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

On my way upstairs, I encountered two people in the hallway.

A man and a woman. The man was tall and thin, wearing round-framed glasses, with a drawing board slung across his back and a sketchbook in his hand—he looked like a real artist. The woman was shorter, with short hair, wearing sneakers, carrying a large backpack, and her eyes darting around, clearly observing her surroundings.

The tall, thin man smiled at Zhou Lang: "Are you also part of the sketching team? My name is Lin Xiu, specializing in traditional Chinese painting."

"Brother Lang," Zhou Lang casually announced.

Lin Xiu was taken aback: "Which college?"

"From a mixed college."

Lin Xiu had never heard of this academy, but he didn't press the matter. He simply smiled and stepped aside to make way. The short-haired girl remained silent throughout, only glancing quickly at Zhou Lang as she passed by.

Zhou Lang noticed—that glance wasn't out of curiosity, but out of assessment.

He entered room 202 and closed the door.

The room wasn't big; it contained a bed, a table, a wardrobe, and a window. The window faced the backyard, where several persimmon trees grew, their leaves a vibrant green.

Zhou Lang opened his inventory. The Key to Return had disappeared, the random item box given by the system was still unopened, and the oil lamp was still there. He opened the item box first—

[Item Obtained: Demon-Revealing Mirror Fragment (1/4)]

[Note: Collecting all four fragments will allow you to synthesize a Demon-Revealing Mirror, which will expose all disguises. Each fragment can be used once individually, lasting for 30 seconds.]

Thirty seconds was enough for him to glance at it. Zhou Lang carefully put the fragments away.

He flipped through the detailed rules of the instance again. Besides the previous ones, there was a line of small gray text, so small he could barely see it unless he deliberately enlarged it:

"There are seven 'guests' in the guesthouse, and they arrived before you."

Seven strange things.

Zhou Lang turned off the control panel, pushed open the door and went out, just in time to run into Han Yingying coming out from next door.

"Did you find anything?" Han Yingying asked in a low voice.

"Seven ghosts, nothing to do during the day, but don't leave your room at night."

"That's all?"

"That's all." Zhou Lang walked downstairs. "Let's go see who the others are."

At noon, eight people sat around a table in the restaurant on the first floor.

Sister Chen prepared a table full of dishes, including fish and meat, and the portions were very generous. If Zhou Lang hadn't known this was a dungeon, he would have almost thought he was actually on vacation.

He roughly outlined the composition of the eight people:

He and Han Yingying were old acquaintances, needless to say.

Lin Xiu, who claimed to be a specialist in traditional Chinese painting, did indeed have the style in his gestures, but Zhou Lang noticed an old scar on the web of his right hand, which was not from a paintbrush.

The short-haired girl is named Sun Miao. She doesn't talk much and only replies with two or three words when asked anything, but she eats extremely fast, finishing a bowl and a half of rice in ten minutes, showing her maximum efficiency.

A boy wearing a baseball cap, who called himself "Dafei," was excessively outgoing. Within two minutes of sitting down, he started talking to everyone and his mouth never stopped.

A quiet, long-haired girl named Lu Yutong sat in a corner, eating her meal in small bites. She had a very low profile, but she wore a string of black beads on her wrist—Zhou Lang recognized them; they were exorcism beads, an E-grade item. They weren't very effective, but at least it showed that the girl was prepared.

The last two were a couple; the man was named Jiang Cheng, and the woman was named Fang Yuan. They were said to be a couple and had known each other before entering the program. Jiang Cheng was strong and broad-shouldered, sitting there like a wall. Fang Yuan was hanging on his arm, occasionally feeding him a bite of food.

"So we're just staying for seven days?" Dafei asked, chewing on a chicken leg, his words muffled. "That's too easy, isn't it? Aren't C-level dungeons pretty difficult?"

"Don't jinx it." Jiang Cheng glared at him.

"I was just saying, why are you so nervous—"

"Eat quietly," Sun Miao suddenly said.

Dafei's voice caught in his throat. He glanced at Sun Miao's expression and obediently shut his mouth.

Zhou Lang picked up a piece of braised pork, chewed it, and glanced at Sun Miao. This person held a high position in the team, and the fact that he could suppress Da Fei with a single sentence meant that he was either strong enough or fierce enough.

After the meal, Sister Chen cleared the table and gave them some instructions: where to sketch nearby, which sections of the mountain road were difficult to walk on, and which general store in town had the cheapest items. She paused at the end.

"Oh, and come home early tonight. Don't wander around outside after dark."

"Why?" Dafei asked.

Sister Chen smiled but didn't answer directly: "It's in the mountains, the roads are hard to walk on at night."

She turned and went into the kitchen.

Zhou Lang noticed that she subconsciously glanced back at the ceiling as she left. The closed door at the end of the second-floor corridor—room 301—was the only room on the third floor. Sister Chen had said that room was under renovation and no one was living there.

No one lives there.

But when Zhou Lang went upstairs and passed that door, he clearly smelled a certain odor.

It was very faint, like a mixture of stale musty smell and something else I couldn't quite put my finger on.

He didn't stop and went straight back to 202.

The afternoon was free time. Han Yingying actually went sketching—she set up her easel and sat under the persimmon tree in the yard, sketching the distant mountains for two hours. Several people passing by praised her work, saying it was well done.

Zhou Lang took a stroll around the town.

Luxi Town is very small; you can walk around it in about half an hour. There are grocery stores, a clinic, a primary school, and a few rows of houses. There aren't many people, mostly elderly. They'll look at unfamiliar faces a few times but won't say a word.

He sat by the stream for a while, unfolding the piece of paper he had brought from the basement of the villa to look at it.

The location marked on the map is Lumingju, that guesthouse.

His sister had been to that place.

But that's a building within a dungeon—it doesn't exist in reality. How did that piece of paper appear across dungeons? Or is there some kind of connection between the dungeons?

He couldn't figure it out, so he put it away for now.

After wandering around for a while, he returned to the guesthouse, the sun already setting. As he passed through the courtyard, he saw Lin Xiu squatting in a corner, studying something.

"What are you looking at?"

Lin Xiu looked up and adjusted his glasses: "This wall."

Zhou Lang looked over. There were several shallow scratches on the white wall, almost invisible unless you looked closely. The scratches formed a pattern—like the outline of a hand.

"What do you think this is?" Lin Xiu asked.

"It was left by the renovation workers," Zhou Lang said.

Lin Xiu didn't reply, his gaze lingering on the scratches for a few seconds before he stood up and dusted off his trousers: "Maybe."

He walked away.

Zhou Lang glanced at the scratches a few more times. Five fingers, but six marks—the extra one, thin and long, stretched from the center of the palm all the way to the base of the wall.

He crouched down and looked along the trail.

The traces disappeared at the junction of the wall and the ground, below which was just soil.

He rubbed the patch of soil with his foot; it was hard and he couldn't step on it.

The sun set faster than he expected. When he looked up again, it was already half dark.

Sister Chen called out from inside the house to have dinner.

Dinner was simpler than lunch: a few home-style stir-fried dishes and a pot of white porridge.

But the atmosphere was different from at noon.

Dafei didn't say much—not because he was being silenced, but because he chose not to speak. He stirred the food in his bowl a couple of times with his chopsticks, looked up at the sky outside the window, and then looked down again.

Zhou Lang ate his porridge, glancing around out of the corner of his eye.