TTGOL CH99

Chapter 99: Human World (2)

What was the standard for being alive?

Tang Cuo carefully scrolled through Bubble Qi’s WeChat Moments, finding nothing but inspirational quotes and pictures of a refined lifestyle. A beautiful day started with morning coffee and aesthetically pleasing light meals, followed by exquisitely plated dinners and the occasional rich nightlife.

This appeared to be someone living a very fulfilling life. Of course, Tang Cuo couldn’t verify its authenticity, nor could he confirm if she actually enjoyed it.

Tang Cuo simply walked to the front and started looking from the first one.

The first one was likely an office worker; the phone screen displayed an unfinished PowerPoint presentation. The presentation was about the future development prospects of P2P. The first few pages were serious analyses with clear tables and concise text. However, starting from the seventh page, the creator had grown irritable, filling the entire page with the words “Go die.”

[Go die go die go die go die go die…] The tiny red characters were densely packed and shocking to behold.

The second one was a delivery driver; the phone showed a food delivery app interface. An order that should have been delivered by 12:30 now showed the time as 12:47, with six missed calls.

“Ring, ring, ring—” The phone rang again.

Tang Cuo swiped to answer. The call actually connected, and a slightly irritable man’s voice came through. “Hello? I’ve called you several times, why aren’t you answering? Are you still delivering my food or not? Do you know it’s already late?!”

Tang Cuo: “Sorry, there’s a bit of traffic.”

Man: “You still have to deliver it even if there’s traffic! I’ve been hungry for a long time! If it wasn’t raining outside, I wouldn’t have ordered delivery. Hurry up and bring it to me, or I’ll file a complaint against you! My time is precious. If you don’t bring it soon, I won’t have time to eat!”

As the words fell, the call was abruptly disconnected.

Tang Cuo pondered over the phrases “raining” and “won’t have time to eat.” Unable to determine anything for the time being, he moved on to the next one.

The next phone screen was dark. Tang Cuo found the button on the side to turn it on, displaying a battery life of 26%. The time was 1:30 PM on Tuesday, June 25th. The lock screen wallpaper was a couple’s selfie.

The photo had been edited, with a line of text added to the bottom right corner: June 12, 2019, 100th day of knowing you!

No facial recognition, no fingerprint scanner—that meant a passcode was required. Counting backward from June 12th, the first day they met should have been March 5th.

Passcode: 190305.

It opened.

The interface that opened was a chat history. The girl and her boyfriend were already breaking up. The boy had sent her countless messages trying to make her stay, every sentence sincere and practically begging.

However, his words also revealed a fact: he had cheated.

An old cliché.

The girl spoke without dragging things out. Although she seemed to still have feelings for the boy, her attitude was resolute; she absolutely would not look back. Their final conversation ended at 11:59 with the girl saying two words: No way.

The boy didn’t try to make her stay anymore. Had he given up? Or had he not seen it?

Tang Cuo looked at a few more. Their identities and genders varied, ranging from delivery drivers and couriers to students and white-collar workers. Everything could be found. What could be investigated were merely trivial matters of daily life; nothing seemed special.

There were ninety-nine cell phone tombstones in total. It seemed this would be a protracted battle.

Meanwhile, Jin Cheng and the others walking on the desolate highway finally encountered a change. A group of monsters suddenly appeared in the middle of the road, blocking everyone’s path.

They had grotesque shapes: covered in jagged teeth, sporting horns on their heads, standing upright, or walking on all fours. They came in all sizes and appearances.

Leng Miao felt they looked somewhat familiar and couldn’t help but frown slightly.

Jin Cheng recognized them as well.

The monsters growled low at them, making “ho-ho” sounds from their throats, as if something was stuck and they couldn’t speak. Although they looked different, their expressions were universally filled with pain and despair. Their red eyes were mixed with a great deal of anger and hatred.

The most important thing was their eyes; within the chaos, a trace of clarity occasionally flashed through.

“Karma-clearing process, special instance,” Jin Cheng concluded.

The others, aside from Leng Miao, were stunned. What karma-clearing process special instance? Instances triggered in the Zone G prison had a very distinct difference from those in other places: players from all zones were mixed together, with no forced segregation. There was Leng Miao from Zone A, Jin Cheng from Zone E, and rookies from Zone F who might not even know what the karma-clearing process was.

Jin Cheng briefly explained it to them. In short—these monsters were the people who had committed suicide in Yong Ye City before the suicide ban was lifted.

They had degenerated into monsters and been assigned to these special instances, experiencing the pain of being killed over and over again while fully conscious, yet unable to express this pain as humans.

They had only one choice: kill the players in front of them.

Did they feel hatred?

Despair?

Unable to break free, unable to escape, that resentment transformed into endless killing intent, dragging other players into the abyss of pain alongside them. Under such circumstances, no one could maintain their sanity anymore.

Looks of pity appeared on the faces of the rookies. But the monsters paid no heed. Opening their bloody maws, they lunged at the players. Accompanied by a foul wind, sharp-eyed players could even see pieces of meat stuck between their teeth.

As everyone hurriedly drew their weapons, a line of glowing, massive text materialized in the void: Stage 1: Birth.

“Fuck! Is it a difficult labor?!”

“Even a difficult labor doesn’t require dozens of monsters attacking together. Modern medicine is so advanced now!”

“Screw you, can’t you tell it’s an abortion?”

A girl with a long ponytail wielding a spear shot a monster in the head ten meters away, temporarily ending the topic. But soon, a boy standing back-to-back with her panted, “So why do you girls get so many abortions? Isn’t that a sin?”

The two seemed to be companions, but upon hearing this, the girl almost smashed him in the back of the head with the butt of her spear. “Abort your mom, you son of a bitch! If you were in my belly, I would’ve aborted you first! Shut up, or I’ll blow your brains out!”

Perhaps because her words were too fierce, the boy shut up in fear, and no one else spoke for a long time. The truth was, no one had the leisure to talk. With fifty or sixty monsters lunging at them simultaneously, even twenty-eight players were struggling to cope.

And this was with Jin Cheng and Leng Miao blocking at least a third of the attacks for them.

Over 99% of the people who chose to commit suicide in Yong Ye City were not strong. But after becoming monsters and enduring the devastation of instances over and over again, their strength was no longer the same.

Strong. They were truly strong.

The perfectly straight highway offered no cover or leverage points, so Jin Cheng abandoned his bow and arrows in favor of blades. In his hands, the twin scimitars were the most lethal weapons.

The monsters were grotesquely shaped. One strike might not pierce the heart, so he used two. A thrust with his right hand was immediately followed by a supplementary strike from his left. Sometimes it required three strikes, all aiming for the most clean, efficient, and painless method of death.

Jin Cheng moved like lightning, his figure flipping and spinning, yet not a single drop of splattering blood stained the hem of his clothes.

Leng Miao was even more clean and efficient. Specializing in spatial magic, he cast an Air Cage downward, killing monsters from a distance. After fighting for several minutes, not a single monster managed to get close to him. His figure was like a ghost; with a single step, he could appear ten meters away, making his movements impossible to track.

The two hardly coordinated, fighting their own battles, but they were fast. About fifteen minutes later, the monsters were finally annihilated. But before anyone could catch their breath, another wave of monsters appeared.

“There’s more?!” someone exclaimed.

“Abortion is just the screening. Even with advanced modern medicine, childbirth can still have accidents.” Jin Cheng shook his wrists, loosening his joints, and charged forward again before the monsters could attack.

Leng Miao didn’t waste words either. Raising his hand, an Air Burst spell detonated amidst the horde, sending the surrounding monsters flying.

The team continued to push forward.

Outside Jin Cheng and Tang Cuo’s game stages, there was a third stage: The Human Realm Information Relay Company.

In a massive, pure-white room with no exits, doors, or windows, rows of cubicles were arranged in a five-by-five grid. Twenty-five players sat in front of computers, wearing headphones, typing furiously on their keyboards.

Looking closely, every computer screen was packed with chat boxes. The conversing parties were divided into red and blue. The players in the two left columns of cubicles were responsible for typing in the blue boxes, while those on the right handled the red boxes.

The prompts for the dialogue were transmitted through their headphones.

The room was so quiet that only the clattering of keyboards and the unconscious grunts of anxious players could be heard. After about twenty minutes, sweat dripped down the players’ foreheads and along their cheeks. Some even had bulging veins and bloodshot eyes.

It was unknown what exactly they were hearing in their headphones. Someone tried to take off their headphones, but couldn’t remove them no matter what. The more they failed, the more anxious they became, their frantic movements resembling a comical pantomime.

“Stop cursing! Stop cursing!” He finally began to break down, his brain seemingly suffering from some intense mental attack.

The next second, his head suddenly exploded, spraying a mixture of red and yellow gore all over his cubicle, even splattering onto the face of the player next to him.

That player stared wide-eyed in disbelief at the gruesome sight. After several seconds, he jolted awake, and with trembling fingers, turned back to frantically continue typing.

Faster!

Even faster!

Upon completing the input for a chat box, the word “Combo!” accompanied by confetti immediately appeared on the screen, transforming into a cool, soothing sensation that comforted their tense, aching mental seas.

“Everyone be careful, this stage is a mental attack! Every single sentence is! Those with insufficient Intelligence points need to be extra careful!” A loud warning from a player near the corner echoed out. Regardless of whether the other players could hear him through their headphones, he continued shouting—

“If you can’t hold on, drink a potion immediately! Visualize your martial skills in your mind and try to convert them into mental attacks to resist the voices in the headphones!”

And from the dirtied headphone lying in the blood and gore dropped by the player whose head exploded, voices continuously spilled out at this very moment. Insults and curses filled with pure malice, sometimes laced with schadenfreude or arrogance, sharp as knives.

“Your mom is dead.”

“Dressing like that, if that’s not being a slut, what is? What decent girl dresses like that? Serves her right.”

“Greasy and disgusting.”

“If you wanted to die, you would have died already. Who’s going to act all melodramatic here? If you have the guts, go die for real! Go die! You’re not dead yet, are you? What the hell are you screaming about!”

“The most disgusting ones are you brain-dead fans. Did your mom forget to give you a brain when she gave birth to you? Spewing shit everywhere. Does your idol even know you exist? Yet here you are barking. You’re truly pathetic.”

“…”

Different voices, different tones, men, women, old, and young, all unrestrained in their malice.

Outside the third stage, there was a fourth stage: The World is a Psychiatric Hospital.

The little girl in the red cloak sat on the red cross hanging on the hospital’s exterior wall, swinging her slender legs, humming an unfamiliar, off-key nursery rhyme. She looked down at the restless crowd in the hospital’s back garden. Finally, she murmured to herself, “I’m back again…”

The system announcement followed.

“Welcome, all players, to the psychiatric hospital. Please return to your respective wards immediately and await the doctor’s rounds. Please do not wander around during this time; violators will be severely punished.”

The players looked at each other in dismay. How did they end up locked in a psychiatric hospital? According to these rules, staying in the ward meant a doctor would make rounds, while not staying meant punishment. Neither sounded good, did it?

“What do we do?”

“Should we go back or not?”

“Speaking of which, how did we even trigger this mission? Shouldn’t we figure that out first???”

Amidst the varying opinions, someone spotted a figure passing through the second-floor corridor from a window. Raising a hand immediately, they exclaimed, “Is that a doctor?!”

The others looked up as well, following the direction of the pointed finger. They saw several monsters identical to the ones Jin Cheng had encountered. Except, the monsters here were all wearing white coats, stethoscopes around their necks, and holding massive syringes that looked like party poppers.

The syringes glinted with a cold light, sending shivers down everyone’s spines and making the afternoon sun feel much colder.

To return or not to return—that was the question.

Zheng Yingying stood up on the red cross, the wind blowing her red cloak, revealing the black eyepatch covering one of her eyes. Slowly, ever so slowly, she raised a hand to touch the black eyepatch. Her remaining good eye revealed self-pity and a faint sorrow, but it was quickly masked by sheer resolve.

A crow perched on the opposite roof observed from a distance. Its wings tucked behind its back, it held its head high and arrogant, unable to conceal its fondness and admiration for the one it watched.

“Kill, kill to your heart’s content. There’s no need for excessive mercy, kill…” it whispered.

Four stages, varying contents, yet sharing the exact same set of clearance rules. A total of ninety-six players; either survive for a full six hours, or kill until only six people remain.

Current death toll: 1.

Tang Cuo knew absolutely nothing about the situations in the other locations. He still walked alone in the empty cemetery, conducting his tombstone investigation. The ding-dong, ding-dong notification sounds chimed continuously. Out of the ninety-nine cell phone tombstones, seventy-seven were already lit.

One of them had automatically shut down due to low battery.

“Bang—” The moment the battery died, the tomb suddenly exploded. Rubble and dust rained down on Tang Cuo. If he hadn’t maintained his vigilance and possessed agile reflexes, he likely would have been buried alive right then and there.

His Health dropped drastically to 44%—a truly unlucky number.