Chapter 2840: Dust Attack
This was probably a place used to raise living experimental subjects. There were many small rooms here, with scratches on the walls of over half of them—likely made by fingernails. Some gaps had turned black from prolonged lack of cleaning, and a faint stench permeated the air.
The six of them descended layer by layer. They didn't notice anything unusual on the first and second floors, but by the time they reached the fifth floor, they suddenly felt a chill run down their spines, as if something dangerous was lurking deep within the pitch-black underground laboratory.
Yet whether near or far, they couldn't sense any foreign entity present.
The two teams exchanged glances and silently left the fifth underground floor through the elevator shaft.
The elevator car had long been dismantled, so the shaft led directly to the surface. Sensing this unusual aura, none of them dared to linger and immediately headed upward. Unexpectedly, as they passed through the elevator shaft, a surge of dust suddenly rushed in from the door on the first underground floor. The closest person, Rick, was caught directly, and then he vanished without a sound.
The players were fast. By the time they came to their senses, Xu Huo and his five companions had already reached the surface. They didn't even dare to look back and immediately moved away from the elevator shaft.
Retreating to the main entrance on the first floor, He He spoke with lingering fear: "Was that cloud of dust that rushed over bone ash or something? It couldn't be the instance boss, could it? Does it come out to kill people during the day too?"
The others also had grim expressions. After all, they had previously speculated that the instance boss should only act at night. If it also killed people randomly during the day, how could they possibly find the "small compartments"?
"The ground floor should be safer than the underground," Xu Huo said at this point. "We've checked all the rooms on the ground floor, and nothing went wrong."
Having lost one person, they only came up with this vague clue.
"I'll send a robot down to take a look," Yue Yan'er said. "At least we need to know what happened to him."
The robot moved quickly. Under Yue Yan'er's control, it focused on checking the elevator shaft and the area outside the first-floor door. Although the dust that had rushed over was concerning, fortunately it wasn't bone ash, and no suspicious traces were left on the ground.
Meanwhile, the first underground floor remained calm.
"Maybe Rick was pulled into another space," He He said. "Like the other players who came in earlier."
With so many people coming in, they couldn't all be dead, could they?
"Didn't the Hundred Forest Society players say they were coming in? It's been so long, and still no movement?" Shen Ling'er glanced outside.
Earlier, while waiting outside, the later-arriving player organization Hundred Forest Society had scheduled their entry time twenty minutes after them. That time had long passed.
"Let's go check it out." Wang Xin took the lead and left.
The other four followed. When they reached the central courtyard, they ran into the other two teams. They had also lost members. When asked, it turned out the accidents also happened in the underground laboratory. One person simply disappeared while walking—besides the instruments detecting a brief, intense fluctuation in spatial power nearby, the others felt nothing.
The other person somehow fell into the elevator shaft and vanished.
Indeed, not only would listeners find it hard to believe, but even those who witnessed the scene struggled to accept it. It was hard to believe that an A-level player would slip without being attacked, and even harder to believe that he would simply fall straight down the elevator shaft and then disappear.
"Did you check the deepest part of the elevator shaft?" Xu Huo asked.
"Both robots and detection instruments went down. There wasn't even a spatial fluctuation, and the robots didn't encounter any issues."
That was the explanation from those two teams. After hearing it, Xu Huo and his group didn't say much and simply found a spot in the central courtyard to rest.
Using a silencing item, Yue Yan'er said, "Do you believe their story?"
"Compared to theirs, our story is even harder to accept," He He said. "If someone disappears due to spatial power, that's somewhat understandable. But in our case, it was dust. If it has a physical form, it might just be the instance boss."
"It was just dust," Xu Huo said. "It rose suddenly, but there was nothing else inside it."
Being so close and under the range of the "Cube Space," he could clearly sense a spatial fluctuation when Rick disappeared. However, the duration was too short for the spatial rays within the "Cube Space" to successfully mimic it.
"Now we can basically confirm that multiple spaces exist simultaneously, but it's unclear exactly how many," Wang Xin said. "Let's mark all the places where problems have occurred and see if there's any pattern."
Soon after, the remaining three teams returned. They were lucky—none of their members had been lost.
After hearing about Xu Huo's situation and estimating the time they had spent in the underground laboratory, a purple-haired man speculated, "The instance boss probably doesn't move around too frequently during daytime working hours, and it can't attack in multiple places at once. The times your two teams lost members were staggered."
"The west side likely saw the instance boss, but near the central courtyard, it was just a spatial fluctuation. That's probably a trap inherent in the instance itself, not something to blame on the instance boss. The east side had no incidents, likely because it can't appear in two places at the same time. This could also be an instance limitation—after all, it's a spatial venue, so moving around is simple."
"However, all three people disappeared near the elevator shaft. The underground laboratory is more dangerous than the ground floor."
"Also, the instance is called 'Small Compartments.' It's likely that the instance's creation is closely tied to the live experiments."
"Following the usual pattern, the identity of those entering certainly isn't that of staff members. Our roles are probably experimental subjects, while the instance boss is the 'staff member.'"
This line of reasoning was solid. The instance rules emphasizing the work-rest schedule were likely based on this.
They searched the research institute but found that only the underground laboratory nominally fit the description of "small compartments." However, considering that the underground was more dangerous during the day, going down early to claim a spot was impossible.
The only option was to wait until close to 8 p.m. and see what happened. If the instance venue underwent other changes, then the "small compartments" probably only appeared at night. If not, they would have to gamble and go to the basement.
In any case, everyone agreed that staying outside at night was very risky.
"There's also another possibility," a woman around fifty years old said, fiddling with the ruby necklace on her chest. "That the instance boss can't appear in multiple places at once."
"If it can't split itself, then it can't kill two players at the same time. So as long as you avoid it, you can survive even without finding the small compartments."
Everyone caught her implication. It was nothing more than diverting trouble elsewhere—surviving on one's own was difficult, but harming others was simple.
"Don't be so tense," the ruby necklace woman said with a smile. "We're teammates, so of course we should help each other. As for the others... isn't the Hundred Forest Society here?"
As luck would have it, the Hundred Forest Society members were just entering through the research institute's main gate.