“How will we know if we don’t try?”
At this moment, another doll-faced young girl rushed in angrily, “Captain! What do we do now? Brother Qi’an got the item, aren’t we in trouble?”
“Even if our names are written in, the mortality rate is not one hundred percent,” the man said calmly. “But if he remembers our names, then his mortality rate is one hundred percent.”
The complete unsealing of his memories meant a loss of control over his power.
“He got the Curse Bone, so he won’t be able to stop himself from thinking about all this. Whenever he sees something related to us, he will also think about it.”
The Whaler’s Association had already become a thorn in Zhou Qi’an’s side that he had to pull out. He knew better than anyone that with the shortcut of writing names, the subconscious would force him to constantly try to recall the past.
This was human instinct.
The sculpture that flowed into the real world, Mr. Si, the brain examination… the man had done many things in secret. All these subtle pushes were to achieve this effect—
To detonate the sealed power like a time bomb.
It was just that for some reason, the recovery of Zhou Qi’an’s memory was much slower than he had expected.
No matter. A five-and-a-half-star instance. Even if he didn’t have amnesia, it would be very difficult to get through it smoothly.
The woman fell silent for a moment upon hearing this, and finally said, “Actually, I feel that your hatred for him is stronger than any of ours.”
If it were them, hatred is one thing, but they wouldn’t waste time making so many arrangements just to kill a former teammate.
The atmosphere in the room suddenly turned cold, so cold that the young girl who came in later wanted to find an excuse to slip away.
But the man spoke again, “Don’t forget my skill.”
Divination.
Unlike ordinary players who could only calculate things related to the game, after his complete evolution, the scope of his divination had expanded greatly.
The man lowered his head, his voice terrifyingly deep, “In the results given by the divination, he will… possess a life even longer than the New Humans, immense power, and an inextinguishable soul.”
The woman’s body trembled.
The man’s expression held a hint of twistedness, “That’s right, the higher level of life transformation that we have been pursuing.”
That person blocked their path, turned around and walked a smooth, wide road, and obtained everything they had dreamed of.
How could this not make him resentful?
It was common for divination results to be reversed. He would personally snuff out Zhou Qi’an’s path to the new world.
·
The much-watched instance #47814.
The moment the door opened, an indescribable sinister cold seeped out from the secret passage.
The sinister energy and the system prompt hit them at the same time. The players’ bodies tensed up. Someone even clenched their fists tightly, as if they had heard the death knell.
No wonder the difficulty level of the instance was followed by a [?]. At first, they thought it was a good thing, a gradual increase. No matter how hard it got, it would at most be a four or five-star instance. At least they could enjoy a period of low difficulty, which would be convenient for them to gather information.
The gifts of fate and their secretly marked prices are often directly proportional; this saying was already a cliché.
But only when it was time to pay did they realize how expensive the cost was.
Letting fear spread would do no good.
Zhou Qi’an stood relatively calmly in place. A five-and-a-half-star difficulty would surely give a lot of experience points, maybe even overflowing experience.
This way, in the next instance, he could directly choose to evolve his brain. Once the first-tier organ completed its evolution, and the evolutionary coverage of other important organs exceeded eighty percent, the remaining organs could completely rely on the first-tier evolved organ to carry them.
If this was the case for ordinary players, he also had a five-star fish-eye heart as a pump; he would take off even faster.
“Friends, we are the first to eat crabs.”
Friends: “…”
Five-and-a-half-star crabs?
“Let’s go into the secret passage first.” Feeling as if she had been struck by the prompt, Mu Ge finally found her voice.
I hope the ending isn’t ‘the funeral of me and my temporary teammates’.
Everyone tacitly stopped discussing the instance’s difficulty. They were even deliberately ignoring this fact.
Discussion was meaningless, only adding to the psychological pressure.
According to the principle of distribution based on labor, the youth, who had provided the least information, was responsible for leading the way.
He himself was not timid, but the feeling this secret passage gave off was very strange. When half of his body was submerged in the shadow, there was a sense of suffocation.
The entrance to the secret passage was narrow. After the youth barely bent over and walked a short distance, the space opened up a lot, at least enough to stand up straight.
It was very dark inside. The little light from the entrance was simply not enough to penetrate. The air was filled with a mixed scent of flowers and rot, a similar fragrance they had once smelled in the greenhouse.
The youth turned on his lighting tool. When the surroundings became relatively clear, he almost took two steps back.
The walls of the passage on both sides were not concrete at all, but more like crimson flesh paste. The youth boldly touched it with his hand, then quickly retracted it.
The wall was moving.
Inhaling and exhaling, just like flesh, living flesh!
The further they went, the greater the amplitude of their breathing, a kind of undulation that was almost discernible to the naked eye. A few times, the flesh almost touched his skin.
The youth gritted his teeth and walked forward. With no other clues at the moment, he could only brace himself and advance.
Zhou Qi’an walked in the middle of the group, not relaxing for a moment either.
Experience, items… all benefits were built on the foundation of survival.
The group proceeded in silence until a splat sound was heard.
A piece of the wall, no, it should be said a lump of flesh, suddenly fell from the upper wall. When it landed, it was in a translucent state like jelly, but in just an instant, it began to expand and twist, piece by piece, the flesh connecting head to tail, blocking the middle of the path.
From a tiny hill, it instantly turned into a mountain of flesh, and finally, it even grew limbs, mutating into a blood giant holding an axe.
With the appearance of the giant, the entire passage also began to grow taller, until it became a space where the giant could move freely. The ground also became muddy, and the players at the back subconsciously wanted to turn around and pull away.
The youth leading the way actually froze for a moment at this critical juncture.
The blood giant’s mouth was wide open, constantly moving up and down, as if it were chewing on human limbs.
Smelling the floral scent and looking at the blood giant, the youth seemed to have returned to the day he least wanted to remember. In that instance, his teammate had been eaten alive by a blood giant.
The blood giant was an unsolvable ghost; encountering it was almost certain death.
A three-bladed flying scythe was thrown from behind. The sharp blade dug into the blood giant’s flesh, forcibly sliding down from its left shoulder, and after piercing through the flesh, it flew back into Mu Ge’s hand.
“What are you spacing out for?!”
Mu Ge held the handle. She wasn’t trying to help the youth; it was just that if they were to go through the secret passage, they had to get past this blood giant.
It’s useless.
The youth’s thoughts were like a rusty chain. He subconsciously thought of the giant he had encountered in that instance. Every time it was injured, its flesh would reorganize, and it would become even more violent.
“Kill, kill…”
The moment this thought flashed through his mind, the originally weak giant suddenly leaped up with renewed vigor. Not only did it revive on the spot, but it also went berserk, swinging its axe and charging over.
The youth bit his tongue hard and immediately sensed that something was wrong.
Unsolvable monsters couldn’t just run rampant across multiple instances. The blood giant in front of him was definitely not the same boss as before. But for some reason, his willpower was exceptionally weak right now. Everything from his past instances appeared in his mind in great detail, and the monster’s strength grew along with his inner fear.
“I once encountered this monster in another instance. It’s very strong,” the youth took deep breaths continuously, trying to regain some rationality. “It’s also… my recurring nightmare.”
“I can’t control it…”
Holding his breath couldn’t stop the floral scent from invading. The youth’s eyes widened in terror.
As he finished speaking, the players each made their own judgments.
Mu Ge and Wang Cai instantly moved forward to block the monster.
Ying Yu took the opportunity to violently pull over the fear-dominated youth and knocked him out directly.
However, the blood giant didn’t weaken with the youth being knocked out; instead, it seemed to have become even stronger.
Zhou Qi’an also came to the youth’s side, pressing on his left eye, which had been faintly aching since just now.
When he opened it again, this eye, which worked intermittently, could vaguely see dense, blood-red threads connected to the youth’s head. They were very fine, and the source of all these blood threads was the surrounding breathing flesh walls.
Ying Yu: “This monster can manifest a person’s deepest fears.”
This was not difficult to deduce.
Even though he was knocked out, the youth’s consciousness had not completely fallen into darkness. It was as if he was still having some kind of nightmare, his eyeballs couldn’t stop twitching.
…It felt like they were about to pop out of his eyelids at any moment.
Shen Zhiyi suddenly spoke at this moment, “Dream Parasite Worms, a species that can be born within some special flower varieties.”
An instance related to dreams, with Dream Parasite Worms added in, was undoubtedly the game’s way of stacking the difficulty.
The Dream Parasite Worms themselves were not aggressive. They just recreated fear after parasitizing. Before they began to parasitize, even Shen Zhiyi would have difficulty detecting something without killing intent.
This type of creature was close to the legendary conceptual gods; they could be extremely strong or extremely weak.
After all, fear is often unbeatable.
“So you’re saying, they are all currently parasitizing Zhang Zhuzi’s brain?”
Han Li glanced at the youth, “So does that mean we have to kill him to survive?”
It wasn’t just her; Mu Ge and Wang Cai couldn’t help but entertain this idea.
The blood giant was getting stronger and stronger. At first, when its body was pierced, the giant’s speed would slow down a bit, but now not only was it unaffected, its rotting flesh could even move like clones, clamping onto people’s hands and feet.
If they let this blood giant continue to grow, they would all be finished.
The only reason they hadn’t acted yet was—
“Will it parasitize a second time?”
Shen Zhiyi showed a somewhat strange smile, “What do you think?”
Everyone actually knew the answer.
There were countless blood threads on the walls. The Dream Parasite Worms here were simply impossible to kill completely.
The only thing that gave them a chance to breathe was that these worms only chose one person to parasitize at a time, otherwise their entire team would have been wiped out long ago.
This should also be the lifeline left by the game.
Amidst a sea of ugly expressions, Zhou Qi’an looked at Ying Yu, “Is there a way to cut these red blood threads?”
Ying Yu nodded, “There is.”
However, after cutting them, they would face two situations. First, the Dream Parasite Worms would continue to split off blood threads to parasitize the youth. Second, they would find other targets.
Zhou Qi’an glanced at the blood giant over there, which was about to get out of control, and made a decisive decision, “Cut.”
Ying Yu was also very straightforward and actually cut them.
The blood threads snapped, and the blood giant swayed. Mu Ge and Wang Cai took the opportunity to rush forward, trying to run out of the tunnel. Before they had taken two steps, the blood threads immediately headed towards them.
Mu Ge’s face changed. It seems the rule is to parasitize the person at the very front!
Before the blood threads reached her, she was already uncontrollably starting to recall her most terrifying memories.
Suddenly, a gust of sinister wind swept past.
The next second, a hand pushed her away. Zhou Qi’an, who had been by the youth’s side, ran in front of Mu Ge.
Being saved by an unfamiliar person for the first time in the game, Mu Ge’s whole body trembled. When she came to her senses, she almost shouted:
‘What have you done!’
They hadn’t interacted much, but the moment Zhou Qi’an took out the key card, it explained who had killed Zhao Sanxun. A person like that was definitely not simple. To let his deepest fears manifest, what was that if not a disaster?
This time, it really would be the funeral of their teammates.
“It’s over.” The University Student’s vision also went black. He felt like he could already see their boss twisting off their heads.
Ying Yu pushed up his glasses, thinking of Zhou Qi’an’s mother who dug eighty-one holes.
“Bless us, heaven bless us…” Han Li prayed that it wouldn’t be Mr. Si who appeared, otherwise the Mr. Si content in this instance would be off the charts.
Shen Zhiyi, on the other hand, was experiencing some rare curiosity. He didn’t think Qi’an would be afraid of his boss or Mother Zhou.
Zhou Qi’an loved his mother very much. After recovering some of his memories, his feelings towards his boss were more of helplessness and a desire to help.
Amidst the various complicated expressions and psychological activities of the crowd, no monster or human appeared.
After about a few seconds, a rice cooker wearing a wedding veil fell from the sky. It didn’t even need the players to attack it; it shattered upon hitting the ground.
“…”
The rice cooker crashed to the ground, making a crisp sound, and broke into pieces on the spot.
Zhou Qi’an closed his eyes, “My marriage… is shattered.”
“?”
Inside the secret passage, it was dead silent.
A full minute passed before Mu Ge dared to crane her neck and look. Confirming it was just a rice cooker, her mind had raced through many possibilities, even imagining the rice cooker might be a robot or a Transformer that would soon reveal its true form.
After waiting a few more seconds, she confirmed it was just a rice cooker.
Including Ying Yu, basically everyone was silent.
After a long while, Wang Cai, who rarely spoke, looked at Zhou Qi’an, “Your fear… is quite niche.”
__
Author’s Note:
Whaler’s Association: I thought you were most afraid of us.
Zhou Qi’an: …Who are you?
That night, Zhou Qi’an had a nightmare, but it had nothing to do with the Whaler’s Association.
Rice Cooker No. N threw off its white veil: “Sisters, stand up!”
Rice Cooker No. N+1 burned the discarded white veil: “Brothers, stand up!”
“All units, attack—”
Zhou Qi’an: …
·
PS: The rice cooker is a landmark symbol of his mother’s murder threats (crossed out), representing a murder notice. For details, refer to the Huagu City arc, the story of ‘I’m going to buy a rice cooker’. It will be briefly mentioned again in the next chapter.
