Chapter 567: Director (4K)

At 10:30 p. m. London time, staring at the fuel gauge on the SUV's dashboard, Scotty recalled the distant afternoon when he had first gained his player qualification, ecstatic with joy.

"Sssss—"

A stabbing pain in his spine interrupted Scotty's thoughts; he released his grip on the steering wheel, letting the vehicle auto-pilot, then pulled out a small mirror, placed it behind his neck, and observed his back skin through the rearview mirror's reflection.

His back bore large red patches, interwoven and arranged into the shape of a hotel wooden door.

The door stood half-open, the security chain stretched to its limit, as if about to snap; a blurred figure lurked behind it, revealing only half a blood-red eyeball.

【Task Type: Regular Task (Team)】

【Task Name: Dream Demon Curse】

【Phase One Objective: Teleport to the Killing Ground, proceed to the designated old mansion, destroy the altar statue】

【Phase Two Objective: Escape the mansion, survive seven days】

【Failure Penalty: Next task becomes a Punishment Task】

"Stop looking. It won't help our situation."

From the SUV's back seat, a thin East Asian youth with short hair spoke hoarsely; he wore a T-shirt, a Wanyan communication earpiece around his neck, and his back skin bore the same hotel door-shaped red patches as Scotty's.

【Fist Tyrant】, Lv13, original name Wu Quan, assigned to the Guangdong Branch Mobile Task Force of the Special Affairs Bureau, randomly matched teammate for this mission.

Including these two, this regular 【Dream Demon Curse】 mission had twelve players, all elites at Lv10, each with at least an A-rank internal evaluation within their respective guilds.

But now, six of the twelve were dead; the remaining six were wounded or maimed, with little hope of returning alive.

"Fist Tyrant, watch your head."

From Wu Quan's Wanyan communication earpiece, Yuan Donglian's voice came clearly.

The SUV was driving through a partially dried natural riverbed, with cliffs towering above; perhaps the engine's echo triggered vibrations, causing several rocks to detach from the cliff face and crash heavily toward the vehicle.

REX and Fist Tyrant's expressions changed instantly; the former yanked the steering wheel hard, using superior driving skills to execute an extreme drift and avoid the largest falling boulder.

The latter flipped onto the roof, his hands forming palms, gathering purple-red qi, and with lightning speed, precisely caught the thousand-jin falling stone.

As a top talent cultivated by the Guangdong Special Affairs Bureau, Fist Tyrant's power system was robust and straightforward—nothing but "body refining."

Of course, body refining offered countless paths: the orthodox Wu Xia novel ideal of "external training of tendons, bones, and skin, internal training of one breath," and the xuanhuan trope of entering the Dao through martial arts, where human wrath reverses heaven and earth—these were clearly not the same.

On the advice of the think tank and logistics team, Fist Tyrant chose the most stable body refining method: gathering rare herbs like thousand-year lingzhi, snow lotus, hundred-year ginseng, and blood bodhi (partly from indigenous barter in script worlds, partly from real-world herbal cultivation bases), soaking for months in medicinal baths to cleanse marrow and shed skin, transforming his body entirely, while supplementing with remote tutorial instruction from over ten Lv30 close-combat transcenders to master the awakening and application of "qi."

As the saying goes, mastery of one method unlocks all others; after autonomously mastering "qi," Fist Tyrant could perform basic techniques like Eighteen Dragon Subduing Palms and One Yang Finger without skill scrolls, and by extension, learned lightness techniques like Snow-Step Without Trace and external arts like Golden Bell Shield and Iron Shirt.

In raw physical strength alone, he could wrestle Captain America to a draw, and all his martial arts didn't occupy skill slots.

For instance, now: Fist Tyrant clasped the thousand-jin falling stone with both palms, his palms soft yet internally forceful, bending his knees to perfectly dissipate most of the impact, twisting his waist and shifting his shoulders to hurl the stone violently away, preventing it from crushing the roof.

Thud!

The SUV screeched to a halt; as the left side lifted high, about to tip over, Wu Quan stomped down, restoring the vehicle's balance.

Wu Quan exhaled deeply, turned his head backward, and saw the second armored vehicle, driven by the other four teammates, slowly come to a stop.

Out stepped three figures: Human Computer · Ada, Lv14—the artificial mechanical life created by the Whale Song Guild that Li Cheng had encountered during the Immortal Court Lawyer mission.

Abdul, Lv12, a Middle Eastern man affiliated with the mid-sized guild 【Saladin's Eagle】;

Alcy, Lv12, a half-cyborg girl with pink long hair, affiliated with the mid-sized guild 【Mech Thunder】—the same guild as Blood Lion Roar.

"We need to set up camp and rest. Priya can't hold out much longer."

Alcy, whose body—down to her jaw—had been replaced with prosthetics, spoke seriously to Wu Quan.

Priya was the last teammate, Lv12, affiliated with the 【Nuwutong Alliance】 guild, a psychic with telepathic abilities; only through her could the players have endured six days under the nightmare curse.

"I—I can feel it. Danger. Terrible danger is approaching."

In the SUV's back seat, the girl wrapped in a headscarf burned with fever, half-conscious, muttering, "Non-human monsters wearing human skins, and pirates with blood-soaked hands— they're watching us..."

Priya's words were incoherent and hard to understand, yet everyone present took them seriously; Wu Quan clenched his lips slightly and asked the customer service Yuan through the Wanyan earpiece, "Sister Donglian, can we get through the canyon ahead?"

"Yes."

The Wanyan earpiece wasn't limited to auditory information—it also had a top-down visual capture function, showing the scenery within a certain radius around the earpiece.

The canyon ahead was blocked by massive boulders; Yuan Donglian only needed to transmit the image back to the Special Affairs Bureau headquarters, where idle supercomputers would analyze the rock formation's stress map and determine passability.

Upon receiving Yuan Donglian's reply, Wu Quan nodded to REX, who understood immediately, stepped down from the driver's seat, stripped off his shirt and pants, and with a pained roar, his body swelled and deformed into a triceratops eight meters long, weighing nine tons, with three horns and a neck shield of bony plates.

REX belonged to the 【Monster Alliance】 guild; his name itself derived from the type species of Tyrannosaurus rex, allowing him to transform into a series of Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous dinosaurs, led by the T. rex.

Clank!

REX used his horns to pry open the rubble, carving a passage. Then he circled behind the rocks, reverted to human form, put on his clothes and pants again, and leapt back into the driver's seat.

The two SUVs passed through the canyon, drove another twenty kilometers, exited the canyon zone, and arrived at a cluster of abandoned buildings.

The buildings were constructed from limestone resembling coral, narrow at the base and wide at the top, with hollowed crowns, resembling morels, chanterelles, and oyster mushrooms.

Morels.

The roads had streets, the buildings had doors and windows, the interiors held tables, chairs, and beds, even vessels for holding food; from the food inside those vessels, long since rotted to dust, it was clear the original owners of the entire complex had died out over a hundred years ago.

The roads had streets, the buildings had doors and windows, interiors held tables, chairs, beds, even vessels containing food; from the dust-like decayed grains inside the vessels, it was clear the original inhabitants had died out over a hundred years ago.

The area was steeped in ominous energy, but Priya's condition no longer allowed them to travel further.

Wu Quan and his companions conferred briefly, then pulled out a capsule and tossed it to the ground.

The capsule split open, and from within rose a polyhedral steel-frame shelter.

The capsule split open, revealing a polygonal steel-frame shelter.

Six legs supported the shelter, lifting it ten meters above ground; each of its four corners mounted an automatic machine gun, and a high-power omnidirectional antenna sat atop.

This space capsule was expensive—equivalent to a junior version of the Seventh-Ring Spell: Mansion. Wu Quan's allocation of a space capsule indirectly proved the level of attention he received from the Special Affairs Bureau.

REX and the others rode the elevator up into the shelter; Human Computer Ada released thousands of small drones, which swiftly scanned the building cluster, confirmed no signs of life, then landed on the mushroom rooftops and activated their sensor cameras as reconnaissance.

Having survived six days in the wild, the group had ample experience and avoided the abstract trope of some fictional works where someone declares, "It's too dangerous to stay together—I'm going to sleep in my own room"; instead, they gathered in the shelter's main hall, turned on the lights, sealed the doors and windows, took turns on watch, and cared for the feverish, unconscious Priya.

They did not know that far above, in the high-altitude clouds, Li Cheng and Grey Rain sat inside a hovering Edge Fighter, observing them through binoculars.

"Six players,"

【61】 Li Cheng lowered his binoculars, rubbed his chin, "average level Lv13..."

Hui Yu pinched his knuckles and asked softly, "They're moving closer to the toy factory—should we eliminate them?"

"They're just passing by accidentally; do I kill them just for that? I'm not born a killer."

Li Cheng rolled his eyes; theoretically, a light-speed elbow strike could reduce Wu Quan and the others to base particles before their pain nerves even registered the signal.

But first, these six are merely passing through—they're not heading for the toy factory.

Second, Wu Quan is still a Mobile Task Force operative; we're all comrades.

Third, Wu Quan still wears the Ten-Eye communication earpiece; Xiao Yuan from the Ten-Eye Command Center can record footage in real time and analyze it frame by frame. The impact signature of a light-speed elbow strike is too distinctive—it'd be easily recognized.

"Then what do we do?" Hui Yu asked.

"Hmm…"

The toy factory is Li Cheng's foundation—he cannot under any circumstances let it be exposed.

If Wu Quan and the others don't know their exact location, that's fine; but if they've encountered or will encounter maps from other guilds, it risks exposing the toy factory.

After a moment's thought, Li Cheng slammed his palm. "Killing them or appearing as Master Pi Fu to make contact—both are unacceptable."

"The best solution is to scare them away—get them moving far from the toy factory as soon as possible."

He picked up the phone worm and dialed the Smart Core: "Pause production. Summon all servitors. Form teams for cinematography, lighting, art, props, and set design."

Li Cheng intended to stage a grand performance.

Ding.

The microwave lit up. Wu Quan pulled out a steaming lunchbox and handed it to Alci, the semi-cyborg girl tending to Priya. "Eat something."

Alci had once been a severely disabled, bedridden patient from a traffic accident; after becoming a player, she immediately took out a loan to install numerous cybernetics—but her digestive system remained human, requiring caloric intake from food.

Alcyone had originally been a severely disabled, bedridden patient due to a traffic accident; after becoming a player, she immediately took out a loan to install numerous cybernetic implants, yet her digestive system remained human-original, requiring caloric intake from food.

Alci took the lunchbox. The Level-One Special Affairs Bureau cafeteria chefs were all Logistics-tier transcendents; their meals weren't just visually appealing, aromatic, and delicious—they came with built-in buffs.

It was just a Cantonese dry-fried beef hor fun, but as she took a bite, Alci suddenly glimpsed her grandmother's kind, smiling face.

The others also took their lunchboxes, eating while tears streamed down their faces unbidden.

Ada, an artificial mechanical lifeform, didn't pick up her chopsticks (she had no digestive function); instead, she multitasked—feeding warm seafood porridge to half-conscious Priya while mentally replaying the mission footage over and over.

This mission was named "Dream Demon Curse." Phase One: twelve players were teleported into the killing ground, instructed by the system to reach a Republican-era residence deep in Shenshan.

The killing ground physically connected to countless worlds; besides absorbing people and structures from Earth through rifts, it also manifested buildings from other worlds and eras.

That Republican-era residence likely came from some alternate timeline; on its altar stood a black dancing deity statue draped in bloodstained rags.

The statue had no head; at its severed neck, a cotton wick burned with a cold, green flame.

After destroying the statue, all players—including Ada and the semi-cyborg Alci—were cursed: red blotches appeared on their backs, and thereafter they continuously encountered supernatural phenomena.

Some were dragged into mirrors by pale, swollen arms and vanished;

Others lost consciousness and jumped off cliffs of their own accord;

Still others smiled as they carved out each other's hearts with blades.

Wu Quan and the others fled the old house; for the next six days, they struggled to survive, guided solely by Priya's telepathic abilities—according to her, the curse's intensity wasn't static; it generally strengthened over time but also fluctuated with the players' movements.

Wu Quan and the others fled the old mansion, and for the next six days struggled to survive, guided entirely by Priya, who possessed telepathic abilities—according to her predictions, the curse's intensity of the Dream Demon's hex was not constant, gradually strengthening over time while also fluctuating in strength with the players' movements.

REX set down his lunchbox with a solemn expression. "By killing ground convention, the closer we get to the deadline, the more intense the attacks will likely become."

The atmosphere inside the shelter grew oppressive, broken only by the faint hum of the air conditioner (the shelter was a pressurized, airtight structure; odor molecules were recycled to prevent native killing ground creatures from tracking them by scent).

"If there's truly no hope of clearing this, I'll force-exit, return to the real world, and spend my last moments with my family."

REX spoke honestly—while regular missions allowed force-exit, the penalty for failing this one was turning the next mission into a punishment mission, which was nearly as good as death.

The others remained silent. After a long while, Abdulah sighed. "Now I think about it, Phase Two was probably a trap laid by the killing ground."

"'Escape the old house, survive seven days'—maybe the key to breaking the curse lies within the house itself."

Wu Quan fell silent for a moment, then shook his head. "... It's useless to say this now. Besides, we were cautious enough—we spent half a day searching every inch of the house before destroying the statue and found no clues…"

Before he finished speaking, Wu Quan's face changed drastically—he shot up from his seat. So did Ada, the highest-ranked person present.

A faint, piercing moan came from outside.

A faint, piercing moan came from outside the house.

Accompanying the moan was the thudding sound of pillars being struck.

Something was crawling toward the shelter.

Something is crawling toward the shelter.