She Was Sentenced to Life Imprisonment [Unlimited] - Chapter 59

Chapter 59: The Studio (1)

◎Don’t Touch Me◎

They were led out of the black hole by the enforcers, but they didn’t go directly to the players’ rest area. Instead, they were immediately thrown into the ascending stairs instance.

A blinding light flashed in front of Jiang Nan’s eyes, forcing her to close them.

But the next moment, a hand rested on her waist. The warmth seeped through the fabric, and the fresh, elegant scent beside her seemed to make the searing warmth accelerate her heartbeat.

“Follow me.”

【Player has successfully entered the “The Studio” instance. All players only need to act as students and strive to survive to clear the instance.】

【A word of caution from the system: Dear players, you cannot seek death, only survival. Those who violate this rule will be sentenced to life imprisonment, forever living in the instance’s cycle.】

This time, it truly lived up to the enforcers’ words about it being the simplest instance. The only information they had was to survive; there were no tasks or hints whatsoever.

But this was also a kind of blank difficulty. It wasn’t simple, nor was it difficult.

As Jiang Nan thought this, she already understood that the system was using a high-sounding pretext to target her.

Things and people appeared before her eyes. The bustling crowds passed by her—they were all energetic… students.

The school bell rang, and the students rushed frantically to the academic building. The familiar sounds around her made Jiang Nan suddenly stunned.

The last bell rang, and a thick, angry voice came from behind her.

“You two students, don’t you know class has started? Where are your art supplies? Where are your brushes?”

Two?

Jiang Nan suddenly snapped back to reality and looked to her side. As expected, there was another person there.

This person’s figure was very familiar, but their face was extremely strange. If it weren’t for the fresh jasmine scent on her, Jiang Nan would have just treated her as a stranger.

The tall figure was wearing a proper school uniform, but it couldn’t hide the lazy, elegant, and noble aura in her every movement. With purple eyes and red hair, she was as wild and unrestrained as a blazing sun. When she faced Jiang Nan, her flamboyant aura subsided, and she smiled at her.

“I am Thanatos, your Luo Ning. I’m sorry I lied to you.”

Her voice was slightly different, as moving as a lute. It had also completely overlapped with the voice in her memory, becoming the same.

Jiang Nan’s expression changed. The gloom between her eyebrows deepened. She spoke with a sense of distance, denying the other person’s words.

“No, you’re not.”

Her denial was subconscious, just like her subconscious denial that the Luo Ning who had accompanied her had disappeared.

Thanatos reached out to smooth a stray strand of hair by her temple, but Jiang Nan resisted and turned her body away, dodging her.

“Don’t touch me.”

Thanatos’s eyes narrowed slightly. Her purple pupils reflected the person in front of her. Her deep gaze seemed to have completely seen through the person before her.

She could tell Jiang Nan was angry, so she retracted her hand.

At that moment, the dean of students came over with two security guards, aggressively lecturing both of them and interrupting the strange atmosphere between them.

“What’s wrong with you two students? Can’t you hear that class has started?”

As he spoke, he took out a roster and flipped through it to find the names that matched their photos.

“Which class are you two in?”

Jiang Nan thought for a moment. She hadn’t heard the system announce their class information, so she spoke calmly.

“I don’t know.”

Thanatos, on the other hand, was also indifferent, a smile on her lips. “I don’t know either.”

The dean of students’ movements paused. He looked at them sternly, then continued to flip through the roster.

Jiang Nan glanced at the roster in the dean’s hand. It was a thick stack. Unlike a normal school roster, each page had a student’s photo and only a student’s name below it. Each page could only hold a maximum of twenty to thirty people.

But for some reason, on every page, there were names that had been crossed out with a red pen.

The dean flipped for a long time, finally finding their information on the last page. He frowned deeply, tapping on it with his pen.

“New students?”

Finally, his gaze sized up the two of them, and he said to one of the security guards beside him.

“You take them to get their art supplies, and then take them to class F.”

Upon hearing this, Jiang Nan raised her eyebrow and once again rejected the other person’s attempt to hold her hand.

The security guard walked over and spoke with an expressionless face.

“You two, follow me.”

Jiang Nan followed behind the person, her eyes lowered, not knowing what she was thinking.

A class arranged by a letter, F was the sixth.

She looked at the academic building, which happened to have six floors.

The unique scent of that person suddenly came over her. Jiang Nan’s thoughts gradually returned. She glanced at the other person out of the corner of her eye, sneered, and said self-deprecatingly.

“I should have known it was you. No one would approach a curse like me for no reason.”

As her last word fell, a strangeness suddenly appeared in the air. A fierce wind swept by, and a faint hint of bl00d-red passed through the depths of her eyes.

The security guard walking in front was caught by the sudden strange wind. The hat on his head flew off and was hung on a tree far away.

The security guard immediately jumped up and complained.

“Where did this strange wind come from? My hat was blown away!”

After saying that, he looked at the hat on the tree, picked up a branch from the side, and tried to get the hat down. In the meantime, he said to the two people over there.

“The art supplies are in the storage room on the far left on the first floor. I’ll give you the key, and you can go get them yourselves. Remember, you can only take the art supplies from the very bottom.”

Thanatos ignored Jiang Nan’s avoidance and grabbed her wrist. She held a hand to her lips and said.

“Don’t be angry. You are not a curse to me.”

As she spoke, she caught the key that was thrown to her.

The warmth from the other person’s fingertips was scalding, as if it was a form of suppression. It made Jiang Nan frown. She tried to shake the other person’s hand off but found that the other person was holding on very tightly, and she couldn’t break free.

The fierce wind around them had already stopped. Jiang Nan also gave up on struggling and let the other person hold her hand as they walked to one area.

“I didn’t mean to deceive you.”

Thanatos spoke, but the smile that was still on her lips made Jiang Nan feel inexplicably angrier.

“Then explain,” Jiang Nan said calmly, but her gaze was directed elsewhere.

Although she said this, she was also clear that no matter how Thanatos explained, she could only listen.

At that moment, the sound of people reading aloud came from the nearby school, carried to their ears by the breeze.

Jiang Nan looked over and heard Thanatos’s explanation.

“When I found you, I discovered that the main god had created an instance specifically for you in order to destroy you. You would have to undergo countless deaths and then willingly perish.”

“Why?” Jiang Nan retracted her gaze. Her voice was still indifferent, as if she didn’t care.

There was still some distance to the storage room. The people in the classrooms they passed by saw them pass by the window. Someone wanted to call out to them, but a passing teacher tapped on their easel to warn them, so they could only give up.

Thanatos led Jiang Nan to the door of the storage room. After inserting the key into the lock, an unreadable emotion flickered in her eyes, and she said leisurely.

“Because you and I are both things created by it. You are an uncontrollable failed product.”

But even the deity Thanatos, who the main god believed was loyal to it, had started to betray it. So from the very beginning, the main god had created two failed products; it’s just that Thanatos was better at hiding.

Jiang Nan’s expression shifted slightly. She reached out and stopped Thanatos from pushing the door open. She met the other person’s eyes and said.

“I’m not asking about that. I want you to tell me, why are you using the identity of Thanatos now?” Instead of continuing to deceive her with Luo Ning’s appearance.

Sensing a change in the air, a playful look flashed in Thanatos’s eyes, but it was gone in an instant. She then met Jiang Nan’s gaze and said.

“It has already sensed your escape and is beginning to suspect my betrayal, so I need you, and you must trust me.”

When the change in the air disappeared, Jiang Nan let go of her hand, turned her head to look elsewhere, and said coldly.

“I don’t trust you now.”

To Thanatos, deceiving her and using her were both things that the other person spoke of as if they were insignificant.

Her request for helping the other person was simply for her not to lie to her, but Thanatos couldn’t even do this from the very beginning.

No, the request she truly said was just for her to always be with her. So, could the other person so rightfully deceive her?

Jiang Nan’s hands subconsciously clenched. The sharp pain from her nails digging into her flesh made her feel a little clearer.

“Mmm.”

Thanatos, as expected, didn’t care about Jiang Nan’s emotions. She smiled in response and then pushed the door open.

Jiang Nan looked at her profile and realized that even though her eyes held a smile, it could never reach the depths.

This was a heartless person who was impossible to see through. All the warmth in the instances was a false illusion meant to deceive her.

Thinking this, the heart pounding in her chest began to ache sharply. But when she was close to the other person, she couldn’t control the longing in the depths of her soul for them.

They groped for the switch on the wall, but after she pressed it, the lights didn’t come on. Instead, the door was slammed shut with a “bang” by a gust of cold wind.

Jiang Nan walked over, wanting to open the door, but it seemed that it could only be opened from the outside, so she had to give up.

“It can’t be opened,” Jiang Nan said, frowning.

A dark shadow suddenly flashed in front of her, but in the dark storage room, it was easy to think one was just seeing things.

Thanatos scanned the room and smiled.

“In a place like this, if no one finds us, it’s possible for us to be stuck here for a night or even several nights.”

She laughed nonchalantly, as if the people she was talking about didn’t include herself.

Jiang Nan glanced at her and snorted coldly.

“Then let’s see who dies first.”

Thanatos laughed. The playful look in her eyes remained as she said.

“I’m just kidding. Let’s wait for that security guard to come back.”

With that, she picked up a few things from the floor, looked at them for a few seconds, then casually threw them away again. After a moment of contemplation, she spoke as if it were an afterthought.

“A place this dark and messy is good for hiding people.”

A paintbrush fell to the ground. Whether it was intentional or not, it landed near someone’s foot.

The thing hidden in the dark instinctively shivered after hearing her words.

Using the faint light from the ventilation louver, they could barely make out the layout of the room.

Paintbrushes, paper, paint buckets… all of these things were placed in a messy fashion, as if the room had been ransacked.

Jiang Nan picked up a brush from the floor and examined it in the light for a moment. She then picked up a few others and looked at them.

“They’re all broken.”

They had all been deliberately broken. Even if they were sharpened, the lead inside was still broken, so they couldn’t be used for drawing at all.

Jiang Nan picked up a few gouache brushes and found that the larger ones had already lost nearly half of their bristles, and the smaller lining brushes were just bare sticks.

Jiang Nan: …

“What can we paint with these things?” Thanatos said, playing with the brush in her hand.

Indeed, with these things, it was questionable whether they could even be used, let alone for painting.

At that moment, the sound of a key turning in the lock came from the door. A few seconds later, the closed door was opened.

But it wasn’t the security guard who opened the door; it was a slightly youthful-looking girl.

The girl was visibly surprised to see them inside, but she quickly smiled at them.

“The teacher told me to find you and take you to the classroom.”

Upon hearing this, Jiang Nan lowered her eyes to look at the brush in her hand that had barely any bristles left.

The girl seemed to have noticed and waved her hand.

“Our class doesn’t have to draw. Hurry and come with me.”

Doesn’t have to draw? A class for art students doesn’t have to draw?

Jiang Nan was confused, but she and Thanatos followed her anyway.