Chapter 15: The Map
“I’ll go with you. I don’t need sleep.” A swallowed whatever else he had been about to say, stood up, and walked over to Su Qiong. “Let’s go.”
“Huh?” The piece of code was surprised, immediately trying to teach the deadly player how to be human. “You’re human. All humans need sleep.”
“Different humans require different amounts of sleep. I’m a state-trained living weapon. Have you heard of living weapons before?”
“Living weapons” referred to cheat-level combatants from a nation’s absolute most elite black-ops units. Their physical capabilities far surpassed those of ordinary humans. When necessary, they could launch self-destructive attacks, with a single person rivaling an entire army.
As the most perfect living weapon in the world, going three or four days without sleep was a completely routine mission requirement for A.
“You’re incredible,” Su Qiong said in awe. “No wonder the system assigned you such a difficult game instance.”
To balance the skill disparity among players, the system always assigned the hell-level instances to the strongest.
A focused on the first half of Su Qiong’s sentence. Hearing the little marshmallow call him “incredible” slightly soothed his mental state, which had been tormented by this trashy hospital instance for four days.
Then he heard Su Qiong ask in a soft, fluffy voice, “Oh, right. What’s your name?”
Because A hadn’t entered a player ID, it was difficult for the NPC to know what to call him.
A fell dead silent for a full thirty seconds.
Su Qiong watched him carefully. A’s expression actually seemed even graver and more intense than it had while he was slaughtering thousands of monsters last night.
Finally, after a long silence, A answered solemnly, “A. It’s my operational codename.”
Because his real name was far too embarrassing to say aloud, A only ever used his codename when out on missions. Even the elite instructors and comrades who spent every day with him were strictly required to call him by that letter.
“You don’t have a real name?” Su Qiong tilted his head. “Even I have one.”
The carelessly coded marshmallow found an inexplicable source of superiority.
A: “…”
Because A had been trapped in the hospital for four days, he was extremely familiar with the layout.
The hospital was relatively small. All the patients and medical staff were concentrated inside a single building.
Su Qiong followed A out of the patient room and saw a directory posted on the hallway wall. The paper looked brand new.
According to the directory, the building had exactly four floors, each capable of holding about fifteen to twenty standard-sized rooms. The first floor was the outpatient department. The second floor held the examination and treatment rooms. The third floor was the inpatient ward. The fourth floor housed the logistics department and the cafeteria.
As a long-term “patient,” A’s room was on the third floor. Aside from the outpatient department—which had the heaviest flow of foot traffic—he could access the other floors easily. With A’s elite abilities, four days was more than enough time for him to thoroughly search every single corner of the building.
“So you haven’t found a single clue?” Su Qiong asked.
“Wrong. I found plenty of clues, but none were useful for the main quest.”
A stepped out of the room, walking close to the wall to avoid the bustling morning crowd. As they walked, he explained.
“On the first day, I discovered that the hospital staff was smuggling expensive medication. They sold the costly drugs allocated by the government to traffickers on the black market, then treated the actual patients with cheap glucose or yeast tablets disguised as the real medicine. That night, I infiltrated the director’s office and exposed the entire ring online under the director’s own name.”
“On the second day, I discovered an illegal human trafficking ring operating out of the basement. After the nighttime restrictions lifted, I went down and destroyed their entire base of operations.”
“Starting on the third night, the remaining people in the hospital began mutating on a massive scale. Their bodies liquefied, and their combat power spiked dramatically.”
“By last night, they had completely transformed into monsters that attacked anything that moved, so I killed them all.”
Listening to A’s casual report, a row of giant question marks slowly appeared above Su Qiong’s head.
He had originally assumed this instance didn’t have any hidden quests. Now it seemed that even if it did, A had already completed them all as a casual side project!
“Besides that, I did find one important item,” A stopped walking and pulled a tattered piece of paper from his pocket.
Su Qiong took the ragged paper and unfolded it.
“A map of the hospital?” Su Qiong studied it carefully. The paper was extremely old, probably dating back decades. But the building depicted on it was unmistakably this exact hospital.
Su Qiong compared it to the new directory on the wall. The general layout of the four floors was the same. But beyond the original four floors, the old map listed an additional level:
The Critical Care Ward.
The terrifying thing was, the Critical Care Ward wasn’t assigned to a specific floor number. Instead, it existed in a shifting state.
The other four floors remained locked in sequence. Whichever level the Critical Care Ward decided to occupy, all the floors above it would shift upward to make room.
For example, if the Critical Care Ward appeared on the first floor, the outpatient department and everything above it would shift up one level. If it appeared on the third floor, the inpatient ward, logistics, and cafeteria would move up instead.
Because of this map, A had known about the hidden ward for days, but he had never figured out its exact location.
“A, has this hospital ever been reconstructed or renovated?”
Hearing Su Qiong call his codename in that adorable, gentle voice, A felt the tension and crushing pressure of the past four days slowly melt away. Even a trained killing machine would struggle to stay tense in front of a marshmallow.
“No,” A answered with absolute certainty. “I broke into the director’s office and double-checked the architectural records four or five times.”
“If the building was never remodeled, then the Critical Care Ward must still exist. I suspect it’s the breakthrough we need to answer the exam paper. We have to find it.”
Holding the map, Su Qiong leaned his squishy body out the hallway window and looked straight up.
The floor above them was the cafeteria. It was breakfast time, and hundreds of patients had crowded into the cafeteria’s water room. The number of patients vastly exceeded the cafeteria’s capacity, so the overflow crowd carried enormous cups of water out onto the open rooftop, gulping it down frantically.
Every single patient was desperately pouring water down their throats. Even as their stomachs swelled like pregnant women, not one of them lowered their cup.
It was as if missing a single sip would kill them.
Looking up, Su Qiong clearly saw that the cafeteria ceiling was also the rooftop floor. The entire rooftop was totally open to the sky, meaning it couldn’t possibly be hiding a secret fifth level.
Gripping the windowsill, Su Qiong thoughtfully looked straight down.
“Stop searching,” A grabbed the back of Su Qiong’s gray cloak and hauled him back inside. “I already checked the basement. The night before last, before I killed all those mutants, I forced them to dig up the dirt beneath the outpatient department. We found nothing.”
“Are you a demon?” Su Qiong gasped. A had actually forced the monsters to do heavy manual labor before murdering them!
“Would you rather dig it up yourself?” A asked blankly.
The frail, useless little marshmallow violently shook his head. If even A’s extreme methods had failed to uncover the fifth floor, then Su Qiong, who had zero physical strength, was completely helpless.
“Anyway, let’s try questioning the staff first. Maybe we’ll get a useful clue. There have to be some elderly doctors or patients here who know what happened, right?”
When Su Qiong suggested this, a rare trace of hesitation appeared in A’s dark eyes.
“It’s useless. Don’t waste your energy,” A said, looking toward the doctors and patients streaming down the hallway.
Everyone walked past them carrying massive cups of water. They chatted and laughed with one another, completely ignoring A. It was as if he were totally invisible.
Su Qiong noticed something else: the patients’ hospital gowns were perfectly clean, but water was constantly seeping out from beneath their clothes, leaving wet footprints on the tiles.
A patient walked directly into A, colliding heavily with his shoulder. The patient left a damp, wet stain on A’s gown, but didn’t react at all. He just kept walking, totally oblivious.
Su Qiong finally realized the horrifying truth. No one in this entire instance had spoken a single word to A.
Even though Su Qiong didn’t understand human society very well, he knew something was terribly wrong.
Warm sunlight streamed through the windows, illuminating the bustling hospital. People came and went. The scene looked perfectly normal.
But A was completely isolated from it all.
He was like a solitary whale calling out on a frequency no one else could hear. Even surrounded by a massive pod, no one in the ocean could understand its voice.
“Since I entered the instance, you are the only one who has spoken to me,” A said calmly.
Last night, even without using his elite scanning privilege, A had instantly sensed that Su Qiong was fundamentally different from everything else in this hospital.
Su Qiong could see him. Su Qiong could talk to him.
“Huh? No one else talks to you?”
A didn’t answer. He raised his wrist and opened his player interface.
Top-tier players received special privileges from the system. Even during the daytime when combat and skills were restricted, A could still use basic tech functions. Tapping the screen, A pulled up the surveillance footage from his own hospital room.
On the screen, it was time for the nurses’ morning rounds. A young, smiling nurse knocked gently on A’s door and walked inside, stopping right beside the bed.
But A was standing out in the hallway with Su Qiong. The bed in the video was completely empty.
Yet, the nurse opened her medical chart, smiled at the empty air, and called out an unfamiliar name.
“Mr. S, your illness is very serious. You must take good care of yourself. Remember to drink plenty of water. You absolutely must drink plenty of water,” the nurse cooed, her voice as gentle as a spring breeze.
“She comes in for rounds at the exact same time every day, and she speaks to thin air,” A watched the screen coldly. “On the first day, she called me by the wrong name. I was foolish enough to try correcting her.”
Su Qiong could easily imagine how awful that felt.
At the start of the Gangan Village level, Su Qiong hadn’t been able to speak. Whenever Yu Qimiao and the others got into a heated discussion, Su Qiong was reduced to background scenery.
But A’s situation was a thousand times worse. Even when Su Qiong couldn’t talk, the Orphan Alliance still remembered to check on him.
A had been entirely erased from the world.
“Is it because of the water?” Su Qiong asked worriedly, noticing everyone chugging from their massive cups. “Have you drunk any water since you got here?”
“No,” A answered.
“That’s really bad! The instance has been open for four and a half days! IF has an extremely high degree of realism. If you don’t drink water soon, you might die!”
Based on Su Qiong’s basic knowledge of human biology, A had already shattered the limits of the human body by surviving four and a half days without a single drop of water.
“Does this instance have a time limit?” Su Qiong asked.
“One and a half days left. I have to escape before the beginner zone disintegrates. We’re running out of time.” A turned and strode toward the emergency stairwell at the far end of the corridor.
“A, where are you going?” Su Qiong floated after him. “The elevator going down is right over there.”
“Avoid the elevator at all costs,” A said without looking back. “It’s too strange.”
“Huh? What’s strange about it?” Su Qiong looked back at the elevator banks.
A dozen patients were standing in an orderly line, waiting to get on. Everything looked perfectly normal.
After hesitating for a second, Su Qiong decided to trust A and followed him into the empty stairwell.
They were on the third floor, just two levels above the outpatient department. Taking the stairs would only take about three minutes, though the elevator should have been much faster.
When Su Qiong passed the second-floor landing, he poked his head out the door to look around.
The entire second floor was dead silent. It was so quiet that a falling leaf would have echoed.
“The second floor is only active when patients are getting exams or treatments,” A explained quietly from the stairs. “But over the last four days, nearly every single patient has only ever visited the outpatient department on the first floor.”
“I see.” Su Qiong tried to push open a locked treatment room door, but it wouldn’t budge. He couldn’t even squeeze his squishy body through the cracks. Giving up, he floated down the rest of the stairs behind A.
Ding—
Just as they reached the first-floor lobby, they heard the elevator doors chiming.
Su Qiong instinctively looked over. Through the narrow gap as the doors began to part, he saw the exact same group of people who had been waiting in line on the third floor.
Strange.
Taking the elevator should have taken five seconds. Why had they only just arrived?
As Su Qiong watched, the heavy alloy elevator doors began bulging outward, groaning under immense pressure. The lower tracks warped and bent, causing the doors to slide open painfully slowly.
Only when the doors were finally forced completely apart did the passengers spill out.
All at once.
Su Qiong stumbled backward, staring in absolute, suffocating horror.
It wasn’t a group of people anymore. It was a massive, semi-liquid brick of human flesh.
The patients had been compressed together so tightly that their bodies had fused into a perfect square. The giant “human brick” bounced heavily twice against the tile floor, but it didn’t break apart.
The people riding the elevator seemed completely incapable of feeling pain. Somehow, they had crammed themselves into the tiny metal box, crushing their own bones and flattening their organs to fill every single inch of available space, right down to the corners.
It looked exactly like stuffing five pounds of raw minced meat into a one-pound square mold, then crushing it down with a hydraulic press.
Su Qiong stared at the horrific human brick.
Their bodies were abnormally soft and rubbery. Their limbs were violently tangled and knotted together, while their swollen abdomens had been compressed into bizarre geometric shapes to fill the gaps between each other. The bodies of the patients squashed into the outer edges and corners showed severe, rotting liquefaction.
But the people making up the brick didn’t scream or cry. As if this were a totally normal occurrence, they expertly untangled their knotted limbs, peeling themselves off one another. Retaining their violently distorted, flattened shapes, they staggered toward the consultation rooms like horrifying walking corpses.
Every single one of them held a medical chart, patiently waiting for an outpatient doctor to treat them.
Su Qiong glanced down at a chart dropped by one of the mangled patients. Under “Cause of Illness,” there was only one word written:
Dehydration.
Beep, beep—
Su Qiong’s black bracelet flashed twice, triggering his very first official clue in the hospital instance.
[Clues for clearing the instance: 1. The hospital’s full name. 2. The Critical Care Ward. 3. The medical charts.]
[Warning: Please use the clues in the exact listed order. Otherwise, you will bear the consequences.]
