Players, Please Board the Train

The plaza looked no different from before. After Gan Yi retreated, Xu Huo and Shajia also maintained a certain distance from each other.

The more perceptive players had already noticed the confrontation over here and mostly chose to avoid it. If any of those involved died, it could drag in the people around them, and nobody wanted to become fish food for the piranhas.

Yet the three of them were still locked in a standoff.

The game Gan Yi brought up was actually a psychological suggestion planted through an item. Seeing through it wasn’t difficult, but what caught him off guard was that Xu Huo’s own psychological suggestion through an item had actually succeeded.

During their confrontation in District 011, he had judged the other man to be a player whose psychic Super Evolution was no weaker than his own.

Had he mistaken the person?

”I never expected all three of us to be kindred spirits,” Shajia said. ”We met by chance, and there’s no grudge between us. Why don’t we each mind our own business and avoid unnecessary bloodshed, what do you say?”

Fighting now would benefit no one, unless they didn’t want to clear the dungeon anymore.

A few seconds later, Gan Yi took the initiative to leave.

The dungeon was still on its first day. Giving up was premature.With someone backing out, the probing came to nothing.

”You and Gan Yi know each other?” Shajia turned his head and said. ”From that move he just made, it seemed targeted at you.”

Judging from Gan Yi’s attitude, the possibility of mistaken identity was very small. Xu Huo raised a hand. ”Maybe it’s because I glanced at him one too many times in the crowd.”

Shajia shook his head with a smile. ”Then you’d better be careful.”

Xu Huo nodded.

At this moment, You Si returned again. He wasn’t interested in their personal feud, only reminding Xu Huo that Gan Yi and that female player Zhuang Mengtian had gotten together.

”Honestly, I suspect she’s the one who was beheading people on the bus,” You Si said.

Xu Huo looked over. ”Whoever was controlling the entire train probably wasn’t her.”

”Doesn’t look like she has that kind of ability. Fish in troubled waters, maybe.” You Si pursed his lips, then gestured with his chin toward the Pod that had just returned. ”The raincoat guy is back.”

The Raincoat Man was soaked through, with numerous flesh wounds, blood and seawater streaming down together. Yet when he walked out, he didn’t take a healing potion first. Instead, he pulled out a small electric hair dryer and a little comb, lowering his head to blow-dry his bangs. Only after his hair was flowing nicely and could fully cover both his eyes did he begin tending to his wounds.

”I told you he’s a social anxiety case,” You Si laughed, then took the initiative to approach. ”Want a hand?”

The Raincoat Man retreated swiftly yet steadily. Once he’d put distance between them, he tossed a ring onto the ground. The ring released a light screen, isolating him from the outside world. He also placed a handwritten sign on the ground as a warning: Danger, Keep Away.

Having gone that far, the only way You Si could get any closer was to resort to force. But he wasn’t an ordinary person either. He simply sat down outside, rotating his position to follow the Raincoat Man while talking. ”Have you ever cooperated with anyone before, acting like this? When you work together, do you stay silent the whole time too?”

”Looking at you, all four limbs intact, features well-proportioned, you shouldn’t have sunk to this state. Could it be you’re a stutterer?”

Seeing he couldn’t shake the man off, the Raincoat Man simply put on earphones.

You Si couldn’t see his eyes. He reached out and waved his hand in front of him, only giving up disappointedly when there was no response.

”That guy is really no fun,” he said upon returning to Xu Huo.

”Has no one ever wanted to beat you up before?” Xu Huo thought his talkativeness probably wasn’t just because he was quitting alcohol.

You Si sneered. ”Of course there have. Plenty. But they all died by my hand.”

”Anyone who can’t even tolerate a few idle words from a stranger but wants to kill - most of them aren’t decent folk anyway. Killing them counts as ridding the world of pests!”

Xu Huo gave him a thumbs-up.

”What time is it?” Shajia suddenly asked.

”Should be late at night,” Xu Huo replied. They had arrived at noon, and the first round of the Three-Color Showdown was nearing its end, having taken roughly ten hours.

Yet the lighting in the Friendship Garden hadn’t changed, and the Host hadn’t announced the game’s stop.

”All this time, the audience outside doesn’t rest either?” You Si frowned. ”Is all-night program viewing popular in Sea World?”

Ordinary people who’d taken evolution potions were no match for players, but their energy and stamina had improved. Pulling an all-nighter wasn’t difficult. But this program wasn’t meant for all-night viewing.

”After the Three-Color Showdown passed the one-third mark, the audience feed probably stopped being live,” Xu Huo said. From that point on, the audience’s reactions had developed a pattern, and their frequency had decreased.

”Besides picking ball colors, the other highlight of this program is the process of participants completing their tasks,” Shajia said calmly. ”The task completion side should be the main event.”

What the audience wanted to watch was the slaughter.

”Say, do you think the area outside this Friendship Garden is Sea World itself?” You Si asked in a low voice.

”The task venues aren’t small, and there are plenty of dangerous animals. They should be far from the urban area,” Shajia said.

When they’d ridden the bus over, they’d seen only a stretch of white city. But based on the number and scope of the task venues so far, at least the areas they’d seen outside were most likely all program venues. How far this place was from the real Sea World was hard to say.

Xu Huo paid attention to the random task patterns. It was rare for two consecutive tasks to be in the same venue. The ball-color selection segment of the Three-Color Showdown had a three-minute limit. The Host’s stalling and some participants shortening their selection time roughly balanced out, averaging one venue every three minutes. At least eight venues had appeared so far. That meant, aside from the very start of the game, later participants would need nearly half an hour before a venue repeated.

Of course, some venues appeared more frequently, like the botanical garden and the Zoo, but those two also had very high mortality rates.

So one fact wasn’t hard to see: the program ”You’re Well, I’m Well” was controlling the number of participants in each venue’s tasks.

From this, the program venues might not be as large as others imagined. The desert in the earlier holographic projection certainly wasn’t as vast as it appeared.

To deal with players entering task venues, Sea World surely had other effective measures.

Xu Huo’s gaze fell to the ground.

Beneath the floor, besides the operational passages for Entry-Exit Pods, there were also task venues like the aquarium. If this Friendship Garden existed independently, then the space beneath the entire venue was very likely a large-scale mutated fish breeding zone.

After midnight, the first round of the Three-Color Showdown was nearly over. Fewer than one-third of those who’d gone on task adventures had returned. On the plaza, counting those who’d stayed behind for ball-color selection and those who’d returned from completed tasks, there were about two hundred and thirty people.

”The time has slipped by so quickly. Of the three hundred and eighty-one guests participating in the program, two hundred and ninety-seven remain so far. That’s quite a lot! Our guests from afar have shown their sincerity, and so Sea World will show ours as well. Please look forward to it. We will spare no effort to create a good environment for making friends. Perhaps as soon as tomorrow, you’ll gain a friend, a sincere friendship!”