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

When Han Yingying jumped out of bed, the alarm clock showed 3:14 a.m.

The curtains weren't fully drawn, and moonlight seeped in through the gaps, casting a pale white streak across the floor. She stared at that light for a full half minute before confirming that she was back in reality.

I woke up from a dream again.

Every time the dungeon ended, she would experience this "waking up" process. The first few times, she thought it was a normal physiological reaction—after all, after spending so much time in a horror game, there always needs to be a buffer period after the tension subsided. But this time was different.

This time she saw something in her dream.

Fragmented images, broken sounds, like film cut with scissors—a man in a white lab coat stands in front of an experimental table; red data jumps on the screen; someone screams, the sound coming from a distance, indistinct; then there is a door, iron gray, with a line of words printed on it.

She couldn't remember the entire line of text, but she grasped two words—"weird" and "descendance".

Han Yingying rolled out of bed, turned on the lamp, and pulled a notebook from the bedside table. This was a habit she had started after the third instance of the game. She would write down any fragments left after waking up from a dream as soon as possible.

The notebook already has more than ten pages used up.

She flipped to her previous records and compared them with the images from her dream. After the third instance, she had dreamt of a set of numbers; after the fourth instance, she had dreamt of the exterior of a building. Now, adding the man in the white coat and the iron gate in this dream—

The puzzle was beginning to take shape.

Han Yingying picked up her phone and searched for the phrase "strange occurrence." The search results were a jumbled mess: paranormal forums, horror novel recommendations, urban legend collections... nothing she was looking for.

She changed her approach and started searching for the building's features.

The building in her last dream was very distinctive—a gray concrete exterior, a dish antenna on top, and a column on each side of the main entrance. She hadn't paid much attention to it before, but now, thinking back carefully, she realized that the dish antenna had a unique shape; it wasn't a conventional satellite receiver.

I searched for twenty minutes but couldn't find a building that matched perfectly.

Han Yingying leaned against the headboard and rubbed her eyes. The light from her phone screen shone on her face, making her look several years older than she actually was. The experiences in the game were eroding her real life in some way—her classmates discussed idol worship, exams, and weekend getaways every day, while she was thinking about how to survive the next game.

"If you can't sleep, don't force yourself to sleep," she told herself.

She put on her coat and went out. The streets were eerily empty at 3:30 a.m., and the streetlights cast long shadows. Han Yingying walked along the sidewalk, her mind replaying the images from her dream.

She stopped at the third intersection.

One of the streetlights was broken. She had walked this road hundreds of times, and this light was working fine last month. On the ground beneath the streetlight, there was a black mark, irregularly shaped, as if something had been burned.

She squatted down to look.

It wasn't a burn mark. The black mass was wriggling slightly.

Han Yingying's pupils suddenly contracted. She took two steps back, her right hand instinctively reaching for her waist—a habit she'd developed in dungeons—to touch the location of her weapon. Of course, there was nothing there.

The black mass moved, then seeped into the cracks in the ground like water and disappeared.

Han Yingying stood there, her back soaked with sweat that had soaked through her underwear.

This is not a copy.

This is reality.

She took out her phone and snapped a picture. The photo only showed the empty ground and a broken streetlight; the dark mass wasn't captured.

Han Yingying bit her lip, thought for a moment, then turned and walked quickly back. She needed to investigate more.

Back home, she turned on her computer and began systematically searching for recent unusual events. News reports don't directly cover things like "the arrival of the supernatural," but if something were really happening, it would leave traces.

She found it.

In the past month, there have been seven cases of "unexplained disappearances" in the city, three times the number compared to the same period last year. Four of these cases occurred in the same area—near the Chengxi Industrial Park.

Chengxi Industrial Park.

Han Yingying pulled up a map and marked the four missing locations. Connecting them formed an irregular quadrilateral, with an abandoned factory building at the center.

She zoomed in on the map to look at the factory building.

Gray concrete exterior wall.

It's about 60% similar to the building in my dream.

Han Yingying's heart raced. She continued searching for information about the factory building—it originally belonged to a company called "Dingxin Technology," which went bankrupt three years ago, and the factory had been vacant ever since. The company's legal representative was Zhang Weiguo, and there was very little information about him online, only a business registration record and a blurry photo.

The man in the photo is wearing a suit, and his face is not clearly visible.

Han Yingying stared at the photo for a long time, feeling that she had seen the face somewhere before, but she just couldn't remember where.

Daylight was breaking. She glanced at the time: 6:20 AM. Time to get ready for school.

She was distracted in class. When the math teacher called on her to answer a question, she gave a completely unrelated answer, which drew laughter from the whole class. She didn't care; her mind was filled with the factory building and the black substance disappearing into the cracks in the ground.

My phone vibrated while I was eating lunch.

A message with no sender ID and only one line of text:

"The fifth instance is now open, S-rank, participation is mandatory. Countdown: 6 hours."

Han Yingying almost dropped her chopsticks into the soup bowl.

S grade?

The highest difficulty she had ever experienced was A-level, which was already deadly enough. She had seen discussions on player forums about what S-level meant—a mortality rate of over 70%, with generous rewards, but the prerequisite for receiving the rewards was that you had to survive.

What unsettled her even more were the words "mandatory participation." While previous instances were also mandatory, at least a day's notice was given, allowing preparation time. Six hours? What's the difference between this and forcing someone to do something against their will?

She quickly sent a message to Zhou Lang.

Did you receive it?

Three minutes later, the reply came: "Received. S-grade."

"Six hours is simply not enough to prepare."

"That's enough." Zhou Lang's reply was as brief as ever. "What props do you have?"

Han Yingying mentally reviewed her inventory: "A self-defense dagger, two health potions, and a detection scope."

"Keep the detector; it might come in handy. Six o'clock tonight, usual spot."

"The usual place" was the meeting point they had agreed on last time—a bench at the east gate of Chengnan Park. Han Yingying nodded, then, remembering that he couldn't see her nod, replied with an "okay."

She sent another message to Lin Mo.

Lin Mo was a teammate she met in the fourth dungeon run. He was a quiet, thin boy with black-rimmed glasses. He wasn't very talkative, but he was reliable in crucial moments. In the last dungeon run, it was he who held off the pursuers in the final stage, buying them time to escape.

"Lin Mo, have you received the S-level notification?"

The reply came quickly: "Mm."