chapter 10

After packing up and heading out, they still went to the 4th Floor first.

The girl from last night was probably as good as dead.

The door to Room 415 was open, more or less the same as yesterday.

But there was no one inside. Not a single person.

No telling where that last girl had run off to.

The two of them went downstairs and stopped as soon as they stepped into the 2nd Floor area.

From the stairwell, they couldn’t see what Room 207 and Room 208 looked like, but the metallic stink of blood hanging in the air was impossible to ignore.

Chu Yue didn’t hesitate and walked that way.

Behind him, Shen Yubi followed. “Brother, where are we going?”

Chu Yue went straight into the 2nd Floor corridor.

The door of Room 207 was wide open. A woman was squatting on the floor, quietly staring at the lump of meat in front of her.

At the sound of footsteps, she turned her head toward the doorway.

In a pool of blood, with her hair hanging down and blood spattered across her face, she made Chu Yue halt mid‑step.

“It’s me.”

The woman spoke.

It was the woman who’d called herself a Forensic Doctor.

“What’s that?” Shen Yubi glanced at the thing on the floor.

The woman looked at him. “A uterus.”

A uterus?

Chu Yue stared at the scene that was practically identical to the one upstairs. Clearly, the killer was still that same Monster.

But something was off. Why did that Monster always remove its victims’ reproductive organs after killing them?

“In a hog farm, Meat Pigs aren’t separated into male and female. When they’re a few months old, all of them have their reproductive organs removed before being raised to slaughter weight. Otherwise the meat doesn’t taste good, and there’s a strong, nasty stink.”

Shen Yubi suddenly spoke.

Chu Yue froze for a second, then understood what he meant.

To that Monster, this group of people were just a bunch of Meat Pigs?

Chu Yue lowered his eyes. “If that’s the case, then the Fat Man died purely because he was fat?”

That was absurd to the point of being ridiculous.

“Then what about her?” Li Baixing stood up, her face expressionless. “She was so skinny a gust of wind could knock her over. Why was she the one who died last night?”

She couldn’t figure it out. The Fat Man had at least still been able to run out and look for help. But last night, after the knocking on the door stopped, she’d slept straight through till morning.

“I didn’t hear a sound. That Monster killed someone in my room and left without making a peep.”

She wasn’t afraid of the gore in front of her. What she feared was that when death finally came for her, she would have absolutely no power to resist.

Chu Yue pondered for a few seconds. Thinking along the Meat Pig logic, he didn’t give a definitive answer. He only said, “Maybe because she threw up right after dinner last night?”

He went on, “According to the kind of unrealistic logic in this Instance, behavior like that might get her flagged as a Sick Pig. Sick Pigs can’t be kept. Under that logic, you, as her roommate, shouldn’t have been able to escape either.”

A lot of livestock diseases are highly contagious. Animals kept together-once one gets sick, the rest are very likely to catch it too. It’s just a matter of time.

Li Baixing said, “Then I…”

“Because Auntie eats a lot,” Shen Yubi agreed with Chu Yue. “I saw you last night. Auntie, you ate a ton.”

For many animals, a good appetite-eating and drinking well-is a sign of health.

Li Baixing nudged her glasses up and said nothing, but the tips of her ears quietly turned red.

When she’d first become a Forensic Doctor, she’d thrown up all the time. Her mentor had forced her to eat more, always picking the expensive stuff.

The reason was that if she ate something pricey, she’d be too reluctant to throw it up-so she wouldn’t.

In the end, she had indeed stopped vomiting, but her appetite had grown a lot compared to before.

Even so, when laid out like this, it all still sounded a little far‑fetched to the others.

“I think what you’re saying makes sense. This is probably the Death Condition.”

The door of Room 208 was pulled open. No one knew how long the people inside had been listening.

The three of them didn’t mind. They had never planned on keeping this discovery to themselves.
It was only a deduction; whether it was correct or not was still hard to say.

“This is a Level Zero Dungeon, it can’t be that hard.”

He wasn’t entirely wrong.

After washing up, everyone gathered in the Hall.

But they waited and waited, and the last girl on the 4th Floor still hadn’t come down.

Chu Yue and Shen Yubi met each other’s eyes, both feeling a stab of foreboding.

Wang Meng stood up. “Let’s go take a look together.”

They had all braced themselves mentally, but when that now-familiar stench of blood hit their noses, they still frowned.

“Fuck! Three people dead in one night-who the hell is supposed to walk out of here alive!”

Wang Meng raised his hand and gave the door a light push. It opened with a drawn-out creak.

It was no different from what Chu Yue and the others had seen before: just bloodstains, no corpse.

Only this time, there was someone huddled in the corner.

One of the two girls.

She wasn’t wearing her jacket. Her eyes were fixed on the mound of flesh on the floor in the middle of the dormitory, her body trembling nonstop, her gaze edged with hysteria.

Li Baixing walked into the room, crouched down beside her, and said quietly, “Come on. Let’s go down and eat.”

The girl didn’t react.

Li Baixing touched her. Her whole body was ice-cold.

She didn’t move and didn’t speak, like she could no longer register any information from the outside world.

“She’s gone crazy.”

Wang Meng looked at her a few times, then let out this verdict.

Judging from where she was crouching, she must have seen the Monster kill someone when she came out of the bathroom.

Otherwise she wouldn’t have climbed down from her bed just to curl up in a place like that.

“Let’s go.” Wang Meng turned and headed downstairs.

Shen Yubi took a few steps out, then looked back at Chu Yue.

“Brother?”

Chu Yue walked back into the room, pulled a quilt off a bed, and draped it over the girl.

Shen Yubi came over and tugged on his hand. “Come on. We still have to keep looking for clues after we eat.”

In a game world, life and death were up to fate.

Before he left, Chu Yue looked back at her one more time. He knew that girl had no chance of walking out of here alive.

After breakfast, the man from the 2nd Floor shared Chu Yue and Shen Yubi’s deduction, and everyone agreed with it.

“Even if we know the Death Condition, it’s still hard to avoid it. Besides being fat and sick, what other conditions are there?”

No one answered. This wasn’t their field; none of them really understood it.

Just then, Li Ergou came in from outside, dressed exactly as he had been yesterday.

He stopped in the middle of the Hall and swept his gaze over their faces. His tense expression suddenly relaxed into a smile.

“Everyone, the assembly is about to start. Have you found my knife?”

Wang Meng shifted slightly. “Not yet.”

“Oh.” Li Ergou responded, “Then you’d better hurry up.”

No anger, no complaint. Once he finished speaking, he turned and left.

As if he’d only come by to ask for an update.

The few of them looked at one another, all wearing heavy expressions.

Since two players had actually died during the night, everyone decided they should first go check out the Plaza Chu Yue and Shen Yubi had discovered.

On the way, they deliberately detoured past Li Ergou’s butcher shop. Sure enough, there were already fresh cuts of meat laid out on his chopping block.

A few scattered townsfolk were lined up at the window, waiting to buy.

The town was still as empty as ever.

Chu Yue stared at the altar piled high with offerings, his eyes calm.

The Fat Man’s limbs were already gone; all that remained were the fresh pieces that had been hacked off just last night.

Faced with this scene, no one looked good.

On the surface, this Plaza didn’t seem to have much to do with the Butcher Knife, but given that the players who died at night were thrown here, there had to be some kind of connection.

Wang Meng and the others began searching the Plaza for clues.

Chu Yue and Shen Yubi, meanwhile, left. They planned to go take a look at Li Ergou’s Home.