After receiving their wristbands, patients were hurried by the nurses to the upstairs wards and were told that they could move around in the hospital’s public areas during the day, but fighting was prohibited, or else everyone would be punished.
A total of over sixty people were assigned to different floors, with the majority on the third and fourth floors, and only a few on the fifth floor. Once they entered their rooms, the hospital’s time shifted to night, and the broadcasts in the hallways instructed patients to return to their wards to rest and prohibited wandering around.
"If I’m not mistaken, it was daylight outside when we came in," Gu Yu and his group were assigned to the same room, they checked the things in the room and then looked out the window again.
The window of this room faced the hospital entrance; now, standing upstairs, they could not only see the lawn in front of the hospital but also the areas that should have been obscured by the fog now looked like a balustrade and streets, hardly distinguishable from ordinary streets.
"If we just climbed over the wall and escaped from the hospital, could we clear the level?" Zheng Liang said.
"How could that be possible," Wen Xuelin replied, "We definitely have to complete the instance tasks, and although it looks like a street outside, who knows what it will turn into once we go out there. If a security guard catches us and locks us on the seventh floor, that would be terrible."
"The first of the three tasks seems simpler, but this is clearly a fake psychiatric hospital, and many things might be meant to mislead and suggest. Let’s skip it and go for the second or third task instead," Brother Liang suggested.
"The hospital’s main door is right downstairs, do you think simply cleaning it would let us clear the level?" Guan Zuhong looked around.
"Who cares if it’s right or not, let’s try it," Gu Yu said, "Do you have any protective gear with you? Put it on first, there might be contaminants on the main door."
The group put on protective suits or took out defense props before they quietly opened the door of the room.
"Didn’t anyone else come out?" Zheng Liang looked at the empty and quiet hallway, "That’s not right. Could those Cannibal Players be so obedient?"
As they went downstairs despite their doubts, they found the door to the hallway locked. Guan Zuhong used a prop to unlock it, only to discover when they reached the third floor that all that remained in the hallway was a single flickering, indistinct light. The light’s fluctuations lent both sides of the hallway an increasingly elongated visual effect.
Wen Xuelin stared down the left corridor, and then suddenly her eyes widened and she instinctively covered her mouth. As the light went out, she whispered tensely to the people beside her, "Did you see that?"
"See what?" Gu Yu turned his head, and just then the corridor lights flashed on and off rapidly again. However, when they lit up this time, a long-haired woman with her face covered was standing about twenty meters away, facing them.
"Damn it!" The first to shout was Zheng Liang, "Move it, move it, let’s go!"
The group hurried down the stairs, but when they looked back, they saw that the woman, who had maintained a certain distance before, appeared at the stairwell entrance with each flicker of the light.
Wen Xuelin uttered a soft cry, and with terror in her voice, she said, "Are there horror instances in the game? I’ve never heard of such a thing! Don’t ; go find someone else!"
When the light flickered back to normal, the long-haired woman with her face covered had not followed them.
Gu Yu and his companions were somewhat shaken, and Brother Liang said, "Maybe it’s other players using props to scare people. I’ve never heard from other players about a horror instance. Ghosts shouldn’t exist in the game."
"Are you sure?" Wen Xuelin’s lips trembled slightly, "These things scare me the most!"
"I’m sure," Brother Liang said, "If there were horror instances, there would have been some talk of them on the forums. Our country already has quite a few Level D Players, even if they haven’t experienced it themselves, they would know about it from other districts. Since nobody has mentioned it, it doesn’t exist. Don’t scare yourself."
Wen Xuelin calmed down a bit and reassured herself, "That might really be another player. Let’s hurry up and go."
They quietly made their way to the first floor, where neither the head nurse nor the security guard was present. In the brightly lit lobby, there were a few other players, including the delicate-looking female player who had spoken earlier and her three companions.
These four people were now standing in front of the door without moving.
"What are you doing?" Zheng Liang cautiously approached.
It was clear that the female player and her group were also there for the third task, but now they were standing motionless in front of the door.
"I’m worried about germs on the door." The female player said, "The Seventeenth Hospital has a special building dedicated to infectious materials research. There might be germs in unexpected places. Simply wiping the door to pass the task, I don’t think it’s going to be that easy."
Then why are you here?
Gu Yu and the others were somewhat at a loss for words, but the next second they watched the female player pull out a gun and shoot several times at the door. The glass door shattered in response, and she glanced at Gu Yu and the others before leaving the hospital with her companions.
"Is she crazy!" Zheng Liang glared at the broken door scattered all over the ground. "How are we supposed to clean this up now?"
However, Wen Xuelin took out cleaning tools from her prop bar and started sweeping the broken pieces together, but unfortunately, nothing happened.
The group stood in front of the door for a while but ultimately didn’t muster the courage to go out. Brother Liang suggested they check out Building Two since it was not possible to receive psychological treatment at this time.
Gu Yu was still cautious, "There must be other players who went there already. Let’s observe from downstairs first."
So, they made their way in the dark to the central transitional lawn. Yet before they even reached the door of Building Two, a piercing scream suddenly came from inside, followed by someone shouting in terror, "Don’t come over! Don’t come over...!"
The voice stopped abruptly, and the ensuing lengthy silence involuntarily accelerated everyone’s heartbeat. Gu Yu and Brother Liang exchanged glances and silently retreated, intending to return to Building One. However, as they turned around, they noticed some changes on the external wall of the outpatient building.
In their haste, they didn’t examine it closely and hurried back inside the building. But when they tried to go upstairs, they found the whole building engulfed in an eerie darkness, with only faint daylight seeping through the windows in the hallway. They also faintly heard a sound like chains dragging on the ground, getting closer and closer.
Zheng Liang, who was leading, hastily stopped and signaled the others to climb onto the external wall to get back to their rooms from the outside.
Considering the "female ghost" they had encountered in the corridor earlier, no one disagreed, and they all found a way to climb up to the fourth floor by their own means.
The wards were just as they had been before. Gu Yu and Brother Liang approached the door to listen for noises outside and discovered that the dragging sound had stopped nearby, followed by a knocking on the door.
After a brief silence, there was the sound of a door opening, then quiet again for a while. Two minutes later, the sound of chains dragging returned to the corridor, followed by more knocking.
That noise was definitely not anything good, and just because there was silence after the door opened didn’t mean the players were unharmed. The fact that it could continue to wander outside indicated that the players were ineffective against it.
Gu Yu and Brother Liang looked at each other, lifted a bed and barricaded it behind the door. They were about to call the others for help when they realized that Zheng Liang and Guan Zuhong had both closed their eyes and leaned against the bedside.