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

"Before I was teleported, I saw a system notification," Lin Yue said. "It said, 'Player ID XXX has been marked. Forced instance transfer will be performed.'"

"Who could do something like that?"

"Guilds," Lin Yue uttered two words, "The top-ranked guilds have special items that can be used to 'mark' other players. Those marked will be forcibly pulled into higher difficulty dungeons."

Han Yingying frowned.

There's this kind of mechanism in the game? She'd never heard of it before. But then she thought, she didn't know much about this game to begin with; some rules were hidden deep within, known only to veteran players.

"Who did you offend?" Han Yingying asked.

Su Mu gave a wry smile: "You might not believe it, but we didn't do anything. Lin Yue found a piece of equipment in the last dungeon, and it was of relatively high quality, so someone was eyeing it. When negotiations failed, the other party resorted to this tactic."

"Throwing people into S-level dungeons just for a piece of equipment?" Zhao Qiang found it absurd.

"You don't understand those people," Lin Yue said calmly. "To them, equipment is more valuable than people."

The four of them remained silent for a while.

Han Yingying explained the dungeon information to Su Mu and Lin Yue: 72 hours to find the city center and destroy it. Su Mu nodded after listening, saying that she had also seen this prompt after being teleported here.

"There are four of us, and we're facing an S-rank dungeon..." Zhao Qiang counted on his fingers, "...that might not be enough, right?"

"That's definitely not enough."

The sound came from above.

Everyone looked up.

On the edge of the second floor of a dilapidated building, Zhou Lang sat there, his legs dangling in the air, holding a green oil lamp in his hand.

"When did you get there?" Zhao Qiang almost bit his tongue.

"While you were chatting," Zhou Lang said, jumping down from the second floor with an incredibly light landing, "you talked for quite a while, and I heard the whole thing."

He glanced at Lin Yue and Su Mu, then at Han Yingying.

"Five people," Zhou Lang said. "That's about right."

Han Yingying noticed several new scratches on Zhou Lang's clothes and asked, "What happened to you?"

"Something with six legs," Zhou Lang said casually. "It ran pretty fast, but it had a bad sense of direction and crashed into a wall."

Zhao Qiang: "..."

Han Yingying: "...You didn't do anything?"

"It moved, so I finished it off." Zhou Lang raised the chainsaw in his hand, "in case it gets up again."

Su Mu and Lin Yue exchanged a glance. Their expressions were both subtle—they stared at the chainsaw in Zhou Lang's hand, their gazes complex, probably wondering what kind of person would bring a chainsaw into the dungeon.

"Um," Su Mu tentatively began, "you... you're just a playboy?"

Zhou Lang nodded.

Su Mu blinked: "That guy on the forum who chased ghosts with a chainsaw?"

"Is there a post about me on the forum?" Zhou Lang asked, more curious than anything else.

"More than that." Su Mu's expression became quite interesting. "The video of you in the haunted manor has been uploaded online and is in the top five in terms of views. The comment section is in an uproar; half of the people say you're crazy, and the other half say you're a genius."

"Some people even call him a performance artist," Zhao Qiang added.

Zhou Lang had no interest in these comments; he was already studying the surrounding terrain.

"The city center is in the middle of the city, and we're currently located slightly to the east." He pointed in a direction, "The building density is higher over there, and there are more cracks; it should be closer to the center."

"How did you make that judgment?" Lin Yue asked.

"The width and depth of the cracks are both increasing in that direction," Zhou Lang said. "The closer to the city center, the more severe the damage. Logically speaking, the source is there."

"Okay, he's a madman with a brain," Lin Yue thought.

The five-person team began their advance towards the city center.

The formation was Zhou Lang and Han Yingying in front, Zhao Qiang in the middle, and Lin Yue and Su Mu at the rear. Less than ten minutes later, their first problem arose.

The thing emerged from a crack in the ground.

Without warning, the ground beneath his feet suddenly cracked open, and a grayish-white arm reached out from the crevice, gripping Zhao Qiang's ankle tightly.

Zhao Qiang let out a scream.

"Don't move!" Zhou Lang had already rushed over.

It wasn't just an arm that emerged from the crack—the thing was still crawling out, another hand reached out, followed by a head. A crooked head, with all the features misplaced; eyes on the chin, mouth on the forehead.

Without hesitation, Zhou Lang started the chainsaw and cut directly at the arm.

With a whoosh, a grayish-white liquid splashed all over Zhao Qiang's face.

The arm was severed, but the thing wasn't dead. It crawled completely out of the crack—its body was long and slender, and the joints of its limbs were bent in the opposite direction to those of a normal person. The severed arm was regrowing at a visible rate.

"Back off!" Han Yingying shouted, throwing out a talisman in her hand at the same time.

The talisman was an item she had collected in the previous dungeon; when stuck on the monster, it could cause a temporary immobilization. The golden talisman seemed to have eyes, precisely sticking to the thing's chest.

The strange movements came to an abrupt halt.

But it only lasted two seconds.

The talisman burned out, the restraint was lifted, and the thing moved again. And this time, it learned its lesson—it didn't charge at us head-on, but instead flipped over and disappeared into another crack nearby.

"They're gone?" Zhao Qiang breathed a sigh of relief.

"They didn't leave." Zhou Lang stared at the ground.

The cracks are spreading.

Starting from the crack where that thing disappeared, new cracks are rapidly extending across the ground, spreading like capillaries, approaching the location of the five people.

"Run! Don't step into the cracks!"

The five people took off running.

They ran a messy way through the area. The cracks were spreading rapidly, and seemed to be consciously tracking them. Su Mu was running at the very back and almost tripped over a suddenly appearing fissure, but Lin Yue grabbed her arm and pulled her back.

After running about 300 meters, the spread of the crack finally stopped.

Five people leaned against a broken wall, panting.

"Is this some kind of S-class welcome gift?" Zhao Qiang bent over, his hands resting on his knees. "It's fucking too enthusiastic."

"The things in the cracks should be the usual weird stuff in this instance," Han Yingying said. "Not the most difficult kind, but there might be a lot of them."

Zhou Lang squatted on the ground, observing the direction of the cracks, without saying a word.

Su Mu took a sip of water, and after calming down, asked the question everyone was thinking: "Besides the five of us, are there any other players in this instance?"

The above hint makes it very clear—a player-versus-player (PvP) mechanism exists. In other words, other players are both allies and potential enemies.

"Yes." Zhou Lang stood up. "I saw it when I was upstairs just now. There was a group of people moving in the west direction, at least six of them."

"Six people." Lin Yue's expression changed.

The six people formed a fixed team and acted in an organized manner from the start of the dungeon—this didn't seem like a random group of people who were just put together temporarily.