Chapter 7: Great, I've Been Targeted by an Evil God

The fourth death rule.

These few words slammed into everyone's hearts like stones, making them feel as if the air around them had frozen solid and breathing had become difficult.

Why is there a fourth death rule?!

Didn't the mission say to find three?!

"Why does everyone only see the words 'main quest' and not pay attention to its prefix?" Wu Wang said with a sunny, beaming smile.

【Personal Main Quest: Find three death rules within the allotted time】

The prefix is—personal!

The glasses-wearing man's face suddenly changed drastically.

Even the fear he had felt from speaking out in the darkness earlier was completely gone, leaving only anger and resentment toward Wu Wang.

"Oh right, right, right, that's the look—regret, anger, even hatred, as if I'm the one who killed you all, completely forgetting that entering this classroom was a path you chose yourselves."

"Those who kill are killed by others, that's all."

Wu Wang said with cold mockery.

A group of murderous criminals to the extreme, still expecting him to show mercy?

He had noticed this word trap from the very beginning.

The word "personal" meant the quest required standing alone at the microphone to speak out three death rules, and then to 【accuse】 the 【Ghost】.

So he had been guiding the others to listen to him speak the death rules, making them mistakenly believe that simply finding them was enough.

This way, only he himself satisfied the personal main quest.

Logically speaking, this instance only allowed the 【Accuser】 to clear it alive.

But Wu Wang had also deduced that the 【Ghost】 must be hiding within the shadows.

During the day there were fifty shadows, and without determining its movement pattern in a short time, it was impossible to find the 【Ghost】.

Only in the darkness, when the 【Ghost】 was forced to hide in the sole remaining shadow—that of the 【Accuser】—could it be caught.

But the irony was—

The 【Accuser】 would be erased along with it.

In other words, the only condition to clear the instance was itself a dead end.

This damned instance had never intended to let anyone leave alive!

"I also thank everyone for using your lives to put on a good show with me. Now then, farewell everyone, and I wish you a pleasant journey of death."

Wu Wang smiled, turned his right toe inward to tap the ground beside his left foot, spun his right hand in two circles before placing it before his chest, and at the same time leaned his body forward thirty degrees to perform a standard hand-circling salute.

Like an elegant gentleman taking his bow at the curtain call to bid farewell to the audience.

As his curtain-call ceremony began, a piercing wail erupted from the shadow beneath his feet.

The 【Ghost】 had been caught.

The light vanished from the eyes of the murderers below, one after another collapsing to the ground boneless and lifeless.

Death descended so abruptly.

The glasses-wearing man still wanted to say something, but the next second he too collapsed silently and died.

Wu Wang had satisfied the clear condition.

The losers were being settled by the instance.

At the same time, in the real world—

The livestream chat had already exploded, question marks flooding the screen.

"If this motherfucker is a newbie I'll eat my hat!"

"Which big shot got a hidden item and snuck into the newbie tutorial?"

"So how the hell did he ignore the death rules?"

"You'd do better to ask God; I can send you to meet Him."

Whether seasoned players of the Calamity Game or those big shots secretly observing.

Without exception, all were shocked by everything inside the instance.

From beginning to end, all the murderers had been led around by the nose by this newbie.

Such masterful strategy and contempt for the instance's rules—no wonder some suspected this was a big shot wearing a newbie skin to slip into the tutorial.

"Wait! Look at his feet!"

Suddenly, someone noticed that Wu Wang, who should have been the sole victor, had suddenly sat down on the ground.

More than half of his legs had already vanished.

The clearer was also being settled!

This was a situation that had never appeared in the Calamity Game before!

Click—

【Livestream Ended】

【The final closed-beta player accounts have been distributed】

【Please look forward to the game's open beta】

Before more people could notice the anomaly, the livestream room was shut down by the game system.

Now the players were even more restless.

They discussed heatedly with one another what exactly had happened in that final scene.

Unfortunately, they had no way to continue observing the Calamity Game's situation through the livestream.

After all, the system had indicated from the start that this was the final pre-registration instance.

The APP would only livestream newbie instances, meaning from now on there would never be another instance livestream again.

But as one of the few entities aware of the inside story, the strange woman in the seaside villa merely smiled faintly.

She knew the sacrifice had been completed.

"With this, I will have the qualification to contest for Administrator privileges."

Carrying visions of a bright future, the strange woman took out a spirit tablet, bit her fingertip to let fresh blood flow, and wrote her name upon the spirit tablet.

She was now going to control Li Guoqiang's corpse to seize the 【Descent Object】.

That was a tool tainted by the aura of an unspeakable existence, and also the stepping stone to unlock the true face of the Spirit Calamity Game.

According to the strange woman's investigation.

Its form should be a piece of clothing.

————

Inside the instance classroom.

Only half a head remained on the podium.

The next second, the cut at the neck of that skull began to writhe wildly.

Bones, flesh, the nervous system, skin, and even hair grew like mad within a mere second.

In an instant, Wu Wang reappeared.

Slowly opening his dead-fish eyes, he sighed: "Indeed, it wasn't that easy to die. Pity."

Boom!

Before his words had finished.

A tremendous roar broke the classroom's deathly silence.

Following it came an earthquake-like tremor; the entire building... no! The entire instance was wailing, emitting a piercing crackling sound as if about to shatter.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

All the stage lights shattered in succession; the brand-new seats began to show patches of rust, and the wooden floorboards emitted a creaking sound of rot and unbearable burden.

The classroom, which should have plunged into darkness again, turned a dim blood-red.

Because a bizarre red sun had inexplicably appeared in the sky, hanging there to illuminate it.

Whoosh—

A corpse, ignoring gravity, shot upward toward the red sun like a missile.

Immediately after, all the corpses began to hover in mid-air.

They slammed violently toward the red sun like moths flying into a flame.

During flight, the corpses constantly underwent strange distortions and rot; even a few individual corpses grew countless eyes, plus fish gills, scales, and even tentacles—organs not belonging to humans.

In the blink of an eye, only Wu Wang remained here.

Before he could even think about what had happened, the system's cold mechanical voice began to echo within the classroom—

【Instance 1008611 is being polluted by %&*#】

【Intercept! Intercept failed!】

【Data anomaly! Forcibly logging out players!】

【Logout failed!】

"No way, bro, is your damn game optimization this bad? Even the Xinshou Sect tutorial has a BUG?" Wu Wang helplessly complained: "Still 'logout failed'! Are you Akihiko Kayaba?"

Although unclear what had happened, it was obvious this was not a normal game flow.

Buzz—

A bizarre humming sound exploded within Wu Wang's skull.

In an instant, his eyes filled with blood; whispers that were far and near and completely unintelligible echoed in his ears, as if a chaotic, disordered musical score was being played, delivering a massive shock to his mind and consciousness.

He could feel his sanity gradually collapsing.

In a trance, he even saw his own feet beginning to fuse together into the webbed feet of some animal, his skin growing coarse brown hair, and his fingers transforming into twisted tentacles that danced out of control.

"Now I don't even need makeup to play an NPC in a dungeon..."

Before the remaining consciousness could finish its complaint, Wu Wang saw a scene he would never forget—

The red sun blinked.

Splat!

The body, transformed into a flesh-and-blood blur of a monster, seemed unable to withstand some power and exploded with a boom.

Exploding along with it was a spirit tablet that had just happened to float out from within Wu Wang's body.

The wooden spirit tablet directly rotted into dust.

But the next second, the corpse pieces on the ground writhed and fused back together.

Wu Wang resurrected in the form of a normal human!

Restored to a healthy state, his eyes held a mad excitement.

He completely failed to notice the appearance, rotting, and shattering of the spirit tablet just now.

His entire attention was on the sky.

"That's the feeling! That's it! It might be able to truly kill me!"

Thinking this, Wu Wang struggled to lift his head and tried once more to lock eyes with that red sun.

But just as their gazes were about to meet.

A system prompt appeared at an inopportune moment.

【Instance 1008611 core data is damaged】

【Destroying instance content】

【Player forced logout successful】

【Compensation reward has been issued】

【Hidden condition achieved, please claim your reward】

The instant the voice appeared, Wu Wang found himself back in a stretch of darkness.

This place was very similar to the dark space he had been endlessly falling through when he first came in.

The difference was that now he could move freely.

Before he could even take a step to investigate, an information prompt glowing with a ghostly light floated up before his eyes—

【Welcome to the Spirit Disaster Game】

【Player #9527 has been successfully registered】

【Please enter your nickname】

Seeing a user-friendly keyboard panel appear before him, Wu Wang instinctively prepared to type in an ID.

But the moment he raised his right hand, he noticed something off.

On the inner side of his wrist, a red vertical pupil had inexplicably appeared, like a simple doodle.

Staring straight at it, he could even feel those eerie, muffled whispers returning by his ear, his thoughts growing sluggish, and his San value beginning to plummet like mad.

He didn't need to think to know where that mark had come from.

Wu Wang immediately turned his head away.

Yet a storm surged in his heart.

"Damn! Why'd they slap a quarantine tag on me? Is that peeping-tom creep of a Cthulhu fixating on me now?"

What had hung in the sky earlier wasn't some red sun at all.

It was an eye, enormous as a blazing sun!

A being whose mere glance caused the dungeon instance to collapse and break — calling it an evil god wouldn't be overstating things.

Besides, the thing was, like Cthulhu, indescribable and impossible to look at directly.

To avoid seeing the red vertical pupil and ending up foggy-headed, carelessly picking some random player nickname,

Wu Wang lowered his right hand and raised his left.

Skillfully, he typed out a line of text.

【Qing Wo Gang Men Hui Shang Ying (Nickname available)】

He didn't click confirm right away.

Instead, he deleted it and kept typing new content.

【Zhang Wei (Nickname available)】

【Bie Ai ↑ Ai ↓ Mo Jie Nao (Nickname available)】

【3.1415926 (Nickname available)】

…………

In that dark space, Wu Wang spent roughly half an hour trying out every kind of nickname imaginable.

Some were vulgar and foul, some were cliché, some touched on religious beliefs, and some even shared names with great historical figures.

No matter what, the display always read "Nickname available."

"Interesting. Looks like this game has nothing to do with any nation or religion. Alien tech? Or one of those Overlord spaces from the novels?"

Of course, Wu Wang wasn't doing it out of vulgar taste.

He wanted to see where this game's limits lay, whether there were any banned words or the like — because anything designed by humans was bound to have some bottom line or untouchable content.

But clearly, it didn't.

He could even name himself after certain bodily organs and still pass review!

This thing was absolutely taboo-free!

He thought it over once more, carefully.

Finally, with utmost solemnity, he typed out on the panel the player ID that would follow him for life — this was not something to be careless about.

【Confirm nickname as — Wei Wang Ren】

【Confirm】

【Wei Wang Ren #9527 successfully registered】

【Unlocking personal information panel…】