Most of the players present had been in the instance for no more than five days, and those who still needed time were unwilling to take the risk. If things didn’t develop as Yi Pei said, their remaining time might involve facing the instance’s backlash.
A few whose time was close were genuinely tempted.
Because they had started to experience certain hallucinations.
The player who set the hotel on fire today might very well be their tomorrow or the day after.
As for Yi Pei’s idea, Xu Huo wasn’t entirely pessimistic.
The only problem at the moment was that they knew too few clues. There was no mention in the instance introduction of rules that couldn’t be violated; it was entirely up to the players to explore on their own.
The current situation was like they were livestock trapped in a pen, with the pen owner occasionally selecting a few for slaughter. They could sometimes see the hand and the knife reaching in, but they were unclear on the true pattern of the pen owner’s behavior.
The rain was letting up. Fang Penghui glanced outside and said, "Whatever we’re going to do, we’ll have to wait until daylight tomorrow."
By now, the players had clearly split into three groups.
The first group, represented by Brother Shi and Yi Pei, was inclined to take the initiative.
The second group included Fang Penghui, Tian Kun, and Wei Xian, among others; they preferred that the players band together to deal with the instance cleansing that could happen in two days.
The third group consisted of Xu Huo and the player in black, as well as a few other loners whose thoughts were temporarily unclear but who obviously did not want to act together with the previous two groups.
"How should we handle the corpse?" Liu Shiyen asked: "If the corpse moves towards the instance’s core, we should gain something by using this body."
Brother Shi walked over to the burned player’s corpse and pulled out a collar, fitting it around the waist of the body—which, with the organs removed, was slimmer than expected. There were three oval-shaped signal flares attached to the collar.
Seeing the other players struggling to contain their emotions, he explained, "The light from the flares can burn continuously for two hours. Unless we’re unlucky and the corpse goes too far off in this heavy fog, everyone should be able to see the position indicated by the signal."
"What about those other two bodies over there?" the female player beside him said indifferently, "If that’s not enough, aren’t there plenty more people nearby?"
Nevermind that the people in this county were all quite abnormal, even for ordinary people, it was not new for players to kill others for the sake of completing an instance.
"Just don’t kill too many," the female player smiled and continued, "We still don’t know how many players will disappear tonight."
Without considering what the others thought, several players used props on the corpse to ensure they’d be the first to get the news before they left the courtyard one after another.
Props had usage restrictions, and since it was just past midnight with thick fog outside, even if the signals came back, players couldn’t immediately find their way there, so Brother Shi and a few others stayed behind, planning to leave at dawn.
Xu Huo was walking at the back of the group when, upon reaching the courtyard gate, he suddenly felt something and looked back towards where the burned player’s corpse was.
"What’s up?" Yi Pei asked.
Xu Huo rubbed his temples, "Nothing, I just felt like someone over by the corpse was watching us."
Yi Pei looked over in that direction, and even with her blurred vision, she could make out two dark holes on the corpse. Frowning, she said, "Let’s get moving."
The two of them headed in different directions and parted ways after exiting.
Xu Huo walked alone in the thick fog, with limited lighting around him, he had no choice but to follow along the side of the residential houses towards his dwelling. But after only a couple of steps, he felt his footsteps become heavier, as if they were overlaid with another person’s footsteps!
His expression suddenly darkened, and he closed his eyes, turned around, and struck out with his Sword. Approximately two seconds later, he heard a street lamp over ten meters away crash down.
After scanning the surroundings with his gaze, he continued forward, Sword in hand.
However, he didn’t get much further before his recently normalized footsteps once again became heavy. This time, there were several sets of footsteps keeping the same pace as his, but there were no sounds, no people.
Compared to last night, this situation seemed even more bizarre. Even shrunken corpses were still corpses—any existing object should be perceivable. The footsteps were trailing him from behind and to his sides. If there was nobody there... could it be that he was hallucinating?
Even if Mental Interference existed in this instance, it shouldn’t have manifested so quickly on him.
After a moment of contemplation, Xu Huo took out "Universal Lubricant." Upon application, a small pebble the size of a grain of rice immediately fell from the back of his shoe.
"So it was a prop." With so many players around just now, it wouldn’t be surprising for any of them to have taken action. He tossed the pebble into the luggage compartment and hastened back to his place.
The old man still had his light on, and he seemed to breathe a sigh of relief upon seeing Xu Huo return, then he closed the door and went back to his room to sleep.
Xu Huo sat on the makeshift bed in the main hall, and reopened the bandage on his hand to check the wound.
As expected, the injury had worsened again, and the area of swelling seemed to be increasing.
If King Fungus was of little help, it meant this wasn’t a normal contaminant or toxin.
He took out the vial of the Potion used before—the piece of flesh he had scraped off from the wound was now somewhat whitened from being soaked. The color of the Potion hadn’t changed, but there was a layer of greasy substance floating on top of it.
He picked a bit of it out to examine closely under the light and discovered that the greasy substance was encasing a type of transparent living creature with round, long legs, which had low activity levels and was difficult to discern unless looked at carefully.
"Worms?" Since entering the game, Xu Huo had come into contact with many poisons and contaminants, but he was only familiar with one type of worm—the Liupi Worm, a strange parasitic worm capable of rapidly consuming human flesh and blood. Later, he had also learned about some mutated worm species. The more formidable mutated worms were poisonous, having evolved new types of toxins that were difficult to cure. Others, like the Liupi Worm, that merely caused superficial flesh wounds were trivial in comparison.
But who could have imagined such tiny worms, no larger than a speck of dust, would have such strange uses? The Potion was unable to kill them, which clearly indicated they had a decent reproductive ability, or else the wound wouldn’t keep failing to heal.
If it weren’t for the Self-Healing Potion and the players’ own good recovery abilities, these small creatures would likely have already consumed a significant amount of his flesh by now.
After scraping off some necrotic tissue, Xu Huo improvised a water bag and wrapped it around the wound.
He didn’t discard the worms in the Potion bottle, instead he added items like wood chips, food, and small pebbles before resealing it and placing it back in the luggage compartment.
After dealing with these matters, he lay down to rest. His eyes had only been closed for a while when the light in the main hall suddenly went out, followed by a "creaking" sound from the side door, as if someone was opening a wood door in disrepair.
"Brother Xu," the girl’s voice arose in the darkness, "the power’s out, it’s so dark, and I’m a bit scared. Do you have any light?"
Xu Huo sat up, the lock that had been on the outside of the side door was now missing, and the door was slightly ajar. An odd sensation flooded over him, "I would like to see what is playing these ghostly tricks!"