Chapter 2461: Instance Clear
The first message was that the instance player count had become 20.
The second message notified him that he had cleared the instance.
One person clearing meant the instance was over. The remaining players all failed to clear, and they could also leave at the same time.
Seeing the clearance message, Xu Huo realized that the instance’s “one-person clearance” didn’t mean only one person could clear it, but rather that as long as one person could clear it, the instance would end. Presumably, the players who came before hadn’t thought of this point and mistakenly believed that killing people was the way to clear it.
Of course, every time the remaining player count updated in the instance, Xu Huo also thought the missing players were dead—killed by fellow instance players or by the true Hidden Friend.
But the instance’s original intention wasn’t killing, so as long as someone saw the instance’s hint, this instance wouldn’t even need anyone to die.
Unfortunately, players were used to fighting and killing in the game and never imagined there could be such a gentle instance. It was like looking in a mirror—whatever the person looking in the mirror was like, the person in the mirror was like that.
The Painting Woman slipped out from behind him, curiously looking at the figures passing by around them. “These shadows are so strange. They won’t let me touch them.”
“That should be the instance’s effect,” Xu Huo said. “Keeping the influence of the past at a certain distance from reality is the only way to achieve the legendary effect.”
“They look like real people.” The Painting Woman tilted her head to think. “If that’s the case, when others see them, they won’t be able to tell who’s dead and who’s alive.”
She pointed at the Bubble Bean in the tree hollow as she spoke. “Him too.”
Xu Huo saw that the smile on her face was almost impossible to hold back, so he played along and asked, “So what are you going to do?”
The Painting Woman’s smile was brilliant. She pulled out the stamp fruit she had bought on the train earlier, carved the four characters “was here” onto it, then pried open the tree hollow and stamped it onto Bubble Bean’s forehead.
The stamp fruit was a gift from a player selling plant seeds on the train. Its liquid was corrosive and could repeatedly damage human skin, so once something was carved onto it and stamped down, it probably wouldn’t recover in a short time.
“If he cuts off the skin on his forehead, will it heal?” the Painting Woman asked.
“That’s hard to say,” Xu Huo replied.
“I’ll try it.” She actually seemed serious about taking a knife to gouge out the skin on Bubble Bean’s forehead.
“Alright,” Xu Huo called her back. “Stop messing with him. We still need to go somewhere.”
The Painting Woman got up with some regret, casually kicked some leaves over the ground to cover him back up, then followed Xu Huo, pressing him for answers. “What are we going to do?”
“Go take a look at where the instance hides people,” Xu Huo said.
Although players could get through the instance safely without killing anyone, the instance would still periodically take away locals, and those who went missing were probably all dead.
The “Hidden Friend” might have a different concept of “death” and “longing” compared to humans, so aside from the older ones, it occasionally called away some young people too. No one knew whether the entire process was completely voluntary, but it definitely had a special place for “hiding people.”
In other words, a burial site.
When he had followed the fluctuation of the instance’s power with Bubble Bean to this area, he had sensed a relatively large cavity underground. It was just a bit deep, and it was easy to miss if you weren’t paying attention.
“This is it.” Xu Huo chose a suitable spot and had the robot dig a passage down. A few minutes later, the two of them descended to a position fifty meters underground.
The robot drilled into a massive root. Strangely enough, this root was hollow inside, allowing a person to pass through easily. Following this root forward, they soon reached the heart of the cavity.
They opened a hole in the root, and a peculiar, refreshing fragrance wafted toward them.
Xu Huo put on a full-body protective suit, jumped out of the root, and landed on the underground rock.
This place was really huge—nearly a hundred meters deep and several hundred meters long. It looked like some kind of special plant root had hollowed out the underground rock and replaced it, so everywhere here was interspersed with dragon-like roots. The root hairs hanging down from them interconnected, covering the entire rock surface of the cavity.
Xu Huo saw some undulations covered by root hairs. He walked over and pushed them aside, revealing the shape of a curled-up person beneath.
No one knew how much time had passed, but this person and the clothes they were wearing had been eroded by some special substance, becoming as fragile as paper. As for the corpse itself, it had been completely absorbed by the plant roots, leaving only a shell.
“There’s one here too!” the Painting Woman called out to him from not far away.
Xu Huo looked over. What she had found was a player who had already died. Judging by the state of the corpse, it probably wasn’t from this instance.
There were many more such human-shaped undulations, almost covering the entire cavity. In some places, it was obvious that more than one person had been stacked.
“Were they hidden by the big tree?” The Painting Woman didn’t care about the instance, but having heard other players talk about it so much, she knew the instance’s content.
Xu Huo examined the surrounding rocks. For this forest to have mutated into this form, it was easy to imagine how drastically the soil and rocks had changed during evolution. Unfortunately, he didn’t find any Subclass Stone suitable for making into an item.
“There’s so much mud here.” The Painting Woman accidentally stepped under a root, pulling out a foot covered in black, wet mud. Water seeped out in some places in the cave, and wherever there was soil, small mud puddles like this formed.
Xu Huo made a full circle without finding anything, so he took out paper and pen and used the trait “Home Field Perspective.”
The earlier content wasn’t very interesting—it was basically his experience in the instance. The latter part was the key.
“…When Xu Huo walked deep into the forest with Bubble Bean, he thought he was sensing some special magnetic field power or space power in the instance. But what he didn’t know was that during the walk, a figure had been following him at a distance, neither close nor far. His eyes saw it, but he didn’t notice whether that figure was any different from the other plants that looked like human figures.”
“However, when he entered the underground cave, that figure didn’t follow anymore…”
…
“Xu Huo was a bit frustrated that there was nothing in the cave except corpses. But this frustration came entirely from his lack of knowledge. If he had remembered the complete guide to mutated plants he had just looked at, he would have realized that those wet muds were very suitable for growing mutated plants.”
Without a second word, Xu Huo scooped up a few buckets of mud and put them into the luggage compartment. The seed he had extracted from Dou Shengnan’s eye last time was exactly lacking nutrients.
Just as he was about to leave, a gentle breeze brushing against his face made him stop, because the words on the paper were still continuing:
“…That figure came before Xu Huo’s eyes.”
Xu Huo narrowed his eyes. He roughly understood that the “figure” mentioned in “Home Field Perspective” should be a force within the instance venue, the true “Hidden Friend.” It might occasionally take the form of a person, or it might have no form at all. Why was it following him? (End of chapter)