chapter 113
Lu Li took a moment to reassure him. “Relax. This NPC is slow as hell and only has one skill, with a really long wind-up.”
Grip the baton, raise the arm, smash down.
There was a pause between every movement, clumsy and jerky.
The security guard NPC stared at the floor, lips curling into a crazed grin.
His job was safe.
Two with one hit!
He raised the stun baton again and slammed it viciously toward the ground.
Then smashed straight into his own leg.
Electricity shot through his whole body. He screamed, flinging the baton away, clutching his spasming leg as he collapsed to the floor.
Lu Li had Luo Jia Bai slung in one hand, moving with incredible agility. He slid right between the NPC’s legs, rolled on the ground, and popped back up in one fluid motion.
The NPC wasn’t his target.
The glowing green-lit door behind the NPC was.
The door was already open and just about to close.
Mirella slipped through first. Lu Li tossed Luo Jia Bai inside, then squeezed in himself, scraping through the narrowing gap.
The door shut with a heavy thud.
All three of them ended up sitting on the floor in a tangled heap.
Luo Jia Bai’s hand was still trembling where it clutched his ear. He stared fearfully at the tightly closed ward door. “The guard’s not going to bust in here, right?”
“He won’t.” Lu Li took off his hat and slapped the excess water off his clothes. “They do attack Players, but only under one condition: they can’t disturb the pet owners who are here to see the doctor.”
Lu Li glanced deeper into the room. “We followed the pet owner into the ward.”
–
The security guard NPC was seething, but the doctor NPC’s warning from earlier flashed through his mind. Just as his stun baton was about to smash into the ward door, it halted abruptly.
He could not attack a ward.
His body twisted with a stiff, rattling motion as he slowly turned. In the process, he caught sight of another “stray dog” darting across the floor and hurriedly raised his baton in excitement.
He missed again.
The ward room beside him lit up green and its door opened.
The “stray dog” leapt forward and vanished through the doorway.
The security guard NPC completely lost his bearings. He spun around in place a few times, then chose to run straight ahead, going after the four stray animals he’d been chasing at the very start.
–
The ward was empty.
Inside and out, everything was deathly quiet.
The stillness was broken only by the persistent snoring that had been echoing around them from the very beginning.
The snores were broken and uneven, punctuated by the occasional muffled cough.
“It feels like the snoring never stopped. Who’s sleeping?”
“According to the Instance prompt, we’re inside a nightmare,” Lu Li said. “That should be the Nightmare Holder’s snoring.”
Pet hospital, sleeping, coughing.
Didn’t sound like the Holder’s health was very good.
Lu Li sifted through the information the Instance had provided so far. There were two things they needed to do next:
One, find the Nightmare Holder.
Two, wake them up.
First, they had to confirm who the Holder was.
“The Holder should also be a non-human creature. I wonder if it’s a cat, a dog, or a rabbit? Those three are the most common in the world of happiness, though there could be other types too.”
Luo Jia Bai analyzed as he watched their surroundings. When he tilted his head back, he pointed at the wall. “There’s a little door-like hole up there. If we go check it out, we might find something new!”
The hole in the wall was about a meter off the ground, just the right size for their current “non-human animal” bodies to crawl through.
A warm light glowed from within the opening.
A table sat right beneath it. The three of them stepped on the chair, climbed onto the table, and headed toward the hole.
The tabletop was cluttered with things: paper, pens, files, and a pair of glasses.
Lu Li stepped around the glasses and suddenly trod on a curled-up sheet of paper.
The moment it was nudged, the paper automatically unfurled.
There were two more sheets on the table folded the same way.
“What does it say?” Luo Jia Bai leaned in and stared for a long time, baffled. “Looks like alien scribbles.”
Mirella had gone on ahead, but when she heard the noise, she turned around. Through the glasses sitting in front of Lu Li, she caught a clear view of the sheet.
“You can’t read it?” Mirella slowly enunciated each word. “It says ‘Physical Examination Test Report.'”
Luo Jia Bai was blank. “You can read that?”
Mirella walked back and discovered that once she was away from the glasses, she couldn’t read the writing either. So she laboriously lifted the glasses and shifted them over the paper.
“The glasses are a translator. Put the lenses over the paper and you can read what it says.”
The two of them lifted the glasses together to look at the contents.
Luo Jia Bai said, “Could these be the owner’s Test Reports?”
“There’s more than one.” Lu Li unfolded the other two similarly shaped sheets on the desk and, even without the glasses, could roughly compare them. “There are two more Test Reports.”
Luo Jia Bai slid the lenses over the new ones. “All three checkups test more or less the same things, and they’re all dated the same day. At the top there’s a label for different animals.”
“These two are for dogs, this one’s for a cat…” As he distinguished the information, Luo Jia Bai couldn’t help sighing. “There are so many test items, and the fee after each one is ridiculously high. This is insane, how can they be making this much profit!?”
Mirella compared the three back and forth. “Do they all have the same illness? Why do they have to run every single one of these super expensive tests?”
Luo Jia Bai muttered, “Is this pet hospital even legit?”
“It just opened. Four weeks of onboarding training, and before that they were all unemployed drifters.” Lu Li narrowed his eyes, thinking. “The NPC doctor just now said he’s not only a security guard, but also a nurse.”
The doctor might have been crash-trained too.
“This might just be a heartless pet hospital out to scam money!”
When the glasses finished scanning all three sheets, the Evil Spirit Bracelet vibrated with a notification:
[Suspected discovery of a Key Item. Please perform elimination!]
[You may only keep two sheets. Select the one sheet that is definitely wrong. If you choose correctly, the incorrect sheet will be burned. If you choose wrong or do not choose, the Player will be burned.]
“Not even a hint, and we have to pick again!” To Luo Jia Bai, the three sheets suddenly felt like hot potatoes. He hurriedly lifted the glasses again for another look.
There were three Test Reports.
On one, all the values were within range and the result was healthy. It belonged to a dog.
The other two all had abnormal readings, meaning unhealthy.
One belonged to a cat.
One belonged to a dog.
Which one should they eliminate?
“Who is at my desk!” An angry shout came from under the desk, and a bald head thrust out. The features on his face looked as if they were melting into pus, and a commendation banner was embedded in his flesh.
If one looked carefully, one could still make out the characters for “Miraculous Healing” on the banner.
His head stretched farther and farther out, his neck like an endless noodle, elongating as he lunged at them.
“Let me put on my glasses and see exactly who you are!”
“We have to pick, fast!” Sweat beaded at the tip of Luo Jia Bai’s nose. “The last stage was a dog. Maybe this one won’t pick the same species again, so we should pick the cat?”
The owner’s voice echoed in his ears again, and inspiration struck Luo Jia Bai. “The owner was sick! One Test Report shows a healthy result, so we should pick that one!”
Lu Li’s hand was already resting on the healthy Test Report. He gave Luo Jia Bai a brief smile. “Smart.”
As he picked it up,
the Test Report instantly burned to ash.
The other two Test Reports turned into Items. When they were stored in the Evil Spirit Bracelet, each had a suspicious question mark stamped at the top.
Once they had the Items, the three of them jumped down through the hole.
Behind them, the deranged head finally managed to get the glasses on. When he saw the words “Stray Animal,” he flew into a rage and charged at them, roaring.
In the end, he got stuck in the hole, unwilling to admit defeat.
–
Outside the hole was a very deep cage.
They tumbled down to the bottom, and the light around them dimmed drastically.
Lu Li looked up and saw, beyond the iron bars, a huge child’s face directly opposite them.
In the child’s pupils, he could see a prone, barely breathing creature.
It was not the three Players’ silhouettes.
“He doesn’t seem to be looking at us.”
This was a scene recreated from a nightmare.
It was more like he was looking through them, at the former owner who had once been in this cage.
The child gnawed on his hand as he stared at where they were. Suddenly he stopped chewing and reached a hand into the cage.
His short, stubby fingers were squeezed white and misshapen by the iron bars, but his expression was twisted with excitement. He curled his fingers and raked them inward.
“So ugly! Mom, come look! There’s something really ugly in this cage! The skin around both its eyes is all white!”