Players, Please Board the Train

[Congratulations, player, for obtaining a special characteristic. Special characteristics are different from professional characteristics. They are randomly generated based on the player’s performance in the dungeon and are usually unrelated to professional characteristics, but closely related to the dungeon content.]

[Please Take a Seat: In a house or a room, regardless of whether it is registered under a specific person’s name or whether its owner is still alive, when someone enters this space, an appropriate host-guest relationship should arise.]

[When the host says ”Please take a seat,” a qualified guest should politely sit down as instructed by the host and maintain a three-minute period of host-guest amity. If the guest attempts to violate the host-guest relationship, they will be forcibly ”seated” for half a minute. If the host violates the host-guest relationship, the relationship will be terminated.]

[However, please note that the scope of ”Please Take a Seat” is limited to individual, room-like spaces. The space must have at least one chair. Additionally, in specific spaces, such as inside large items, whether the characteristic takes effect depends on the actual circumstances.]

[Of course, the player should also carefully choose the target of ”Please Take a Seat.” Hot-tempered guests often flip the table after the host-guest time ends. And if the guest successfully refuses the host’s ”Please Take a Seat” from the start, then the host-guest relationship does not exist.]

[Only usable once per day.]

Simply put, the ”Please Take a Seat” characteristic can only be used in a small, enclosed space. Think of it like a bedroom, living room, or dining room. When the host says ”Please take a seat,” everyone except players who can shake off the characteristic’s effect will automatically sit down and need to remain seated for three minutes.

During those three minutes, if a player turns hostile, that player will be forcibly trapped in their chair for half a minute. This means players can move freely during the three-minute ”Please Take a Seat” period, but whether they can attack other guests remains to be seen—though they definitely cannot attack the host.

Naturally, since it’s a host-guest amity period, guests probably shouldn’t attack each other either.

And of course, during those three minutes, the ”Please Take a Seat” host also cannot attempt to attack the guests, otherwise the characteristic effect will end.Players who never fell under the characteristic’s effect from the start are not within the host-guest relationship, so they can either attack the host or be attacked by the host. It’s just unclear what would happen if someone attacked a seated guest.

It’s a characteristic very suited for a dramatic entrance. Besides the host-guest relationship, there might be some unexpected clever uses.

Getting such a good characteristic from a dungeon that wasn’t particularly difficult was a pleasant surprise. Xu Huo nodded in satisfaction and opened his item slot, planning to merge an item first.

There were three items available for merging. He selected the ”Escape Chance” and the newly obtained C-grade item ”Targeting Scope,” because merging these two would allow him to exchange for a special item.

After confirming, the exchanged item quickly appeared in the item slot:

[Anthill Marker: Small bodies contain immense power. As insects that have brought endless headaches to maintenance workers tending to dams throughout history, after several evolutions, they developed the ability to burrow into all kinds of materials. With repeated upgrades in building materials, the ants finally achieved a qualitative leap, gaining a new ability to easily find weak points in any whole structure.]

[Artificers drew inspiration from these small-bodied insects, and thus the Anthill Marker was successfully born. By using it, you can mark a relatively weak zone within an enclosed space. No matter whether that location shifts or is disguised, the mark will never disappear. However, whether you can successfully escape from this marked point depends on the player’s own ability.]

This item was a good deal. While the ”Escape Chance” could give a precise numerical readout on escape probability, testing it one by one was a hassle. The ”Anthill Marker” was much simpler and more intuitive. And since the mark never disappeared no matter how the location changed, the numerical value wasn’t all that important. After all, if you were trapped in a place with no visible exit at all, a high or low number didn’t mean much—there was only one path anyway.

Closing the game panel, Xu Huo logged into the network platform to check for messages.

One of the two detectives he’d hired had replied. The boy from the pair of children who had emigrated abroad—along with his parents—had died. They had been swept away by a tsunami five years ago. Their bodies were never found, and the authorities had declared them dead.

After sending the remaining payment, Xu Huo wiped his online traces and left the Immigration Office.

Empty houses attracted more attention, since there were plenty of homeless players wandering around looking for places to stay.

After leaving the Immigration Office, he found a hotel in a well-policed area.

He didn’t expect to run into Ye Yingdong again while checking in. Ye Yingdong was resting in the lobby with his younger sister and a few other players.

Xu Huo nodded in acknowledgment from a distance. From the conversations of people around him, he learned that this hotel was part of a player organization’s assets. A third of the security guards had been replaced with players, so many politicians and wealthy people were willing to pay high prices to stay here. Still, some rooms were kept specifically for players.

Having been unable to rest properly for several days, Xu Huo took a shower first before asking the hotel to send up a meal.

A bottle of liquor came with the food cart.

”I didn’t order this.”

”This is a complimentary gift from the hotel.” The server smiled politely. ”It’s a special liquor infused with self-healing potions. The taste and effects are quite good. Every player staying at the hotel can drink it for free.”

Xu Huo wasn’t very interested. He told him to leave the items and go.

He ate by the window, looking down at the street below. The area around the hotel was surprisingly peaceful, but the view farther away was not so pleasant. A few plumes of thick smoke were still rising into the sky, and the sounds of sirens and alarms never stopped.

He also skimmed the trending topics online. A large portion of them condemned the players who came to Zone 009 not to enter the dungeons, but to loot and pillage. Netizens called these people ”refugee players.”

Refugee originally referred to people displaced by disasters, without any specific emotional connotation. But when applied to players, it was a blunt, ironic insult—basically saying these players were no different from ”refugees.” Although they were players, they had no fixed abode and no real ability, so they just wandered around, bullying ordinary people to scrape together some benefits. Serious players all went into the dungeons to fight—especially now, right when the dungeons had just opened, which was the best time to find items.

This was just the first wave. A second wave was about to come out, and they would mainly target items for grabs. Maybe this time, quite a few high-grade items with actual evidence would emerge.

”I wonder if Super Items will show up...” Xu Huo’s movements paused slightly. If a high-grade item appeared in Zone 009, the situation would definitely be far more brutal than what happened in Zone 014 back then.

”Knock, knock, knock!” Someone was knocking at the door.