A bizarre and terrifying experience; I messed up the dungeon world.

After dinner, Wang Jianguo took Gu Tian to the second floor. Lin Jue said she would go sit in the courtyard for a while. Li Ming went back to his room, leaving only Zhou Lang and Han Yingying in the hall.

Zhou Lang reread the dungeon prompts.

[Hint: In broad daylight, the dead are not truly dead; as night falls, their true form is revealed.]

[Hint: Find the origin of the event, resolve your obsession, and clear the dungeon.]

"So all those weirdos during the day were pretending to be people," Han Yingying copied these two clues into her phone's notes. "The boss and the woman in the apron are most likely weirdos. We've been with them all day."

"That's how the dungeon is designed," Zhou Lang said. "The danger is at night."

"What is the origin of this? Why have so many people died here?"

"We haven't found out yet," he paused, "but there's a clue. The area where the exterior wall was repaired is on the wall corresponding to 403. The repair wasn't a renovation; someone was doing something, and they did it in a hurry, using uneven materials."

Han Yingying understood, "There's something buried in the wall."

"It's not just about burying," Zhou Lang said. "The cement that you repaired was bulging because the contents were too big to be completely filled."

The hall fell silent for a moment.

Han Yingying put down her phone. "People."

Zhou Lang did not answer, which was taken as tacit agreement.

---

Soon, a noise came from upstairs. It was the sound of the door to 403 being opened. The hinges hadn't been maintained, and there was a dull thud when it was pushed open, then it went silent.

After about four or five minutes of silence, Gu Tian suddenly ran down the stairs. She walked very fast, but her expression was not right—not panic, but more like a suppressed excitement that she had disguised as ordinary tension.

"The walls in 403 are all cement," she said, standing at the bottom of the stairs. "They're built from the floor to the ceiling, very thick, and there's something buried inside; we can see the outline."

"A human silhouette?" Han Yingying asked.

Gu Tian nodded. "The shape of the hand, and other things, but it's not very clear. Wang Jianguo is on top of it. He said he wants to chisel open a little bit of the cement layer to see what's inside."

Zhou Lang stood up and walked towards the stairs. "Did he bring any tools?"

"He brought it; he has tools to enhance his skills, and he said he could handle it with his bare hands."

Zhou Lang quickened his pace by two steps.

---

Room 403 was more oppressive than he had expected. The entire interior wall was made of cement, grayish-white in color, and uneven. Under the light of a cell phone flashlight, several obvious bulges could be seen, some shaped like curled fingers, while others were more blurry and unrecognizable.

Wang Jianguo stood in front of the wall, holding a heavy screwdriver he had taken out of his toolbox. He was forcefully chiseling at the cement layer, and had already made a shallow cut, with cement fragments scattered all over the ground.

"Don't move," Zhou Lang said.

Wang Jianguo didn't stop. "Almost done. Just dig a little deeper and we'll be able to see inside."

"I said don't move," Zhou Lang stepped forward and stood beside him, his voice lowered by an octave, "Didn't you see that outline moving?"

Wang Jianguo's hand stopped.

Everyone looked at the wall, where the most obvious outline of a hand was. At that moment, the curvature of the knuckles changed slightly. It was very subtle, but under the flashlight beam, the change in the shadow was real.

There's something inside the wall, it's alive—

No, they haven't left yet.

Gu Tian took a step back, her heel brushing against the threshold. She looked down, regained her balance, and found that the paper crane she had folded earlier was now clutched in her hand, wrinkled from being squeezed.

"Get out," Zhou Lang said, turning around. "Everyone, come out."

Lin Jue appeared at the doorway without anyone noticing. "What is it?"

"Those we can't afford to mess with, come out first."

Wang Jianguo put down the screwdriver, walked out the door, and said, "Okay, I'll listen to you. Come out first."

But as soon as he finished speaking, the flashlights in the room suddenly went out.

It wasn't that there was no power, it was that the power was cut off, as if something had slapped the light source out. At the same time, the door to 403 slammed shut behind them, the hinges making a sharp metallic sound, like fingernails scraping a blackboard.

Zhou Lang and the others stood in the corridor and did not go in. Even when the door closed, there were still people in the corridor, but they were not in room 403.

Only Wang Jianguo.

He just walked out the door, but before the door closed, did he completely come out?

"I'm here," Wang Jianguo's voice came from the corridor, sounding about two meters behind them. "It's okay, I'm coming out."

Zhou Lang turned around, and there was indeed Wang Jianguo standing in the corridor, shining a flashlight, his face expressionless.

It should be fine.

There was a three-second silence in the corridor, then a sound came from inside room 403.

It wasn't a sound a human could make; it was a wet, dull thud, the sound of something being dragged, that came through the door, echoed briefly in the corridor, and then disappeared.

Han Yingying didn't speak, Gu Tian didn't speak either, and Lin Jue took a few steps back to the window at the end of the corridor.

"What else is inside?" Wang Jianguo asked Zhou Lang.

"There's one inside the wall," Zhou Lang said. "There's one outside the wall."

"Where is the one outside the wall now?"

Zhou Lang did not answer immediately.

At the other end of the corridor, Li Ming emerged from his room at some point and stood in the shadows, head down, hands hanging at his sides. His shadow, cast on the ground in the moonlight, was not aligned with his outline, but rather tilted nearly forty degrees to the right, as if some other thing shared the same body with him, and the shadow was of that thing.

Zhou Lang used the observation mirror for one last observation.

[Emotional State: The original entity no longer exists. Current Occupant: A remnant of obsession, with a strong directional influence.]

He put the observation mirror away.

I used it up in three uses.

Wang Jianguo followed his gaze to Li Ming, "He..."

"Don't make a sound," Zhou Lang said in a low voice, "Don't provoke it."

Li Ming stood there, slowly raising his head, his gaze falling on them. Moonlight shone on his face, and his eyes held nothing that a player should have; they were like two empty holes filled with something else.

He spoke, his voice was Li Ming's, but the tone was completely different, "...They're all here."

"Who?" Han Yingying asked.

"The dead are all here; they can't get out."

After saying that, he lowered his head and remained motionless, like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

---

At 10 p.m., the system sent a notification.

[WARNING: This instance contains internal player risks. Please be aware.]

Zhou Lang placed his phone face down on the bedside table and stared at the ceiling.

He hadn't encountered the term "internal player risk" before. It meant that the threat didn't just come from the supernatural, but also from fellow players.

He mentally went through the five faces that had been in the hall that day.

Wang Jianguo is straightforward and impulsive. He started acting without doing any assessment before entering 403, a habit that will inevitably cause problems in high-difficulty dungeons.

Lin Jue is shrewd and observant, but before entering the room, she left the door slightly ajar. It wasn't that she forgot; it was a habit of leaving herself an escape route. Such people usually don't like to expose themselves completely to any kind of risk.