Zhao Zijing spoke in a grave tone, "This disappearance case is filled with eeriness from beginning to end. First of all, the Mercury Alloy Guild had good private relations with some small guilds. If they encountered any troubles, they could’ve easily sought help.
Secondly, the Mercury Alloy Guild may be small but has a fully functional team. Except for the president, the other nine members each had their own expertise and could cooperate to handle most unexpected situations.
It’s hard to imagine what they encountered that led to all of them dying, without a single person escaping.
To uncover the truth, the Global Supernatural Alliance and several other large guilds also sent expert teams, attempting to search and rescue for a period. In the end, it all came to nothing."
Zhao Zijing paused for a moment, considering that the Mercury Alloy Guild had a team consisting of a Level 30 and nine Transcendents above Level 20. With such a lineup, they mysteriously all disappeared.
If this had happened in any other circumstance, she would have kept as far away as possible and not gotten involved. But now, trapped in the Mystery Lock, there was nowhere to flee.
She had no choice but to press on.
Taking a deep breath, she controlled the drone to move its camera.
Next to the body was a metal monument inscribed with the elegant French phrase "He rests here" on one side,
and on the other, it was engraved with crooked, incomprehensible Chinese characters, "Will it be successful this time?"
The two inscriptions seemed unrelated, leaving one unable to comprehend.
Furthermore, the skeleton was clutching a recording device, the size of a power bank.
Many players habitually carried GoPro action cameras and voice recorders to document everything encountered during the Script Task, for self-review after returning to the real world to identify any oversights.
"Bring that voice recorder over here."
Li Cheng said to Zhao Zijing. If the recorder wasn’t damaged, the information inside might help them understand what happened to the Mercury Alloy Guild and what occurred here.
The drone extended two dainty mechanical arms, carefully and slowly extracting the voice recorder from the skeleton’s embrace, before flying back with it.
"This is European Heavy Industry’s new flagship model voice recorder released a year and a half ago."
With Li Cheng’s discerning eye, he instantly recognized the model, "Touted to withstand extreme heat, cold, humidity, toxic gases, underwater, and other harsh environments. Can be charged by solar energy. Comes with facial recognition unlock feature."
After pressing the power button, the voice recorder’s small, two-finger-wide screen lit up in the middle, showing the device powered up but requiring facial recognition to unlock.
Zhao Zijing immediately took out her tablet and searched the GOC database for photos of all the Mercury Alloy Guild members, displaying each one to the voice recorder in turn.
There was no response; the device was still locked. Clearly, the facial recognition software it used was advanced, unable to be fooled by static photos.
Li Cheng pondered for a moment and decisively took out paper, flesh-colored plasticine, and a complete set of makeup tools, while instructing Zhao Zijing to control the drone to fly back and take several more photos of the skeleton.
Zhao Zijing did as instructed, asking almost unconsciously, "What are you going to do?"
Li Cheng casually turned his pencil, quickly sketching out the precise outline of the skull on the paper and adding muscles bit by bit.
The facial features and soft tissues of the human face attach to various parts of the skull, and except for the cheeks, the thickness of these tissues is relatively stable and does not vary much. Thɪs chapter is updatᴇd by novel✦fire.net
In other words, the so-called "fat or thin" aspect of a human face mainly refers to the amount of flesh on the cheeks.
Based on this, one can infer the deceased’s gender, age, ethnicity, and most crucially, their facial features from the skull’s contours.
In a moment, Li Cheng had roughly reconstructed the skull’s face; comparing it with the photos in Zhao Zijing’s database, he discovered that the deceased’s codename was "Bismuth Yellow," a French male, Lv25 fire-support Transcendent who went missing at the age of twenty-two.
With a clear photo, it was easier to proceed. Li Cheng picked up some flesh-colored putty and spread it over his face, then used foundation, false eyelashes, eye shadow, a brush set, and other makeup tools to fiddle around. Finally, he put on a wig,
and with a little bit of worm gene control over the facial muscles, the end result was almost indistinguishable from the person in the photo.
Midnight Howl was repeatedly shocked, "Where did you learn all this?"
"Are you asking about the makeup skills, or facial reconstruction?"
Li Cheng casually responded: "I learned the makeup skills from the beauty channels on websites, and facial reconstruction from a Soviet treatise from the fifties called ’The Principles of Reconstructing Facial Features from the Skull.’
The author of this book was the Soviet anthropologist M.M. Grasimov, a pioneer in applying skull reconstruction to the field of forensic science.
By the way, he is not related to the current Russian armed forces’ chief of general staff, Valery Grasimov."
Grasimov seems to be a common Russian surname, huh?! Was there a need to mention that?
Midnight Howl wore a peculiar expression; with his reclusive nature, he felt that if he stayed any longer alongside Ant, he might awaken a soul of quips...
What this Indian mix didn’t know was that, even without facial reconstruction, Li Cheng could suck some bone marrow from the remains in the skeleton, extract the genes, and use the ability of worm genes to also restore the deceased’s appearance.
The reason Li Cheng mentioned Grasimov was partly because he had just dropped from a hot air balloon and wanted to play on the crash joke related to Priogozin,
and partly because he wasn’t hungry right now and didn’t want to suck on the marrow.
Li Cheng pushed aside his scattered thoughts and approached the small camera of the recorder with his face, and with a "beep" sound, he successfully unlocked the face recognition and could retrieve past recordings.
He immediately pressed the button, scrolled to the very beginning, and played the recording from September last year.
"Hello, this is ’Bismuth Yellow.’"
The recording device echoed with a young man’s French voice tinged with magnetism, sharpening everyone’s focus as they listened carefully.
"A month ago, our guild used a special tool to enter the script world collectively and successfully killed a powerful Nordic Witch, completing the script task.
But before she died, she put a curse on all of us."
Bismuth Yellow’s voice was filled with fatigue and bitterness, "Over this month, everyone in the guild has been experiencing hair loss, urinating blood, insomnia, organ failure...
No medical approach could detect it, and gene suppressants could only barely control it for a short while.
According to the Global Supernatural Alliance, that Nordic Witch sacrificed the two children in her womb to inflict upon us the ’Corpse Net Death Curse.’
It’s a malevolent curse that affects everything from the soul to the body, akin to a law of causality.
No matter if we reshape our flesh or ascend mechanically, we cannot escape the curse and will step by step approach death.
The only one who might have the potential to help us break the curse is the Evil Science Alliance, the organization that has gone the furthest in exploring the spiritual realm.
Our president Mithril, brought a heavy gift to visit the president of the Evil Science Alliance.
The answer he got was that he too couldn’t lift the curse, but he could provide us with a map, a map to the legendary Hidden Room, the ’Retrospection Room.’"