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

The day we came out of the dungeon, the weather was ridiculously good.

Zhou Lang stood on his balcony, holding a can of cola that had expired three days prior, watching the pedestrians coming and going on the street below. There were no aliens, no ghosts, and even the lingering stench of decay in the air had dissipated.

It's abnormally clean.

My phone vibrated; it was a message from Han Yingying.

"Is there anything unusual on your end?"

Zhou Lang typed two words: "No".

"I don't have any either. It's been three days in a row."

Three days ago, they had just emerged from their seventh instance. That damned Horror Manor almost got Zhao Qiang trapped there. Fortunately, they all returned to reality unharmed.

After I returned, the eerie thing seemed to have vanished.

Zhao Qiang was quite happy, and his voice was trembling when he called: "Brother Lang, do you think this weirdo is scared of us? I haven't had any nightmares these past few days, and I've been sleeping like a log."

"Pigs can't make phone calls."

"...Can you please have a normal conversation?"

Zhou Lang hung up the phone and took a swig of cola. The expired cola was flat and cloyingly sweet, like sugar water.

He was thinking about something.

The clue discovered in the last instance—the source of the eeriness—is not random, but rather exhibits a certain regular fluctuation. After each instance ends, the eeriness in reality experiences a period of silence before returning with even greater force.

The length of the downtime is directly proportional to the level of the instance.

The seventh dungeon is S-rank. Based on previous patterns, the gap period should be about five to seven days.

It's the third day now.

He sent this idea to Han Yingying via text. She didn't reply for half a minute, then sent three more messages.

"So you mean this is just the calm before the storm?"

"Will the next strange event be even more intense than any of the ones before?"

"Then we need to prepare in advance."

Zhou Lang replied with an "Mm".

Han Yingying sent another message: "Couldn't you type a few more words?"

"Uh-huh."

There was a full two minutes of silence on the other end. Zhou Lang could almost picture Han Yingying staring at the screen, gritting her teeth. But in the end, she didn't dwell on it and changed the subject.

"I've organized the data fragments I found in the dungeon last time. The source of the strangeness points to a coordinate, but the corresponding location in the real world is—"

"ocean."

How did you know?

"It's a guess." Zhou Lang was telling the truth, but his guess was based on evidence. Based on the information gathered from the previous instances, the strange diffusion path was radial, and the extensions of all the rays converged in the same direction—somewhere in the East China Sea.

The exact coordinates are still missing a few key data points, which we'll have to find in subsequent dungeons.

Day 4, Day 5, Day 6.

Everything was as usual. People were eating and drinking as usual on the streets, and some even started posting online saying "the bizarre apocalypse is over," which got quite a lot of views.

Zhou Lang's daily schedule is very fixed: he goes to school in the morning (although the school is in a state of partial suspension, his sister told him to study hard before she disappeared, so he keeps going), goes home in the afternoon to organize supplies, and exchanges information with Han Yingying in the evening.

Zhao Qiang would occasionally join in, and the three of them formed a group chat, which Zhao Qiang named "The Three Musketeers of Dungeons".

Zhou Lang thought the name was incredibly stupid, but he didn't say anything.

At four o'clock in the morning on the seventh day, Zhou Lang was awakened by a piercing buzzing sound.

It's not an alarm clock.

It was the strange detector he placed on the windowsill.

He acquired this item using reward points from three dungeons; it can sense strange energy fluctuations within a 500-meter radius. Since he bought it, it has only gone off twice—each time signifying major trouble.

He rolled out of bed and walked to the window.

The sky outside is red.

It wasn't the gentle red of the morning glow, but a thick, blood-red that burned from the horizon all the way to overhead, even staining the clouds.

Zhou Lang picked up his phone, and Han Yingying called at the same second.

"Can you see the sky?" Her voice was urgent, with the sound of shattering glass in the background.

"I saw it. What happened on your end?"

"The glass door of the supermarket downstairs shattered, and all the goods inside were floating out—floating, not rolling. Beverage bottles, cans, and potato chip bags were all floating in mid-air, like they were weightless."

Zhou Lang frowned. This level of change had never occurred before.

"Stay where you are and don't move," he said.

"I'm not that stupid. I'm at home, and the windows are closed."

No sooner had she finished speaking than a loud bang came from Han Yingying's side, followed by her exclamation.

"What's wrong?"

"The wall—the wall in my living room is bleeding."

Zhou Lang was silent for two seconds. "True blood?"

"I don't know, it's red and sticky, seeping out from the cracks in the wall." Han Yingying's breathing quickened, but she remained calm. "I moved to the bedroom and locked the door."

"Open your personal panel."

After a brief pause, Han Yingying gasped.

"Eighth instance... The countdown has begun. Twelve minutes left."

Zhou Lang also opened his own panel. The same countdown, the same information—

The eighth dungeon is about to open.

[Rank: S]

Number of participants: 6

[Forced teleportation countdown: 00:11:47]

Six people.

Previously, the maximum was four.

He quickly sent a message to Zhao Qiang, who replied instantly: "I saw it! Damn it, my toilet is spinning, and the water is black, like ink!"

"Pack your things, get ready to enter the dungeon."

"I know, I know, you don't need to tell me... Brother Lang, to be honest, I'm a little panicked."

"Panic is the right thing to do; only when you panic can you run faster."

"...Are you trying to comfort me?"

Eleven minutes later, the white light engulfed all three of them simultaneously.

-

The feeling of being teleported is always unpleasant, like being stuffed into a washing machine and spun around eight hundred times. When Zhou Lang landed, his knees hit the hard ground, making him wince in pain.

It was pitch black all around.

The oil lamp. He immediately reached into his pocket—it was still there. But he didn't light it right away; he let his eyes adjust to the darkness first.

"Zhou Lang?" Han Yingying's voice came from the left, not far away.

"exist."

"Me too... ugh." Zhao Qiang's voice came from the right, sounding like he was dry heaving. "I feel like throwing up every time I teleport. Can't you upgrade the teleportation technology? What a crappy game..."

Besides the three of them, there were other breathing sounds in the darkness.

Three paths.

Zhou Lang lit the oil lamp. The green light spread out, illuminating the space they were in—an abandoned subway platform.

Tiles were peeling, rails were rusted, and overhead signs hung crookedly, their words blurred and illegible. A damp, musty smell permeated the air.

There were three people standing opposite them.

One man and two women.

The man was very tall, over 1.9 meters, with a buzz cut and a python tattooed on his arm. He was looking them over with his arms crossed.

The woman on the left is in her thirties, wearing gold-rimmed glasses and with her hair tied up tightly, looking like a university professor.