Chapter 759: The Syringe in the Puppet's Arm
If this instance refreshed every day without ever closing, then the day after they cleared it would be a brand-new instance. Players who cleared it and stayed would become non-ticket players, and non-ticket players might never be able to leave this instance. Therefore, it was best to exit before noon the next day.
"What prop did you use just now to lure away Peng Fengnian and Sun Bo?" Xu Huo asked Xiao Ling.
"Just a recorded sound," Xiao Ling replied.
"They've been gone a while," Yu Guangnan said. "If they realized it was a prop, shouldn't they have come back immediately?"
The three exchanged glances and went down to the next floor. The prop Xiao Ling had left in the corridor was gone. Both ends of the hallway were empty, with no sign of Peng Fengnian or the other man.
Xu Huo took out a detector and walked straight to a room about ten meters away. He pushed the door open, and a thick stench of decay rushed out. Looking closely, he saw two rotting corpses. They were wearing props, so they were definitely players, but they appeared to have been dead for several days.
"Are these Peng Fengnian's companions?" Yu Guangnan asked in confusion. "Even if they didn't want to bury their companions, they should have recovered the props, right?"
Even if they weren't companions, picking up two props wouldn't have been much trouble, especially since there didn't seem to be any monsters here.
Xu Huo frowned and quickly returned to the doorway. He looked left and right, then quickly realized where the problem lay.
"Look at the scenery outside the window," he said.
Yu Guangnan didn't notice anything wrong, but Xiao Ling quickly caught on. "The angle is off. Two positions ten meters apart should have different perspectives, but there's no change at all."
Yu Guangnan walked left and right, trying it out before reluctantly admitting, "We're trapped in an even stranger space. Did Peng Fengnian and the others not run off on their own, but get swallowed by the space?"
To test this idea, Xu Huo and the others wandered aimlessly through the corridors for several laps. Not only did they fail to find Peng Fengnian and Sun Bo, but Teacher Pan and the others were also gone.
"They didn't just ditch us, did they?" Xiao Ling said through gritted teeth. "They must have done something to get us in here!"
Xu Huo was certain that Teacher Pan and the others knew about this space and also knew how to get in and out. The reason they had brought them in was likely to find a way out. There was no reason for them to separate—unless these people didn't actually understand the space well, couldn't predict the danger, and were simply gambling.
The survival probability on the prop fluctuated between "1" and "2."
Entering the mirror hotel from the corpse hotel required hearing footsteps, and the player didn't need to do anything. But entering this space from the mirror hotel required the assistance of a space prop. Although footsteps could also be heard, it was clear that neither set of footsteps was a good omen; they were actually lures to trick players.
Regular tickets and return tickets couldn't be used. Either the instance was still in progress, but no instance notification had been received upon entering this space, so the possibility of a random instance nested inside the hotel was ruled out.
The only situation where tickets couldn't be used outside an instance was when inside a container prop, like the painting frame gifted by the curator of the Hundred People Art Museum. But if the hotel space was inside a container prop, players wouldn't be able to use props or open their game panels, which didn't match the current situation.
That left one possibility: this space was outside the game scope of the dimensional rift, like certain places the train tracks passed through that weren't included in the game, so tickets naturally couldn't be used.
But could this happen when the hotel and instance spaces overlapped?
After failing to find the other players, Xu Huo asked Xiao Ling and Yu Guangnan, "Under what circumstances can tickets not be used?"
"Outside the game, within the instance's time limit, and when under hallucinations. I don't know any other cases," Xiao Ling said, turning her gaze to Yu Guangnan. The latter shook his head, indicating he didn't know either.
But this gave Xu Huo an idea. He took out the bean seed used to test mental power, which he had obtained from the cannibal player he killed earlier, and scattered it on the ground.
In his spiritual world, the bean plant grew like rice stalks, but here, it climbed the walls like vines.
"What is this?" Xiao Ling asked.
Xu Huo briefly explained, and Xiao Ling said in surprise, "Does this mean we're all under a hallucination?"
"If we were always under a hallucination, how could you have received the clearance notification?" Xu Huo said. "There's spiritual interference here, that's true, but it's also an overlapping space."
That was the strange part. Being able to receive a clearance notification proved that the game's "signal" could reach here. There was no reason only the tickets couldn't be used. Had he guessed wrong? Were Teacher Pan, Peng Fengnian, and the others not ticket players?
"We should have tried it back in the mirror hotel," Xiao Ling said, full of regret. "I shouldn't have been greedy for the high-level prop!"
The three hadn't used their return tickets or regular tickets to leave immediately because they all had their own agendas, but now that calculation might trap them here forever!
Xu Huo followed the wildly growing bean plant forward. The plant grew steadily until they reached the top floor of the hotel, where it surged like a flood toward the central suite and burst the door open.
At the same time, Teacher Pan and the others came up from the other staircase. The two groups locked eyes. Teacher Pan's group looked surprised, while Xiao Ling's group was furious. But before either side could speak, a crowd of man-sized puppets rushed out of the room, flooded into the corridor, and scattered them!
The puppets ran but didn't make much noise. At the same time, footsteps sounded from downstairs again.
Seeing that the puppets in the room seemed to be pouring out endlessly, Teacher Pan and the others turned and ran without a word. Xiao Ling shouted, "They're trying to get out! Follow them!"
She and Yu Guangnan pushed through the puppets' heads, but when they looked back, they saw Xu Huo being swept away by the puppets and disappearing at the stairwell entrance. They paused briefly before continuing forward.
As for Xu Huo, he wasn't actually unable to break free from the puppets. Instead, he had noticed that among these puppets, all dressed differently and holding various tools, one was very special—it was dressed like a housewife and held a kitchen knife.
Although many puppets held knives, only this one's knife had the same numbering as the kitchen knife from the illusion in the psychotherapy room, and it was the same size as the missing knife.
Using a string to hook the puppet, Xu Huo grabbed its swinging arm and successfully obtained the kitchen knife.
Instantly, all the puppets stopped. A second later, they all widened their eyes and let out thunderous stomps. The puppet Xu Huo had grabbed tore off its own arm and ran away. He looked at the severed arm and found a light green syringe in the slot.
(Chapter End)