Chapter 304: Wang Wang

The Talisman Nail Painter could no longer hold on; the ink in his brush was completely squeezed dry, and he could no longer paint alloy steel plates.

Massive numbers of flying snails scurried about everywhere, and the players scattered in all directions through the pitch-black tunnel, soon losing one another completely.

"Heh heh."

Hyena ducked into a dim room, leaned against the wall, and gasped violently for a while. Just as he was about to pull out a health potion and drain it in one gulp, he hesitated for a moment, then put the potion away and took out some witch's brew from his inventory, pouring it onto the gruesome wound on his forehead.

The witch's brew was extremely irritating; smoke rose from the wound and fresh granulation tissue sprouted. The intense pain made Hyena clench his teeth tightly, and he hurriedly punched his own chest to choke back his moans.

"Don't move."

Before Hyena could even catch his breath, an icy voice rang out from directly above his head. He instinctively looked up,

and saw that Master Pi Fu was clinging to the ceiling in a bizarre head-down, feet-up posture like a gecko, his steel banner-spear hanging silently right above Hyena's head.

"Don't attack, it's me!"

Hyena quickly said in a low voice, and to prove his identity, he deliberately displayed his player ID.

To cope with all sorts of bizarre scripted quests, players would usually browse various genres of literary and artistic works in their daily lives, especially horror films.

And in horror films, one of the biggest scares is that a companion who got separated once will be possessed by a vengeful ghost or something else.

"Just showing your ID can't prove you're really Hyena."

Li Cheng, crouched in a corner of the ceiling, asked calmly: "After all, there might be a situation where 'a parasite burrows into the brain and seizes control of the player's body.'"

Bro, do you really need to be this cautious?

Hyena helplessly raised both hands. "What do you want me to do to prove it?"

"Split your skull open and let me check if there are any bugs inside."

"Huh?" Hyena's eyes went wide. "Can you still live after splitting your skull open?"

"Of course you can. Hua Xiong's father Hua Tuo once performed a craniotomy on Cao Cao. The surgery was very successful, but during the procedure Hua Tuo discovered the fact that Cao Cao's true form was actually a pretty young girl, and in the end he was killed by the embarrassed and enraged Cao Cao in a violent medical dispute."

Li Cheng casually spouted this piece of wild history while gently swaying the banner-spear in his hand, as if ready to thrust down at any moment.

"Brother Pi Fu?"

The beam of a flashlight lit up on the other side of the room. Talisman Nail Painter, Zhao Zijing, and a Border Collie walked over, their tone delighted.

"Oh, it's you three." Li Cheng hadn't really intended to kill Hyena. He casually stowed the Victory Banner-Spear, flipped over, and jumped down from the ceiling. "Where are the others?"

"Everyone got separated."

Zhao Zijing sighed and showed the GOC-standard walkie-talkie in her hand. "My 【Dot Matrix Detection】 skill is still on cooldown. In theory, this kind of walkie-talkie can display the locations of other units,

but the interior terrain of the Gao Ta is complex, and the walls are especially thick, which can block signals, so we can't see or contact the others.

We only found you guys thanks to Baiji Bear's sense of smell after he turned into a search-and-rescue dog."

"Wang Wang, you did a great job. I'll introduce you to a championship-grade dog breeding center later. I'm good friends with them—every time I walk Big Yellow from downstairs and queue up at the entrance, they always ask me, 'Are you here to breed too?'"

Li Cheng gave Baiji Bear a thumbs-up. "Can you track the scent of Dorian Gray and the others?"

"Yes."

Even after turning into a dog, Baiji Bear could still put on a pained expression. He tried his best to ignore the jab in Li Cheng's words and said: "Dorian Gray happened to spray himself with a uniquely scented perfume earlier, so we can track him. Follow me." "Wait, are you really going?"

Hyena hurriedly asked: "Just now a whole group of players couldn't take down that three-headed, six-armed aberrant monster, and now there are way fewer of us."

There was also something he kept bottled up inside without saying: that monster deliberately chose an escape route filled with flying snails, clearly possessing a certain degree of intelligence. Going there now would very likely be walking right into a trap.

"Letting 'Nezha' keep draining the Gao Ta's power and causing further collapse of the geological structure is just as much a death sentence—no difference."

Li Cheng twirled the banner-spear in his hand, flicking off a spear flourish, and walked into the darkness on his own. "If you don't want to come, you can stay here."

Hyena watched the group striding forward, then turned to look at the dark, silent corridor. Gritting his teeth, he followed after them anyway.

In the Gao Ta's underground parking lot, Hui Yu sat on the ground, leaning against a pillar, idly scrolling through the offline version of Douyin.

The Earth teenagers and otherworld natives gathered here silently munched on the emergency rations and drinking water the players had left behind.

Calling them emergency rations, they actually tasted quite good—soft, glutinous, sweet, and far more nutritious than Snickers. Transcendents certainly wouldn't shortchange themselves when it came to food,

and some players even took advantage of the inventory's setting that items don't spoil to bring in hot meals and bento boxes.

Looking at them one by one/p>

"."

Xue Luomeng held a sandwich, eating while silently shedding tears. Her brother Xue Lingyu still hadn't been found, and with every passing second, hope grew fainter.

Hui Yu, who was scrolling short videos, glanced at her. As Li Cheng's self-proclaimed lady of the house (?),

Li Cheng's relatives were her relatives, but she couldn't show it too eagerly, lest the others notice.

After thinking for a moment, Hui Yu put down her phone, took out a small folding table, coffee, white sugar, and a thermos from the travel bag Li Cheng had left, and said to Xue Luomeng: "Don't pull such a long face, have some coffee. This is Panama Geisha coffee—very fragrant and very expensive. I always have to add sugar when I drink it."

As she spoke, Hui Yu used her fingers, which had turned into razor blades, to arrange the white sugar into strips, neatly placing them on the small folding table.

???

Holy shit, ice!

No, ma'am, are you trying to drink coffee or what? Don't corrupt the children, hey.

The people around them had odd expressions. Xue Luomeng's face also went stiff, not knowing what to say.

At this awkward moment, Tina, an otherworld native sitting alone in a corner of the crowd and flipping through an old notebook, suddenly seemed to discover something and sprang to her feet, excitedly saying to Hui Yu: "Found it!

My father ran into a wanderer two years ago. He claimed to have escaped from a survivor settlement in Boston.

That base had thousands of former American bureaucrats, scholars, soldiers, and over ten thousand civilians, as well as a massive laboratory—until an accident occurred, when a charged protective outer wall was breached by an aberrant monster capable of absorbing electricity from a distance, and the base fell."

Hui Yu hurriedly brought the coffee over, took the old notebook from Tina's hands, and according to the book's description,

the researchers at that Boston base had tried to find a way to control aberrants, but had accidentally bred a kind of monster in the lab that could continuously evolve.

It would absorb nutrients like a bottomless pit. Every time it suffered a fatal wound, it would find a hidden corner, expend all its energy, and at the cost of its own death, produce an egg.

The new individual hatched from the egg would be smarter and stronger than the previous generation.

(End of this chapter)