V3C3

Parsed with an automated reader. The content accuracy is not guranteed.

There was a subway station right next to the cafe, connected to the city and intercity services. Leaving the cafe, the two walked into the station. The air underground was even colder than above, and even a long-sleeved jacket was unable to keep out the air’s chill. Lin Jue shivered and looked for the arrival time of the next service.

“Are we going to a nearby city through the metro?” Lin Jue asked uneasily.

“Mhm.” Song Hanzhang said thoughtfully, “Truthfully, I had wanted to go to an even further place by plane, the faster the better, but we have no time left.”

The desire to find everything out burned inside of him, making him unwilling to wait for even a second. He had considered walking or driving out of the city, but at the same time he couldn’t stop wondering: if the boundaries of this world would continue to expand following his movements, how would he prove that the world beyond what he was able to see was really there?

Thinking about it that way though, there was no difference between any mode of transport. If this world was bent on lying to them, then no matter how much they struggled, they would be unable to see the truth behind the curtain.

Whether it be loopholes or truths, the only reason they were aware of it all was because the will controlling the world was willing to let them find out.

Since it was willing to let them discover it, it had to have a purpose.

What he wanted to know now was just what it was trying to achieve.

The train stopped at the station and the waiting passengers alighted it. Song Hanzhang had already walked in. Lin Jue’s reaction was a beat slower and he hurriedly rushed into the train as the closing lights came on.

There weren’t a lot of people in the station and there were still some empty seats in the carriage. Lin Jue sat down next to Song Hanzhang and watched in silence as the train doors closed and the metro accelerated towards the next stop.

The two remained silent; neither of them knew just where the line would take them, nor whether or not they would be able to leave the city. They couldn’t even estimate just where the boundaries to the fake world were.

The crisp announcement of the train sounded; they had arrived at the next station. Passengers left the carriage one by one, and new passengers alighted. The train started and continued forwards.

Lin Jue silently watched the station map inside the train, the red dot representing the current station jumping forward one stop at a time. The metro was connected straight to the nearby city; just three more stations…

They left the station. In the dark tunnel, brightly lit billboards darted past the windows; in the sections without billboards, the windows were shrouded by boundless darkness.

Song Hanzhang shifted in his seat and Lin Jue immediately turned to look at him. He was rubbing his temples, his brows furrowed.

“Is your head hurting again?” Lin Jue asked quietly.

Song Hanzhang didn’t say anything, his eyes glancing to the other side of the carriage.

After having passed through several major stations, the number of passengers on board had decreased even more. In this carriage, there were only around ten or so people, not even filling up the seats.

Lin Jue followed Song Hanzhang’s gaze. Several passengers sat in nearby seats, staring at them expressionlessly. It was a blatantly eerie expression: stiff, numb, cold, with neither good nor evil intentions, as if they were all looking at dead men. Being stared down by a whole crowd of people, the hair on the back of Lin Jue’s neck stood up!

This was too unnatural, too unnatural!

The two sides confronted each other in silence. Whether it was the passengers or Lin Jue and Song Hanzhang, there was only the sound of the train moving forward in the quiet carriage. There were no lights nor billboards outside the window; the metro drove on in darkness, as if heading to hell.

Song Hanzhang glanced at the station map in the carriage; this stop was taking too long, almost as if… there was no end.

“Xuezhang…” Lin Jue whispered, absolutely horrified.

Song Hanzhang covered Lin Jue’s hand with his own and Lin Jue immediately took hold of it. The warmth of another human being on his skin gave this eerie environment a hint of reality; he could only hold tightly onto that hand to fight off the urge to run away.

The train continued forwards, not stopping, not announcing its stops, no light coming from outside of it. Even the sounds coming from the train itself slowly grew fainter. Cold sweat dripped down from Lin Jue’s forehead as he looked nervously around him. The other people in the carriage had already disappeared some time ago; from where he was seated, the carriage furthest away he could see was shrouded in a layer of mist, all of the passengers and seats faded and blurry…

Song Hanzhang also saw it. The strange layer of mist was quickly expanding, approaching their carriage from both ends of the train. Everywhere it went, what it touched was reduced to nothingness.

“What do we do now?” Lin Jue stood up from his seat anxiously as he looked around him, searching for a way out.

“Don’t wander off. We’ll die if we jump out of the train now, so let’s just see what it wants to do,” Song Hanzhang said calmly.

If Lin Jue wasn’t close to him, he wouldn’t have caught the slight tremor underneath his collected tone.

White mist filled the air, flooding their carriage. The compartments and passengers enveloped in the white mist seemed to have all disappeared into it, never to be seen again. Finally, the mist surrounded them completely. It was as if his eyes were covered by a thin veil. Lin Jue looked around anxiously, but the scenes around him were becoming more and more blurred, including the person next to him. He couldn’t help but hold tightly onto Song Hanzhang’s hand with such force that he himself felt pain.

His thoughts slowed down, his consciousness blurring. Lin Jue gradually began to lose all sense of his surroundings. In the white mist, that painfully real world no longer existed.

Next to his ears, he faintly heard the sound of some sort of machine. No, not heard, more like he was ‘aware’ of it.

[…Connection to The Overworld failed…

Return to 0708 Tutorial Quest…

Checking tutorial quest data…

Checking canceled…

Confirm reporting anomaly…

Anomaly report interrupted…

Repair tutorial quest anomaly…

Repair suspended…

Unable to lift abnormal status…

Determining quest continuation…

Unable to sync data, Automatic Return Countdown: 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1

Return Successful.]

Lin Jue opened his eyes.

The corridor in front of him was familiar. Lin Jue looked at the rooms next to him. The door number on the iron plaques made his heart skip a beat; this was the corridor on the fourth floor outside his dormitory room, but just a week ago, he had received that phone call from ‘hell’ and had since been dragged into an endless nightmare.

Why was he here? Where was Song Hanzhang?

Without thinking, Lin Jue ran towards Song Hanzhang’s dorm room. After a round of furious knocking, the door opened, revealing the annoyed face of Song Hanzhang’s roommate. “He’s not here!”

Only then did Lin Jue remember that he had already moved to the campus guest house with Song Hanzhang. He immediately ran downstairs without even apologizing for knocking over the passing students, his heart filled with Song Hanzhang.

Even when he was being engulfed by mist in the metro, he had never been as scared as he was now, because he could hold onto Song Hanzhang’s hand then, but now, he didn’t even know where Song Hanzhang was.

This fear was even more terrifying than the threat of death.

As Lin Jue ran wildly down to the hall on the first floor of the dormitory, he jerked to a halt.

Song Hanzhang stood outside the door, his arms crossed, waiting for him.

Outside the building, the evening sun let out its reddish-gold afterglow through the open glass doors of the building, dragging out the shadows of each person. Standing against the sunset, Song Hanzhang looked as if he had been waiting for a long time, the gentle golden glow falling over his white shirt. He looked like he would melt into this twilight at any moment.

Without waiting for him to speak, Lin Jue had already rushed up to hug him.

Smelling the fresh and clean scent on Song Hanzhang’s collars, Lin Jue finally felt his heart settle down in his chest.

Song Hanzhang, who was knocked back a step, was bewildered and even considered if something had happened to Lin Jue in those few short minutes. It shouldn’t be possible for something so terrible to occur in such a short time period though. Could there have been a mistake in the timings of their returns?

It was the end of class. The young men coming and going stared at the two standing in front of the dormitory hugging each other, but Lin Jue was oblivious. “I thought you vanished…”

“I returned to the balcony of my dormitory, which was where I had first entered the game. I thought the same thing had probably happened to you, so I waited for you downstairs,” Song Hanzhang said.

Lin Jue let go of his arms. He had been so excited that there were tears in his eyes. “That metro… just what happened?”

“Let’s walk as we talk.” Song Hanzhang strode away from the dormitory building.

Lin Jue followed close behind, walking alongside him. He heard Song Hanzhang say, “We did get something out of that risk. You should have ‘heard’ it as well: 0708 Tutorial Quest. That’s where we are right now, and it’s developed some serious malfunctions.

“Since this is a tutorial quest, there must be a place we need to go after leaving it, which is the definition of ‘Connecting to The Overworld’. This ‘Overworld’ has been severed from the tutorial quest we are in though. Whether it was checking data, reporting anomalies, or automating fixes, none were successful, forcing us to continue doing quests, sending us back to the tutorial map, unable to return to the real world nor proceed to the ‘Overworld’. We don’t know the reason behind the anomaly- it may be an accident, or on purpose. Without anything more, I can’t make a judgement on it easily.”

“Then what was behind those weird things in the metro?” Lin Jue asked.

“Most likely, the problem is the scope of the tutorial quest. In the game, our movement space is this campus; on normal days, our movement space is this city. Once we venture too far, we will be sent back to where we first logged-in, which is where we started the game,” Song Hanzhang analyzed.

“Actually, I’ve always thought that there was a problem with the settings of this game. It focused on the ‘selection’ of the players, emphasising survival in each round, using external pressure and internal conflicts to filter out the players who aren’t mentally or physically prepared. But for the players who survive, there are no further quests, only a second round with other new players. If no changes are made, we will continue to be filtered out. Perhaps the difficulty will increase, but the filtering nature of the selection will not change.

“So what is the nature and purpose of the game? Simply filtering? Or is it trying to receive emotions from the players such as fear? But the latter makes no sense, as the more experienced the players become, the less fear they will fear, which is in no way as efficient as using new players for every round. Then is it only for filtering? That makes no sense either, filtering is a means, not an end. From what I can see, we entered this game to be filtered and then sent to a main world, but for some reason, we are unable to proceed and are trapped here.”

“Does that mean we will never be able to leave?” Lin Jue felt a wave of despair. To think that such a terrifying nightmare would be repeated and rewinded infinitely… Even if he could withstand it physically, he would break mentally.

“…We’ll try again. We’ll take the subway again, no, we’ll travel by car this time,” Song Hanzhang said decisively.

His phone rang. Song Hanzhang glanced at the screen and picked up.

From the other side of the phone came Lu Ren’s cheerful voice. “Uh oh, I think I overdid it.”

“What did you do?” Song Hanzhang frowned in annoyance.

Instead of answering, Lu Ren asked, “Where are you right now?”

“Underneath the dormitories.”

“Oh, then you’ll know soon.”

The phone hung up and Lin Jue couldn’t help but ask, “What did Lu Ren do?”

Song Hanzhang’s flat tone had the vague sense of the calm before the storm. “Nothing good.”

From the distance came a succession of screams as the passing students suddenly became restless, scattering in all directions, some screaming, “Murder, murder!”

The two hurried towards the site of the incident against the current of the escaping crowd and soon saw Lu Ren.

The setting sun was like blood. With his back to them, Lu Ren held a knife in one hand, a human head in the other. A headless corpse lay by his feet, crimson blood still flowing ceaselessly from the cruelly severed neck. Apart from this headless corpse, several unconscious people lay strewn around him, bleeding profusely without exception.

But the rosy evening sun was an even brighter red than blood.

Lu Ren turned around and cracked a cheerful smile. “I believe, the threshold for this world is here.”

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