Chapter 209: A Perilous Situation
Zhou Ning took a deep breath, suppressing the slight surge of excitement in his chest as he watched Count Robbins walking in his direction from a distance. Right beside him happened to be a rather ordinary-looking carriage.
Soon, Count Robbins stopped and began exchanging pleasantries with Professor Edwin, who had just caught up. Clearly, just as Professor Edwin had said before, he and Count Robbins were friends.
Zhou Ning raised his eyebrows slightly at the sight, thought for a moment, and suddenly came up with an idea.
He quickly slipped into a secluded alley, took out the "World Amplifier" from his inventory, and—pia!—fired it at himself.
In an instant, a beam of light struck him squarely in the chest.
Immediately, the surrounding walls loomed higher, and the entire world seemed to expand. In the blink of an eye, Zhou Ning had shrunk into a tiny figure no bigger than a thumb.
Even though this was already his second time using it, Zhou Ning couldn't help but marvel at the wonder of gnome engineering.
This buff would only last for ten minutes before entering a full hour of cooldown. Not daring to linger, he stepped out of the alley just in time to see Count Robbins's enormous carriage rolling forward.
From Zhou Ning's current perspective, the carriage was as tall as a skyscraper and moved at remarkable speed—about to leave him far behind.
In his urgency, he quickly donned the Phoenix Battle Suit. The grappling hook in his hand shot out like a coiling python, catching on the carriage's axle and looping around it several times. Using the recoil force, Zhou Ning's black-armored body shot forward. With a soft thud, he landed lightly on the roof.
"Whew…"
Only then did Zhou Ning exhale, retracting his grappling hook and pressing an ear to the roof to listen to the sounds inside.
At the moment, the carriage interior was strangely quiet—so much so that not even breathing could be heard. If he hadn't seen Count Robbins board with his own eyes, Zhou Ning might have thought it empty.
Meanwhile, he spotted the unlucky nobleman's carriage traveling on the same road. At a narrow intersection, Count Robbins even slowed down to let the other pass first, displaying remarkable courtesy.
Zhou Ning had originally suspected that Robbins might rob the man, but clearly he'd guessed wrong—Robbins's standards weren't that low.
With his shrunken size and limited visibility, Zhou Ning could no longer tell where exactly he was. He had to rely on smell and direction to judge that they had left the Old Quarter and were now near the Sedon River.
About five minutes later, the carriage stopped before an extremely grand residence. Zhou Ning crouched low, watching as Count Robbins stepped down and headed inside.
The carriage then turned toward the inner grounds. Seizing the opportunity, Zhou Ning fired another grappling hook, this time latching onto a nearby low eave, landing quietly by a second-floor window without making a sound.
With about three minutes of transformation time left, Zhou Ning crept closer to the window—just in time to see someone strike a match with a sharp snap, lighting a kerosene lamp.
Count Robbins appeared in view. This was an enormous study—almost a library—with shelves packed full of books. The most eye-catching item, however, was a gray, hazy-looking book lying open on the desk.
The book was blank.
Robbins glanced at it, took a key from a nearby shelf, and opened a safe. He placed a stack of banknotes inside, then groped deeper until he pulled out a bundle of extremely thin objects.
He stared at them for a moment, then began undressing—and, to Zhou Ning's horror, even peeled off his own skin, revealing a ghastly body of raw flesh. Then, like putting on clothes, he slipped into a new skin.
Hiss…
Zhou Ning sucked in a sharp breath. What on earth had he just witnessed? An old man's version of Skin Painter! What crime had he committed to deserve seeing something like this?
Once Robbins was dressed again, he let out a breath, sat at the desk, and put on a pair of glasses. He picked up a quill and wrote:
"Act Three, Scene Eleven."
"The Careless One."
"As a member of the conservative Lambert family, Joshua Lambert has a careless habit. He leaves something very important behind at the site of a secret gathering. On his way back to retrieve it, a sudden gust of wind knocks down steel bars from a nearby construction site, striking and killing him along with his coachman. Then…"
Just as he was about to add more detail, the book suddenly flipped pages, words spilling across them in thick paragraphs.
"Act Three, Scene Twelve."
"The Voyeur."
"As a habitual voyeur, Wayne Strewell is at this moment peeping at us from outside the window. Due to an unknown device, he is currently shrunken in size, and because of a mechanical malfunction, he cannot revert to normal for the time being. Thus, any supernatural being could easily kill him…"
The moment Zhou Ning read this, a wave of dread surged through him. Without a second thought, he leapt backward.
A sudden gust slammed the window against the wall—crash!—shattering the glass, sending a storm of shards raining toward Zhou Ning like deadly snow.
From his shrunken perspective, they were like a sky full of razor-sharp weapons.
Before he could react, his body instinctively leaned back. A fierce sense of weightlessness washed over him as the Phoenix Battle Suit sealed around his body, wings unfurling from his back as he glided downward.
But his misfortune wasn't over yet—a strong west wind struck, driving him toward the window.
At the same time, Robbins flung the window open with a bang. His gaze swept the air, quickly locking onto the windblown Zhou Ning. Pale threads instantly streamed from his hand, spreading to ensnare him.
Just then, Zhou Ning summoned Little Deathwing from his inventory. Obeying his command, the creature swooped in, catching him steadily before arcing back upward.
Clutching Little Deathwing's neck, Zhou Ning soared away from the mansion just in time, leaving Count Robbins empty-handed and fuming.
Once firmly seated on the dragon's back, Zhou Ning exhaled heavily. That moment had been one of the most dangerous of his life.
A cascade of coincidences had led to this!
Suddenly, realization struck him—he had finally seen the very book that had appeared in the serialized story, the same one he had dreamed about: Leoncavallo's Four-Act Opera.
From what he could tell, it allowed its owner to insert others into its scripted scenes and, to some extent, influence their actions—manufacturing one "accident" after another.
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