Chapter 65

To prove his human identity, Taylor pulled out his employee badge, then showed the back of his neck to indicate no chip was implanted, and cautiously asked with a flickering gaze: "By the way, exactly who are you all?"

Since this wasn't a scripted mission, he could see the players' true appearances, and had noticed Li Cheng's earlier action of summoning a shotgun out of thin air.

"You can think of us as some kind of rescue personnel."

Li Cheng said: "We need to reach the bunker's main control room and open the main gate. Do you know how to get there?"

"The main control room? The doors and gate buttons there require the bunker supervisor's personal key."

Taylor said: "When the disaster first happened, the PA system here still worked—it broadcast the supervisor's own voice, telling everyone to find shelter and wait for rescue."

"The PA system is in the command center, same as the main control room, both on the west side. I'll lead you there."

As a survivor who had barely escaped the monsters, Taylor's enthusiasm seemed excessive; the driver tilted his head and asked: "You're so eager to guide us—does your wife and children also lie in that direction?"

"Uh, yes."

Exposed, Taylor looked uneasy and quickly added: "My wife is a senior staff member here with high clearance—she can open many doors. And she's hiding along the way to the command center; it won't delay us."

The driver merely smirked, gesturing for Taylor to keep leading.

Though he didn't treat other world's humans like mere NPC characters in a game, slaughtering them without guilt, neither was he particularly maternal.

If he saw someone, he'd save them—nothing more.

To prove his worth, Taylor racked his brain, constantly sharing information along the way: "The entire theme park is roughly divided into four zones: Ocean Terror, Realm of the Dead, Dark Cemetery, and End World—each housing different monster types for tourist viewing."

"But now the park's security system has shut down, monsters are roaming everywhere, so zones don't matter anymore. On my way here, I even saw werewolves fighting vampires."

"Wait, monsters attack each other?" Su Jie asked in confusion. "We also saw zombies and transformed corpses eating corpses together."

"The more similar a monster's attributes, the more likely they are to attack each other. That's the theory."

Taylor said: "Zombies and transformed corpses might coexist peacefully—perhaps zombies see transformed corpses as not worth eating? Or maybe their levels are just too low."

Could a transformed corpse that can't be killed even by decapitation really be low-level? Then what counts as high-level?

Su Jie's confusion was immediately answered.

Just around the corner, a square metal box lay quietly in the middle of the corridor.

"Holy shit!"

All three players shouted in unison, freezing in place.

The box was about fifteen centimeters per side, black and gold, its surface engraved with intricate, ornate patterns that resembled both script and symbols.

Li Cheng clicked his tongue and said to his companions: "I'll offer two hundred game coins—anyone willing to go touch that box?"

"I'll offer four hundred gold bars," the driver said, voice thick with suffering.

"I'll offer six hundred bitcoins," Su Jie said, face taut.

The box ahead was called the Lemarchand Box, also known as the Magic Cube, Puzzle Box, or Box of Mourning—originating from the classic horror film series Hellraiser.

Once opened correctly, it summons a demon emissary from Hell to hunt down the opener, pursuing them until their body is torn to shreds and their soul dragged back to Hell for endless torment.

The demon emissary, represented by Pinhead, possesses supernatural abilities including but not limited to: immortality, pain immunity, teleportation, invisibility, wall-piercing, summoning chain hooks, gravity control, and spatial distortion.

Even among all horror movie monsters, the demon emissary ranks among the most deranged.

Its only two weaknesses: it can only be summoned by opening the box, and when the box is restored to its original form, it is teleported back to Hell.

"Don't touch the puzzle box and you're safe," Li Cheng said seriously. "Let's stick to the edges."

The three players and one native moved in a comically awkward posture, all pressing against the wall, backs flush, slowly circling the box.

Then they bolted, running until the next corner, where they finally exhaled.

"That was close," Li Cheng mused. "Last time I was this terrified was during the Curse mission—I got hit by seven waves of curse attacks in a row."

Hey, hey, hey—that's from Infinite Crisis, isn't it? Do you even remember your Chu Xuan persona?

Su Jie couldn't hold it anymore: "I thought you weren't afraid of anything."

"Danger is an objective description of reality; fear is a subjective emotion. Don't confuse the two."

Li Cheng glanced at him. "Xiao Honglü, you need to be more rigorous—if you can't, you'll never replace me as the Zhongzhou Team's top strategist. Penalty: five hundred Olympiad math problems. No calculators allowed."

You've had enough.

Su Jie rubbed his temples and looked ahead.

Ahead appeared to be the Ocean Terror zone Taylor mentioned—the terrain suddenly opened up, featuring water park slides, wave machines, and a lazy river.

But due to broken pipes and a failed water filtration system, the once-clear water was now murky, obscuring the bottom.

Li Cheng scanned the map at the water park entrance—indeed, as Taylor said, they had to pass through here to reach the main control room.

He rolled up his sleeves, removed his armguard-shaped 【Holographic Bone Corridor】, restored it to a doorway shape, stepped inside, and retrieved an inflatable rubber boat.

Even prepared this? The driver and Su Jie exchanged glances, silently choosing not to ask or comment.

They'd seemingly been forced to accept this "Chu Xuan's" oddities—feeling he could pull out any bizarre thing imaginable.

The group boarded the rubber boat and followed Taylor's directions toward where his wife and daughter were hiding.

Vrrrr—

The rubber boat's engine echoed through the vast, silent space.

The calm surface was disturbed as over a dozen mangled human corpses and several massive shark carcasses slowly rose from the murky water.

Classic great whites, double-headed sharks from The Jaws of Death, triple-headed sharks from The Three-Headed Shark, five-headed sharks from—

Basically, a bunch of trashy sea monsters.

The common trait among all these sea monster corpses: their skin and flesh had been stripped away, revealing grim white bone.

Since underwater visibility was poor, for safety, Su Jie put on his 【Ten Thousand Eyes Communication Earpiece】. Amid suffocating silence, the kayak safely crossed the water and came to shore.

Taylor leapt out first, rushing to a storage room door and whispering urgently: "Lijiana, Carol, are you in there?"

"Dad?"

A girl's tearful voice came from inside the wooden door; as it opened from within, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl flung herself into Taylor's arms.

Taylor held his daughter tightly and asked in a low voice: "Lijiana, where's your mother?"

The little girl sobbed as she wiped away her tears, then raised her hand and pointed to a corner of the storage room—beneath a pile of junk, a woman's corpse could be seen, long since drained of color.

Clearly she had been injured while leading her daughter to the safehouse; though she had crudely and roughly stitched the wound with needle and thread, she had still died from blood loss.

There was no time for the father and daughter to grieve. Li Cheng narrowed his eyes and looked up at the ceiling—something seemed to be stirring in there.

Clang, clang, clang—

From the ventilation ducts came the sound of something scurrying, growing from far to near, reaching the storage room within seconds. With a bang, it blasted away the grate panel.

It was a section of a grey tentacle belonging to a soft-bodied creature, thick as a python, forked at the tip, with hideous, terrifying barbs and suckers inside.

Its name was an Octowa-class creature, from the film *Deep Rising*—a colossal deep-sea vampire octopus that lived at depths of ten thousand meters, possessing countless tentacles, each with its own sensory organs and independent mind. In a single night, it could devour every one of the thousands of passengers aboard a cruise liner.

"Get out of here!"

Without needing Su Jie's shouted warning, Taylor scooped up his daughter and bolted out of the storage room. But in the corridor outside, the grate panels of the ventilation ducts—installed at regular intervals—had all been blasted away, and dozens of bloodsucking tentacles came slithering in.

When the moment came to fight for their lives, the players stopped holding back. The motorcyclist took out three Poké Balls and slammed them on the ground. Besides the Mankey that had appeared earlier, there was also a Pikachu and a Cyndaquil.

Su Jie also used some kind of summoning skill, generating seven Crystal Golems that fired laser beams at the tentacles.

Li Cheng held a machine gun in both hands, and the three players took turns providing covering fire, blasting apart a great number of tentacles—but the tentacles seemed endless, pouring out of the ventilation ducts in an unceasing stream.

Just as the few were fighting and retreating, all the tentacles seemed to sense something and stopped moving, hanging in the air.

A strong sense of foreboding gripped their hearts. The three players turned their heads and saw, in the corridor behind them, a little girl in red with disheveled hair and bare feet had appeared at some unknown moment.

There are many horror characters with this image, but the most famous is only one—Alma Wade, from the video game series *F. E. A. R. *

The game's plot is fairly complex. Simply put, Alma is a powerful psionic who suffered immense physical and mental torment and harbors a towering hatred for the world. Even after her body died, her soul could continue to exist as a vengeful spirit.

With a deep-sea behemoth ahead and a psionic vengeful spirit behind, caught between a rock and a hard place, Alma made the choice for the players.

She took one step. With a bang, the tentacles nearest to her burst apart for no apparent reason.

The motorcyclist, merely because he was standing closer to the front, also had an arm blown off out of thin air; the stump at his shoulder was a mangled mess of flesh.

Li Cheng unhesitatingly pulled a shoulder-fired rocket launcher plastered with talismans from his inventory and pulled the trigger on the girl in red.

Whoosh—

The rocket accelerated at full speed, reaching within five meters of Alma in an instant, its tail continuously spewing flames to provide thrust—yet no matter what, it could not advance a single inch further.

Seeing this, Li Cheng raised his machine gun and fired precise aimed shots at the rocket's warhead suspended in midair.

Boom!

The rocket's warhead was manually detonated, the roar deafening. Yet before Alma there seemed to be an invisible, indestructible force field that isolated the flames, the shockwave, and even the exorcising spiritual power attached to it.

"Sorry to disturb you. I'll be going."

Li Cheng gave a dry laugh, put away the rocket launcher, and without hesitation sprinted in the opposite direction, shouting to his teammates: "Run!"

(End of this chapter)