Chapter 10: The Asylum Pantomime: 9

“Brother?”

Ruan Yu’s soft voice drifted over. He sat beside Nan Lin’s bed, tilting his head up to look at him.

Nan Lin replied with a lukewarm hum, keeping his distance.

Perhaps Ruan Yu’s disguise had slipped for just a moment, triggering Nan Lin’s guard. Or perhaps Nan Lin’s own temperament was simply too indifferent.

Either way, Nan Lin thought: This is fine. Same as it’s been for all these years.

As if sensing his thoughts, Ruan Yu visibly deflated, even his striking features dimming by a shade.

Nan Lin glanced at the wounded look on the young man’s face and looked away without a flicker of emotion.

But internally, his mind was racing: Could my judgment have been wrong?

It can’t be wrong…

Probably?

…

Whatever. Clear the instance first.

He exhaled in irritation and flopped onto the bed fully clothed.

Among the current rules, the only two concerning nighttime sleep were [No roughhousing at bedtime] and [Dreaming without permission is strictly forbidden].

No problem, Nan Lin thought. I sleep like a lamb.

He stopped worrying about it. On the opposite bed, Ruan Yu’s gaze grew deep and shadowed as his fingertips traced the soft lines of Nan Lin’s sleeping face, the corners of his lips curling upward.

A few seconds later, Ruan Yu slipped into his own bed as well.

Midnight.

Faint sounds drifted from the room next door.

Nan Lin’s eyes snapped open. He slipped out of bed with a light step and moved toward the door.

Inside Song De’s room, there was a familiar shadow.

She was petite, with twin braids, looking about seventeen or eighteen. When she turned, layers of skirt hem fanned out behind her.

Song De scrabbled on all fours toward the edge of the bed, but with every inch he crawled, the figure advanced another step closer.

[I am your roommate. You may call me Teresa.]

“No, no, no! Get away, stay away from me!” Song De’s terrified voice echoed through the door.

[Why the fear? Teresa is the roommate of every lonely madman. You chose me.]

“Please, I don’t want to die yet. Go find them… Turn around! Go find them instead!”

Nan Lin, suddenly on the receiving end of the finger pointing through the window, blinked in confusion.

Teresa followed Song De’s outstretched finger and slowly broke into a smile.

[Teresa is not friends with sane people. She can’t take him away just yet.]

[But you already agreed in the stairwell. You said you’d play hide-and-seek with me whenever I wanted.]

Song De’s eyes glazed over as if he had truly lost his mind. He fell silent, no longer shouting, only mouthing Teresa’s words over and over in a daze.

“I promised you… I promised you…”

The two shadows of mismatched size merged into one. Nan Lin turned and walked back into his room, finding Ruan Yu breathing softly in deep sleep.

The words he wanted to say circled his lips and died there. He turned his face away again and stared at the ceiling, lost in thought.

Song De could have survived. He simply refused to believe Lin Yi’s warnings, instead obeying every word the NPC told him.

But he had overlooked one thing: in a game instance, the ones who most want players to die are always the NPCs and monsters.

Arrogance and selfish stupidity are also diseases. And they tend to be the most lethal.

Still, the asylum was far livelier at night than during the day.

Somewhere in the building, a room produced sounds of weeping and wailing. One person lamented their suffering while another screamed about their suppressed misery.

Nan Lin rolled over and summarized: One person uses constant self-sacrifice to manufacture guilt in the other, then forces compliance through that guilt.

Not a particularly clever manipulation.

The argument seemed to be getting louder.

What were they saying? Something about taking medicine early?

Yesterday the nurse had announced the meal schedule. The ninety minutes between waking up and breakfast, was that the medication window?

Soon the commotion shifted in tone, dropping from wailing to low whispers.

“The emergency exit… was sealed… by the director… Accept your fate…”

The voices grew fainter until they vanished entirely.

Nan Lin considered getting up and moving closer to the source to see if he could catch any useful information. Just as he prepared to move, something caught the corner of his eye.

Moonlight glinted off the glass in the door, slightly blinding.

But if he looked carefully, he could make out a shriveled humanoid figure standing outside the door, silently watching him and Ruan Yu.

Nan Lin recognized the figure as the male doctor who had escorted them to the cafeteria the day before.

What was he doing now?

Ward rounds?

Nan Lin closed his eyes and pretended to sleep. But after waiting a while, he stopped caring about the doctor’s intentions.

The man couldn’t get in anyway. He could plaster himself against the door all night for all Nan Lin cared.

The first night passed quickly.

Everything appeared to be fine.

At six in the morning, someone knocked on the door right on schedule.

It was the same female nurse from yesterday afternoon. She looked considerably better today, though a putrid odor still clung to her.

Nan Lin hadn’t paid attention yesterday, but today he deliberately glanced at the nurse’s wrists.

Just as he’d suspected, a cloth wristband dangled from her thin wrist.

Having confirmed his theory, Nan Lin quickly looked away to avoid arousing the nurse’s suspicion.

The metal tray clattered loudly as it was set on his bedside table.

Compared to yesterday’s emptiness, today’s tray was heaped with brightly colored pills, along with patches of unidentified powdery substance.

[No lying in. No crying. Take your medicine like a good patient.]

Nan Lin watched the nurse sort the medication without blinking, a mountain of multicolored pills.

He had every reason to believe that swallowing that handful could cause problems even if you didn’t have any before.

“6:00 to 7:30, wake up and take your medicine. Conversation is permitted, fighting is not.”

“And finally, stay in your room, take your medicine like good patients, and no picky eating.”

Her footsteps receded down the hall. That was rather surprising. She wasn’t going to watch them take their medicine?

In that case…

Just a few steps away on the neighboring bed, Ruan Yu was poking at the pile of pills with a troubled expression. Nan Lin picked up a pill and rolled it between his fingers.

“Brother,” Ruan Yu said, “how about I try taking mine first?”

Nan Lin refused without hesitation. “No.”

He was thinking: Do I really have to take this medicine?

And what exactly does the wristband represent?

So far, what players had lost was their sanity. Their health hadn’t decreased at all.

Combined with the ninety-minute medication window…

Could it be that the rules on the sheet were tied solely to players’ sanity?

A rhythmic tapping came from across the room. Nan Lin shifted slightly and looked through the glass panel in the door.

Sure enough, diagonally across the hall, Qiu Xinxin was holding up a pill in one hand and a cup of water in the other. When she saw Nan Lin looking, her eyes lit up.

She dropped the pill into the water, and the solid capsule dissolved completely within seconds.

After that, she pointed behind herself and gestured repeatedly.

Nan Lin frowned and looked in the direction she indicated, but his line of sight was blocked and he couldn’t make out what Qiu Xinxin was trying to tell him. He scanned the room again carefully. Nothing was out of place.

Qiu Xinxin clearly seemed frantic, but the nurse’s instructions about “no gathering in groups” and “stay in your room” kept her from bolting out directly.

After a few seconds of deliberation, Nan Lin shoved the door open with a sharp bang. The aging door groaned in the dead silence.

Qiu Xinxin stared, utterly baffled.

Zou Zhiming’s jaw dropped. “Huh?!”

Lin Yi said nothing.

I didn’t even leave the room. Which rule says I can’t open a door? Nan Lin thought.

He said aloud: “There’s nothing unusual in this room.”

Qiu Xinxin looked puzzled, her delicate brows knitting together. “Shouldn’t every room have one? That can’t be right.”

As she spoke, Nan Lin tilted his head back to examine the door frame and knocked on it.

No response.

He knocked again.

Still nothing.

But the instant Nan Lin pulled his hand away, the door frame of his room collapsed inward, crashing to the ground with several heavy thuds.

In the cloud of dust that erupted, Nan Lin suddenly spotted something and bent down to fish out a slip of paper.

He scanned it at a glance.

[The nurses deliver medicine to us every day, but we all know it’s their revenge.]

[My roommate in this room refused to take his medicine. He resisted violently several times and injured several doctors one day.]

[But the next morning, he was dragged away.]

[Later, we all saw the result of that resistance. His body was unrecognizable. His skull had been cracked open with a huge gash, both eyes stitched shut, jaw and cheekbones shattered in compound fractures, and every single rib broken. Like a grotesque, terrifying balloon doll.]

[He had clearly endured unimaginable torture before dying. But when he was hung on the Nightingale Statue like a trophy, we discovered he had likely been injected with drugs that kept him fully conscious right up until death.]

[After that, far fewer people resisted. At the very least, they no longer dared lay hands on the doctors or nurses.]

[The asylum’s medicine cannot be taken. It causes a degree of mental disarray. But if we fail to hide the discarded medicine properly, the attending physician and the nurses will punish us.]

[Here’s the discouraging news: out of all thirty of us, across hundreds of attempts, not a single person has successfully hidden their medicine.]

Reading this, Nan Lin began to understand what Qiu Xinxin was getting at.

She likely had a similar note left by a previous patient, describing a method of hiding medicine. Whether Zou Zhiming and the others had one too was another question.

Sure enough, Qiu Xinxin was speaking to Zou Zhiming again. He nodded and turned back from the doorway.

In the meantime, Nan Lin gave Qiu Xinxin a brief rundown of the note’s contents.

Then, in his room with the door now permanently wedged open, Nan Lin took one last look at Song De’s still-silent room before returning to his bed.

He laid the rules sheet and the note side by side, comparing the wording back and forth.

The rules sheet was a directive aimed at all players. The rules written on it might cause fluctuations in a player’s sanity, but they wouldn’t reduce health.

But that was precisely the problem.

In the game, players had two life-or-death stats.

The first was sanity.

The second was health.

If either stat dropped below a critical threshold, the consequences would be unpredictable.

And in this instance, sanity was especially important.

This instance’s rules sheet offered some protection for players’ health, but it did not guarantee stability of their sanity.

On the contrary, certain rules on the sheet would cause players to lose sanity in exchange for keeping their health stable.

Put simply, it was a choice.

If a player’s health remained untouched while their sanity was ground dangerously low, they could choose to hide their medicine. Even if they were caught not taking it, the doctors’ and nurses’ punishment would only cost them some health, not their life.

Conversely, if a player’s sanity stayed normal at a comfortably high level while their health was critically low, they could choose to take the medicine, sacrificing sanity to protect their health.

So it’s a gamble between sanity and health? Nan Lin thought.

On the server, before Nan Lin’s personal feed.

“A choice between health and sanity? But what if both base stats are low?”

“…You might as well have named him directly.”

“Heh, I’ve seen plenty of pretty faces, but a walking time bomb is a first. Aren’t you curious when he’ll snap?”

“Shallow. I’m only curious how many players in his instance survive once he does.”

“But hasn’t this instance’s difficulty gone up?”

“Seems like it. The rules used to just protect players.”

“I remember that too. Teresa wasn’t this crazy before.”

Back in the instance, Zou Zhiming found the note in his room.

Nan Lin glanced over from a distance. There weren’t many words on it.

Zou Zhiming also opened his door and gestured toward the group.

“What he’s trying to say is…” Qiu Xinxin looked down at the wooden floor beneath her feet.

Lin Yi cut in: “The remaining portion of medicine that can’t be dissolved can be hidden under the floorboards.”

Qiu Xinxin stomped her foot and indeed felt a slight unevenness beneath the floor. She nodded at Zou Zhiming, glanced at her sanity hovering right at the danger threshold, hesitated for a moment, and chose to hide her medicine.

Lose any more sanity and she’d go mad.

Besides, what if the nurses didn’t catch her?

Meanwhile, Ruan Yu also understood the choice between sanity and health. He looked up at Nan Lin.

Whatever Brother does, I do.

Nan Lin was thinking: As long as the medicine is hidden well and no one in the asylum finds it, both sanity and health can be preserved.

But it couldn’t be that simple. The note had stated that almost no one had succeeded in hiding their medicine.

So where could it be hidden?

Nan Lin glanced at the floor, then at the cup of water by his bedside.

7:28.

The male doctor from yesterday appeared again with his clipboard, but when he saw the collapsed door and door frame of Nan Lin’s room, he visibly stiffened.

Nan Lin kept his gaze lowered, his expression utterly unruffled.

“Six… all accounted for. Let’s go.”

At this, Nan Lin turned to look at Song De’s room.

The tightly shut door opened, and a figure stepped out.

In just one night, Song De had lost a terrifying amount of weight. His eyes were veiled in a white haze, giving him an eerie, unsettling appearance.

Seeing this, Zou Zhiming called out to him, but there was no response.

The surroundings fell deathly quiet.

Nan Lin suddenly said, “There was no death announcement.”

So at least up to now, the game still recognized Song De as alive.

After a moment of silence, Qiu Xinxin said, “Let’s go. We’re running out of time.”

Song De still didn’t respond. Only after everyone else had left did he shuffle blankly toward the cafeteria.

The same route as last night. Past the corridor, across the Green Field, and beneath the shadow of the other building, the cafeteria lights flickered on.

Having survived yesterday, they were all braced for another round of revolting food.

But to their surprise, breakfast was considerably more normal.

At least on the surface.

Qiu Xinxin tasted a bite with the resolve of someone facing death, then blinked in surprise. “It even tastes normal.”

Her words seemed to lift some invisible taboo. They could even hear Zou Zhiming exhale quietly in relief.

During the meal, Ruan Yu caught Nan Lin staring at the food in his bowl. His right hand kept rising to pick up his chopsticks, only to be pressed back down by his left.

“Brother, what’s wrong?” Ruan Yu asked.

Last night I couldn’t tell what the ingredients were, which was bad enough. Now that I can actually see it…

“Brother… you don’t like spinach?” Ruan Yu asked.

“No,” Nan Lin replied instantly.

He looked at Ruan Yu with complete seriousness, though it was unclear whom he was trying to convince. “I don’t have any food I particularly dislike. It just happened to land in front of me.”

Ruan Yu’s eyes brimmed with amusement. That was definitely a yes.

He was about to say more when a familiar figure entered the cafeteria.