Chapter 24

Chapter 24

“Why aren’t the anomaly doctors attacking Zhao Xiuming?”

The team leader with shoulder-length hair abruptly looked up, her eyes widening. She seemed to be asking both the players around her and herself.

She repeated the question almost compulsively, unable to hide the anxiety in her voice. “Why aren’t the anomaly doctors attacking Zhao Xiuming?”

No one beside her could follow her train of thought. The beautiful woman in red was riding high. “They’re all anomalies now. Of course they’d join forces to attack us players.”

“If it weren’t for my skill, Zhao Xiuming wouldn’t even…”

Her voice began to fade before she finished, confusion slowly spreading across her face. “Wait. Zhao Xiuming only attacked the players because I told him to.”

“But he’s powerful. He can inflict fatal damage on the anomaly doctors. Control him, and we control the way to clear the game. I only decided to have him kill the Terror players because our victory was assured. That way we’d get better rewards when we cleared it.”

Some of the players were beginning to catch on. The team’s technical specialist spoke first. “You mean…”

“If Zhao Xiuming belonged to the anomalies’ faction, he’d attack players. If he was on the players’ side, he’d attack anomalies.”

“But before he received an order through the irresistible charm skill, he didn’t attack either side.”

The other players couldn’t follow. They had no idea what this team was getting at.

The leader explained, organizing her thoughts as she spoke. “We found a way to get him to tell us how he could be killed.”

“He said the anomaly doctors wouldn’t kill him because they feared the masked man beside him.”

“He also said the monster made of flesh wasn’t afraid of the masked man. If we wanted him dead, only that monster could do it.”

“But you saw what just happened. He fought that monster himself, and he won.”

“The monster is capable of killing him. That doesn’t mean it can actually manage it.”

“Even under the lie-detecting rabbit and a player’s skill, he still withheld crucial information.”

“How could someone like that be controlled by love?”

The woman in red pressed her lips together and didn’t argue.

Their leader rubbed her forehead, still anxious. “No. This isn’t right.”

“Why exactly aren’t the anomaly doctors attacking Zhao Xiuming?”

“Because the monster assimilated him, putting them on the same side?”

“But the mutated Zhao Xiuming attacked the flesh monster, while the doctors have never attacked it. Of the three, the doctors and the monster should be allies, with Zhao Xiuming as their enemy.”

“If Zhao Xiuming really can bypass the doctors’ healing and resurrection, they’d have even more reason to kill him.”

“Something’s wrong. What is it…?”

She struggled to put the feeling into words. To everyone else, her remarks made no logical sense. The other players were baffled and thought she’d become obsessed.

Had Zhao Xiuming been there, he would certainly have been impressed.

Ever since he’d entered the instance and met the players, this short-haired team leader seemed to have displayed extraordinary intuition.

In the ward, she’d realized that Zhao Xiuming and his two companions were using the players to fight the flesh monster.

In the morgue, she’d pointed out that his proposed “cooperation” was a way to get rid of them.

And now she was declaring that he wouldn’t submit to anyone’s control.

She had keenly sensed that an enormous secret lay behind the doctors’ refusal to kill Zhao Xiuming.

A secret that could dismantle the instance, shake the players’ beliefs, expose the ultimate truth, and break the instance’s rules.

Zhao Xiuming had buried that secret beneath a mix of truths and lies.

As a result, the other players could always find explanations. “What’s so hard to understand? Maybe the doctors think a fully assimilated Zhao Xiuming is one of them.”

“That flesh anomaly with all the heads doesn’t seem to attack anyone but Zhao Xiuming, either.”

“He isn’t human now. In a sense, losing himself is the same as dying.”

The technical specialist chose his words carefully. “Captain, don’t get hung up on these questions.”

He scratched his head. “Of course we need to pay attention to the details in an instance. I’m not saying… you should stop questioning things.”

“But maybe these are the questions we’re meant to investigate. If we do nothing because we can’t figure them out, and insist on understanding everything before we act, we’ll never solve the mystery.”

“Zhao Xiuming is doing what we say right now. If you’re really worried, we can stay away from the morgue for the time being.”

Another player immediately objected. “Once the anomalies go on a rampage, the morgue is the only safe place in the hospital.”

The beautiful woman in red backed her leader. “Then we’ll wait until night. There’s no harm in testing Zhao Xiuming a few more times.”

“Once he kills all the Terror Game players, I’ll order him to kill the anomaly doctors…”

Before she could finish, a tremor beneath their feet brought the conversation to an abrupt halt.

The woman in red almost fell and barely managed to steady herself. “What’s happening? An earthquake?”

A far more terrifying collapse answered her. At the same time, a deafening explosion erupted in the building next door.

Chunks of concrete hurtled toward them. Deep booms accompanied billowing black smoke, and amid the flying dust, the shock wave shattered all the remaining glass.

The hospital building seemed to be collapsing, tilting toward the players on the roof.

At the same time, the rooftop beneath their feet split down the middle. Weightlessness seized them. Unable to stay upright, they could only fall with the tilting walls.
With no time to think, the players used various items to transport themselves away, trying to escape the danger as quickly as possible.

They soon realized something was wrong. Buildings were being blown up one after another. The surrounding structures collapsed in succession. Nowhere was safe.

The players could tell an earthquake from explosives. That was precisely what shocked them.

Huddled in the temporary refuge created by a defensive item, they could see exactly what was happening in the vast expanse of rubble around them.

“Explosives?” a player cried. “Are they trying to blow us up?”

“Have those Terror Game players lost their minds? They’re blowing up the whole instance!”

“You couldn’t buy this much explosive for less than a hundred thousand points.”

Viewership surged in the Horror Game players’ streams as spectators flocked to watch.

The two game companies were competitors. Terror Game had no livestreams, so Horror Game viewers only occasionally got to see the other side.

After several encounters, however, Horror Game players knew that Terror Game also involved clearing instances, with systems, shops, points, and missions.

But Terror Game players were very insular and rarely cooperated with players from other game companies.

Terror Game favored firearms, melee weapons, and brute force. Its players weren’t particularly good at dealing with supernatural instances.

By contrast, Horror Game strictly restricted firearms and explosives, afraid its players would blast their way to victory.

Under those circumstances, seeing an entire instance blown up at the first sign of trouble was a real eye-opener for Horror Game players.

The Horror Game streams’ chat feeds were buzzing. “Fuck, I’ve wanted to do that for so long! Hahaha!”

“Shame Horror Game restricts that kind of weapon. Otherwise I’d get a nuke and give those anomalies a taste.”

“There we go. Terror Game players just fulfilled a wish I’ve had for years.”

“Did the Terror Game players lose it? They nearly got wiped out in the morgue just now. Are they… throwing a tantrum and blasting the instance to pieces?”

“If they blow up the instance, won’t our Horror Game players get an easy clear?”

Horror Game’s viewers and players alike believed the explosions were the Terror Game players’ work.

The entire hospital was in ruins. With nowhere to hide, the Horror Game players had no choice but to approach the morgue in groups. They would try to lure the NPCs out and take shelter inside. If that failed, they could always strike first.

Otherwise, once the anomaly doctors went on their rampage, the rubble would leave them nowhere to hide or maneuver. They’d still have to face the doctors head-on.

Night fell on schedule. Everything was silent. Only the morgue remained intact.

On one side, the Horror Game players cursed the Terror Game players as lunatics for blowing up the instance.

On the other, the Terror Game players cursed the Horror Game players for their treachery: using an item to lock them in during their assault on the morgue and cut off their retreat.

The Terror players had heard the explosions too, and discovered they couldn’t leave the morgue. A high-level game item was sealing them inside.

In the storage room, Zhou Qingyan trembled at the sound of the blasts. Assistant Li struggled to raise his drooping head and listen to the commotion outside.

The soldiers in the storage room heard something through their headsets and stopped attacking.

Zhou Qingyan and Assistant Li watched them jerk and flicker like glitching game characters, then vanish before their eyes.

Just like that, in full view of Zhou Qingyan and Assistant Li, the Terror Game players… suddenly logged out.

The scout beside them even gave Zhou Qingyan an approving thumbs-up before glitching out and disappearing as well.

Zhou Qingyan stood frozen. “Did they just… Are we safe?”

She reached out to touch the empty air, then pinched the back of her own hand. A smile tugged at her mouth.

Covering her face, she laughed until her laughter broke into sobs.

They were safe, just like that?

“We… we didn’t die?” she sobbed, her eyes red with disbelief.

She didn’t know why the soldiers had begun disappearing after the explosions, but she was still alive.

Assistant Li struggled to his feet. “That’s right. We’re safe.”

He didn’t look particularly happy. “Those two groups are at odds.”

“The soldiers probably realized the other group had set them up while they were attacking the anomalies. They must have had no choice but to disappear.”

Assistant Li carefully avoided words such as “players.” He knew the two groups feared each other and even intended to wipe each other out.

So while the Terror soldiers were fighting the anomaly doctors, the Horror players were bound to make a move.

For instance, cutting off the Terror Game soldiers’ retreat.

Having reached the same conclusion as the Terror players, Assistant Li started out. Zhou Qingyan hurried after him to support him. “Where are we going?”

He stepped out of the storage room. Beyond it lay darkness and ruin, with black fungus covering the entire corridor.

Traces of bullets and gunpowder were clearly visible everywhere. The smell of medical solutions still lingered in the air.

The anomaly doctors had all stopped at the morgue entrance. With their backs to Assistant Li and Zhou Qingyan, they stared outside.

Cracks in the plastic bodies of the wounded doctors were slowly healing. They struggled to retain their human forms.

Detached heads were stuffing themselves back onto bodies. At the sound of footsteps, the heads turned, saw Assistant Li and Zhou Qingyan, and turned back to stare outside.

It was as if… the anomalies were watching a spectacle. They looked rather shocked themselves.
Assistant Li glanced over. His eyes widened slightly, and he swore. Everything outside had been reduced to rubble.

Zhou Qingyan started to say something, but he stopped her.

They slowly entered the body-storage room. It was a square space strewn with equipment. Many of the refrigerated cabinets were damaged; some had been torn into pieces and scattered everywhere.

Along one wall in particular, a cabinet had been moved aside to reveal a door. An elevator door, at that.

Assistant Li stepped inside. Zhou Qingyan hesitated.

“Zhao Xiuming is down there,” he told her. “If you don’t want to come, you can stay here by yourself.”

She could only follow. The elevator slowly came to a stop at basement level one.

This was the real morgue. The hidden place the players had been searching for was here.

Zhao Xiuming lay on a mass of flesh, his body wrapped in tendrils. His face was pale, his lips unnaturally red.

The basement was even colder than the floor above, and the smell of formalin was everywhere.

The emergency lights were out. It was too dark to see a hand in front of your face.

But Zhao Xiuming could see. His five senses were growing sharper with the mutation.

The flesh monster carried him deeper inside, squeezing its way forward. In the silence, the sound of flesh grinding over the floor and walls was especially distinct.

He could see nurses holding trays and containers. They ignored the approaching flesh monster.

Only when they saw Zhao Xiuming engulfed within it did they give him a few interested looks.

The anomaly nurses were nowhere near as bloodthirsty as the doctors. They seemed somewhat more intelligent, too.

They even made way for the flesh monster as it carried Zhao Xiuming into a room deep inside.

Even before he reached it, he could hear an enormous heartbeat. Black mold grew more wildly here. Ceiling, floor, and walls had all turned black, leaving no trace of how the room had originally looked.

Tendrils gripped the floor like plant stems, rooted fast throughout the space.

Huge tendrils like tree roots, so thick it would take several people to reach around them, spanned the corridor.

In the deepest part of the nest, a cocoon hung in midair, held against the ceiling by a tangle of tendrils.

It was hardly a sight for anyone with trypophobia. Worse, the missing players’ bodies were clustered around the “cocoon.”

Zhao Xiuming’s gaze swept over them and settled on one particular “corpse.”

He’d spotted an acquaintance: Li Zhehan.

The man was in reasonably good spirits, despite his bound limbs and the tendrils driven into his chest and through his shoulder blades.

He could even shout when he saw Zhao Xiuming. “What are you doing here?”

As if afraid he’d made a mistake, Li Zhehan struggled a few times and raised his head for a closer look. Once he was certain it was Zhao Xiuming, he grew agitated.

“Zhao Xiuming! Zhao Xiuming!”

“Wake up!”

“Zhao Xiuming, I saw you with your eyes open just now. Don’t pretend you’re asleep.”

With no way to keep up the act, Zhao Xiuming could only open his eyes weakly.

The accommodating flesh monster beneath him extended its tendrils to “blend in” with the surroundings. It even tried to hoist him into the air and bind him there.

But once he’d been lifted up, nothing pierced his shoulder blades. Li Zhehan noticed, but didn’t find it suspicious.

Zhao Xiuming was in such terrible shape that he barely looked human.

As weak as he was, having his shoulder blades pierced as well would probably kill him.

Zhao Xiuming lifted his eyelids. The black patterns on his cheeks looked eerily beautiful.

One eye had no white at all. The other was normal.

Conflicting emotions crossed Li Zhehan’s face. He asked tentatively, “Are you really Zhao Xiuming?”

Instead of answering, Zhao Xiuming asked in a thread of a voice, “Where is this?”

Li Zhehan gave a bitter sneer. “Something made itself look like you and captured me and Zhang Xueya.”

Zhao Xiuming was silent for a few seconds. “Made itself look… like me?”

Li Zhehan tried to nod, but the movement pulled at his wounds. Cold sweat broke out from the pain. “I knew it wasn’t you.”

“That thing wasn’t human at all.”

“The anomaly that caught me let Zhou Qingyan escape on purpose.”

“Since you’ve been caught too, does that mean someone came to rescue me?”

“Was it Assistant Li?”

Zhao Xiuming nodded. “Don’t move,” Li Zhehan told him.

Zhao Xiuming seemed to try to smile. “You care about me…”

“You never used to give me a second glance.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Li Zhehan snapped.

Zhao Xiuming smiled gently. “Young Master Li, I’m dying.”

“Could you stop being so harsh?”

Li Zhehan looked torn. He lowered his head and studied Zhao Xiuming properly, one of the few times he’d ever deigned to do so.

Only then did he realize that Zhao Xiuming was actually very good-looking. He was nothing like the gloomy figure who’d always hidden his face in Li Zhehan’s memories.

With their lives hanging in the balance, Li Zhehan felt a rare flicker of sympathy for someone who shared his predicament.

Whatever their relationship had been before, they really did have only each other now.

His tone softened further. “Hold on a little longer. Maybe Assistant Li can think of something.”

“Zhao Xiuming.”

“I never thought you’d be the one with me at the end.”

“Could you…”

“Could you please not die?”

“Don’t leave me here alone… I don’t know what this hellhole is. We both have to live.”

Zhao Xiuming’s eyelids drooped, a hint of indifference settling over his face. He yawned.

Then he hurriedly resumed his fragile, innocent act. “All right…”