(3/5)
Chapter 632: Grab him!
Beep beep beep…
The busy tone of a lost signal came from the receiver.
Orange Candy frowned deeply, staring at the call interface on her phone, lost in thought.
“Hurry, someone’s coming!”
A hushed, childish voice from behind yanked Orange Candy out of her thoughts.
Not far away, the sound of heavy footsteps immediately followed.
Almost the very next second after Orange Candy quickly hid the phone, the footsteps arrived right in front of them—
The figure of an adult appeared in the doorway.
It was a tall, faceless woman. She slowly lowered her head—her face was completely blank, devoid of features, yet her probing gaze felt incredibly tangible. It swept slowly over the children before her, bringing with it a suffocating sense of oppression.
“What the hell are you doing?”
A shrunken version of Wei Cheng immediately put on a fawning smile:
“We’re just mopping the floor, Momma.”
The other children nodded hurriedly.
On the stain-covered floor sat a bucket of dirty water and tattered rags, clearly corroborating his claim.
Momma’s cold gaze rested on Wei Cheng. Only when Wei Cheng’s back began to sweat did she finally speak slowly: “Behave yourselves. Get this place cleaned up before dinner—you don’t want to go into the dog cage tonight, do you?”
The children shook their heads frantically.
Leaving behind this gloomy threat, Momma finally withdrew her gaze as if granting a great mercy. She turned around and continued walking into the distance, her heavy, dragging footsteps gradually fading away.
Hearing her footsteps disappear, they finally let out a slow sigh of relief.
At this moment, inside this pitch-black utility room, there were five children, including Orange Candy.
Two were members of her squad: Wei Cheng, whose talent was foreseeing death and who had entered the Changsheng Building and Yuying Comprehensive University instances with Orange Candy; and Zhao Ran, a high-level attack-type anchor who hadn’t participated in Orange Candy’s recent instance runs.
The other two were strangers matched into the instance with them. Although they had no prior interaction with Orange Candy, they had long since realized who the boss was after the instance started. In front of Orange Candy, they only dared to walk on eggshells, terrified of getting on her bad side.
Wei Cheng put down the water bucket he was holding and raised a hand to adjust the crooked glasses on his face.
One of the temple arms was broken and hastily stuck together with tape, hanging comically on the bridge of his nose. The prescription didn’t seem to match his eyes, forcing him to squint constantly.
He looked at Orange Candy.
“What did the other side say?”
Orange Candy briefly recounted the content of the phone call.
“Pinocchio? He actually came?” Wei Cheng’s eyes widened in surprise. “And he gave such specific advice…?”
Even though he had long witnessed how quick-witted the man was, he was still…
“I don’t know the specific details; he hung up too fast.”
Orange Candy rolled her eyes, her expression still very irritable.
“And God knows when he’ll be able to call a second time.”
Although she and Bai Xue were in the same instance, they were clearly not in the same zone. The flow of time on both sides was completely different, and there was almost no pattern to follow—sometimes the time speed was nearly synchronized, and other times they had gone through several loops inside while only a few hours might have passed outside.
Due to signal issues, Orange Candy could only wait for Bai Xue to contact her.
During the long, endless wait, her already short temper was pushed to the brink of exploding at any moment.
Only now did Orange Candy realize the flaw in their perfect plan.
She hadn’t expected that this instance, named [Dream Orphanage], would be a damn puzzle instance.
She even less expected… that Bai Xue would drop the ball too.
No matter how powerful and terrifying Bai Xue’s abilities were, his role was still support and assistance, not a strategist anchor who could figure out the entire picture of an instance through trivial details.
Of course, if he were actually with them, it would be fine; breaking the game wouldn’t be impossible.
But the problem was…
Not only could the two sides not act together, but there was also an unbridgeable time difference. Aside from life-and-death crises, it was difficult for Bai Xue to grasp their movements, let alone provide effective puzzle-solving plans in time. So, the calls he made were basically to avoid some incoming fatal threat, not to tell them how to clear the level.
Thus, they fell into their current awkward predicament.
It wasn’t that Orange Candy hadn’t tried to slaughter her way through the entire instance—as she did best—but when the 5th day arrived, progress reset to zero, and everything started over.
Unable to find the key to breaking the game, they could only loop here endlessly.
Even though they had been here for a long time, the progress of the main quest [Survive in the instance for seven days] remained at a pitiful 42%.
“After dinner, there’s a defense gap of about half an hour in this instance,” Wei Cheng calculated in his mind and said. “We can act then.”
Orange Candy: “OK.”
Regardless, the content of this phone call was the most specific and actionable guidance Orange Candy and her team had received during this time. Naturally, they wouldn’t let it slip.
But before that…
Orange Candy glanced gloomily at the dirty water bucket on the floor and picked up the tattered rag from inside.
They still had to work.
They had been doing damn chores for nearly two months!
At 6:00 PM, the orphanage served dinner on time.
Even though Orange Candy had been to countless instances with terrible environments, she had to admit that the food here was ridiculously rotten.
Inside the huge white iron buckets was muddy meat soup resembling swill. It had no oil on top, yet floated with a few chunks of fatty meat as hard as leather belts, emitting a nauseating smell. On the trays at the side tables was black bread almost capable of being used as a murder weapon; not only was it hard as rock, but it was also clearly rancid.
If it were any other instance, it would be fine since the Nightmare Shop was always open. But in this instance, the number of items that anchors could exchange per loop was limited. They couldn’t waste such precious quotas on food, so they had to force themselves to eat this swill.
There were several rows of long tables in the cafeteria, each crowded with children, totaling over a hundred.
Here, it was clear at a glance who was an NPC and who was an anchor.
All the NPC children were filthy and thin as firewood. Even with the food being this terrible, they stuffed it into their mouths with their small hands like starving ghosts.
The anchors were different. Although they were the same age, compared to these native children, their childhood living environments were obviously much better. Because of this, even though they had shrunk in age, their skin was better, and they were taller, sturdier, and healthier.
But even so, they couldn’t sympathize with these brats.
These children were definitely not as pitiful and harmless as they appeared on the surface.
One could even say that due to the harsh living environment, they had become more cunning, vicious, and unscrupulous.
The child Orange Candy mentioned on the phone was the best among them.
That guy not only held significant prestige among the vicious orphans but could even occasionally speak up in front of those vicious Mommas…
In the eleven loops they had spent here, they didn’t know how many times they had been tricked and played by that guy. Almost every failed operation, big or small, had his involvement.
The most frustrating one was during the seventh loop.
That was the furthest they had gone, and the closest they had gotten to the core of the orphanage. If that brat hadn’t jumped out from somewhere to blackmail them, causing them to miss their window of action, they might have already left this place.
Not to mention Orange Candy, even the others gritted their teeth at the thought of that guy, wishing they could skin him alive.
At the long table.
Wei Cheng adjusted the glasses on his face, squinting up at the crooked clock above, seemingly trying hard to distinguish the numbers on it.
Zhao Ran raised an eyebrow at him, a playful, teasing look on his small face that didn’t match his age: “Brother Wei, can’t see clearly? Want me to do it?”
“…Shut up.”
Wei Cheng glared at him fiercely with a dark face.
He was nearsighted as a child and only had corrective surgery after college.
Of course, even without surgery, it wouldn’t matter; after entering Nightmare, points could be used to restore vision to perfect levels—but none of them expected that in this instance, all their bodies would revert to their childhood states, including their eyesight.
Even the glasses Wei Cheng had now were obtained with great difficulty; there was no room to be picky.
Orange Candy struggled to break the hard bread in her hand. Without looking up, she said lazily:
“Stop looking. Five minutes left.”
Five minutes was neither long nor short.
Orange Candy wrinkled her nose, stuffed the last piece of bread into her mouth, forced it down, and then made a disgusted expression. By the time she finished all this, the minute hand hit the top.
She lifted her eyelids, glanced at the other anchors, and ordered:
“Start.”
The other children sitting at the same table as her hurriedly stood up.
Eleven loops, a full fifty-five days, were enough for them to understand Orange Candy’s temperament.
Unpredictable, bloodthirsty, warlike, vicious in her methods, and never soft-hearted toward those not in her squad.
But similarly, because of the overwhelming strength of her and her team, although they had been in this instance for so long, they had lost fewer than ten people—and among those ten, five were killed by her personally.
They really didn’t want to see the little girl covered in blood with that manic smile a second time.
So, after that “rebellion” was quelled, all the surviving anchors followed Orange Candy’s lead.
After the anchors left the dining table, Orange Candy jumped off her chair:
“Let’s go.”
With other anchors responsible for diverting attention, they had about forty minutes of free movement time.
The three of them walked silently out of the cafeteria, moving quickly through the cold, dark corridors and the wide, filthy hall like three formless shadows—stealthy, swift, and practiced.
Using a makeshift key matched in a previous loop, they opened a side door and slipped out.
There was only one activity area in the orphanage.
However, in all the time they had been here, they had never seen the Mommas allow the children out to play—they were forever doing endless heavy labor, scrubbing the corridors over and over with small hands red from the cold water.
Calling this place an activity area was too generous; to put it bluntly, it was just a dirt pit for these kids to play in.
In the center of the dirt pit was a tattered, yellowed, faded slide. Apart from that, there was nothing else.
Under the gray sky, it looked particularly terrifying.
“Where is the spot?”
Zhao Ran lowered his voice.
“Left side,” Orange Candy glanced around and walked straight to a corner of the slide. “But we can dig everywhere.”
The three split up and began digging.
Soon, Wei Cheng shouted in a low voice: “I found it!”
Orange Candy stood up and walked over quickly:
“Where?”
When she reached Wei Cheng, he was carefully digging a white tin box out of the yellow earth—the box wasn’t big, only palm-sized, with a pitted surface that looked very old and crude.
Orange Candy took the tin box and applied pressure with her fingers.
With a muffled clack, the lid of the box was pried open.
At the bottom of the box lay a few small items, askew.
Two dusty marbles, half a colorful candy wrapper, a few glass shards with edges ground very smooth, some colorful strips of cloth… all of it was garbage with clearly no value.
The only ones who would like this kind of thing were either children with no worldly experience or crows that liked shiny objects.
“…”
The group looked at each other blankly.
This was… the “treasure” the other party mentioned?
Just then, a crisp voice rang out from above their heads.
“Hey!”
They all raised their heads in unison and looked up.
A child was sitting at the top of the slide.
He was short. Even in an orphanage where all the children were malnourished, he looked a bit too thin.
He bent one leg and sat at the very top, the other leg dangling and swinging. Inside the tattered pant leg was a thin calf that looked like it could snap with a little force. His face was filthy, but his eyes were surprisingly bright, like a sprite.
“You didn’t think that no one besides you knew about this patrol gap, did you?”
“I’ll count to five. Put the things down and go back to the cafeteria, and I’ll pretend nothing happened.”
The annoying brat stood up and said with a smile:
“Otherwise, I guarantee your time here is going to get very miserable.”
“…”
Orange Candy held the tin box, staring at the other party searchingly.
She rarely scrutinized an instance NPC’s face so seriously—on that dirty little face, the features were unexpectedly regular, especially those wild, untamable, cunning eyes. The light-colored irises shimmered faintly in the dark.
Orange Candy paused slightly.
In that instant, she seemed to understand something.
Flashbacks raced through her mind: what Bai Xue had said to her before entering the instance—she hadn’t paid much attention at the time, only remembering bits and pieces—
About how special this upcoming instance was…
And the rumors about its long-term closure…
And…
Through the phone receiver, amidst the slightly distorted static, the young man’s voice laced with helplessness—“Try going to… the activity ground, under the slide. Dig under the left pillar. You might be able to find that… ‘detestable brat’s’ treasure.”
Suddenly, all the details aligned.
“…”
Orange Candy raised her eyes in silence and reached out to hand over the tin box.
The brat beamed with joy and jumped down…
Orange Candy’s fingers loosened, and the box smashed onto the ground, scattering the shiny objects everywhere.
In the instant, the other party’s eyes went wide with shock, and a blank expression appeared on his face. Orange Candy let out a vicious sneer. She barked an order to the other two standing by:
“Grab him!”
