first round!
…
On the other side, the investigation, led by Gu Shunzhi, was basically going well.
In the back, Wang Ling silently watched Gu Shunzhi work. At the same time, he was well aware that they were trapped in a setup by the officials.
All the students present were at the Foundation Establishment stage.
Cultivators had more stable mindsets than ordinary people, so hypnotizing them was a much more complicated procedure. The 700,000 steps were the key to directly hypnotizing the students so that they fell into the dream one by one.
As for Wang Ling and the other students who hadn’t taken the stairs, President Qi had pretended to arrange room service for them afterward, and they were hypnotized individually.
Of course, the officials had no idea that this kind of hypnosis didn’t work on Wang Ling.
A dream maker wasn’t a rare profession in the current cultivation world, but in order to be able to trap so many people in the dream at the same time, this dream maker had to have strong mental powers.
In Wang Ming’s absence, the only person capable of this was naturally President Qi.
At that moment, Wang Ling was silently watching Gu Shunzhi’s performance.
After the first round of investigations, Gu Shunzhi had already ruled out nearly ninety percent of the students.
Of those that were left, the students from No. 1 Devil-Subduing High, Titan High, Balance Flame Middle School and South Sea Sky High were on the list of suspects.
“Explain: What were you doing before this?” Gu Shunzhi smiled gently as he stared at a boy from South Sea Sky High.
“Who are you? Why are you picking on us?” The boy was clearly unhappy that he was considered a suspect. He didn’t know Gu Shunzhi’s background, and at the same time, looked down on No. 60 High in his heart. A high school with an overall mediocre ranking was actually taking the lead in investigating this case? What right did they have?
“I hope you’ll cooperate with the investigation; otherwise, it’ll be very hard on you,” Gu Shunzhi warned the boy softly. His voice wasn’t loud, but shocking mental energy flooded the boy’s mind.
This boy was stunned on the spot, and there was a loud buzzing in his head. He looked at Gu Shunzhi as if he were looking at a devil. In the end, he was so frightened that he started crying on the spot.
“…” Wang Ling sighed in the back.
Sure enough, Gu Shunzhi was still too young to set out on the road of staying low-key.
There were times when an initial show of strength was proper and necessary, but Gu Shunzhi had clearly gone a little overboard.
This group was following Wang Ling to learn from him… They wanted to learn how to keep a low profile, and to control their powers and grades, but it was obvious that there was still a long way to go.
