Chapter 301: The Method of Escape
The longer time went on, the deeper he sank into this spiritual contamination zone.
Just as he was contemplating a countermeasure, Sima Xiao'er suddenly started pounding on the door from outside, shouting, "Xu Huo, can you hear me? Wake up! They're going to cut you open and gut you!"
Xu Huo saw his frantic expression and was about to go open the door when Sima Xiao'er let out another howl, tears streaming down his face as he turned and rushed out, his voice still echoing in the corridor: "I'll avenge you! Once I get out, I'll file a report and blow this damn place to pieces!"
Xu Huo walked out, only catching a glimpse of his figure disappearing at the stairwell entrance.
He closed the five open doors on both sides of the corridor, then left the fourth floor and returned to the third floor.
Sima Xiao'er wasn't in his room; he was nowhere to be found. Xu Huo had to go back to his own room first. The tall, dark-skinned man still hadn't woken up. He moved him to the other bed and lay down to rest himself.
When dawn broke, he went out to look for Sima Xiao'er.
Sima Xiao'er was hiding in a corner of the lawn, clutching his head with both hands and muttering to himself nonstop, "...Xu Huo is dead, can I escape alone?"
"No! Is he really dead? Was the person I saw real?"
"I clearly entered the fog zone with my teammates, and the others disappeared. Where did he come from? He must be fake, the hospital is tricking me, and no one died!"
"...But he died so horribly, there were so many limbs in the treatment room... How could no one have investigated this hospital? Hmm! This hospital is fake too!"
"That's not right either. The hospital is visible and tangible, how could it be fake... Have I really mistaken the game world for reality? Is this real, or was the past real? Were the people I killed before real people, or people in the game world?"
Xu Huo walked over and kicked him. "Snap out of it?"
Sima Xiao'er fell to the ground, staring at him with bloodshot eyes. "You're dead. You're fake."
Xu Huo crouched down to meet his gaze. "See if this is fake?"
As he spoke, a screen lit up in the air, displaying the player's personal panel—nickname, ID number, and other information all present and accounted for.
Sima Xiao'er's sluggish expression gradually became a bit more alert. His voice trembled as he said, "Am I really not crazy?"
"Didn't I tell you last night? This hospital is fake. Everything you saw was your imagination, and you don't have a mental illness." Xu Huo dismissed the electronic screen.
Sima Xiao'er's pupils darted around, clearly his convictions were starting to waver, but he still refused to fully believe Xu Huo's words.
Xu Huo gestured for him to follow. The two walked to the middle of the activity area. He pointed at the words on the hospital rooftop and asked, "Doesn't that say 'Seventeenth Hospital'?"
Sima Xiao'er stared for two seconds before giving a definite answer.
"Close your eyes, open them, and look again," Xu Huo said.
Sima Xiao'er did as he was told. When he opened his eyes again, he found that the large characters on the hospital roof had suddenly disappeared, only reappearing after a few seconds.
"Go grab someone at random and ask them what the hospital is called," Xu Huo continued.
Sima Xiao'er asked several people in a row and surprisingly got several different answers.
"The hospital is just a framework. Its content is made up of each person's imagination. Different mental states and life experiences lead to different hospitals, so the hospital's name is different in each person's consciousness," Xu Huo explained. "Your mental state is unstable, so what you see is different from what I see."
"I saw you being killed," Sima Xiao'er said with difficulty. "A lot of people held you down, and you watched with your eyes open as they cut open your belly..."
"As far as I could see, that treatment room was just a bit old, nothing else," Xu Huo interrupted him.
"But why did I see that scene? I never thought of anything like that." Sima Xiao'er was getting a bit agitated.
"Your mind was interfered with by someone else," Xu Huo said. "Just now, you saw the 'Seventeenth Hospital,' and the window that disappeared and reappeared the night before last—before the window disappeared, wasn't the ward pretty much like a normal hospital? But when I pointed out that the window was gone, the ward changed along with your consciousness, becoming more like a psychiatric hospital from movies and TV shows."
"The hospital is just a water surface. Anyone who steps on it creates ripples, and the ripples affect each other, generating something new."
He continued walking along the lawn. "Everyone who comes in here can become a part of this place. The difference lies in individual mental states. The more you believe something is real, the more realistically it will be projected in the hospital. The doctors and relatives in the reception room are all imagined by you. To me, they are also real."
Sima Xiao'er grabbed his hair. "But I can't control it. Things I never thought of also become real. If we get killed by monsters imagined by others, will we really die?"
"I don't know about that." Xu Huo stopped in front of the hospital gate, looking up at the building, which wasn't as clear as it had been the previous two days. "But the longer we stay, the more dangerous it gets."
"Then how do we get out?" Sima Xiao'er pressed. "If the hospital is all imaginary, then this definitely isn't an instance. Even if I imagine an instance, I still can't get out in the end!"
"Before you came in, the Special Defense Department studied this fog, right? What did they say?" Xu Huo turned to look at him.
Sima Xiao'er took a deep breath. "They said this is a random instance, caused by spatial overlap. It's just that the range is larger and stranger than any random instance we've seen before."
"How is it strange?"
"In the past, the entrances to random instances were completely invisible to the naked eye, like an invisible teleportation portal. But this time, the fog zone has formed an isolation from the outside. Apart from people being able to enter, there's no communication between inside and out, no sound transmission, and even the temperature difference is huge!" Sima Xiao'er pounded his own head. "What the hell is going on?"
After listening, Xu Huo suddenly caught onto something. Sima Xiao'er and his team had entered the fog zone in Ting City, while he was in the neighboring Flower City. This fog zone had been constantly changing, cutting off communication, and creating temperature differences. It was more like another space invading Zone 014. The fact that no instance prompt had appeared could be taken as circumstantial evidence.
If this strange space was simply a spiritual contamination site, then the players' minds had been affected from the moment they entered. They might not be moving here with their physical bodies. And since the fog zone could be entered and exited, that meant as long as they broke free from this spiritual contamination, they could freely walk out of the fog zone.
They were only mentally trapped, and the fact that they couldn't use their player abilities proved this. To escape, they had to wake themselves up.
But under the influence of mental contamination, ordinary pain or stimulation couldn't wake them up. They still had to start from the spiritual level.
"Have you thought of a way?" Sima Xiao'er stared at him intently.
"This method might not work for others," Xu Huo said. "I'll try it first."