Players, Please Board the Train

Bentley hadn’t revealed the real location of the ore deposits, but that didn’t matter. There were still eight others.

Xu Huo paid a visit to each of those players locked in the isolation wards. Half an hour later, he walked out, peeled off his bloodstained gloves, and pulled out his phone. On the final page of each patient’s medical record, he scribbled, “Accidental death during treatment.” Only then did he mark a few spots on the map.

The ore from the New Energy Zone had to be an incredibly important mineral resource. With Zone 014’s unrest far from over, Country Y definitely wasn’t the only nation trading with the Artificers for advanced items in exchange for this ore.

Though the number of advanced items being traded was limited, the effect of any single one of them couldn’t be underestimated. And this massive incident in Capital City had blown up so big that it was likely someone had smuggled an advanced item in.

Xu Huo wasn’t sure if the Special Defense Department had gotten wind of it yet.

He paused for a moment, then turned and walked back into the room. David Pierce, who had been tied to the bed earlier, was already freed and sitting to the side. Seeing Xu Huo enter, he immediately greeted him politely.

Xu Huo picked up the medical record book, flipped to the last page, and said with a smile, “Congratulations. Your condition is fully under control now. You’re discharged as of this moment. If you experience auditory hallucinations again, make sure to come back to the hospital for treatment in time.”

As soon as he finished speaking, Pierce vanished from the dungeon, and Xu Huo pulled the door open to head to Building One.

The successful escape of Gu Yu and the others had given hope to the remaining players, who all rushed to the front entrance to clean up the gate area. Quite a few people had died here.

The hospital’s main gate was fixed in place, and before entering, all the players had known exactly where it was. Creating a fake door in the middle of everything would have been too obvious, so Xu Huo had simply shifted the original door’s position by one panel to the left.In other words, between the two doors, only one was real. The ones who died before the gate had just been unlucky—they’d picked the wrong side.

Still, this wasn’t a completely unsolvable puzzle. The hospital’s floor plan was accurate to scale, and he hadn’t tampered with the building’s dimensions. If any player measured and compared the layout against the actual structure, they could pinpoint the correct entrance’s location.

Of course, some people got lucky. Setting aside the ones who had already left, from this point forward, Xu Huo began culling the Player-Eaters.

Roughly a hundred people had entered so far, and over half of them were Player-Eaters—though only a few belonged to Double Snake.

These people were probably a bit simple-minded. They thought they could seize the chance to raise hell at the Special Defense Department headquarters and, like Double Snake, establish an underground Player-Eater organization of their own. But Double Snake had been built on connections, with backing from high-ranking government officials. No matter how strong the scattered Player-Eaters out there were, they could never match that kind of organizational power. Coming to the Special Defense Department headquarters was practically suicide. Even if they somehow managed to set up shop, the department would dismantle them before long.

Under his control, in less than ten minutes, the hospital transformed into a playground of ghosts and rampant viruses. After letting a few ordinary players slip away, he sealed off the main gate and windows, leaving all the players trapped inside, struggling to survive.

Once Building One was overrun, the panicked players with nowhere to go fled toward Buildings Two and Three, only to encounter the escaped experimental samples. Mutants and patients carrying pathogens tore into people like zombies, biting anyone they saw. One by one, the infection spread, assimilating every player who tried to take refuge.

And so it went: players died, players went mad, and those still alive charged into the Director’s Office before leaping from the rooftop, one after another smashing to death on the first floor.

With the hospital population mostly cleaned up, Xu Huo gathered the items left behind by the players from the vessel, then ended the dungeon.

To shift attention away from himself, he deliberately kept a few players alive. The instant he exited the dungeon, he activated his characteristic, “Straight-Line Distance,” and bolted in a different direction from the rest.

By this point, the dungeon had just concluded. The Special Defense Department personnel had already surrounded the pile of corpses, waiting to deal with them later, and made no attempt to intercept the players emerging.

However, Xu Huo did notice several newly installed large monitoring devices.

He smoothly slipped out of the Special Defense Department’s encirclement—ducking into a nearby building and hiding himself—and began browsing through what had happened outside during his absence.

There were three key developments.

First: the crackdown on Player-Eaters. The Special Defense Department had deliberately released some footage to showcase national power. A large portion of the Player-Eaters had been intercepted by the department. Though many had escaped, quite a few had been killed.

The department was impressively efficient.

Second: intervention with ordinary players. Quite a few spectators had come to watch the commotion tonight. As long as players caught up in the chaos didn’t attack the Special Defense Department, the department wouldn’t arrest them. But starting fights and causing trouble was off-limits. In those cases, the department would take forceful action upon encountering them. If someone accidentally hurt an innocent bystander—well, sorry, but the Special Defense Department wasn’t responsible.

Third: foreign players.

From the start of the chaos, both players near headquarters and netizens online had noticed an unusually high number of foreign players showing up today. Everyone quickly realized that this chaos wasn’t just about Player-Eaters and ordinary players anymore—it involved foreign players too. Add in the earlier incident of foreign players using themselves as human bombs to breach the border, and even a fool could figure out they weren’t here with good intentions.

But the Special Defense Department responded with ruthless efficiency.

Earlier, during the Player-Eater crackdown, some people had questioned the department’s capabilities. But after the prison video surfaced, everyone understood that the department had deliberately deployed its main elite forces to the foreign battlefield today. And honestly? Those foreign players were really strong.

“Let those foreign bastards see the power of our Special Defense Department!” a chorus of cheers erupted across the internet.

Xu Huo paused his scrolling. David Pierce had likely been taken away by the Special Defense Department. Bentley and his people only knew about the advanced item, but not its specific function. Finding the person would lead to the item.

If someone really had smuggled an advanced item into the vicinity of Capital City, only the Special Defense Department could find them.

“Drip!”

A faint sound of rain came from outside.

Xu Huo immediately walked to the window. A sour, rotten smell, different from ordinary rain, spread through the air. He looked down at the street.

“Why is the rain black?” a Special Defense Department officer wiped his face and spat, “Stinks like rot!”

Just then, a Captain received a message and immediately changed expression, barking orders to the men, “Find shelter from the rain right now! Don’t get wet, no matter what! This rain isn’t normal!”

The Special Defense Department members and some players gathered around the building quickly scattered into the surrounding structures. They cleaned themselves off, waited a few minutes, and when nothing unusual happened, started moving again. Still, no one dared to go out in the rain.

Xu Huo’s gaze fell on the raindrops on the windowsill. A layer of black oily film coated the surface of each droplet—familiar, but he couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was. The drops also carried an unnatural iridescence, resembling the dull, dirty rainbow shimmer on the surface of stagnant water after prolonged decomposition and accumulation.

He slit his palm and released a few strands of King Fungus mycelium toward the raindrops.