Players, Please Board the Train

Xu Ruosi had temporarily changed her story about task progress, claiming it was for clearing the dungeon to prevent Xiao Ling and Yu Guangnan from learning about their gains in the Wax Figure Hall. Unexpectedly, Xiao Ling had also completed one-sixth of the progress.

Now that things were out in the open, Xu Ruosi and the others naturally wanted to try and obtain new progress.

Xu Huo didn’t gain any new progress, but a moment later, Xie Ling and Xu Ruosi nodded at him.

Although Xu Huo hadn’t gotten the new one-sixth progress, Xie Ling and Xu Ruosi had benefited, so they could certainly exchange information.

Thus, Xie Ling told Xiao Ling and Yu Guangnan about the Wax Figure Hall, omitting the Horror Room and selectively sharing only what the Wax Figure Hall appeared to express on the surface.

After all, the answer Xiao Ling had provided merely connected the content of the two venues, hardly a puzzle that was too difficult to solve—come to think of it, getting this one-sixth progress so quickly and easily actually felt a bit strange.

But after Xiao Ling verified it and confirmed it was correct, he smiled and said, “Nice working with you.”

“This answer is way too simple,” Yu Guangnan said skeptically. “It’s so simple I’m starting to doubt whether this is really a D-rank Dungeon.”

“In situations like this, there’s usually only one possibility—most likely one of the six puzzles will be particularly tough,” Xiao Ling said. “Maybe one of them is figuring out why the dungeon is stuck on the first day.”

“If that’s the case, then the task’s difficulty would be extraordinary,” Xu Ruosi said.“I’ve thought of another problem,” Xie Ling spoke up. “What if the hidden requirement for clearing the dungeon is to make the dungeon’s time run normally?”

“That seems unlikely,” Yu Guangnan hesitated. “Time being stuck on the first day should be a condition of the dungeon itself. For players, the difficulty lies in whether they can clear it within seven days. It doesn’t have much to do with the dungeon’s own time rules.”

“I hope that’s the case,” Xie Ling said.

Though she said that, a bad feeling lingered in everyone’s minds. The dungeon was named “Sphinx’s Mystery,” and it was entirely possible that a time-related puzzle would appear at the end.

“At least we now know the dungeon’s time is stuck on the first day we entered the game,” Xu Huo said. “That’s new information, and knowing it from the very start of the game gives us a huge advantage. Also, if more players arrive around noon today, it will confirm our guess.”

Time looping back and forth within a single day—this could very well be the “Sphinx’s Mystery.”

The Sphinx’s Mystery was a historical legend. A creature with a lion’s body and a human head would ask passing travelers a riddle: “What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?”

The Sphinx would kill anyone who answered incorrectly, until the riddle was finally solved by Oedipus.

Of course, as the story spread far and wide, many people came to know the answer. This riddle, which seemed to be about time on the surface, actually had “a human” as its final answer. But forcibly linking this riddle to the dungeon’s one-day loop could still be argued, since the riddle itself represented a single day on its surface level.

However, whether this was related to the dungeon-clearing task was hard to say.

“Since you’ve been to the Beheaded Cemetery and the puzzle for the Mannequin Building was so simple, you should have cracked the third progress by now, right?” Xu Huo paused, then looked at Xiao Ling and the other.

Xiao Ling shook his head. “Unfortunately, no luck. I’ve told you everything I know about the Beheaded Cemetery. To be honest, I already tried back when I was still at the cemetery. It didn’t work.”

“That can’t be right,” Xu Ruosi said. “The Insane Prison was about imprisoning living people for experiments, and the Beheaded Cemetery is easy to understand—it must be where those tortured to death were buried, which perfectly corresponds to the mannequin numbers.”

“You can try submitting that answer,” Xiao Ling gestured with a “go ahead.”

Xu Ruosi paused and decisively gave it a shot. Then, she looked even more surprised than when she first learned how easy the puzzle progress was. “With the first two progresses, this shouldn’t be wrong!”

“I think the puzzle difficulty might be increasing progressively,” Xie Ling said. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the stories in these venues are connected. The Beheaded Cemetery must not be just a simple burial ground for experimental subjects.”

“The ideas about caging living people and abusing test subjects are both fine, but would those people running the experiments—who are basically devoid of humanity—be kind enough to sew the test subjects up and bury them in coffins? It’s much more likely they’d just burn them or cover them up on the spot.”

“The Sun Museum City was built later,” Yu Guangnan said.

“I looked at those bones, and they don’t seem like they were scattered and then reassembled,” Xiao Ling mused. “It’s hard to say how much time passed between the deaths and the museum’s construction.”

“A few years would be enough,” Xu Huo said, leaning toward the idea that those people had been properly gathered and buried in a normal way when they died. The tombstones and such could have been changed later, but piecing together so many broken bones would be difficult.

This raised a problem. If experimental subjects were treated like livestock, the likelihood of a normal burial was very small. What would have driven the experimenters to do this?

Considering that all those skeletons had been decapitated, there might be some religious element involved, more or less.

But simply submitting this conclusion didn’t make the game judge the progress as complete. That meant the Beheaded Cemetery had other hidden information—or perhaps it wasn’t even part of the six progresses at all.

“If that’s the case, there could be many reasons,” Yu Guangnan said. “Maybe the people here had some special belief that the dead must be buried whole. Or maybe it was just for show, to trick more people into joining the experiment. But neither of those is the real answer.”

“Maybe the Beheaded Cemetery isn’t one of the progresses,” Xiao Ling concluded. “There are so many venues in Museum City. We’ve run through seven or eight and only hit two. Even the one-sixth progress needs some filtering. Just looking at story continuity, the Mannequin Building has nothing to do with the Insane Prison behind it.”

The other players agreed with this reasoning.

“Keep your voices down,” Xu Ruosi warned.

The mannequins that had run outside were gradually quieting down. Whether they had wandered off or returned to their original venues was unclear.

“I’ll go check,” Yu Guangnan said before carefully climbing out the window. After a moment of silence, Xu Ruosi asked Xie Ling, “How are your injuries?”

“I took a potion, it’s fine,” Xie Ling said, moving her limbs lightly to show ease.

Xiao Ling let out a derisive snort. “A broken leg can’t be healed in a moment. Instead of pretending to be fine, you should think about how not to hold the rest of us back.”

Wariness crept into Xie Ling’s eyes. Being unable to move freely not only meant she might be abandoned, but she could also become the primary target of her traveling companions. She had tried hard to conceal it, but she hadn’t expected Xiao Ling to call her out so bluntly!

“Let’s keep things civil,” Xu Huo interrupted the atmosphere that was starting to grow tense. “If we can’t clear the dungeon, we might end up being neighbors in the future. There’s no need to make things so awkward.”

All three women shot him a glare at the same time.