Racing Against The God of Death

All the content that followed was grumblings and complaints—either that or a simple record of what he had done that day.

The last entry in the diary was dated two days before that night in the manor.

To others, this was just a normal diary. The owner even had problems with sleepwalking and having nightmares. He had suddenly recovered later on, but how he had recovered was not recorded in the diary.

But to Tang Luo and the others, the information it contained was extremely important.

"He was possessed by Jack the Ripper!" Chu Chongtian asked, "So the first few victims were actually killed by him?"

Sleepwalking. Bloodstains.

"His nightmares were something that Jack the Ripper had experienced? A sign of being possessed? Or perhaps it was to weaken his body before possession," speculated Zhou Zhenguo.

Based on the theory that the Ripper was becoming stronger right now, Jack the Ripper had been relatively weaker in the beginning.

In other words, he could only slowly influence the Inspector General in his dreams while he was having nightmares. And possess and take control of people while they were asleep.

Later on, Jack the Ripper didn't need to go to so much trouble to possess people anymore.

The hotel proprietor had been normal and clear-headed, but the very next second, he had been possessed.

Jack the Ripper had probably been weakening the Inspector General's mental strength through nightmares and then possessed and controlled him.

And these nightmares…

It was very easy for one to associate them with the underground experiment lab in the hospital, which Tang Luo had briefly described to them!

"If the cold floor that the Ripper had experienced was actually the operating stone platforms, which Master Xuanzang mentioned it, means that the Jack he heard was referring to Jack White, right?

"The Ripper is one of the organization's experiment test subjects?!" exclaimed Chu Chongtian.

So this was the relationship between the organization and the Ripper? The two didn't exist independently of each other?!

"What about those patients who were still alive?" asked Zhou Zhenguo.

The psychiatric hospital had admitted over 100 patients.

After Tang Luo had destroyed the experiment lab, only five patients, who hadn't been imprisoned in the underground experiment lab, had survived.

A large majority of the others had become test subjects.

All of them had been dead.

The remaining minority had been eaten by the Resurrected and died as well.

"The patients who weren't imprisoned shouldn't count as test subjects, right?" Chu Chongtian asked with a frown.

The scenes in the nightmares were clearly those of test subjects being experimented on and dissected.

"Could it be that someone didn't die but was discarded by the organization as a corpse and then survived in the end?"

This was the most logical explanation.

"We've been fighting a battle of courage and wits with a lunatic?" Zhou Zhenguo found this hard to accept.

All along, they had been treating Jack the Ripper as a smart and shrewd opponent only to discover in the end that the other party was actually a lunatic.

Because their mental processes were entirely different, it led to the opponent being unusually difficult to figure out.

Was there anything even more of a scam than this?

"He might not necessarily be a lunatic." Chu Chongtian asked, "Master, didn't you say that the Ripper Gang or something had also kidnapped some people for the organization?"

"Yes." Tang Luo nodded.

"Damn it!" Chu Chongtian swore. He wasn't swearing at Tang Luo, of course. Rather, it was because the organization was gone!

The Ripper Gang had also been destroyed by Jack the Ripper!

The clues had been cut off again!

They were only a step away from Jack the Ripper's true identity. But in the end, they found out that the other party had already taken action in advance and cut them off.

This was a very horrible feeling. It was practically as if the meat that was already in one's mouth had been forcibly dug out by someone.

"It's fine. There are files that we can look through," said Tang Luo.

"Files?"

"Although the psychiatric hospital has been closed down, there must be records of the patients they admitted," replied Tang Luo. "As for the Ripper Gang, we can go to Cotland Yard. When people go missing, there'll at least be people registering and reporting the case, right?"

This included the missing Old John too.

People had also gone to Cotland Yard to make a simple report. As for whether or not they could find him, he was but just an old bachelor. It was entirely dependent on Cotland Yard's mood.

Everyone whom the Ripper Gang had abducted was probably people like him who lived alone.

It was impossible for people living alone in the city to never ever step out of their homes. Even if they were living alone, to some degree, they still needed to be in contact with the outside world and make a living to maintain their daily needs.

Should they go missing for an extended period, the possibility of people going to Cotland Yard to make a report was fairly strong.

"Right." Chu Chongtian added, "Also, if someone returned after going missing, we can determine that he's the Ripper!"

"Could it be that Jack the Ripper is the result of their research on immortality? Just that he had been overlooked by the organization!" Zhou Zhenguo clapped loudly, a possibility coming to him.

'A crazy organization…

'Cruel experiments…

'A person with supernatural powers, who had unintentionally been born, hiding in the shadows and killing people one by one to strengthen himself and take revenge.

'All the way till the shocking and horrifying consequences at this point.

'To think it was a script like this!'

Furthermore, the most important thing was that in this world, Employees of Gods and Demons should have been racing against time.

The earlier they discovered the truth, the weaker Jack the Ripper would be. The more time dragged out, the more disadvantageous it was for the Employees of Gods and Demons.

And now, Jack the Ripper seemed to have gotten so strong that it had reached an unsurpassable point.

As for why Tang Luo and the rest were still on the other party's hunting list even though they had clearly destroyed the organization, which equated to taking revenge for Jack the Ripper?

This was something very easy to understand.

One couldn't possibly expect a fiend out for revenge to maintain an attitude that separated kindnesses and enmity clearly.

Right from the start, Jack the Ripper's acts of slaughter didn't discriminate. What he wanted was probably to fully vent his anger.

"Our encounter on the first night was a reminder to us to complete the mission at the fastest speed we could," said Zhou Zhenguo.

They had already stayed for half a month in the small city.

Out of the original team of seven, four were dead. The other three were the only ones left.

Against the current Jack the Ripper, Zhou Zhenguo and Chu Chongtian probably wouldn't last a single round. The only one capable of fighting was Master Xuanzang alone, and whether or not he could fight on at this point was an unknown factor.

They didn't have any time left!

This was a mission where they were racing against the God of Death!

"Forget it, let's just head to the psychiatric hospital first and then the Cotland Yard. We must find the Ripper's true form as fast as we can!" said Zhou Zhenguo.

The sky was already turning dark at this point.

Before long, it would be nighttime. According to past situations, the night was when Jack the Ripper was active. It was his home turf.

Everyone gathered to wait for Jack the Ripper to show up. As for fishing and whatnot, under these increasingly dangerous circumstances where so many had died, no one was willing to act as bait anymore either.

But now, they couldn't afford to care about that much anymore.

Even if it was nighttime, they had to act nonetheless and expose the truth.

Compared to the crude method of completing the mission by waiting for Jack the Ripper to really show up and kill the other party, searching for his true form was the method with a higher chance of survival at the moment.

Zhou Zhenguo didn't think that the Gods and Demons would raise the mission completion condition to something as difficult as Kill Jack the Ripper.

That was mission impossible.

In the Game of Gods And Demons, theoretically, missions that were absolutely impossible to clear didn't exist.

Just like a normal game, it was definitely possible to clear the test.

It was nothing more than the difficulty level and… how many lives one had.

They couldn't tell whether it was their imagination or not, but the night seemed to fall a little faster than usual tonight. By the time they reached the entrance of the psychiatric hospital, the sky was almost dark.

The fire the other time had turned the general hospital into a specialized hospital.

And Tang Luo and the others' actions had turned the specialized hospital completely into a pile of ruins.

No one knew where those few remaining patients had been sent to.

To be honest, they weren't very sure, either.

There were relevant patient records in the hospital. Even though the records might have already been destroyed by the organization, the only thing they could do was to try searching and see what they could find.

Not even kerosene lamps existed in the abandoned hospital.

Both the electricity and water supply had been cut off.

Tang Luo and the others' vision was greatly restricted after they entered the building.

Fortunately, they had prepared handheld lamps. After entering the reference room, the three of them began their search.

The data regarding the patients' medical history was already gone.

It wasn't so much as the organization being worried about it leaking. In actuality, Thorndike and the others had only suppressed the news of the incident at that time to prevent it from spreading widely. Even if the incident had erupted, it had nothing to do with Thorndike and the others.

At least, there wasn't any evidence in the open.

The data's disappearance was because Thorndike and the others had wanted to pick up where they had left off.

Because they couldn't enter the basement, they could only search for information related to the patients here.

At least, part of it had been recorded.

"Found it!" shouted Zhou Zhenguo. He had found the registry of patients admitted into the hospital.

With this, they would know the patients' basic information, including their residential addresses.

The records were relatively detailed.

A quick glance revealed that there were about 100 people. It matched the number of patients who had been admitted to the hospital over the years.

"Let's go to the underground research facility." Zhou Zhenguo said, "There should be research records there. We can narrow down the scope if we cross-reference the records there."

"Hasn't the underground facility collapsed?" asked Chu Chongtian.

"It's likely just part of it or the passageway that collapsed. If the entire facility had collapsed, this building would have been affected too." Zhou Zhenguo looked at Tang Luo.

"Yes, I only blocked off the passageway," replied Tang Luo.

"Master, you can open the way again, right? How long do you need?" asked Zhou Zhenguo.

"Not very long. About… a minute?" Tang Luo replied after thinking about it for a moment.

With two minutes spent walking and a minute to open the way, three minutes later, the trio walked into the underground research facility.

Zhou Zhenguo and Chu Chongtian stopped in their tracks, staring at the remnants of the Resurrected on the ground.

"What's this?"

The twisted form made them forget their purpose of searching for information for a moment there.

"Oh, that's the product of their research on immortality. They call it the Resurrected," replied Tang Luo. "Jack released it, so I killed it along the way."

"Along the way…" Chu Chongtian and Zhou Zhenguo felt the corners of their lips twitching.

Although they weren't very clear on what exactly the Resurrected was, the body parts and broken electric chair in the vicinity were enough to prove that this was a monster through and through.

Yet he had killed it along the way?

Did he think that monsters didn't have their own pride!?

"The research records are in these three rooms. We'll take one each?" Tang Luo said as he pointed at the three doors.

20 minutes later.

"He isn't here, Jack the Ripper isn't among the patients!" said Zhou Zhenguo.

They had cross-referenced the data.

The number of patients who had died from the experiments, including those they had seen the other day, who hadn't been sent into the underground experiment lab and had been only used for show, as well as the ones here who the Resurrected had killed, happened to be all the patients that the hospital had admitted over the years.

The numbers matched perfectly.

In other words, Jack the Ripper was someone whom the Ripper Gang had secretly abducted!