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

There was a door in front of me.

The wooden door was different from the doors upstairs; its surface was covered with densely packed symbols, which began to slowly writhe when illuminated by the green light of the oil lamp.

Zhao Qiang took a step back.

Han Yingying stared at the symbol for a few seconds, then raised her hand to push the door open.

"Wait a minute." Zhou Lang stopped her and took the chainsaw out of his inventory.

Han Yingying looked at him.

Zhao Qiang's lips twitched: "Big brother, you're not going to saw the door off, are you?"

"What are you thinking about?" Zhou Lang put the chainsaw away, switched to scissors, and swung them at the door lock.

Click.

The door opened.

The scene inside made all three of them stop in their tracks—it wasn't a secret room or a laboratory, but an exquisitely furnished bedroom. The bed was neatly made, the curtains were clean, and a bunch of dried white lilies sat in the corner. In the center of the room sat a black coffin, its lid half-open.

The light from the oil lamp swept across, revealing a person lying in the coffin.

No, it was a corpse. Dressed in an elegant suit, arms crossed over his chest, face serene. Strangely, the body was not decomposed, as if he had only recently died.

"This is..." Han Yingying leaned closer to identify it.

Zhou Lang raised the oil lamp. The green light illuminated the corpse's face—features exactly like the butler's, only now it had flesh and blood.

"The owner of the manor," Zhou Lang said.

On the bedside table next to the coffin lay a diary, its cover yellowed with age. Han Yingying opened it to the first page; the handwriting was crooked and illegible. It read:

"They came. Things that shouldn't exist. I locked myself in the basement, thinking I could hide from them."

The last few pages were torn out, leaving only the last paragraph:

"The butler betrayed me. It is no longer alive. If anyone sees this diary, please leave this place and do not disturb what lies beneath—"

The message wasn't finished.

Zhou Lang noticed a detail: there was bloodstain on the last page of the diary, and the bloodstain extended towards the coffin. In other words, the manor owner had already suffered a fatal wound when he wrote the diary, but he still crawled back into the coffin.

"He's waiting for someone to come to him." Han Yingying flipped to the very beginning of the diary. "No, he's waiting for someone to come... to finish something."

As soon as he finished speaking, the corpse in the coffin opened its eyes.

Zhao Qiang almost jumped to the ceiling.

The corpse sat up, its movements stiff as a puppet, its head slowly turning towards the three people. Its eyes were grayish-white, without pupils.

Zhou Lang did something that no one expected.

He held the oil lamp up to the corpse, grabbed the chainsaw with his other hand, and pulled the start cord.

hum-

The chainsaw emitted a piercing roar.

The corpse stopped moving.

When Zhao Qiang later recalled this scene, he said that he personally saw a confused expression on the corpse's face. A corpse that had been dead for an unknown period of time was terrified and confused by a living person wielding a chainsaw.

[Intimidation successful, special reward obtained: Manor Core Key]

When the system notification popped up, the corpse lay back in the coffin and slowly closed its eyes. This time, it was truly dead.

Zhou Lang looked at the bronze key that had appeared out of thin air in his hand, then turned to Zhao Qiang and Han Yingying and said, "Let's go upstairs."

The three returned to the lobby on the first floor, where the butler was already standing. It saw the key in Zhou Lang's hand, and its empty eye sockets flickered.

"You've found it," it said, its voice no longer the mechanical coldness of before, but rather a little hoarse.

Zhou Lang tossed the key to it.

The butler caught the key, and its body began to shatter. Starting from its feet, it cracked like glass, the fragments spreading upwards. It didn't struggle; it even tilted its head, making a nodding-like gesture.

"Thanks."

After it shattered, the butler vanished. The entire manor shook violently; walls crumbled and ceilings collapsed.

[Dungeon cleared!]

[Settlement in progress...]

[Player "Langligelang" rating: SSS]

[Player "Zhao Qiang" rating: A]

[Player "Yingying" rating: SS]

The white light engulfed the three of them.

-

Han Yingying woke up from her dream again.

It wasn't an ordinary dream. It was the kind of dream where she was so lucid that she could recall every single detail. She remembered the manor's basement, the corpse sitting up in the coffin, and the absurd scene of Zhou Lang wielding a chainsaw to scare ghosts.

But more importantly, she remembered something else.

Fragmented images. Someone is running in the darkness, followed by countless shadows. There is a door, beyond which lies a street in the real world, empty and all the windows sealed shut. A person stands under a streetlamp—she can't make out their face, but the clothes they wear look familiar.

Han Yingying sat up and picked up her phone from the bedside table. It was 4:17 a.m.

Instead of going back to sleep, she opened her browser.

These days, she's developed a habit: after each dungeon run, she searches for recent news. At first, it was unconscious, but it gradually became deliberate. She'd discovered a pattern—strange things always seemed to happen in real life a few days after each dungeon run ended.

"Residents of an old neighborhood in the west of the city are suffering from insomnia for unknown reasons."

"Unidentified images were captured by the surveillance cameras on the third floor of the Third Hospital. The hospital claims the equipment malfunctioned."

"Several residents reported hearing knocking sounds at night that did not exist."

Individually, these news stories seem like sensational social issues, but when viewed together, something feels off. Han Yingying arranged them chronologically and noticed a problem: the frequency of these events was increasing. A month ago, it happened once a week; now it happens almost every day.

Moreover—the geographical area is shrinking.

She marked the locations of all the incidents on the map, initially scattered throughout the city, with the most recent ones all concentrated within a three-kilometer radius of the city center.

She lives within this area.

Han Yingying put on her coat and went out. The streets were deserted in the early morning, and the streetlights cast long shadows. She walked for twenty minutes along the marked route and arrived at the entrance of an old residential area in the west of the city.

The gate to the residential compound was unlocked, and there was no one in the security booth.

As she walked in, passing the first building, she caught a glimpse of a window on the third floor. The curtains were drawn, but something was moving behind them. It wasn't a human silhouette—it was too tall, almost touching the ceiling, and the angle of its movement was abnormal.

Han Yingying stopped in her tracks.

That thing stopped too.

Five seconds later, the curtains were pulled down from the inside, and there was nothing behind the window.

When Han Yingying left the residential area, her palms were sweaty.

Back home, she turned on her computer and began systematically organizing the information. The search engine results dwindled, and many previously accessible news links became 404 errors. Someone was deleting posts.

She switched to another channel, using a pseudonym on a forum to search for the keywords "weird," "descent," and "instance."

There was little discussion on the forum, but one post caught her attention. The post contained only one line:

"Have you guys noticed that things in the game are starting to move outside of it?"