Recap
Slow footsteps came from the corner on the right.
The slender and handsome young man came to the living room and stood in the shadows.
Zhang Xue couldn’t see his face.
She could only feel that he seemed to have glanced outside.
Then, the young man’s gentle voice sounded in the darkness.
“Do you want to leave with him?”
An ordinary question.
But Zhang Xue trembled all over, as if falling into an ice cellar.
She shook her head vigorously.
She covered her mouth, sat on the ground, desperately moved back, shaking her head constantly.
“Then, Tuanzi,” the young man seemed to have no other thoughts, just said gently, “close the door.”
The golden retriever got up in response, walked to the door, looked up at the blood-splattered monster outside the door, and raised its paw.
With a “bang”.
The door cut off Zhang Xue’s line of sight from the monster.
The safe house returned to darkness and tranquility.
This is Terror City, also known as Smiley City by countless players due to its unique symbol “: )”. It is a special space hidden within the real world.
Every day, many new players are absorbed here, and countless new instance games appear every day, filled with deadly traps.
The Safe House wanders between these instances.
Twenty hours have passed since Zhang Xue and Li Jianqiang entered the Safe House.
Xia Jing sat on the sofa, holding Tuanzi, quietly gazing at the scenery outside the window, when he suddenly heard a slight “click” of the door opening.
He turned his head.
Meeting his gaze, Zhang Xue subconsciously looked away, seemingly afraid.
The scene of Li Jianqiang’s death lingered in Zhang Xue’s mind. The young man’s indifferent attitude at that time, as if he had just seen an ant being crushed to death, made her feel chilled to the bone.
Xia Jing didn’t mind her attitude and just smiled, “Good morning.”
Zhang Xue trembled.
Even the gentlest voice couldn’t give her any comfort at this moment.
Avoiding Xia Jing’s gaze, she said hoarsely, “…I, I still have a monster eye on me, I want to see… if I can use it to buy some props.”
The smile on Xia Jing’s face widened.
He said briskly, “Feel free to use the electronic scale on the front desk.”
Xia Jing’s smile made Zhang Xue bury her head deeper.
…That monster eye, she had picked it up when she was collecting the dragon horn.
At that time, she didn’t know why the veteran players were picking up these disgusting monster body parts, she just thought, just in case, maybe it would be useful… And the existence of the monster eye was indeed deliberately hidden from Li Jianqiang.
Li Jianqiang was too impulsive, too brainless, the less he knew, the less likely accidents would happen.
Of course, Zhang Xue had to admit that during the previous sixteen hours, she had thought that with Li Jianqiang’s personality, outside, she would still be forced to get along with him due to her family’s strong demands, but at this critical juncture of life and death… she still had to leave herself some way out.
Biting her lip, Zhang Xue took the wet and sticky monster eye out of her trouser pocket and carefully placed it on the electronic scale.
Soon, the small screen of the electronic scale displayed “200 energy density 100 grams”.
Zhang Xue took back the monster eye, calmed herself, and turned to walk towards the small supermarket.
After a while, she came out empty-handed.
Unlike obtaining props in instances or the game hall, props “bought” in the Safe House supermarket would be directly displayed as small icons on the player’s body. With just a thought, the prop would appear in the player’s hand, and the method of use would also automatically appear in the player’s mind.
A small icon of a sickle appeared on Zhang Xue’s wrist.
She nodded to Xia Jing and cautiously approached the door of the Safe House.
The scenery outside the Safe House changed, instantly returning to the familiar corridor.
Xia Jing leaned on the sofa, his elbow resting on the armrest, his palm supporting his chin, watching with interest as the woman, who had just entered Smiley City not long ago, skillfully peered outside with a vigilant attitude.
After waiting for a full minute, there was no movement outside. Zhang Xue took a deep breath, resolutely summoned the sickle into her hand, opened the door and walked out.
In the next second, the Safe House left this place, drifting towards the next instance.
Xia Jing chuckled softly, retracted his gaze, and ran his slender fingers through Tuanzi’s fur: “It’s really interesting, isn’t it?”
All kinds of people, all kinds of personalities, ever-changing instances and monsters.
Tuanzi raised his small head comfortably, rubbing against Xia Jing’s palm, as if asking him to pet his head more.
“It’s a pity that to play a game from beginning to end like them, you still have to log in to the instance from the game hall.” Xia Jing muttered to himself.
And he only had one chance a week to control the drifting direction of the Safe House.
Thinking of this, Xia Jing got up, walked to the door, and raised his hand to gently touch a crack on the door frame.
The Safe House could not be damaged from the outside, but it could be destroyed from the inside.
Li Jianqiang was too bulky. When he was forcibly ejected by the Safe House, he bumped all the way out and directly cracked the door frame.
Xia Jing spread his five fingers in the void, and with a thought, a dragon horn appeared in his palm.
As if playing a musical instrument, or extracting silk threads, Xia Jing’s slender fingers grabbed and gathered the monster’s energy from the dragon horn in his palm. The dragon horn instantly turned gray and fell apart like powder.
Xia Jing, carrying that ball of energy, gently stroked the crack on the door frame.
In an instant, the crack disappeared without a trace.
And just like that, a dragon horn was used up.
Tuanzi stuck to Xia Jing’s feet like a shadow. Xia Jing rested his elbow on his chin and murmured, “One dragon horn was used to make that bowl of noodles, the other dragon horn was used to repair the crack, now there’s only the newly acquired eye and four other body parts left…”
Inventory was running low.
Xia Jing’s eyes turned, and he smiled at Tuanzi, his eyes curving.
“But it’s okay, today is Monday in the game hall.”
That is, the day he could control the Safe House.
He could go out and collect supplies—
And, play games along the way.
*
Smiley City Game Hall, Monday.
The game hall was like a huge square, the entire space oval in shape. At the very front and center was a massive holographic screen, and at the top of the screen, like a countdown calendar hanging in a senior high school classroom, it displayed:
: ) Currently running for 235 days, 3232 players online, 13 instances updated today, 981 historical instances.
The last three numbers were constantly changing in real time.
Below this line of text, the holographic screen was divided into two sections. The left side was the system announcement board, and the right side was the player announcement board.
At this moment, few players lingered in front of the large holographic screen. On days when player rankings weren’t updated, most players weren’t interested in it.
Some of them gathered in the official supermarket in the right corner of the game hall, using points to collect supplies. Those with spatial bags stored their weapons inside, while those without simply carried them by hand.
Other players were scattered around the rows of public login rooms surrounding the game hall, doing their final mental preparation before logging into the instances.
All players forcibly pulled into Smiley City were required to enter an instance once a week. Otherwise, when the deadline arrived, Smiley City would randomly suck the player into any instance.
It might be a relatively simple one-star or two-star instance.
Naturally, it could also be a three-star, or even a four-star instance, which was unbearable for ordinary players.
For the sake of their own lives, most players wouldn’t dare to defy the rules of Smiley City’s game.
Diagonally opposite the official supermarket in the game hall, there was a narrow, winding corridor. This narrow corridor was like a bug left by an unqualified designer. Many players had curiously entered the corridor to explore, and the final conclusion was: it was a corridor with nothing in it, and at the end was a wall.
Perhaps one day Smiley City would realize this and fill in this meaningless corridor.
But at this moment, in this unknown corner, the wall at the end of the corridor quietly turned into a door.
Inside the door.
Xia Jing was making his final preparations before setting off.
As the owner of the Safe House, he naturally didn’t have to pay anything to obtain props.
But Xia Jing never wasted the monster props he had painstakingly collected—these were all good things used to exchange for high energy density monster body parts.
He only took a Faceless Woman’s human skin mask from the shelf, and a small human face icon appeared on the back of his neck near his right ear.
The Faceless Woman’s human skin mask needed to be activated.
Xia Jing took a piece of paper and quickly drew a very sloppy face on it. Even Tuanzi frowned when he saw it.
Unfazed, Xia Jing summoned the human skin mask with a straight face and fed it the paper with the human face drawn on it.
The mask “crunched” and chewed the paper. After swallowing it, the face, which had no features except for a mouth, gradually showed specific facial features.
Xia Jing put the human skin mask back into the small icon on the back of his neck, and then with a thought—
His originally handsome and beautiful face turned into an unremarkable one.
He looked to be in his early twenties, with a large face like a steamed bun, small inverted triangle monolids, a flat nose bridge, and dry, rough, thick lips. His features seemed to have been modified by some kind of funny filter, and it was simply not something a normal human could grow into.
And the smooth, fine black hair also turned into the spiky crew cut that Xia Jing had randomly drawn.
Tuanzi couldn’t bear to look directly and lay down on the ground, covering his face with his paws—to be more precise, this was not “unremarkable” at all.
If he wasn’t afraid that Xia Jing would waste monster body parts to treat him, Tuanzi would have liked to perform a “dog paw digging out his own eyes” on the spot.
Xia Jing laughed, and the clear and pleasant voice also became hoarse and rough.
“You can’t blame me for this voice, it’s the voice that the Faceless Woman’s skin automatically matched after recognizing these facial features.”
Xia Jing put the machete, rope, pliers, and dagger into the spatial bag, and then put the small, sachet-like spatial bag into his trouser pocket.
These were all things he had bought in the game hall with the points he had earned from passing instances.
Xia Jing finished his preparations, squinted his eyes and smiled, hooked Tuanzi’s chin with his beautiful and slender fingers that didn’t match his face at all, and said, “Alright, stay here and guard the house.”
Tuanzi “awooed”, flicked his tail in disgust, turned his head away, and squinted with resentment in his eyes, indicating that he was hurt by this face.
Xia Jing laughed loudly, straightened up, and said in a good mood, “I’m going out—”
“I’ll be back early.”
Leaving behind one last bright smile and these words that couldn’t convince the dog at all, the young man pushed open the door and walked out.
……
The young man emerging from the narrow corridor didn’t attract anyone’s attention. Although he stood a full 1.8 meters tall with a model-like physique, his face simply couldn’t draw any eyes.
Seven days had passed… no, more than seven days. Time in the Safe House mostly followed the instances, and one day in an instance might only correspond to an hour in the game hall.
So, Xia Jing had been cooped up in the Safe House for far more than seven days. Finally arriving at the game hall again, he took a deep breath, the dark pupils in his small eyes sparkling with fragmented light.
Humming softly, Xia Jing smiled with narrowed eyes and strode straight towards the login rooms.
Currently, there are over a hundred public login rooms in the game hall, automatically increasing or decreasing according to the number of online players.
Quite a few scattered players stood hesitantly in front of empty login rooms, not daring to enter. Among the numerous login rooms, many were lit with green lights, indicating “occupied”.
Suddenly, several rooms had their doors opened from the inside, and the people who came out were either covered in blood, pale and sweaty, or relatively calm and collected.
Seeing these people, the expressions of those players who hadn’t logged in kept changing.
Some, no longer wanting to hesitate, clenched their fists and with a “bang” opened a login room and walked in.
Others directly had a mental breakdown, squatting down with their heads in their hands, chanting “Amitabha”* non-stop.
*(Buddhist prayer)
In stark contrast to these people, Xia Jing barely paused in front of a login room with a red light, indicating it was empty. He pulled open the door and walked in.
His fleeting profile attracted quite a few meaningful glances.
After the small door closed, the only object in the login room, a machine resembling an ATM, lit up its screen.
The screen displayed various instances in small frames, sixteen instances per page, with a total of sixty-two pages.
The instances were arranged in order of difficulty from lowest to highest.
Seeing the instances, Xia Jing was like a desert traveler who had been thirsty for a long time finally getting a drink of water, his whole face glowing.
After standing still, he excitedly clicked directly to the last page, then raised his eyebrows.
—Not very surprising.
There were still no four-star instances today.
At the end of the sixty-two pages, the last instance was still a three-star.
Xia Jing pondered and flipped forward. Most of the three-star instances, at the upper right corner of their small frames, displayed “0”, meaning that no players intended to enter those instances at the moment.
Players would automatically deduct two points upon entering a login room, and entering a login room didn’t guarantee that they could start an instance game.
Each instance had a player number requirement.
If a player chose an instance that was currently empty, and after waiting for three hours, the instance’s player number requirement was still not met, the instance would automatically spit the player out.
Those two points would be wasted.
Many new players didn’t have many points to begin with. If they wasted all their points in the login room before figuring out the rules, they would lose the opportunity to choose an instance independently.
Once the seven-day time limit was up, Smiley City would automatically suck them into any instance, leaving their life and death to fate.
Xia Jing wouldn’t do something as reckless as entering an empty instance; that was purely a waste of time.
He thought for a moment and summoned the player’s holographic mini-screen he had bought with points.
The mini-screen appeared in front of him. Xia Jing clicked into the forum and saw a dense mass of posts.
“Gritting my teeth and buying the holographic mini-screen, now I only have ten points left, is there any big boss willing to take a newbie to earn points QAQ”
“Anyone want to chat about the previous four-star instances [1][2][3][4]”
“The fucking one-eyed dragon in the ‘Humans Must Die’ instance yesterday at 4 pm, if you have the guts to steal my props, you have the guts to come to the game hall and duel with me! [1][2]”
“What exactly is that mysterious Safe House? Any big bosses to enlighten the newbies?”
“Newbie asking, has anyone successfully earned 10,000 points and left this place…”
“Are there few people today? Why hasn’t anyone entered the three-star instance so far?”
Xia Jing quickly browsed through and clicked into the last post.
The post was posted at 9 am, and it was now 12 noon, but no one had responded to the original poster to enter the three-star instance together.
Just Xia Jing and the original poster were far from enough for a three-star instance’s player number requirement.
Xia Jing wasn’t disappointed. For him, playing low-star instances was also playing, and he could still collect “supplies” – monsters.
He simply closed the holographic screen, raised his hand, and selected the “Newly Added Today” category on the machine. A total of 13 instances appeared in front of Xia Jing.
Among them were 10 one-star instances and 3 two-star instances.
Among the two-star instances, two were already full, and the games were in progress.
The only remaining two-star instance had “8/9” displayed in the upper right corner.
The instance required nine players, and eight had already logged in.
Xia Jing focused, scanning the name and cover of this instance.
“Don’t Think About It!”
In the middle of the cover was a distorted black mass, with several tentacles extending from it, somewhat like an octopus. The monster’s face had a pair of crescent-shaped eyes that curved into a smile and a pale, eerie mouth.
Staring at it for a long time, it seemed that one could also see a distorted human face from the front of this monster.
Xia Jing narrowed his eyes.
That human face seemed to emerge automatically from the cover, or it might be an illusion produced by staring for too long, making it impossible to distinguish.
Xia Jing quickly shifted his attention.
In the background behind the monster, various daily life scenes were scattered: an open office space, a crowded supermarket, a wide road, a cozy home, a school classroom, and so on…
It was difficult to find any pattern for a while.
The information was very fragmented.
Hmm.
This one then.
Hopefully, it will be a bit interesting.
Thinking this, Xia Jing smiled and tapped the cover of the instance, and his vision plunged into darkness.
…
…
After an unknown amount of time, Xia Jing was awakened by a melodious piece of music.
Along with the music, a gentle female voice sounded, making a gentle call.
“Classmates, wake up, classmates, wake up…”
“After washing up, please go to the cafeteria to eat. After breakfast, go to the classroom as soon as possible to start morning reading…”
The sound of “creak” and “creak” rang in his ears, which was the noise made by the simple wooden bed boards when pressed.
Xia Jing felt a little dizzy. The moment he propped himself up, he noticed that he was wearing… a thin spring school uniform with a white background and blue border.
His lower body was a pair of loose matching trousers. Stuffed under the quilt, even just waking up for a minute made him feel stuffy and hot.
…For a two-star instance, it was understandable to be simple, but it was a bit too much to not even provide pajamas.
Xia Jing was silent for a second, then lifted the quilt and silently looked around.
A dormitory with four beds.
Under the beds were desks, and everyone slept on the upper bunks.
The other three people besides him—
One was a young man who also looked to be in his early twenties, wearing a pair of glasses, thin, and with ordinary features. He was currently rubbing his eyes in a daze, looking around the dormitory in confusion.
One was a muscular, dark-skinned man who looked like a bear, with a somewhat fierce face, vigilantly sizing up the other three.
The other person slept on the bed opposite Xia Jing, raising his hand to rub his forehead.
He looked tall, maybe close to 1.9 meters, with broad shoulders, handsome features, and fair skin. A pair of peach blossom eyes* looked a little listless, showing that he was trying to shake off his sleepiness, his gaze calmly sweeping over Xia Jing and the others.
*(
The four of them were undoubtedly all players.
The four of them, regardless of age, were all wearing fresh green school uniforms.
…It was quite comical.
Glasses was the first to break the silence. He cleared his throat: “Ahem…”
Xia Jing, Peach Blossom Eyes, and the bear-like man all focused their attention on him.
Glasses suddenly became the center of attention, the pressure suddenly increasing.
He laughed dryly: “Well… I just want to get out of bed and pee, I’m a little desperate!”
After saying that, he timidly got out of bed.
The other three: “…”
Xia Jing chuckled softly and also moved.
The bear-like man and Peach Blossom Eyes immediately looked at Xia Jing.
“I’m going to the bathroom too,” Xia Jing raised his eyes, a smile playing on his lips, “Why… want to come together?”
Peach Blossom Eyes pondered for a second and followed him out of bed.
The bear-like man stared at him sharply.
Peach Blossom Eyes curled his lips and said lazily, “Don’t be shy, if you want to go to the bathroom together, just come down and line up, no need to ask for permission with your eyes.”
The bear-like man almost choked!
Who the hell was in the mood to go to the bathroom after entering an instance, who the hell was shy about going to the bathroom, and who the hell asked for your permission!
Speaking of which, everyone’s first priority after entering the instance was to go to the bathroom, what kind of operation was this?!
___
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Update: Monday, Wednesday, Friday
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