Players, Please Board the Train

This waterway had an entrance but no exit.

They had been inside long enough for Xiao Ling and Yu Guangnan to thoroughly walk the waterway, only to find at the end that it was a dead end; to get out they would have to go back the way they came.

Of course, they could dig up through the ceiling, but they did not know what lay above at the corresponding spots. Recklessly digging might mean getting buried beneath.

Still, that was the best option for now, as long as they found a suitable spot.

The map showed the layout of ground-level buildings; if they picked an open area they could climb out.

But the layout was only approximate. The safe approach was to find a larger venue to ensure they wouldn’t hit a building’s supporting structure.

While they were searching for a way out, Xu Huo had almost reached the end of the waterway. Besides a few narrow cavities underwater every so often, the tunnel posed basically no danger. The only information to glean came from the stone tablets carved into the rock walls.

The names on those tablets did not match the patients or doctors in the Infectious Disease History Museum, so it couldn’t be concluded that these people had died of the epidemic.

But the fact that they had individual tombstones here proved they had some connection to Sun Museum City.

There were men, women, and children. His first thought was family ties, like the merchant in the game background who had many children, but the ages didn’t line up. It fit slightly better if they were relatives of that merchant’s clan.From the ages, though, this group didn’t seem to suffer from an inherited disease.

They, plus the doctor surnamed Shang from the history museum, implied that the genetic disease explanation might not be true.

If the genetic-disease explanation didn’t hold, the role the Shang family played here deserved deeper thought.

If human experimentation was true, it would be extremely odd for a merchant family to lose so many relatives at once if the merchant was the mastermind or leader. Even a ruthless man who used his own kin for experiments would likely keep the children alive to maximize benefits.

Over twenty people surnamed Shang, plus spouses who might be their husbands or wives—if a whole clan was nearly wiped out, then the Shang family would be the biggest victims.

If the descendants of the Shang family inherited the museum and deliberately recorded these facts in the exhibits, there would be only one reason: to preserve that past.

If that history were positive, those descendants could simply showcase the family’s anti-epidemic deeds in the history hall. Presenting it abruptly and half-hidden like this suggests an invitation to dig deeper.

Museum City was very likely founded by the Shang family, but if they were victims, the story that the experiments began because of a genetic disease starts to sound more like the experiments targeted Shang family members...

Xu Huo paused in his thoughts. That doctor surnamed Shang was indeed an excellent subject for research. Surviving so many epidemics unscathed was not purely luck or personal resistance.

If that was the case, it would not be impossible for the Shang family to experience a sudden, large number of deaths in a short span.

Assuming this line of thought was correct, then beyond Shang family members there would have to be a large number of test subjects. Those people probably wouldn’t count as missing persons—detention, imprisonment, forced pregnancies—this would no longer be something done quietly.

“The Shang family was murdered because one of them, a doctor immune to infection, was an important experimental subject. After death, their bodies were abandoned in Museum City. The Shang family were not the instigators of the human experiments.”

Progress on solving the missing-person mystery jumped to 4/6: the Wax Figure Hall, the Insane Prison, the Doll Clothing Store, and now the River Styx Ferry—four locations in total.

By the time the puzzle had reached this point, a rough story thread of Museum City could be pieced together. At the start, the Shang family might have built Museum City for epidemic control—either for quarantine treatment or drug trials.

The Shang doctor’s special condition made the family a hope for curing the disease. Of course, the original purpose for building Museum City changed, and the leading group probably were not trying to save others, which in turn brought disaster on the Shang family. Whether the frequent childbirths by the young merchant to keep the family line going were voluntary or coerced remained unclear.

Soon the truth of Museum City would be exposed and human experimentation could no longer continue.

The disappearances didn’t happen overnight but continued for years without scandal; if there was no protection from the government or authorities, that wouldn’t make sense. So after the Museum City incident was uncovered it turned into a scandal, and having one merchant take the fall was plausible.

The Shang descendants rebuilt Museum City and reconstructed past events in the exhibits—likely because they had no proper route to clear the family name. But whether they deserved vindication was no longer important: so much time had passed that most participants were probably dead, and with Zone 009 reopened as a dungeon, one family’s past didn’t matter much.

Next up was the Beheaded Cemetery. It was odd that everyone there had been executed by beheading.

There were still two progress points left. If not for the dungeon’s time puzzle, then there had to be other hidden content in Museum City’s story.

As he headed back, a sound of heavy objects falling into the water came from ahead, and it seemed to cover a wide area.

Xu Huo sped up and arrived in time to see Xiao Ling and two others trying to punch through the ceiling overhead. He didn’t rush out; he simply stood to the side and watched.

“Did we pick the wrong spot? Why can’t we break through the floor?” Long Aotian asked irritably.

“Maybe the underground rock layer’s too thick.” Xiao Ling’s companion kept working without stopping, scraping the stone above with one tool after another.

“It didn’t feel this deep when we dropped down,” Yu Guangnan was helping, but as more stones fell the sound grew more distant.

A few seconds later, the group who had ambushed them last night appeared at the other end of the waterway.

“Those people outside—did you kill them?” The leader was the same man who had fought Xu Huo. When he saw Xiao Ling’s group he glanced ahead first.

Pride in defeat remained intact. Long Aotian immediately said, “Those bastards out there were on your side? We killed them, so what? You come into a dungeon and waste time looting and slaughtering instead of clearing it properly. Killing them is removing pests!”

“Who exactly are you?” Xiao Ling watched them warily, her hand behind her back signaling Yu Guangnan, and added, “You didn’t come into the dungeon to clear it, did you? Maybe you aren’t even ticketed players.”

“Don’t you know?” the man countered, eyes on Yu Guangnan.

“Who doesn’t know there might be good items in a new dungeon,” Xiao Ling said. “Is that something worth silencing people over?”

“If you have time to kill, why not go find the loot?”

The man didn’t argue with her. Instead he asked, “There’s one person missing.”

When he said that, Xiao Ling and the hidden Xu Huo both frowned. If he asked for only one person, that meant the person who had already encountered Xu Ruosi and Xie Ling.

“We don’t know,” Xiao Ling answered immediately. “We all met in the dungeon, worked well together, and if we didn’t get along we parted ways.”