Players, Please Board the Train

“Both of their eyes were gouged out, their brains and internal organs sucked dry, leaving just skin on their upper bodies.” Fang Penghui said, “I’ve been here four days, and this is the first time I’ve seen players killed like this.”

Previously, aside from those killed by other players, everyone else had simply vanished without a trace, their bodies never found.

Having bodies so blatantly tossed here was a first.

It seemed more like a warning… Xu Huo pondered for a moment, then said, “Isn’t there a player in the dungeon who’s been here for six days? He might know what’s going on.”

“Brother Fang, why beat around the bush with him!” A hot-tempered, square-faced player cut in, “That guy’s raving mad, you can’t get anything out of him. The only ones who know what’s happening are this man and woman. If the dungeon’s monsters didn’t kill them, then these two are Player-Eaters trying to cover their tracks by staging this!”

“If he won’t talk, kill him. If he’s a Player-Eater, killing him makes everyone safer!”

“Are you sure?” Xu Huo didn’t feel like fighting right now. “Before the end of the month, the number of players here is clearly fixed. A few disappear every day. One less just increases the odds for everyone else. Do you really think, with your intelligence, you can survive all seven days?”

The square-faced man was about to explode, but Fang Penghui stopped him. “What do you mean by ‘before the end of the month’?”

“The hotel’s registration book. It gets cleared every end of the month.” Xu Huo said, “Players in this dungeon check in at different times. There’s no way everyone can clear it simultaneously, and it’s unlikely they all agreed to stay at the guesthouse. So the dungeon does a monthly purge, and it probably catches every player.”

“Going by the calendar, that’s the day after tomorrow. Your seven-day dungeon timer won’t be up by then, right?”Fang Penghui’s face darkened, and he let down some of his guard toward Xu Huo. “You’re right. I noticed the registration book too. Everyone before was fine, but things changed yesterday. Even if players stay in the hotel and never leave, avoiding whatever triggers the disappearances, they most likely won’t survive until the dungeon ends.”

“That’s exactly why I want to know what happened last night.”

“I really don’t know.” Xu Huo said, “They were the first to run into danger. Yi Pei and I only turned back after hearing the commotion. The only thing I’m sure of is that they were taken down in seconds, with no chance to fight back.”

“You didn’t see what killed them?” The square-faced man couldn’t help pressing.

Xu Huo shot him a look. “Would you rush in to look? In that situation, you’d be lucky to escape, and the fog was so thick you couldn’t see three feet ahead.”

That much was obvious. Several players looked up at the gloomy sky, and then Fang Penghui said, “The dungeon won’t let us off just because we don’t break the rules. The best approach is to contact all the players and fight the dungeon together.”

His eyes locked onto Xu Huo. “Since the hotel gets cleared every end of the month, that means no player before has succeeded. Collective effort beats going solo.”

“I wasn’t planning to go solo anyway.” Xu Huo raised his injured hand. “I don’t have that luxury. But can you convince the other players?”

People were disappearing every day. If they knew a bigger danger was lurking, would gathering all the players only bring that danger sooner?

“Convincing most of them is enough… we need a few cannon fodder anyway.” Fang Penghui shrugged. “So it’s settled. We’ll meet in the hotel lobby.”

With that, he led his people away, but two broke off from the group, keeping a distance as they tailed Xu Huo.

Xu Huo didn’t mind. He followed the route from yesterday, first checking the grass for footprints before examining the couple’s bodies.

Fang Penghui’s group had covered the bodies with grass. When he lifted it, a stench hit him—not the smell of rot, but the odor of internal organs.

He pressed down on the skull, torso, and limbs. The eyes were naturally gone. The head and abdomen were hollow, with only some contents in the abdominal cavity. The muscles and bones of the hands and feet were still intact, though slightly shriveled.

With the head, organs, and most bodily fluids missing, the bodies weighed less than a third of their original weight—had the ones that appeared in the woods yesterday been hollowed-out corpses too?

They had no living aura, left no footprints in the forest, and there were many of them.

Even as half-corpses, they couldn’t have appeared out of nowhere. In such numbers, where could they have been hidden?

After a moment’s thought, he took out the Screaming Chicken and had it continue along yesterday’s path.

Through the woods, the man and chicken reached the water pool. Here, the Screaming Chicken stopped moving forward, instead spinning in place.

The administrator had come to the pool before disappearing.

Gazing at the misty water surface, Xu Huo pulled a monitor from his luggage compartment and dropped it into the lake, guiding it downward.

The monitor was something he’d brought from District 011, waterproof without issue, but since it was a portable model, it couldn’t dive too deep.

What surprised him, though, was that the monitor hit bottom less than ten meters down. He put on his glasses and Oxygen Supply, then remotely moved the monitor left and right.

Beneath the water was a flat stone surface, about fifteen meters wide, likely a road originally. On either side, the water dropped off into darkness, light failing to reach the bottom. But the road started from this side of the pool and seemed to head toward the opposite bank.

People should have lived across the water, at least before the road was submerged.

The game background mentioned that Sifang Palace City had shrunk repeatedly over time. Could the abandoned areas all be isolated on the other side of the pool?

Thinking this, Xu Huo felt a subtle sense of wrongness rising in him.

The buildings in the county showed no signs of change. The people here believed in gods, so they wouldn’t have completely discarded religious traces. More than a remnant of Sifang Palace, it felt like they had simply moved to a new location and built a new city from scratch.

The disappeared players and the county’s dead all ended up in the pool, suggesting that the dungeon’s Sifang Palace wasn’t limited to this county—the missing players should be in the part of Sifang Palace that had been superficially abandoned.

Turning to look back at the county, Xu Huo frowned. In other words, he’d spent two or three days just circling the entrance of Sifang Palace, never touching the dungeon’s core.

Just as he was considering crossing the pool to take a look, thick smoke suddenly rose from the direction of the county. Judging by the location, the hotel was on fire.

He put away the umbrella, shook off the two tailing him, and raced back to the county at top speed. By the time he arrived, the hotel was already half-burned. Two or three players were working together to pin a man down in front of the hotel entrance.

“This lunatic!” The square-faced player took a bite and couldn’t help punching the man on the ground.

The frenzied player had completely forgotten how to use his characteristics and items, relying only on brute force. When hit, he screamed in terror, “Eyes! Eyes! They’re everywhere! Anyone who sees the eyes will die!”

Xu Huo slowed his pace. This man was the only player in the dungeon who had lived to the sixth day.