Chapter 2593: Internal and External Time Difference
From the initial dozen or twenty, within a few minutes, the ghost-face masks crowded around Xu Huo and the Painting Woman like a swarm of jellyfish, seemingly endless—cut one down and more would immediately appear, as if they would never be exhausted.
After leaving the theater, Xu Huo and the Painting Woman hadn't actually gone very far, still on a street a few hundred meters away. Finding no one nearby, Xu Huo decided not to waste any more time. Signaling the Painting Woman to retreat, he used "Explosion Maniac" to compress two space bombs.
With a deafening explosion, countless mask fragments and building debris carried Xu Huo and the Painting Woman outward. Under the force of the blast, they flew nearly a kilometer before landing on a large building. Looking back at the site of the explosion, the jellyfish-like swarm of masks was gone, but the surrounding buildings hadn't been leveled as Xu Huo had expected. Only half a street was destroyed, leaving a large crater and several buildings with their upper halves sheared off.
The power of "Explosion Maniac" was far greater than this—it seemed the instance had suppressed it, preventing it from achieving its full effect.
Still, this wasn't entirely unexpected. If bombs alone could level an instance, it wouldn't qualify as an A-rank instance.
"More hats are flying over," the Painting Woman warned.
Xu Huo nodded. "Let's check somewhere else first."
Of course, they encountered more ghost-face mask attacks along the way, but the giant masks from before didn't reappear. This time, instead of engaging in combat, they chose to avoid them. Although the masks continued to pursue them, their numbers didn't surge.
Maintaining this state, Xu Huo and the Painting Woman arrived at a commercial street several kilometers away.
Here, the space was cut off.
An invisible spatial barrier blocked their path. Although they could still see the streets and buildings ahead, an intangible wall sealed the area tightly. Xu Huo walked along the wall for a while before giving up—both the ground and the sky were sealed, and neither bombs nor items could penetrate this barrier. The strange thing was that the spatial power here wasn't particularly concentrated.
Under normal circumstances, the more solid a spatial barrier, the more spatial power accumulated there. But this wall defied that rule, as if... they had reached the edge of space itself, where space naturally split apart.
Afterward, the two roughly explored the boundaries of this wall. Judging by its extension, it seemed to have cut out a section of the entire city. Without a map, it was hard to determine exactly where this section was located within the city. The only certainty was that there wasn't a single person nearby.
With so many people swallowed up, aside from the Painting Woman he carried with him, the few Enforcement Team players who had entered with Xu Huo from Yangming Building were nowhere to be seen... It seemed the entire city held only him.
After tapping and probing along the spatial wall for a while, Xu Huo decided to head back to the theater to take another look.
The collapsed theater remained in ruins, with no new people appearing nearby. Xu Huo released the shuttle, using it to strike away the masks that kept trying to approach and cover him, then found a place to sit down. He sent out several small flying drones to inspect and record the surrounding situation.
This was quite different from the information about the instance restricted zone on the 001st District's message collection terminal.
In the instance restricted zone, it wasn't yet dark, so it wasn't strange that the night parade hadn't appeared. But the players who had entered—aside from the few corpses at the theater—there wasn't a single person anywhere else, which was odd.
Could it be that the instance restricted zone actually folded more than one space?
Other places had no people and no corpses, only the theater had them. Perhaps this was a fixed teleportation point in the instance restricted zone. Who knew if more people would enter from here later?
"Is that old man dead yet?" the Painting Woman raised the communicator.
"That depends on whether his luck holds out," Xu Huo replied, keeping his eyes on the images transmitted by the drones. Finally, at a location ten kilometers away, he found another place with corpses. He immediately took the Painting Woman and rushed over, just in time to encounter two players fleeing from a shopping mall building. Their faces were filled with terror. The moment they stepped out of the mall, silver-white threads lifted them into the air and dragged them back.
One of them swung his hand to cut the silver-white threads but accidentally had his arm severed. As blood splattered, the silver-white threads that had been pulling them upward transformed into blades, slicing that player into pieces. Blood and organs splattered all over the face of the other player, who was a step behind.
Seeing that the second person was about to meet the same fate, Xu Huo raised his hand and pressed down. Gravity slammed both that player and the silver-white threads behind him onto the ground.
This time, he didn't level the mall along with it, but the silver-white threads that had been hanging the players quickly retracted into the mall. Even though they moved slowly, by the time Xu Huo circled into the mall, they had vanished without a trace. There were no giant masks either, only two or three ghost-face masks flying around aimlessly.
"Slap, slap, slap!" The shuttle, which had been hovering in the air, knocked the ghost-face masks away one by one before quickly returning to Xu Huo's side.
"I'm really grateful to you," the surviving player said, quickly standing up to thank him. He wiped the blood off his face. "Those threads are very strange. Once they pierce you, even removal items can't get rid of them. If you try to cut or pull them out, they turn into blades. If I hadn't run into you today, I'd probably be dead!"
Xu Huo nodded and asked him where he had entered the instance restricted zone.
The space inside the restricted zone was completely different from Xiacity outside, even the architectural styles were vastly different. It seemed to be an abandoned city existing in another space. If that were the case, then players entering from different instance cities could all potentially end up in this space.
"Lan Shui Wu," the other player answered truthfully. He had originally been a contract staff member of the Enforcement Team. When the A-rank instance spread, he was notified to stay behind and evacuate the citizens. He was sucked into the instance restricted zone during the evacuation process. As for the player who had just died, he wasn't a colleague but an outer zone player from another instance city, Coral City. Both were C-rank players, and falling into an A-rank instance's restricted zone was almost certain death.
Xu Huo then asked in detail about the time he had entered and the situation in Lan Shui Wu, as well as the rescue team's arrangements.
Comparing the times, Xu Huo realized that the restricted zone and the outside 001st District were out of sync. He had only been inside for about ten minutes, but two hours had passed outside. There was a time difference between the restricted zone and the outside. Which time did the instance's "seven days" follow?
As for Lan Shui Wu, the restricted zone's range had expanded slightly, but it was still manageable for the entire city. Based on the characteristics of the religious-themed night parade, the Enforcement Team had successfully evacuated all ordinary citizens around the restricted zone. Some easily influenced and induced teenagers were gathered together and protected by specialized players, isolated from the outside world as much as possible to prevent emotional loss of control.
Also, as Xu Huo had guessed earlier, very few of the missing people in Lan Shui Wu were elderly.
"The rescue team... they're probably in grave danger."