Chapter 2337: Seventeenth Hospital Upgrade
"Being able to avoid pitfalls in advance is already pretty good," Xu Huo said as he poured him water. "You can share these experiences with the Special Defense Department and the military as well."
Nie Xuan raised an eyebrow slightly and lifted his cup in a toast. "When it comes to magnanimity, all the military personnel combined can't compare to you."
Xu Huo chuckled. "You have quite a deep conflict with the military."
"It's not really a conflict, just a difference in philosophy." Nie Xuan drained the tea in his cup.
Before long, Gu Yu and Wen Xuelin arrived. Xu Huo took out the "Time Tower" and simultaneously released his spiritual realm, giving them a concrete visualization of what time power looked like and how fluctuations occurred in the surrounding space when manipulating it.
Of course, he also explained his experiences with time evolution in meticulous detail, including the detours he had taken and the circumstances when he first detected time power.
This was all he could do. For the remaining time, they could only get close to the time power and feel it firsthand. If they had questions, he would answer whatever he knew.
The entire process lasted two hours. Yuan Yao and Liu Jia were the first to give up, followed by Zhou Ning, Shen Xin, and the others, who truly gained nothing.
Xu Huo also needed to rest. He ended the session precisely at the two-hour mark. Looking at the group who had gained nothing, he said, "Succeeding on the first try is something only a genius among geniuses can do. Rest today, and we'll try again tomorrow."
"Opportunities like this are rare. I don't plan on leaving," Gu Yu said with a sweet smile, pulling out her location item. "How about everyone stays here?"
"That saves us the trouble of moving around," Nie Xun agreed without objection.
"I'll make some late-night snacks," Shen Xin offered proactively.
"There's plenty of ingredients, all fresh." Gu Yu led them inside and opened her custom-made oversized refrigerator, then turned back to ask Xu Huo and the others, "Want some drinks?"
"A few cans," Xu Huo replied.
Everyone divided the work. Some prepared ingredients outside, others busied themselves in the kitchen. A hearty late-night meal was soon brought to the table.
"It's been a long time since we've gathered so many people. Cheers!" Yuan Yao livened up the atmosphere.
Everyone clinked their glasses with smiles.
After the meal, they each found a room to rest. Once they were all asleep, Xu Huo left the location item, chose a distant spot, and opened the "Seventeenth Hospital."
The last time he had used the "Seventeenth Hospital" was before rising to B-rank. Since random instances were more flexible than fixed ones, as long as a player could manage both tickets and instances, instances could be opened and closed at any time.
Although instance authorization wasn't explicitly stated, it was said that if someone kept an instance open for a long time and then returned to the game, their player status would be paused, but the instance accumulation wouldn't stop. In other words, if an instance holder stayed inside their instance for a while and then suddenly closed it or it was destroyed, they would very likely be thrown back into a game instance for a high-risk random run.
Of course, this was just hearsay. Xu Huo had never encountered another player who held an instance, so he had no way to verify it. And since he did instances every month without pausing just because the "Seventeenth Hospital" was open, he wasn't sure if it was true.
Every time he opened or closed the instance, he never received any notification from the game.
Additionally, Little Pink Hat had mentioned that the game would arrange the opening range of random instances and later swap or upgrade them after a period of time. He was equally unclear about this, perhaps because he always opened and then hastily closed the instance without keeping it open for long, so nothing ever came of it.
The "Seventeenth Hospital" reappeared before him. Xu Huo pushed open the door and walked in. He observed the empty building, then went upstairs to the director's office. After closing the door and sealing off the space, he took out the three stone statues, along with the special item he had just obtained, "Best Director."
Even though he had used a space-sealing item, the three stone statues quickly hid in spatial gaps the moment they came out. Before he could even notice, the entire hospital's space was under assault.
Xu Huo had complete control over the hospital, so he could detect any changes immediately—he had no idea when the statues left the room through space, but when they tried to leave the hospital, they collided with the hospital's space.
He felt them rapidly shifting positions throughout the hospital, trying every possible spot. Then, suddenly, they went silent.
The next second, Xu Huo triggered the Water Cube Barrier. At the same time, six stone hands reached out from the space, grabbing at him from different directions!
The Water Cube Barrier didn't change much. It was like an impenetrable obstacle, isolating Xu Huo from everything around him, naturally keeping the stone statues out as well.
Moreover, these statues were a beat slow. Although they had specifically turned back to attack Xu Huo, they automatically slowed down upon contacting the Water Cube Barrier. The movement of their fingers revealed hesitation and confusion—they really didn't seem too bright.
Soon, they slipped back into the spatial gaps and disappeared.
As long as they didn't rampage through the hospital or come out to attack him, he didn't care where they were.
[Detected that the Seventeenth Hospital meets upgrade conditions. Please confirm whether the instance holder wishes to upgrade?]
Xu Huo selected [Yes].
Next came the instance upgrade time. He would have to wait.
However, during the wait, he could also sense some changes in the hospital.
First was the scale. At E-rank, the hospital had only one building, mainly for wards. At D-rank, it expanded to three buildings, including one specifically for storing pathological samples and another for sealing off the remnants of Yu Guo's bacteria that hadn't completely disappeared.
It wasn't exactly small, but now three more buildings had appeared out of nowhere. During their formation, they flickered unsteadily, sometimes rising, sometimes vanishing. Their exteriors changed repeatedly, only stabilizing after more than ten minutes.
The second change was, of course, the space.
It was very strange. Perhaps because of the stone statues themselves or the "Best Director" that strongly controlled space, his sensitivity to space increased during the hospital's refresh. Besides the place where the stone statues were hiding, he clearly sensed the existence of another space.
But before he could examine it closely, that space suddenly vanished. Then, the three newly generated buildings began to deconstruct from the rooftop, disappearing bit by bit from top to bottom, like being dismantled.
When only the foundations of the buildings remained, the rate of disappearance slowed. Then, the entire hospital underwent a drastic transformation, including the director's office where Xu Huo was staying.
Watching the walls continuously peel away and repair themselves, he had no choice but to move to the open ground outside, observing the hospital's changes from a high vantage point.
This time, the hospital's expansion was no longer stingy like before. It spread out to more than ten times its original area in one go. Looking out, besides the continuously generating and rising buildings, parks and lakes were also pieced in out of thin air—not only had the scale expanded, but its assets had visibly grown richer.