Players, Please Board the Train

If this dungeon refreshes every day and never closes, then the day after they clear it it would be a brand-new dungeon. Staying here after clearing would make them ticketless players. Ticketless players might never be able to leave the dungeon, so it would be best to get out by twelve-thirty noon tomorrow.

“What item did you use just now to lure Peng Fengnian and Sun Bo away?” Xu Huo asked Xiao Ling.

“Just a recorded sound,” Xiao Ling said.

“They’ve been gone a long time,” Yu Guangnan said. “If they realized it was an item, shouldn’t they have come back right away?”

The three exchanged looks and went down the corridor to the next floor. The item Xiao Ling had dropped in the hallway was gone; both ends were empty, and there was no sign of Peng Fengnian or the others.

Xu Huo pulled out his scanner and walked straight to a room about ten meters away. He pushed the door open and a thick rotting stench rolled out. Looking more closely, they found two putrefied corpses wearing items — clearly players — and it looked like they had been dead for several days.

“Are these Peng Fengnian’s companions?” Yu Guangnan asked in puzzlement. “Even if they didn’t collect their companions’ bodies, they should have at least taken the items back.”

Even if they weren’t companions, grabbing two items wouldn’t be hard, and besides, there didn’t seem to be any monsters here.

Xu Huo frowned and quickly returned to the doorway, glancing left and right, and soon realized where the problem lay.

“Look at the view outside the window,” he said.

Yu Guangnan didn’t notice anything wrong, but Xiao Ling reacted quickly. “The angles are off. The two positions are over ten meters apart, so the outside perspective should be different, but it hasn’t changed at all.”

Yu Guangnan stepped left and right, and after trying admitted, “We’re trapped in an even stranger space. Could it be Peng Fengnian and the others didn’t run off by themselves, but were swallowed by the space?”

To test the idea, the three of them ran around the hallway like headless flies. Not only could they not find Peng Fengnian and Sun Bo, but Teacher Pan and the others were also gone.

“They wouldn’t abandon us and leave, would they?” Xiao Ling gritted her teeth. “They must have had a hand in getting us in here!”

Xu Huo was certain that Teacher Pan and the others must know about this space and also know how to get in and out. Their purpose in bringing them here would only be to find a way out, so there’d be no reason to split up with them — unless these people didn’t actually understand the space at all and had only guessed danger and were taking a gamble.

The escape chance numbers on the item hovered between “1” and “2,” alarmingly low.

Entering the Mirror Hotel from the Corpse Hotel comes with audible footsteps and requires no effort from players, but entering this space from the Mirror Hotel needs a Spatial Item’s assistance. Although footsteps can be heard in both cases, these particular footsteps were clearly ill omens, more like bait to lead players into a trap.

Normally, train tickets and return tickets can’t be used only when a dungeon is in progress, but when entering this space they hadn’t received a dungeon notification, so it ruled out the hotel being a random dungeon.

Another situation where tickets can’t be used is being inside a container item, like the Curator of the Hundred-Person Art Gallery gifting someone a frame. But if the hotel space were inside a container item, players couldn’t use items or open their game panels, which didn’t match the current situation.

So one possibility remained: this space might not be within the Dimensional Rift’s game boundaries, like some sections along the train tracks that aren’t part of the game, in which case tickets wouldn’t work.

But could the hotel and dungeon spaces be overlapping and still produce that effect?

After failing to find other players, Xu Huo asked Xiao Ling and Yu Guangnan, “Under what circumstances can a ticket be unusable?”

“Outside the game, when a dungeon is active, or when you’re trapped in an illusion. I don’t know anything else,” Xiao Ling answered, glancing at Yu Guangnan, who shook his head to indicate he didn’t know any other answers either.

That answer gave Xu Huo an idea. He took out the bean seeds he had obtained earlier from killing a Player-Eater and scattered them on the floor.

In his mental world the bean plants looked like rice ears, but here the bean vines crawled over the walls like creeping vines.

“What is this?” Xiao Ling asked.

Xu Huo briefly explained, and Xiao Ling couldn’t help but exclaim with delight, “Doesn’t this mean we’re all in an illusion?”

“If we were fully in an illusion, how would you have received the clear-the-dungeon notification?” Xu Huo said. “There is mental interference here, but this is also an overlapping space.”

That was the odd part. Receiving the clear notification proved the game’s “signal” could reach this place. It made no sense for only tickets to be unusable. Had he guessed wrong? Were Teacher Pan and Peng Fengnian not ticket players?

“I should’ve tried it while in the Mirror Hotel,” Xiao Ling said regretfully. “I shouldn’t have been greedy for higher-level items!”

The three had a reason for not using return tickets or train tickets immediately, but now that calculation might trap them here forever!

Xu Huo followed the rapidly growing bean vines forward. The vines grew steadily all the way to the hotel’s top floor, where they surged into the central suite like a flood, breaking through the door.

Teacher Pan and the others arrived from the other staircase at the same time. The two groups glanced at each other: Teacher Pan’s group looked astonished, while Xiao Ling’s group was enraged. Before either side could say anything, a crowd of tall puppets rushed out of the room and spilled into the corridor, scattering them!

The puppets ran without making much noise, and at the same time footsteps echoed from below.

Seeing the puppets surge out as if endlessly, Teacher Pan’s group turned and fled without hesitation. Xiao Ling shouted loudly, “They’re heading out, follow them!”

She and Yu Guangnan pushed through over the puppets’ heads, but when they turned back they saw Xu Huo being swept up by puppets and disappearing at the staircase. After a brief pause they continued forward.

Xu Huo wasn’t truly trapped by the puppets. He noticed among those dressed in various clothes and holding different tools there was one particularly special puppet — dressed as a housewife and holding a kitchen cleaver.

There were many puppets with knives, but only the cleaver in that puppet’s hand had the same serial number written on it as the kitchen knife in the illusory kitchen of the treatment room, and it matched the missing knife’s size.

Using a piano wire to hook that puppet, Xu Huo grabbed the puppet’s swinging hand and successfully took the cleaver.

For a moment all the puppets froze. A second later they all widened their eyes and started stamping like thunder. The puppet Xu Huo had grabbed tore off its own arm and ran. When he looked at the severed limb, inside the socket was a pale green syringe.