Chapter 2289: Never-Ending Repetition
"Isn't One-Third Game still a game?" The buzz-cut man looked despairingly at the door on the opposite wall. "If it's a game, they should tell us the rules. What's the point of locking us in here? Starving us all to death?"
The group fell silent for a moment.
"Who among you has entered the One-Third Game for the second time?" Xu Huo asked at this point.
"I think this is my second time." The buzz-cut man said weakly. "Last time, I lost my past memories in the game. I thought if I kept my head down, I wouldn't get pulled back in. But I'm this unlucky... Why? A lot of people who lost their memories have settled down in Buliucheng. Why is nothing happening to them!"
"You're unlucky? I'm even more unlucky!" said the player with a silk scarf tied around her neck. "I didn't even trigger a game, and I ended up here. There's absolutely no game prompt like you mentioned. Clearly, I'm different from you guys. I must have jumped straight into the high difficulty!"
Xu Huo turned to look at this young woman. "You're a Super Evolver."
The young woman instinctively wanted to deny it, but meeting his gaze, she changed her mind. "It's not a big deal to tell you. I am a Super Evolver, but I only evolved some special physical abilities. It has nothing to do with time-space powers. I have absolutely no clue about this place."
Xu Huo nodded and looked at the remaining three. "Has anyone won the previous game?"
"Are you interrogating us?" one of them, a middle-aged man with a refined demeanor, spoke up.
"You misunderstand." Xu Huo said. "I was just thinking, since this game has no prompts, there must be something special about it. To be honest with you all, this is my second time entering the One-Third Game. When I came out of the last game, the game notification said I had won."
The middle-aged man then gave him a serious look. "I see. My name is Ye Jiwen. How long after you came out did you enter the second game?"
"Less than two days." Xu Huo replied. "Xu Zhi."
Ye Jiwen sighed. "Same here."
He then asked the remaining two, and found that, like the silk-scarf female player Zhan Ling, they had never entered the One-Third Game before, and neither of them were Super Evolvers.
"Judging by our identities, there's no particular pattern to how the second game selects players." Ye Jiwen said. "Besides those of us who won the first game and must enter, those who lost the first game, and those who have never entered the game before, all have a chance of ending up here."
This was not good news. Because there were more people, players could, through various methods, more or less bring out useful clues from the game. But those were all from the first game. Since the trigger for the second game could ignore the conditions of the first game and was almost completely random, it meant that no one had ever made it out of the second game alive!
The few people present fell silent. After a moment, the buzz-cut man, Feng Mao, said, "We've walked through almost fifty rooms. Should we keep going? There aren't many people behind us. What if we go too far and can't get back?"
"There's nothing else to do anyway, might as well look around more." Ye Jiwen said. "What if there's a valuable clue in the rooms further back?"
Xu Huo naturally wanted to go further back as well.
Similar to what the other players guessed, the rooms here were indeed filled with Time Power, but the special thing was the hanging corpse. Having walked through so many rooms, the flow of time on the corpses had subtle differences. It might not be very noticeable in adjacent rooms, but with more rooms in between, the difference could be easily seen.
But that was all. He tried to manipulate the Time Power on the corpses, but nothing happened. Also, because the rooms were sealed off, he couldn't capture the Time Power from other spaces. So this place seemed to be a completely sealed location.
Naturally, it couldn't be truly without an exit. Otherwise, they would only need to place the rooms, not the corpses. From the corpse's attire and some physical characteristics, it wasn't a local player from Buliucheng. It was a player from an outer zone, hung here as a decoration. Whether the corpse had any special properties, or whether it represented any special meaning, was unknown.
All the rooms were the same. The only difference was the corpse. So they had to look at more corpses.
"Then let's take advantage of our energy and walk through more rooms." Zhan Ling said.
The remaining two naturally agreed.
So the group of six proceeded from one room to the next.
Along the way, they also encountered rooms where players had gathered, probably people who had entered as recently as they had. When they met, both sides were shrouded in a faint sense of despair.
After traveling for a while longer, they met three players who had walked through a thousand rooms and were turning back.
From their conversation, Xu Huo and the others learned that the rooms further back were still the same. Even worse, if they went too far, the corpse would gradually weather away. At first, only the skin remained, then later only the bones.
"Maybe if we go even further, even the bones will become brittle." One of them said listlessly.
"Then should we still go?" Feng Mao, who was with them, wanted to back out.
Ye Jiwen also hesitated. "Hundreds of rooms are all the same, and we can't reach an end. It's hard to say if these rooms even have an end. The only special one is probably the first room."
"The difficulty of this game is different from previous instances. It can even transcend dimensions. Time-space power can be engraved into items. Eternal repetition isn't a difficult thing." Zhan Ling said.
Xu Huo didn't say much. "Alright, I'll walk a bit further ahead."
"Alone?" Ye Jiwen tried to stop him. "Better to stay with us. We can look out for each other."
"Here... the only risk might be starving to death." Xu Huo smiled.
"You can still smile," Feng Mao said in admiration. "Brother, your mindset is really something else."
Currently, all their timing tools and devices had stopped working. They could only rely on their senses to roughly judge the time. Passing through the rooms and checking the corpses had taken them nearly five hours for these few hundred rooms. According to other players, the rooms here seemed to refresh every twelve hours, and the next refresh was about two hours away.
Although they had asked in detail about what the room refresh entailed, without experiencing it, they couldn't help but worry about potential problems during the process. Traveling together seemed much better than going alone.
"Since the only proof of the rooms returning to their original state is the hanging corpse, it suggests there's no effect on the other living players. Otherwise, with a refresh rate of once every twelve hours, no player would have stayed for more than half a month."
Xu Huo waved at the few of them and dashed into the next room.
Once the door closed behind him, he no longer wasted time on the corpse. Instead, he used his Space Power to open the room first, passing through the rooms at the fastest speed possible.