Chapter 3358

Now, an awkward situation has arisen.

Shiler and Strange deliberately refused to take on tasks, seemingly triggering a mandatory death ending, but they did not die. To complete the destruction caused by the mandatory death ending, the game could no longer proceed smoothly.

The nurse had clearly never encountered a situation where a wooden monster rushed out of a metal passage but failed to kill the doctor. The key point was that these two not only did not die, but were jumping around happily, not only physically healthy but also mentally unharmed, and still concerned about work.

If you say he's strong, he doesn't know why he inexplicably stopped playing by the rules; if you say he's weak, he perfectly bore the consequences of not playing by the rules, and even managed to survive.

After standing there dazed for a while, the nurse only left behind the words "I'll go check" before departing.

By this time, the sky had completely darkened, and it was nearly rest time. The evening bell rang, and Shiler and Strange sat again by the fireplace, stuffing the wooden monster's limbs into the fireplace.

Shiler observed the operating room environment and found the lighting much dimmer than when they arrived, but the fireplace seemed unaffected, its light still bright and warm.

"Don't forget to take the props before sleeping." Shiler handed the jar containing fingernails to Strange, then said, "We can test our hypothesis to see if this can bear our punishment for us."

Strange nodded, although he felt some aversion to others' body parts, having his fingernails pulled out was not a pleasant experience, and he did not want to go through it again.

Shiler was thinking about every detail from yesterday's dream. He remembered being fixed to a metal chair, but the chair's armrests were made of metal brackets and wood, and the handcuffs were not particularly tight. If he could grind away a small piece of wood, he might have a chance to escape.

But this also required the game to let him control his body. If it was merely a first-person observer perspective throughout, then there would be no hope.

But Shiler felt that if it were merely being an observer to experience the child's suffering, there would be no need to use the dream format; random hallucinations would suffice. Given the immersion, there must be a certain degree of freedom.

The two lay down on the chairs by the fireplace and soon sank into sleep one after another.

What surprised Shiler was that this time his perspective was not that of the child, but of a woman constantly moving through a pitch-black passage. She kept muttering "Henry... Henry..."

Her voice carried a hint of sobbing, sounding somewhat pitiful. But Shiler was focused on observing the environmental details in her field of view.

Because it was truly too dark, he could not clearly see the specific details of the buildings, but by listening to the sound of footsteps on the ground and the woman's fingers scraping the wall, he could determine that the floor and walls here were not wood, but likely brick material.

Suddenly, a sound came from the end of the darkness, as if some colossal object was gushing forth.

The woman panicked and stopped her steps, then quickly began to run back. After running for a while, the commotion gradually faded away, and she thought she was safe.

But when she lifted her head, a faint beam of light suddenly appeared at the end of the corridor. There stood a small figure.

With a "whoosh," flames began to wildly spread from where the figure stood, all the way to the woman's side. She screamed and retreated backward, but discovered that her back had somehow become a wall.

This was a very classic horror movie trope, Shiler thought to himself, but he was not just watching for excitement.

As soon as the flames lit up, he discovered that the small boy standing at the end of the corridor was not a ghost, but more like a charred corpse.

And the faint light where he stood was not coming from a window. Shiler saw massive turning gears, with light leaking from their meshing gaps, looking like the internal structure of a clock tower.

The woman was engulfed by flames, but this time Shiler did not feel pain; it seemed merely a simple cutscene, without sensory sharing.

But thinking about it, being burned to death can be said to be one of the most cruel ways to die. Moreover, this smokeless magical fire would not suffocate a person; the person would be roasted alive, dying a truly miserable death.

If players were made to experience this pain, they might just quit directly.

Then the dream was not over. He returned to the small boy's perspective, as if what had just happened were his memories.

Metal pliers again extended into Shiler's mouth. At this moment, Shiler discovered he had grabbed another tooth and pulled it out. Shiler felt no pain, and then the tooth was pulled out.

Shiler narrowed his eyes to look closely and discovered that what was clamped in the pliers was exactly the tooth he had obtained in the operating room.

This thing was indeed used as a scapegoat.

Strange's side was the same situation. Only, he did not see the woman's cutscene, but appeared in an earlier timeline, namely when the big toenail on his foot had just been pulled out.

Strange looked down at his bleeding foot, while those people prepared to pull out the second toe nail. But strangely, when the second toe nail was pulled out, Strange felt no pain, and upon lowering his head, the second toe nail was still there.

Those people noticed this anomaly, they retreated several steps. Someone in the crowd shouted: "Witch! She is a witch!"

Strange rolled his eyes, come on, you're in a world with magic settings, still hunting witches here?

Afterwards, he became puzzled again. Clearly, the world they were in had both octopus people and bird-headed people, yet these people ignored them, instead gathering together to torment a little girl who at least looked human. Is that reasonable?

Strange felt something was off, but his body was not under his control. Unable to control the character, he could only silently observe, trying to figure out what these people were up to from their behavior.

On Shiler's side, the pliers that were to pull his tooth disappeared, leaving him alone in this eerie place, and he still could not control his body, only able to watch helplessly.

For Shiler, this was a rather boring dream; he had expected some escape room segments, but obviously this stage would not work. Perhaps they had not triggered some condition, causing the plot to be unable to advance.

Could it be that they had not cured enough patients?

If the number of cured patients were the condition for progress, then they probably would never manage to gather enough in their lifetime.

The flow of time in the dream was uncertain. Shiler silently counted seconds in his mind, and about half an hour had passed when the prison door was actually pushed open.

This time, what came in was not pliers or similar tools, but a doctor wearing a black robe and a bird-beak mask. His hand held a blood-stained pair of pliers, seemingly the very pair that had just flown away.

Shiler focused intently, wanting to see what would happen next. Result: when the bird-beak doctor approached, the little boy struggled fearfully, crying and screaming incessantly, and the dream ended abruptly.

Strange woke up earlier than him, currently holding a parchment and writing something, seemingly noting some details he had seen in the dream.

The two each recounted what they had seen in their dreams. Strange furrowed his brow and said: "Obviously, this is not quite right."

When Shiler heard that Strange's side seemed to involve some witch-hunt background, he was also very surprised. The setting of this world is that magic and steam-punk technology coexist; magic is not something lofty, and some races are born with it.

Although humans are not innately magical, they can learn magic through training, and in daily life they often come into contact with magic, which to them is a commonplace existence. Witches could not be some rare curiosity; what kind of witch are they hunting?

"Could this not be the real world?" Strange proposed a possibility, saying, "Currently, the environment we have contacted is only this ward. We cannot go into the corridors, and the consultation rooms and wards are connected by passages, so we cannot see the actual situation. I already felt this was strange before."

"Are you saying we might exist in someone's consciousness world? And because he only knows this ward, the consciousness world can only present this ward? The outside world cannot be explored because he has never been there?"

"This possibility is not impossible." Strange followed up with his reasoning, saying, "Of course, it could also be that the game system is too lazy to make a map, so it directed the story this way."

When talking about the consciousness world, it naturally falls into Shiler's professional domain. He said: "If we think along this line, then what we are seeing now is not what it appears to be on the surface."

"The owner of this consciousness world has only this ward in his mind. Psychologically speaking, there are two possibilities. Either his mind suffered a major blow, memories completely scattered, retaining only one fragment, which is this ward."

"Or, as you said, the owner of the consciousness world has been here since the beginning of memory, never having left, so he does not know what the outside world is like, and thus the consciousness world naturally manifests as merely this single ward."

"If it is the latter, then the age at which he came here might be very young, not exceeding the age when they began to form memories. Otherwise, at least he would have some impression of the consultation rooms and corridors; as long as there is an impression, combined with some of his own imagination, it would not be a complete blank."

"And if he came here at a very young age and has never left, then he might be suffering from a serious illness, sent to the hospital for treatment, and has remained bedridden, so the consciousness world naturally contains only this small area, and the people he has come into contact with are only these few."

"Wait, then what role are we playing?" Strange asked.

"Naturally, we are the quack doctors treating him... uh, I mean doctors." Shiler said, "I believe the owner of this consciousness world cannot be a modern person. Besides, the ward's style does not resemble that of a modern hospital, which would not keep only sick children in one ward, even if they did not go out for fresh air, they would certainly be busy with various examinations in different wards. Even if the child is young, he would still have some impressions."

"Only when medical conditions are underdeveloped do children with strange illnesses remain in a ward, seemingly receiving treatment, but actually just waiting to die."

"In my dream I also saw the plague doctor with a bird-beak mask. This means that if there is a real world, then the owner of the consciousness world living in the real world might be a sick child living during the background of the Black Death outbreak in the Middle Ages."

(End of Chapter)