Beep, beep, beep————
Around the silent circular table, Monkey leaned his upper body as far over as he could, reading the countdown for Protector.
"Twenty seconds have passed!" Monkey shouted. "The countdown is at seventeen!"
Protector calculated the ti in his head. Even though the countdown only showed seventeen, he actually had forty-seven seconds left.
Because apart from the initial sixty seconds, the rest of the ti was completely hidden.
His true tir was set for thirty seconds, making his total ti ninety seconds.
Subtracting the twenty-three seconds consud during the first round, he had exactly sixty-seven seconds remaining.
Eighty seconds————that was more than enough.
"The countdown is almost out! Four, three, two, one————" Monkey grew frantic. "Uncle, it hit zero!"
When the number above his head reached zero, the Sunflower did not fire a single bullet.
Instead, the beeping simply grew increasingly urgent.
It sounded exactly like a bomb on the verge of detonation.
"Just... the last thirty seconds left," Protector said, his own voice turning hoarse.
By this point, all the players finally realized why everyone's visible countdown was capped at sixty seconds.
Because the mont the visible number ran dry, the ga officially entered its second phase.
During this phase, any ti added through betting remained hidden, and the remaining ti acquired after pressing 'Terminate' was also completely invisible. This ant that no one could accurately track their latter half of ti by relying on the countdowns above their teammates' heads.
If a player never pressed 'Terminate', they could still keep track of how much ti they had left.
But the mont soone pressed 'Terminate' and beca the dealer, even they would lose track of their own remaining ti.
If Monkey had not sacrificed himself to force Protector into the second phase early————if they had consud their ti evenly and entered the second phase almost simultaneously, the ga would have abruptly devolved into a bloody slaughter.
Just like how Monkey had increased Lin Ya's tir, he currently had no idea how much total ti he possessed.
But none of that mattered anymore.
Because he never intended to win.
He just could not stand the thought of watching this uncle die right in front of him while he did absolutely nothing to stop it.
No matter what, Monkey simply could not accept that outco.
"I can't count the ti for you anymore, Uncle!" Monkey panicked slightly. "Can you count it yourself————?"
Protector squeezed his eyes shut and bellowed, "Don't worry about it! As long as your tir really is eighty seconds, it will definitely be enough!"
"It really is eighty seconds, believe !" Monkey yelled back with equal ferocity.
Even though the gaming arena was vast and quiet, and neither Ming Po nor Lin Ya had spoken a single word, the voices of the other two grew louder and louder.
It was as if they were screaming to release the fear festering in their hearts.
‘Is his tir... really set for eighty seconds?’
Even Protector could not help but let that sliver of doubt creep into his mind.
The visible countdown was utterly useless now.
He had already begun burning through his final thirty seconds.
At that sa mont, both Ming Po and Lin Ya shifted their gazes toward him.
One looked pensive, while the other was fraught with nervous anticipation.
Because Protector still had another option available to him————
He could wait until the very last few seconds and smash the 'Pass' button.
He could shove the bomb, now critically low on ti, straight down to the next player.
Whether Ming Po failed to react in ti, or Ming Po managed to react but Lin Ya could not, there was a high chance that one of them would be blown to pieces.
Because of this, Lin Ya was even more terrified than Protector himself.
Her breathing grew heavy and ragged, so loud that even Ming Po and Monkey could clearly hear her gasps.
Who exactly was going to die?
Would it be Protector? The Wolf? Or... would it be her?
Or perhaps she could manage to react at the absolute last second and blow up Monkey, who was currently the dealer?
Ming Po remained entirely silent, simply watching Protector.
His gaze was completely devoid of emotion, lacking even the slightest ripple of panic.
But what the others did not know————
Was that Ming Po's fingers were not even resting on the 'Pass' button.
Amidst the increasingly frantic beeping, Protector's breathing hitched.
His tightly shut eyes darted wildly beneath his eyelids, and his face flushed a deep crimson. His hands clenched into tight fists before releasing, over and over————yet he carefully avoided touching any of the buttons.
Faced with the simultaneous approach of life and death, stray thoughts began to flood Protector's mind.
————Even if Monkey really did set the tir for eighty seconds.
Could he have pressed the wrong button?
If the ti completely ran out, would he instantly win? Would the ga imdiately end?
Or would he still need to press 'Pass' or 'Terminate' when the ti was up?
If he failed to press a button at the very end, would the ga finish, only to blow him to pieces anyway?
Was the ti still not up?
————Could thirty seconds really last this long?
In that fleeting mont, Protector's past flashed before his eyes, scene after scene playing out in his mind.
Ever since he was a little boy, no one had liked him.
He had not been nearly as fat back then, but he harbored an overwhelmingly stubborn sense of justice.
The other kids loved tossing pebbles at the neighbors' windows, screaming and bolting away as the residents threw open their sashes to curse at them.
They loved sneaking into other people's dormitory buildings and stuffing chewed-up gum into keyholes.
And every single ti, he would loudly try to stop them.
The others called him a 'buzzkill' and an 'idiot'.
He would even go as far as telling the other kids' parents exactly what they had done. Over ti, they simply stopped playing with him.
But he never regretted it back then.
Because his father had told him that doing the right thing was exactly how a person should act. It was his friends who were wrong, and they would eventually realize their mistakes when they grew older.
Then, he started school.
Whenever soone cheated on a test, he told the teacher. Whenever soone copied howork, he told the teacher.
All the students despised him.
One day, a group of boys laughingly grabbed the skinniest, frailest kid in the class, dragging him outside and hoisting him up to ram him against a large tree.
He charged forward to stop them.
In the ensuing scuffle, his physical size put him at a disadvantage, and he was shoved hard to the ground.
Desperate, he put every ounce of his strength into biting the ringleader's face, biting down so hard he drew blood.
But the result was that his father had to co to the school to grovel and apologize.
He had scarred a classmate's face, forcing his family to pay a massive sum in compensation.
They even had to pay for rabies vaccines, as the other boy's parents insisted their child needed the shots as a precaution.
Treating him as if he were a rabid dog.
In the end, because he had fought with a classmate, both sides received a formal public reprimand. He stubbornly insisted that he had been acting out of righteousness to save soone, but even the boy he had rescued claid they were only playing around.
But he clearly rembered the look of absolute reluctance on that boy's face.
Even his own father, with tears welling in his eyes, had begged him to stop causing so much trouble.
‘Our family doesn't have much money! It's hard enough just affording your tuition! Do you have any idea how difficult it is for your mother and to take ti off work?!’
‘You left a permanent scar on that boy's face. How is he supposed to find a partner in the future? Do you know how long it takes for your mother and to save up fifty thousand yuan?’
He could not understand why things turned out this way.
But he knew that the 'future' his father had promised him, the one where everyone realized their mistakes, would probably never co.
His childhood friends might never realize they were wrong————but he certainly knew he was wrong now.
From that day forward, he stopped his 'weird' behavior.
He quietly attended a completely ordinary university, found a completely ordinary job, and beca a completely ordinary corporate drone. Fortunately, he was relatively smart and managed to claw his way out of the miserable pit that was the biochemical and materials engineering industry.
He learned how to turn a blind eye. He learned how to go with the flow. He learned how to keep his mouth shut.
And surprisingly, his life beca smooth sailing.
So, he was the weird one all along. He was the one who didn't understand how the world worked.
It was all his father's fault for teaching him the wrong things from the very beginning.
‘That's right,’ he thought.
Until the day he uncovered his company's secret. The pediatric dication they were manufacturing had failed its clinical trials, and every single piece of clinical data had been completely fabricated.
But before he could even do anything about it, before he had even uttered a single word to anyone about his plans————
————By the ti he regained his senses, he was already flying through the air.
He had no mory of ever going up to the rooftop, nor did he know why he had jumped.
His only thought was————
‘Will my family have to pay for that car I'm about to smash into down there?’
——Beep.
Accompanied by one final, sharp beep.
The sound of the tir abruptly ceased.
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