Players, Please Board the Train

”How is that possible?” the Blonde Man said first. ”Mutants that appear on the train track usually come in packs, and they generally don’t show up during the daytime. Besides, mutants eat people.”

The bodies at the scene didn’t appear to be missing anything.

”Why would you say that?” another middle-aged, refined-looking man asked.

”There shouldn’t be players this strong in the same carriage,” Xu Huo said. ”These people were almost all killed through sheer violence. That takes considerable physical strength. Even a Player-Eater of the same level shouldn’t be able to reach this kind of intensity.”

”That’s not a bad point. To finish off the players in an entire carriage within two hours isn’t easy either,” the refined man said.

In fact, there wasn’t two hours at all. Strictly speaking, it might not have even been half an hour.

Skinny Monkey had been through this carriage. He clearly knew one of the players here, which was why he looked so shocked when he saw the floor covered with corpses and immediately checked for survivors.

At least before he returned from the tail carriage, the people in this carriage were still alive.

From the moment Xu Huo fought the paper beast to when that player was killed, less than half an hour had passed. In the eighth carriage, apart from Skinny Monkey, no one had gone back to the tail carriage. No players had come forward from the previous carriages either. There was a staff corridor beside the carriage, but it wasn’t open to players.

”That still doesn’t rule out the possibility that a high-level player boarded,” the baby-faced player glanced at Xu Huo.”High-level players wouldn’t come here,” the Female Player rolled her eyes. ”There are two major stations along this line, with dungeons of all levels. Even if a high-level player wanted to go, they’d take the corresponding train. There’s no explicit rule, but generally, player level matches the train. Didn’t you notice this train is different from the E-level dungeon trains?”

”That’s because the game adjusts the train’s level based on player strength. If you let a high-level player ride this train, they might flip the whole carriage in two moves.”

”You’re talking about the general case. As far as I know, there’s something called a temporary pass,” the baby-faced player said dismissively. ”It lets you go to any station without being forced to participate in a dungeon.”

A few people inside and outside the carriage showed some surprise. The middle-aged woman asked in confusion, ”Is there really something like that?”

”I’ve heard of the temporary pass too,” the Hat-Wearing Player said. ”But among low-level players, it’s basically urban legend. They say once you get one, you can head to any station and ride any train anytime, like a universal train ticket.”

”If someone truly had a temporary pass, they wouldn’t need to worry about train grade differences, right?” the baby-faced player said.

Xu Huo had first heard about the temporary pass from the Skinner dungeon when the Skinner mentioned it.

He had also obtained a Random Dungeon Authorization Document, so he roughly guessed there must be rules about which Game Partition random dungeons appear in. If the Skinner wanted a temporary pass, then this pass was probably like the Hat-Wearing Player described: a universal train ticket that allowed free travel between Game Partitions.

If someone with a temporary pass boarded the train, that player’s level shouldn’t be low, and breaking in through a window to kill people wasn’t impossible.

At this, the wary players showed a barely perceptible flash of greed. The temporary pass might be more valuable to high-level players, but for low-level ones it could be a life-saving trump card.

Xu Huo also studied the others. More than the temporary pass, he was paying attention to the hole in the window.

The killer who explicitly killed the players in the ninth carriage wouldn’t be someone from the eighth carriage, but if it was someone from the previous carriages, why enter from outside?

After a moment of silence, the Female Player said, ”It probably wasn’t someone from our carriage.”

”Who knows,” the baby-faced player shrugged. ”There were thunder and lightning so loud and you couldn’t see anything. Anything could have happened.”

”I think you all are overthinking it,” Skinny Monkey said, pointing at the hole in the window. ”I don’t think that person is that strong. Otherwise, why smash a window? It’s clearly an attempt to frame a mutant.”

”Look, the first thing we saw when we came over was the hole in the window, and the players died so horribly. Of course we’d think mutant first,” he continued. ”But you also know mutants eat people, so this is deliberately diverting our attention.”

”Not necessarily. It could also be meant to lull us into letting our guard down,” the Blonde Man countered.

”So if that’s true, the killer is among us?” the middle-aged woman stepped back two paces.

”No. Why are you so sure the killer is in our carriage?” the heavily wounded Burly Man interjected. ”Can’t someone else break in from outside?”

”You’re so dense,” the Female Player shot him a coquettish look. ”If it was a player from a previous carriage, why go out of their way to come in through the window? Wouldn’t killing someone nearby be more convenient?”

The other players agreed with her. So the current consensus was that among the ten people present, one of them was a vicious, cunning killer.

”Did anyone actually see someone go to the back carriage?” Xu Huo asked.

The Blonde Man shook his head. ”The lightning came every two hundredth of a second. The frequency was too high. Even if by luck the flashes were spaced out, a tenth of a second isn’t enough to clearly see anything. Especially later, everything was black.”

They had stopped fighting because, as they moved deeper into the Thunderstorm Zone, they were both blinded and deafened, and continued fighting would have been pointless.

”I can only see shadows now,” the middle-aged woman hurriedly said.

Xu Huo rubbed his eyes. He was much better off, likely thanks to his perfect evolution, and because he kept his eyes closed while passing through the overgang carriage.

At that moment the carriage door opened and two staff members walked in. Faced with the gruesome scenes across the two carriage sections, their expressions didn’t change as they dragged the eighth carriage’s bodies toward the rear carriage.

Xu Huo noticed one of them pause slightly when he saw the hole in the glass window. Xu Huo asked, ”While passing the Thunderstorm Zone I saw a pair of blood-red eyes. Are there mutants in the Thunderstorm Zone?”

The other players and the two attendants all turned to look at him. The attendant who had been watching the window said, ”There are mutants near the train tracks where the train runs.”

It was a completely perfunctory answer. The two piled the bodies in the back and used items to recover the eighth carriage’s debris and bloodstains. They didn’t bother to replace missing seats.

Xu Huo pressed the meal bell. The attendant who had shown him around the train yesterday came. Xu Huo first asked about the situation in the front carriage, confirming that none of the dead displayed particularly strange postures, then brought up the red-eyed creature in the Thunderstorm Zone.

The attendant’s hesitant expression turned eager after Xu Huo laid down a thick stack of White Bills. Xu Huo placed the Sound-Muffling Figurine on the table before signaling him to begin.

”The red-eyed thing you mentioned is actually a kind of mutant,” the attendant said. ”But this kind of mutant is different from ordinary ones. They were originally fairly powerful players who degenerated, so they’re stronger than regular mutants and have fewer limitations. It wouldn’t be strange for them to show up anywhere.”

”High-level players can degenerate into mutants?” Xu Huo frowned.

The attendant adopted an ambiguous posture. ”Anyone could become a mutant.”

”We usually call this kind of mutant a blood mutant or a car-slaughtering monster, a destroyer of public property. They like to follow trains. They don’t eat people but they enjoy killing. Strange, isn’t it? I’ve heard trains that ran into car-slaughtering monsters in the past sometimes didn’t even have any staff survive, tsk tsk.”