Players, Please Board the Train

The longer the time passed, the deeper he sank into this mental contamination pit.

While he pondered a countermeasure, Sima Xiao Er suddenly began banging on the door from outside, shouting, ”Xu Huo, can you hear me? Wake up! They’re going to gut you!”

Seeing his manic expression, Xu Huo was about to go open the door, but Sima Xiao Er let out a howl, turned and ran out in tears, his voice still echoing down the corridor, ”I’ll get revenge for you! Once I get out I’ll report this damned place and shut it down!”

Xu Huo went out and only had time to see his silhouette vanish at the stairwell.

After closing the five doors along the corridor that had been opened, he left the fourth floor and returned to the third.

Sima Xiao Er was not in his room and his whereabouts were unknown, so Xu Huo returned to his own room. The tall dark man was still unconscious; Xu Huo moved him onto another bed and lay down himself to rest.

At dawn he went out to look for Sima Xiao Er.

Sima Xiao Er was hiding at a corner of the lawn, clutching his head and muttering to himself without stop, ”...Xu Huo is dead, can I escape by myself?”

”No! Is he really dead? Were the people I saw real?”

”We clearly went into the fog zone with the team, and the others disappeared. Where did he come from? He must be fake, the hospital tricked me, nobody actually died!””But he died so horribly, there were so many limbs in the treatment room... How could no one have investigated this hospital? Hmm! This hospital must be fake too!”

”That can’t be right, you can touch and see the hospital — how could it be fake... Did I really start treating the game world as real? Is this place real, or was the old reality real? The people I killed before, were they real people, or characters inside the game?”

Xu Huo walked over and kicked him, ”Are you clear-headed now?”

Sima Xiao Er collapsed onto the ground, his eyes rimmed red as he stared at him, ”You’re dead, you’re fake.”

Xu Huo crouched to meet his gaze, ”Look, is this fake?”

As he spoke, a screen lit up in the air, showing the player’s personal panel, complete with nickname, ID number, and all other information.

Sima Xiao Er’s dull expression gradually sharpened, his voice trembling, ”I’m really not crazy?”

”Didn’t I tell you last night the hospital is fake? The things you see are your imagination, you’re not mentally ill.” Xu Huo wiped away the electronic screen.

Sima Xiao Er’s pupils darted; his conviction was clearly starting to waver, though he still hesitated to fully believe him.

Xu Huo signaled for him to follow and they walked to the center of the Activity Area. He pointed at the characters atop the hospital building, asking, ”Does that say Seventeenth Hospital?”

Sima Xiao Er looked for two seconds before giving an affirmative answer.

”Close your eyes, open them, and look again,” Xu Huo said.

Sima Xiao Er did as told. When he opened his eyes he found the large hospital characters had vanished, only to reappear two seconds later.

”Go ask anyone you like what the hospital is called,” Xu Huo added.

Sima Xiao Er went around asking several people and astonishingly received several different answers.

”The hospital is only a framework; the content inside is composed of everyone’s imaginations. Because people’s mental states and life experiences differ, the hospital they see is different, so its name exists differently in each person’s consciousness,” Xu Huo explained. ”Your mental state is unstable, so what you see differs from what I see.”

”You saw me being killed,” Sima Xiao Er said with difficulty. ”So many people held you down, you were looking at them as they slit open your belly...”

”I saw that treatment room as no more than a little rundown,” Xu Huo interrupted.

”But why did I see that scene? I never imagined anything like that,” Sima Xiao Er said, agitated.

”Your mind was interfered with by others,” Xu Huo said. ”That Seventeenth Hospital you saw just now, and the window that disappeared and reappeared the night before last — before the window vanished, wasn’t the ward pretty much like an ordinary hospital? But when I reminded you the window was gone, the ward changed with your consciousness and became more like a psychiatric hospital from a movie.”

”The hospital is just a surface, anyone stepping on it causes ripples, and those ripples influence each other and create new things.”

He walked across the lawn as he spoke. ”Everyone who enters here can form a part of this place. The difference lies in their mental states: the more something is believed to be real by a person, the more truly it will be projected inside the hospital. The doctors and relatives in the Visiting Room are all conjured by your imagination. From my perspective, they are real too.”

Sima Xiao Er grabbed his hair. ”But I can’t control it. Things I never thought of become real. If monsters imagined by others kill us, would we really die?”

”I don’t know that,” Xu Huo said, stopping at the hospital entrance and looking up at the building which was less bright than it had been two days ago. ”But the longer we stay here, the more dangerous we become.”

”Then how can we get out?” Sima Xiao Er pressed. ”If the hospital is all imagined, then this definitely isn’t a dungeon. Even if I imagined a dungeon, we still couldn’t get out in the end!”

”Before you came in, didn’t the Special Defense Department study this fog? What did they say?” Xu Huo turned to him.

Sima Xiao Er took a deep breath. ”They said this is a Random Dungeon caused by overlapping spaces, except the area is larger than any Random Dungeon we’ve ever seen and stranger.”

”Stranger how?”

”Normally you can’t tell the entrance to a Random Dungeon with the naked eye; it’s like an invisible portal. But this time the fog zone formed isolation from the outside. People can go in, but communication between inside and outside is impossible, sound doesn’t transmit, and even the temperature differs a lot!” Sima Xiao Er thumped his head. ”What’s going on here?”

When Xu Huo heard that, something suddenly clicked. Sima Xiao Er and the others entered the fog zone in Ting City, while he was teleported to nearby Flower City. This fog kept changing, blocked communications, and created temperature differences, which made it feel like another space invading Zone 014. The absence of any dungeon prompt could be taken as indirect evidence of that.

If this strange space is a mental contamination site and players’ minds start being affected from the moment they enter, they might not be operating here with their true bodies. Since the fog zone can be entered and exited, that suggested they only needed to break free from this contaminated mental place to regain the freedom to leave the fog zone.

The fact that they were mentally trapped and unable to use player abilities proved this. To escape they had to wake themselves up.

But when the mind is affected, ordinary pain or physical stimuli won’t rouse them; the approach must target the mental layer.

”Have you thought of a way?” Sima Xiao Er stared at him without blinking.

”This method might not work for everyone,” Xu Huo said. ”I’ll try it first.”