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

Han Yingying closed the chat window immediately, before the other person could finish their sentence.

Zhao Qiang, watching from the side, felt a pang of worry for her: "Aren't you afraid she'll hold a grudge?"

"So what if I hold a grudge?" she said flatly. "When we're in a dungeon, the guild won't help individual players either."

Zhou Lang didn't respond, but he agreed with the logic. If you don't join a union, being targeted is inevitable; if you do join, being used as a tool is also inevitable. Since neither path is unavoidable, focus on securing your own path first before worrying about anything else.

The instance was forcibly logged out at 2:47 AM real time.

Zhou Lang sat at the table, looking at the notifications on his phone screen.

In a subway station in a certain city, 32 passengers witnessed a "faceless person"; in a university dormitory building, surveillance footage showed a person walking down the corridor turning their head 180 degrees and disappearing; further away, in a certain town, all the well water turned black on the same day, and all the cats in the town disappeared.

These all happened in the last couple of days.

In the past, these kinds of events were scattered across different places with long intervals, making them easy to dismiss as coincidences. Now, the frequency is different; it's so high that some ordinary people are starting to feel that something is amiss.

He picked up his notebook and flipped to the record page—the one he'd kept from his very first entry into the dungeon. Dates, locations, real-world anomalies, and in-game patterns—he'd filled in nearly a third of it, but the core question remained unsolved: where did the strangeness come from, and where was its very origin?

My phone vibrated.

"Are you there?" — Han Yingying.

"exist."

Did you see those two push notifications?

Before he could reply, the other party sent him a document link, saying it was a summary of recent abnormal events in 37 cities over the past 40 days.

Zhou Lang opened the app, but stopped halfway through the first page—the numbers were nearly twice as many as he had expected, and the geographical distribution had no focal points; it was scattered very evenly, unlike a radial diffusion, but more like a synchronous event.

"Did you notice the distribution pattern?" he sent the message.

"I noticed that it doesn't seem to spread naturally."

"right."

The two were stuck on this topic for a while without reaching a conclusion, so Zhou Lang changed the subject: "How long have you been keeping this record?"

"About five months."

"Can it be shared?"

The pause lasted longer than expected.

"Sure, but you have to send me the same thing from your end too."

"OK."

That was settled. Zhou Lang moved the document into the organizing folder, stared at the list for a while, and then heard the neighbor's child crying downstairs; it was past three o'clock. The streetlights outside flickered twice and then went out.

He closed his laptop and continued looking at the data instead of going to sleep.

The notification for the ninth instance of the dungeon was sent out when Zhou Lang was in the cafeteria.

He pushed the lunchbox aside, glanced at the instance information, and sent a message to Han Yingying.

"SS-rank dungeon, now open."

"I saw it."

This time the team was larger than before. Besides him, Han Yingying, and Zhao Qiang, there were three temporary partners: Shen Kuo, Lin Rou, and Xu Nan. They had worked together in the last dungeon and their cooperation was acceptable. There was also a person named Gu Xing who was in the same area as them in the last dungeon, but he basically went his own way, neither actively cooperating nor sabotaging them. That was about it.

These kinds of people are sometimes harder to judge than overt enemies.

The instance is called "Ancient Town." Inside, you enter a small town surrounded by mountains. The architectural style resembles that of the Republic of China era, but the details are off in many ways—the windows are a bit narrower, the doors are three centimeters shorter than normal, and the footsteps of pedestrians on the street are half a second behind their actual location. The first thing Zhou Lang did upon entering was to memorize these three points.

The density of SS-level anomalies is three times that of the previous S-level, and they are capable of autonomous action. They don't just stay in one place waiting for people to run into them; they can track and ambush. In the first two hours, Zhou Lang encountered being tracked twice, once by Zhao Qiang, and once by taking a detour to shake them off.

The problem became apparent in the third hour.

Shen Kuo sent a message: "There are guild members in town. They're not here to run dungeons; they came with us."

"How many unions?"

"Look at the flags... three, maybe four."

The Second Guild, the Fifth Guild, and the Eighth Guild. The simultaneous appearance of these three guilds was no coincidence—with the Guild Tournament approaching, they had repeatedly refused to recruit, and the friction that had accumulated between them and other guilds was enough to bring them together: to take advantage of the high difficulty of the SS-level dungeon, clear out the field, and incidentally establish their authority before the tournament.

Zhou Lang forwarded this assessment to Han Yingying.

"I guessed so," she replied. "They've already started closing the roads."

The problem was that the SS-rank dungeon was already stressful enough, and with the guilds pressing in from three sides, their room for maneuver was already very limited. The group met up in the alley, and there was already movement at the other end; guild members were sneaking in.

Gu Xing is not here.

"Should we split up?" Zhao Qiang asked.

"Separating is suicide." Zhou Lang surveyed the alleyway's layout. "Let's go to the granary first. Its structure is complex, and having too many union members will make things difficult."

The direction was correct, but something went wrong during the execution.

Lin Rou was injured first.

While crossing an abandoned wooden bridge, the bridge plank broke, and the strange creature below took advantage of the situation, dragging her a short distance away. She suffered a deep cut on her left arm, not a fatal injury, but the significant blood loss affected her movement speed, making her a weak link in the team.

Then the guild members pressed in from three directions, giving them no chance to breathe. Shen Kuo went to protect Lin Rou, but was knocked away by the guild players' skills, crashing into the wall and falling down. He was noticeably slower to get up. Xu Nan was the only one holding on, barely managing to stay afloat.

Zhou Lang led Zhao Qiang and Han Yingying to retreat inside, but their retreat route was already half blocked, and the window they wanted to go back to rescue people couldn't be opened at all.

Then the guild players over there all stopped.

It wasn't because they left, nor was it a strange interruption; it was because new people had come in. When Zhou Lang turned around, the union members were already in disarray. The new group didn't have the banner of the major union; they only had an identifier that Zhou Lang had never seen on the list before—an X.

One of them walked over, his hair half-tied up, and spoke in a flat voice, making it impossible to tell what he had just been through.

"Are they all still alive?"

"Basically, two minor injuries." Zhou Lang glanced at Lin Rou and Shen Kuo.

The other person squatted down next to Lin Rou, took out first-aid supplies from their waist bag, and skillfully asked, "What did you do that caused to attract the attention of the three major guilds?"

"We refuse to recruit," Han Yingying said.

The man paused for a second, then laughed—not mocking, but more like a sigh of admiration: "That works too?"

After Lin Rou's injuries were treated, Zhou Lang asked, "Which guild are you from?"

The other person pointed to the insignia on their chest: "X Guild".

This name is a special kind of unfamiliarity in the player community—it's not that no one has heard of it, but almost no one knows its size, members, or scope of activities. They only know that it exists and occasionally leaves traces in high-difficulty dungeons, but no one has ever seen the complete team.

"Why are you helping us?" Han Yingying asked.

"The rule of the X guild is to help whenever you see someone doing it."

"Help whoever you see?"

The man glanced at her and said, "You'll find out later."