Players, Please Board the Train

“What kind of medicine is this?” Gu Yu asked.

The nurse smiled sweetly. “Vitamins. You all need to take enough vitamins every day. After taking the vitamins, you can have breakfast.”

As she spoke, she pulled out a medicine bottle with no label, handed each of them two pills, and watched them intently. “Eat up.”

The group stared at the red tablets in their hands, then glanced at the security guards monitoring them from nearby. One by one, they put the pills into their mouths.

The nurse checked their hands and mouths, nodded in satisfaction, and left.

Gu Yu and the others exchanged glances, then returned to their room. Only after closing the door did they pull out the pills they had hidden using different methods and flush them down the toilet.

But that wasn’t the worst of it, because there was an even more troubling piece of news—their personal panels could no longer be accessed, and the items they had been wearing had turned into ordinary accessories.

“If it’s like this for us, it must be the same for the other players,” Gu Yu said. “Stay calm. Don’t forget what Xu Huo said.”

With things as they were, they could only venture out and test the waters.

During the day, the hospital was eerily peaceful. There were none of the ghosts from the night before, no signs of fighting inside or out, and the broken gate was standing there intact.“If we weren’t all here, I’d think I had a dream,” Wen Xuelin said, jerking her chin toward the back. The Scar Player was leading a group of people into the courtyard.

After breakfast, most patients were lounging on the lawn in the sun. When the Scar Player arrived, the other players automatically moved aside. At this point, everyone was holding their breath, wanting to see if the others also couldn’t open their game panels.

There were plenty of Player-Eaters in the hospital. They were the calmest of the bunch, with some even going so far as to harass the female players, nearly causing a scene in front of everyone. In the end, other players stepped in to stop them, sparking a fight between the two sides. But the hospital security quickly put an end to it. The two instigators were muzzled and dragged back inside the building.

The two who got taken away were Player-Eaters. The other Player-Eaters wanted to stop them, but the security guards had tranquilizer guns and stun batons, and they were watching from various positions. Even if they wanted to act, they couldn’t be sure they’d take out all the guards at once. Besides, these were all NPCs in the dungeon. Who knew if they’d just pick up their own heads like the Head Nurse did last night?

The troublemakers were dragged away, and soon the Head Nurse came out to call for a patient, saying she was going to give him psychological therapy.

A player quietly followed to check it out, but the man was taken to the seventh floor, where there was a security checkpoint. The player couldn’t get in.

When the news spread, the players grew curious about the seventh floor.

Someone asked a nurse about it and learned that the rooms on the seventh floor and above were singles. Patients sent up there were all serious cases and would be tied to their beds for treatment.

“Why haven’t we seen any doctors?” someone questioned.

“What do you mean, no doctors? Aren’t those all doctors over there?” Another person pointed at the figures standing by the windows on each floor. “The doctors are definitely in the doctors’ offices.”

Above the third floor, the entire floor wasn’t made up of just wards. One end had offices and duty rooms, but they hadn’t noticed any offices nearby yesterday.

“I thought all of it was just wards.”

“You must be remembering wrong. There have always been offices.”

“What’s there to argue about? Are these the only things that appeared today that we didn’t see yesterday?”

The players bickered for a bit, realized it was pointless, and then started wandering around the hospital again. Some went to Building Two.

About an hour later, two ambulances drove in from outside, followed by a police car.

Someone from the hospital went out to handle the handover and discovered that the people being brought back in restraints were actually the players who had left last night.

They were all bloodied and battered, their hands and feet bound tightly with leather straps until they were discolored. They were carried off the vehicles like human logs.

A middle-aged man got out of the police car following behind and said to the doctor, “These people ran out of the hospital and barged straight into the police station. Just as the main gate closed, they crashed into it and started bleeding profusely.”

“We had no choice but to restrain them. They kept shouting about something called ‘item players’ and threatened to kill me… Are these people’s delusions getting worse?”

The doctor sighed and spoke with the middle-aged man in front of all those patients. “Young people, addicted to games, mistaking games for reality. We did an assessment before, and their condition had improved. Now it looks like we need to step up the treatment.”

With a wave of his hand, the female player and her companions were carried into the outpatient building. One of them somehow managed to spit out his gag and yelled, “This place is fake! The hospital is fake too! I want out! I want out!”

A nearby nurse immediately stuffed a towel into his mouth.

The people were taken away, but their clearly unhinged state left the players present in silence: It had only been one night. How could they have become like this?

“…These people have quite the imagination.” The middle-aged man in a police uniform let out a hearty laugh. “They even made up a story for me, saying I was some team leader in a Special Defense Department. Haha, quite the high-ranking official!”

“There’s no limit to human imagination.” The doctor chatted with him a bit more, and then a young man got out of the police car. He called to the middle-aged man, “Captain, let’s go.”

The middle-aged man chuckled and said his goodbyes to the doctor.

“Am I seeing things? Isn’t that Dai Wenqian?” Wen Xuelin pointed at the young man.

“It’s not just Dai Wenqian. That captain is Team Leader Wu.” Zheng Liang scratched his head. “What the hell? Is he a figment of our imagination too?”

They weren’t the only ones who recognized the two. A player who had been loitering nearby suddenly lunged at Team Leader Wu!

“Watch out!” The young officer and the doctor both shouted at the same time, but they couldn’t match Team Leader Wu’s speed. He drew his gun and shot the man dead, then fired two more shots, killing the two Player-Eaters who tried to attack afterward.

After their game panels disappeared, even the physical superiority the Player-Eaters had prided themselves on seemed to vanish.

At that moment, the players present couldn’t help but look at Team Leader Wu with a hint of fear—that was a gun. A single shot could really kill you!

Team Leader Wu was no longer smiling. His face turned cold as he glared at them. “A bunch of worthless good-for-nothings. If any of you dare to come out and cause trouble again, I’ll shoot every single one of you I see. I want to see if you really have the ability to fly through the sky and burrow through the ground!”

People who had become Evolvers, become players, and gained power—now they were reliving the helplessness and terror of being ordinary people. Especially those who had climbed to the peak and then fallen back to the bottom. That feeling hit them twice as hard!

Right then, a few Player-Eaters lunged at Team Leader Wu from different directions. But their speed was no better than ordinary people’s. One chubby guy was even clumsy on his feet. He tripped over himself after just a couple of steps, and then was hit by a tranquilizer dart.