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

"Who did I offend?" Zhou Lang carefully put away the manor lord's token.

"Your companions," Lin Qi tilted his head towards Han Yingying, "among the guilds she just rejected, a few have rather bad tempers. You guys don't have any guild connections, yet you achieved such great results; some people will be envious."

"Thanks for reminding me," Zhou Lang said. "And then?"

"And then? With Dark Erosion, all these troubles will naturally disappear." Lin Qi smiled. "Our guild leader is very interested in you."

"Need not."

Lin Qi's smile remained unchanged, but something new flickered in his eyes. "Have you thought it through?"

"No need to consider it."

Lin Qi paused for two seconds, then put his mask back on. "I hope you won't regret it."

He turned and walked away. After a few steps, he stopped and said without turning back, "You'd better investigate Han Yingying's background."

These words were like a thorn, silently piercing the air.

Zhao Qiang was taken aback for a moment, then subconsciously looked at Han Yingying. Han Yingying's expression didn't change much, but she lowered her eyes, her eyelashes obscuring the emotions in them.

"Ignore him." Zhou Lang stood up. "Let's go back to reality."

The three players chose to quit the game.

The white light enveloped his entire body once again.

-

In the real world, it's 3 PM.

Zhou Lang opened his eyes and lay on his bed in his rented room. The sun was shining brightly outside the window, and he could hear cars passing by on the street. Everything seemed perfectly normal.

He sat up and picked up his phone from the bedside table. There were three unread messages, two of which were "gone" messages, and one was from the landlord reminding him to pay the utility bills.

There were no warnings of strange events, no unusual celestial phenomena, and no breaking news.

It's too quiet.

Since the advent of horror games, strange events have occurred in the real world every now and then. These range from minor incidents like elevators in a building operating on their own to the mass disappearances of entire neighborhoods. Official media never report on these events, but communication channels among players are open, and everyone knows that the world is gradually becoming abnormal.

But nothing has happened in the last two weeks.

Zhou Lang opened the player forum and flipped through a few pages of posts. Most people were discussing his recent SSS-rank evaluation, while a few posts mentioned the decrease in strange events.

"Is it almost over?" a user with the ID "I Don't Want to Play Anymore" posted. The replies below were varied, ranging from optimistic that the game might be fixing itself to pessimistic that it was the calm before the storm.

Zhou Lang prefers the latter.

My phone vibrated; it was a new message. The number belonged to Han Yingying—they had exchanged contact information in the previous instance.

"You're back?"

"Um."

"Have you noticed how quiet it's been lately?"

"have."

"I have a bad feeling about this." Han Yingying sent a voice message, her voice filled with undisguised unease. "Those clues we found before... the strange things don't just disappear into thin air; they're accumulating."

Zhou Lang stared at his phone screen for a few seconds, then typed two words and sent them.

"careful."

The quiet days lasted for a full twelve days.

On the thirteenth day, as Zhou Lang was cooking instant noodles in his rented room, it got dark outside the window.

It wasn't the kind of darkness where dark clouds obscure the sun, but rather as if someone had taken a cloth and completely covered the sun. The light went from noon to dusk, and then from dusk to midnight in five seconds.

The streetlights weren't on. None of the lights were on.

Zhou Lang put down his chopsticks and walked to the window. The pedestrians downstairs stopped in their tracks, all looking up at the sky. No one spoke, no one screamed; everyone seemed to be controlled by something, all looking up in unison.

Then Zhou Lang heard the sound.

It wasn't coming from outside. It was coming from behind him—from inside his room.

He turned around abruptly.

In the corner of the room, a hand was reaching out from the wall. The skin was greyish-white, the nails black, and the joints were bent at an inhuman angle. The hand groped along the wall, as if searching for a foothold to pull itself out.

Previous strange events never directly invaded the player's residence.

The rules have changed.

Without hesitation, Zhou Lang grabbed the keys and phone from the table and rushed out of the room. The stairwell was pitch black, and he felt his way down the walls as he ran. At the corner on the third floor, his foot stepped on something soft. Looking down, he saw a black, wriggling mass spreading up the stairs.

"Damn it." Zhou Lang jumped over the lump and rushed downstairs in two strides.

Stepping out of the building, he found the situation outside was worse than he had imagined. The sky was completely dark, but not the darkness of night—it was a textured darkness, like ink poured into water, slowly spreading through the air.

The pedestrians on the street no longer looked up. They started walking, aimlessly, their footsteps in perfect unison, like a column of soldiers without orders.

Zhou Lang's phone vibrated.

Han Yingying called.

"Where are you?" Han Yingying's voice was urgent, with chaotic footsteps and the sound of something breaking in the background.

"Downstairs at the rented apartment. What about you?"

"The school. The entire campus is sealed off, and all the exits have those things—climbing out of the walls."

"Find a secluded room and stay there; don't go out."

"I know. The eighth dungeon raid is about to open, right?"

"It should be."

As soon as he finished speaking, a game interface popped up in front of Zhou Lang.

The eighth dungeon is about to open.

[Difficulty: S]

[Forced teleportation countdown: 120 seconds]

[Special mechanic for this dungeon: Team mode, teammates are randomly assigned]

Zhou Lang glanced at the list; the teammate roster hadn't been released yet. He looked up at the sky; the darkness was spreading rapidly, already engulfing most of the sky. In the distance, buildings were beginning to deform, as if being kneaded by an invisible force like clay.

This time, the strangeness is more ferocious than any before.

"Yingying, I'm going into the dungeon now," he said to his phone.

"I also received the teleportation notification." Han Yingying's voice, however, was calmer. "See you in the dungeon."

hang up the phone.

A white light appeared.

-

When Zhou Lang opened his eyes again, he was standing in the lobby of an abandoned hospital.

Half of the fluorescent light tubes on the ceiling were broken, and the rest flickered, casting an inconsistent light throughout the hall. Scattered on the floor were medical records, medicine bottles, and shoes belonging to someone else. The air was thick with the pungent smell of disinfectant mixed with another indescribable odor, so strong it made one want to vomit.

"Brother Lang!"

Zhao Qiang ran out from the corridor next door, his face showing the expression of someone who had just seen their mother.

"You were assigned here too?" Zhou Lang asked.

"You bet I was going to have to carry this all by myself." Zhao Qiang wiped his face. "Where's Yingying?"

"I don't know, it should be in this instance as well."

The two walked down the corridor, checking each room one by one. Most of the wards were empty, and occasionally one or two mannequins could be seen lying on the hospital beds. They were extremely realistic, but when Zhou Lang shone an oil lamp on them, he confirmed that they were not ghosts—just props.

At the end of the third floor, they found Han Yingying.