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

Han Yingying sat up in bed.

The curtains weren't fully drawn, and a ray of light cut through the gap, shining on the back of her hand. She stared at the light for a few seconds, then raised her hand to touch her face—dry, without cold sweat or a sticky feeling.

This is reality.

She glanced down at her phone; the screen showed Wednesday. Two days had passed since she last emerged from the instance.

But she remembered much more than she had two days ago.

The memories in the instance were no longer blurry, like looking through frosted glass, but much clearer. The bandaged ghost, the butler murder, the long staircase in the basement, Zhou Lang's back as he walked ahead holding an oil lamp—these scenes played back frame by frame, even the details were brought to life with color.

There are even earlier things.

She remembered the scene when she first entered the game, the red-clad female ghost who almost killed her, and Zhou Lang's first words when he appeared: "You're blocking my way."

At the time, she thought this person was mentally unstable.

Looking back now... this person definitely had something wrong with their head, but the way they had something wrong was different from what she expected.

Han Yingying got up, washed her face, changed her clothes, and went out.

The restored memories brought not only the items from the dungeons, but also some more subtle fragments of information. She remembered seeing a document in one of the dungeons that mentioned a term—"the arrival of the eerie."

At the time, she didn't pay much attention, assuming it was just background information within the game. But now, thinking back, the contents of that document do match some of the things happening in the real world.

For example, in the past three months, the number of missing persons in the city has been seven times that of the same period last year.

For example, some places have started to have "restricted areas," which the official explanation is construction and renovation, but there is no activity inside the fences.

For example, recently there have been knocks on doors in the middle of the night on the street below her apartment. It's not just one door that's being knocked on, but all the doors on the street are being knocked on at the same time.

Han Yingying went to the library.

She wasn't there to read books, but because the library's electronic reading room had access to archived local news databases. She spent the morning sifting through local news from the past three months.

The missing persons reports started to surge two months ago, and then suddenly stopped—not that the missing persons stopped, but that they stopped being reported.

Meanwhile, certain place names frequently appeared in various news reports. Han Yingying marked these place names on her phone map and discovered that they formed an irregular circle, with an old factory area in the northeast of the city at the center of the circle.

She looked up information about the factory. It had been shut down three years ago, acquired last year by a company she'd never heard of, and there had been no public records of it since.

Han Yingying put her phone back in her pocket and walked out of the library.

It was getting dark. She stood on the steps and looked into the distance. The city skyline blurred into a gray band in the twilight. She couldn't see anything in the direction of the old factory buildings, but she always felt that it was darker there than elsewhere.

Perhaps it's just my imagination.

She decided to go and see for herself tomorrow.

But I didn't have time to go tomorrow.

Halfway there, Han Yingying's game marker on her arm suddenly became hot. She rolled up her sleeve and saw that the marker's glow had changed from its usual light blue to a deep red.

Red indicates forced transfer.

"No, I've only been out for two days—"

Before he could finish speaking, everything went black.

When she opened her eyes again, she was standing in a pile of ruins.

The sky overhead was leaden gray, and broken buildings pierced the sky from the ground like a row of jagged, rotten teeth. There was a metallic smell in the air, and another indescribable odor, a sweet, metallic scent, like freshly congealed blood.

A line of red text popped up in front of me.

Welcome to the fifth dungeon – The Broken City

[Dungeon Rating: S]

[Survival condition: Find and destroy the "City Center" within 72 hours]

[Special Note: This dungeon features player-versus-player combat. Defeating other players will grant bonus points, but will also attract stronger monsters.]

After reading the prompt, Han Yingying's first reaction was not fear, but rather to curse.

S-class.

The highest-ranked dungeon she's encountered so far is A-rank, and she almost died from that. What does S-rank mean? She'd seen posts on player forums saying that the death rate for S-rank dungeons is over 80%.

"Yingying!"

A voice came from behind. Han Yingying turned around and saw Zhao Qiang crawling out from behind a pile of rubble, covered in dust and with a black mark on his face.

"You were dragged into this too?" Han Yingying asked.

"Of course, otherwise why would I be here on vacation?" Zhao Qiang dusted himself off. "S-rank, huh? I almost fainted when I saw the notification."

Where is Zhou Lang?

"I don't know, the teleportation is random." Zhao Qiang looked around. "This place is terrible, there isn't even a single intact building."

Han Yingying was also observing her surroundings. The City of Fractures lived up to its name—all the buildings looked as if they had been torn apart from the middle by some force, with clean cuts, unlike natural collapses. There were cracks in the ground, some wide enough to fit half a person, others only as thick as a finger, but all bottomless.

"Let's find a safe place first," Han Yingying said, "and then try to contact Zhou Lang."

The two walked along a fairly intact street. After about ten minutes, Zhao Qiang suddenly stopped.

"There's someone there."

Han Yingying followed his gaze. In front of a half-broken building, two people were squatting. A man and a woman; the man was wearing a black hoodie, and the woman had her hair in a ponytail. Both of them had obvious injuries—the man in the hoodie had his left arm hastily bound with a strip of cloth, and the girl with the ponytail had a scabbed wound on her forehead.

Upon seeing Han Yingying and Zhao Qiang approach, their reactions were completely opposite: the man in the hoodie immediately stood up and took two steps back warily, while the girl with the ponytail's eyes lit up.

"It's a person! Alive!" the girl with the ponytail shouted, her voice filled with the relief of surviving a close call. "Are you also players who were pulled in?"

Han Yingying nodded and looked the two of them over.

The guy in the hoodie was very thin, with bluish stubble on his chin. His eyes kept darting around, as wary as a rabbit that had been chased the whole way. The girl with the ponytail looked young, maybe eighteen or nineteen, but the look in her eyes didn't seem like something an eighteen or nineteen-year-old should have.

"My name is Su Mu." The girl pointed to the man in the hoodie next to her. "His name is Lin Yue. We were originally in our respective instances, but somehow we were forcibly teleported here."

"In your respective instances?" Han Yingying seized on the key phrase, "You weren't originally in S-rank?"

"My dungeon is Rank B." Su Mu's expression changed. "Lin Yue's is Rank A. We were almost done with it when suddenly the screen went black, and when we woke up, we were here."

Lin Yue hadn't spoken until now, when he finally said, "Someone's targeting us."

His voice was hoarse, as if something was stuck in his throat.

"What do you mean?" Zhao Qiang asked.