Chapter 623: Reality is This Hell
The few people who went out were all taken down, and the security guards who arrived later orderly carried them away to the seventh floor, then began driving all the players back to their wards.
During this time, some players refused to believe it, trying over and over to use their items and verify their power, but the items didn't work. To others, it looked like a person standing there making strange, incomprehensible movements... like a madman.
"Impossible!" a female player grabbed her hair. "An instance dungeon can't truly make us lose our player abilities, so I must be in a hallucination right now. Since it's a hallucination, it can be broken. Why won't it work? Why won't it work?!"
After saying this, she slapped herself twice. When that had no effect, she rushed to the nurse's station, snatched a fruit knife, and stabbed it into her own thigh!
The blood was painful just to look at, but it still seemed ineffective. The female player was pinned down by the nurses and couldn't help but scream, "I have a self-healing agent! I'm a player! I won't die! Why can't I open my personal panel!"
"She's so crazy," a player said as he walked past the door, hands shoved in the pockets of his hospital gown, grinning as he watched the female player. "She definitely didn't take her medicine."
The two people standing beside him both looked at him, but this person showed no self-awareness and continued, "If she took two more pills, she'd become as normal as me."
His calm tone sounded like he was stating a chilling fact.
"I can't take this anymore," Wen Xuelin said, rubbing her arms. "Everyone looks insane to me now!"
The most terrifying part was that most of them weren't alone—since entering the instance dungeon, at least two or three people had been together—yet they still ended up in such a chaotic situation. That meant this instance dungeon had been subtly influencing them all along, using methods they couldn't even detect!
The cannibal player who had gone upstairs for treatment came back down. He walked up to the head nurse and handed him a form. "The doctor said my condition has improved and I can see my family."
The head nurse showed a sincere smile. "That's great news. Let me register you first. You should be able to see them this afternoon. You just need to cooperate with the doctor's treatment. Your family cares about you very much and has been calling to say they want to see you."
The man looked very excited and quickly nodded. "I'll do exactly what the doctor says."
After the head nurse registered him, he let him go. The player had just walked over when the scarred player called him over, and they put their arms around each other's shoulders and went to a corner of the corridor. The others were neither too close nor too far away, and for a moment, it seemed like they could hear what was being said, but also like they couldn't.
Gu Yu and the others stepped back, all seeing a hint of gravity in each other's eyes.
Their hearing seemed to be deteriorating too.
"We can't delay any longer. Let's go find the doctor."
After saying this, they headed upstairs. However, many others had the same idea, and for a moment, everyone looked at each other before scrambling to run up to the third floor.
There were only a few offices and only a few doctors. If they were late, they might not find one. Every extra minute spent in this instance dungeon brought unpredictable danger, so of course they had to get to the front.
The doctors in the offices didn't turn anyone away, but once the door closed, nothing could be heard from outside, which left those who wanted to see what was happening helpless.
The scarred player also entered an office. The doctor in a white coat sat behind the desk and waved him over. "Sit down first."
The scarred player saw him write at the bottom of that page in the medical record: "Mental state still unstable, temporarily cannot be discharged."
"Slap!" The medical record was closed. The doctor put it aside and asked him with a smile, "How are you feeling today? Any more auditory hallucinations?"
The scarred player didn't know what counted as an auditory hallucination, so he just asked, "Doctor, how can I be discharged?"
Xu Huo smiled as he looked at him. "You can only be discharged when your condition improves. Your illness isn't serious. Relax and focus on treatment. You should recover soon."
The scarred player gripped the wooden armrest, a vein on the back of his hand twitching, but he quickly calmed down. He looked at Xu Huo with a smile. "Doctor, I want to be discharged today."
Xu Huo naturally saw the finger marks he had pressed into the armrest, then picked up his pen and made a note in the medical record.
The advantage of a mental-type instance dungeon lay in its influence on people's thinking, but a major flaw was that certain strong-willed individuals were hard to disturb with external factors.
This was also a good sample.
He placed the "Orb of Murmurs" in the open drawer below and continued, "Then let's do a test. If you pass, you can be discharged immediately."
The scarred player snatched the medical record from his hand, filled in the test answers himself, and even wrote "Permission to discharge" at the end on his own.
But after writing it, he didn't receive a clearance prompt, so he threw the record back. "You write it."
Xu Huo smiled. "That doesn't follow the hospital's normal procedures. Even if I write it, you won't be discharged."
"I say you can discharge me, so you can!" As the scarred player spoke, he shot up from his seat and punched at Xu Huo's face.
Xu Huo didn't dodge or avoid, but the fist stopped two inches from his face. The scarred player was shocked and furious to find two straps wrapped around his arms, elastic straps that yanked him back, nearly knocking over the chair.
Then he saw Xu Huo take out a remote control and press a button. Metal clasps popped out from the chair, completely trapping him in place!
"This isn't real!" The scarred player had inspected the hospital building from outside. Before the instance dungeon started, it was an abandoned building with basic, shabby furnishings—there was no such chair!
"Seeing is believing. Can't you even be sure of what you've seen with your own eyes?" Xu Huo picked up his pen and made a note in the medical record with a straight face. "It seems your delusional disorder hasn't improved."
The scarred player's eyes turned vicious, but he was helpless against Xu Huo. He thought about using self-harm to wake himself up, slashing his palm deeply with a ring knife. But the pain didn't pull him out of the hallucination; instead, it dragged him deeper. What was originally just an ordinary wound now bled profusely like a severed artery.
The dripping sound came continuously from the floor. The scarred player heard the doctor across from him say, "Self-harming tendencies. This means you definitely can't be discharged."
"I'll fuck your—" The scarred player started cursing, but then another dripping sound joined the first. He looked down—there was now a wound on his left wrist too!
"Drip! Drip!"
The sound of blood flow kept overlapping. In just a few minutes, blood had pooled all around the chair. His body had inexplicably gained many wounds, all bleeding uncontrollably!
"Save me! Save me!" The scarred player's face turned pale as he begged Xu Huo for help.
But Xu Huo just looked at him and shook his head, smiling as he said, "Falling into a hallucination and unable to escape. Your illness is very serious."
(Chapter End)