Players, Please Board the Train

”If we don’t look, will it be harder to fall victim?” Yi Pei asked.

Closing one’s eyes might have some effect, but it wouldn’t be decisive.

Xu Huo glanced outside. ”The rain is getting heavier. You should go back.”

After bidding farewell to the grandfather and granddaughter, Yi Pei left the small courtyard.

The sky was as dark as night, and by evening, a torrential downpour had begun, making it impossible even to hold up an umbrella. Naturally, no one was walking outside in the rain.

Shortly after nightfall, a faint, barely audible scream came from outside. Xu Huo immediately walked into the courtyard. The little girl saw him about to leave and quickly blocked his way. ”Don’t go out at night.”

”I’m worried about my friend.” Xu Huo stepped out of the courtyard, but when he looked back, he saw the elderly man calling his granddaughter back inside and forcefully shutting the courtyard door.

Some players living nearby had also come out. Several of them walked toward the direction the sound had come from, and soon they spotted the Square-Faced Man from Fang Penghui’s group standing guard in front of a courtyard.

When Xu Huo and the others entered, they found that besides themselves, the Black-Shirted Player and the Artistic-Style Player were already there.

The carnage in the courtyard was obvious at a glance. The heads of the two elderly sisters living there had been smashed to pulp. One lay collapsed in the main hall, and the other was sprawled in the courtyard. That scream must have been the second woman, who had run out of the house but still died.These two had been killed by a player. The player Xu Huo had burned alive during the day was lying just two steps away.

”These two women—I remember they spat on that guy during the day,” Fu Danhong said. ”His vengefulness was way too strong. He snuck out at night to kill them, but he ended up getting himself killed too.”

”Don’t talk like that,” one of the Artistic-Style Player’s companions said. ”Can’t you see how horribly he died?”

That was also why the players were still lingering in the courtyard. The burned player’s death was exactly the same as the couple in the woods. His eyes had been gouged out, his head and chest were caved in, and his brain and internal organs were gone, but the shattered bones remained inside his body.

”Didn’t anyone see how he died?” Xu Huo asked.

”With such heavy rain, you can’t even hear clearly, let alone see anyone,” the Square-Faced Man said. ”And the thing that did this is way too fast.”

He used the word ”thing” because the time between the second woman’s death and their arrival was very short. The killer not only killed her but also started digging out her organs starting from the eyes. If they had been even a little later, most of the bones in her abdominal cavity would have been gone too.

”It could also be other players doing it,” the Artistic-Style Player said with a smile. ”There are quite a few Player-Eaters among us. Maybe the smell of blood got them itching.”

”Don’t stir up trouble just for the thrill of it,” Liu Shiyan said with a dark expression. ”No one died in the county in the past few days, but three have died from yesterday to today. Let’s focus on how to deal with this.”

The Artistic-Style Player remained nonchalant, shrugging his shoulders. ”Maybe they triggered the dungeon rules.”

”Could killing locals also be a trigger?” someone immediately thought of the two murderous players. ”They didn’t come here?”

”Someone’s already gone looking for them,” Fang Penghui said at that moment.

The others glanced at him but said nothing more.

Soon, several people came running over. The two groups had clearly come from different directions. One group was the people Fang Penghui had sent to find the two players, and the other was the group who had stayed behind at those empty courtyards.

”The people are gone!”

”The bodies are gone!”

”Speak clearly,” Fang Penghui said as he quickly walked over.

The explanation wasn’t complicated. In short, those two players had forcibly taken over a residence and kicked the original owners out. Exactly what happened was unclear, but when they went to look, the house was already empty, there was no sign of them nearby, and there were no signs of a struggle inside the room.

The missing bodies were those of the elderly people who had died during the day.

Their bodies had been placed in an empty courtyard right next to the small courtyard where Fang Penghui and his group were staying together. When Fang Penghui and the others had come out to check the scream, a few players hadn’t joined them. Just now, when they happened to glance next door, they found that the bodies laid out in the main hall had vanished without a trace.

”Can corpses just walk away on their own?”

This undoubtedly cast a shadow over all the players. They had no idea how the people died or how the bodies disappeared. Whether they ran off on their own or some lurking thing in the county took them, it was beyond their imagination.

”I don’t believe there are really gods in this world,” the Black-Shirted Player said, pressing down on his hat. ”It’s just the Dungeon Boss using props to play tricks.”

”Everyone knows that,” the Square-Faced Man said. ”The question is how to deal with it. Before, it was sneaking around, but now it’s blatantly coming into the county. If this keeps up, it’ll kill all of us!”

”What if the dungeon location no longer exists?” the Artistic-Style Player said. ”No people, no buildings—the dungeon won’t exist either.”

Truly, with great skill comes great audacity.

And surprisingly, everyone present started considering that proposal.

If the dungeon ceased to exist, they could clear it ahead of time.

”Destroying the county will only speed up the dungeon progress,” Xu Huo spoke up at that point. ”First of all, we might not be able to destroy the religious statues enshrined in the residential homes. The rule of ’not looking’ alone could put us in a difficult position.”

”Is it that we can’t look at the statues, or that the statues can’t look at us?”

”Without the houses and wooden cabinets as cover, everyone could be exposed to the statues’ line of sight.”

”Also, leaving aside the dead, where did the missing players and corpses go? Since they’re nowhere to be found in the county or the woods, and they can’t leave the dungeon boundaries, that means the county isn’t the full extent of the dungeon. Are you sure that burning down the dungeon will end the game early?”

To destroy the dungeon location, unless you could completely annihilate the space itself, logic dictates that the dungeon most likely wouldn’t collapse just because its location was destroyed. In the Skinner’s dungeon, Xu Huo had only been lucky enough to burn the dungeon authorization document, which caused the dungeon to end prematurely.

Sifang Palace was clearly much more than just this one county. Destroying the buildings was a last resort.

”There is something strange about this county,” the Black-Shirted Player added. ”It doesn’t feel like it was renovated from an existing town. Judging by the wear and tear on the building materials, they’re at most twenty years old. For Sifang Palace to have formed a religious culture, the city’s history wouldn’t be this short.”

”Are you saying we have to go find the Dungeon Boss?” Wei Xian was startled and somewhat hesitant. ”I’d rather just survive the seven days here than go for a high rating.”

”You won’t survive the seven days,” the Artistic-Style Player said, shaking his phone. ”I took a picture of the hotel registration book. Every month, the hotel clears out all guests. No matter how many days they’ve stayed, everyone has to check out. Think about why they check out.”

”Brother Shi is amazing!” the two female players clinging to him praised him with enthusiastic kisses.

”Either we take the initiative, or we wait until the time’s up and we all die together,” the Artistic-Style Player said with a grin. ”Either way, it’s death. Risk it for a biscuit, and maybe we’ll get lucky and scrape by with an A-rank.”