Chapter 37: Surviving Your Teammate

“This is a little strange. Wasn’t it too easy to find this place?”

Ying Zixin and Zhang Hengheng both stopped in their tracks.

Their current location was extremely familiar; it was the exact scene from the photo attached to the game’s quest information.

It had taken them almost no effort to find this place. They simply followed the plastic mannequins that had transformed to look like their teammates, pretended to believe them, and walked straight ahead, arriving at this area that wasn’t marked on the map at all.

Then, they had immediately turned the tables, slaughtering the impostors with a single strike.

The terrazzo floor was still beneath their feet, but now it was covered in unknown brown grime, making its original appearance unrecognizable.

The air was turbid and thick with dust, carrying a faint, nauseating stench.

The floor was piled with discarded plastic mannequins, missing arms and legs, their surfaces pitted and uneven. Some were just heads, scattered and rolling across the ground.

But in several prominent spots within their line of sight, there were several human corpses.

Even from their swollen, decomposing faces, one could see the terror frozen on their features in their final moments, as if they had glimpsed an unimaginable horror beyond all logic.

And the most crucial detail—without exception, the back of each corpse’s skull had a large hole. It was as if something had dug it open, forcibly scooped out the contents, leaving behind only dried, crusted blood.

“There were actually other people here?”

“Players?”

But this thought only flashed briefly through their minds before they ruled it out.

This level of decomposition was absolutely impossible for it to be the other players who had entered with them as part of the same team.

Furthermore, this was a Reality Quest, not an Instance World, so it couldn’t be players from a previous batch who had died here.

Even if a prior group of players had entered this quest world and perished, the All Living Beings Forum would likely have information and discussions about it, and the game would have increased the difficulty.

Therefore, these people were likely just ordinary individuals who had stumbled in here by mistake and met their unfortunate end.

“Hey, Old Ying, do you think they came from the old Center Department Store decades ago, or from the current Dome Mall?” Zhang Hengheng suddenly asked.

“Who knows.”

Ying Zixin wasn’t in the mood to answer.

He took out his phone and found the photo posted by the game.

The date displayed—yesterday morning, or rather, the day before yesterday’s morning.

The address listed was also the Dome Mall, the current high-end shopping center in Rongcheng with its massive foot traffic and colorful stained-glass dome.

Not the old Center Department Store buried in the fire.

He slowly let out a breath.

He probably knew where that photo had come from now.

Zhang Hengheng was far more thick-skinned than he was. He walked over to one of the male corpses. “Look, he even brought a camera in with him. This kind of DSLR camera doesn’t look like something from decades ago. Looks like these people stumbled in a few days ago.”

“It’s likely that the entry of living people triggered an Aberration here, so the game issued a Reality Quest, forcing players in Rongcheng to come and resolve it.” Ying Zixin had participated in more than one Reality Quest and understood the subtle differences between them.

Zhang Hengheng rubbed his neck with his thumb and forefinger. “Then why is our quest ‘Survive’? Why isn’t it something like ‘Resolve the plastic mannequin event, trace the source’?”

Ying Zixin looked at the human corpses and remained silent.

After a moment, he said, “It might be because the only way to survive is to resolve the source.”

Thus, forcing the players to resolve the source of the event in order to live until the next morning.

“That’s quite logical. Uniquely logical to this game, Sinless Abyss.” Zhang Hengheng agreed. “Looks like our move was the right one. Staying put would have been a dead end.”

“But logically speaking, a Reality Quest of this difficulty shouldn’t produce this situation. Unless…”

Ying Zixin finished his unspoken thought. “It should be that the last two players, who haven’t appeared yet, are too strong. The game judged that our combined strength is fully capable of resolving this kind of event.”

“Tsk, we’ve been screwed over.” Zhang Hengheng muttered a couple of times, but didn’t dare to truly complain.

This wasn’t like real life, where running your mouth might at worst get you beaten up. In the game, if you ran into a player who was both formidable and mentally unstable, you could lose your life on the spot. Who could you even reason with then?

Ying Zixin bent down, closed the eyes of the male corpse carrying the DSLR camera, and continued walking deeper inside.

This place was like an old warehouse piled with discarded plastic mannequins. Even some of the animated mannequins seemed to be barely clinging to life, on their last legs. They were not on the same level at all as the monsters they’d encountered before, the ones that could deceive, speak, and take the forms of others.

“A bit strange.”

“It is. Is it a trap?” Zhang Hengheng kicked a plastic head that was frantically blinking and twisting its features, but lacked a body to support it. It flew away, and after waiting a long time, they only heard faint, rustling, crawling sounds. No other powerful monster appeared.

“What if this quest is really just like this?”

Ying Zixin replied, “Then this wouldn’t be a Common Level survival quest, it would be a Novice Level one.”

Despite saying this, no matter how vigilant they were, they ultimately reached the end without any real danger, only a few scares along the way.

They finally saw the “source” of this quest.

It was the plastic mannequin that most resembled a human.

Its surface had wrinkled textures, its skin rough and covered in age spots like an elderly person in their sixties or seventies.

Its body was gaunt and thin as kindling, unlike the other plastic mannequins with their uniform, aesthetically pleasing, mold-made figures.

It even had grey, cracked fingernails that looked somewhat filthy.

Yet, it was still not human.

Because it had no head—or rather, no head of its own.

On its neck was a human head with dilated pupils. Female. It was clearly ripped from some victim’s body and forcibly jammed onto its own neck.

The wind carried no sense of danger to Zhang Hengheng. He took the lead, walking up and circling this exceptionally unique plastic mannequin.

Just like the others, this female victim’s skull also had a wound at the back, its interior completely empty.

“Still no brain.” Ying Zixin pondered, prodding its soft body with his Peach Wood Sword. “And it doesn’t move. It’s like it has no consciousness.”

“Even those plastic mannequins that are nothing but a head can move. There’s no reason this one, the most special, wouldn’t move, right?”

“Also, why are all the human victims missing their brains? Where did their brains go? This isn’t one of those sci-fi Instances with monsters or bugs that specifically eat human brains.”

Zhang Hengheng was suspicious. He really wanted to cut it open and see if it was just pretending to be motionless.

From the very beginning, when these things transformed into teammates’ appearances to lure the players, they had displayed cunning and intelligence. They even coordinated, as if something behind them was directing their actions.

So, where was that ‘something behind them’?

“Doesn’t this seem like a decoy tactic?” Ying Zixin suddenly said. “Lure us here, but just leave an empty shell in this spot.”

The two exchanged a glance.

“We need to go back, now!”

Yin Luo and the others were in danger.

Ying Zixin no longer hesitated. He held his sword with both hands, pointing it skyward, using the wooden blade as a conduit. Blinding light exploded from top to bottom. “Thunder Descend!”

“BOOM!”

The grey, hazy space was once again as bright as day.

…

Blood soaked the floor, its stench assaulting the nostrils. Plastic mannequins, indistinguishable from human corpses in death, were piled nearly two layers high. There wasn’t even a place to step.

An endless stream of monsters with familiar faces swarmed in, only to collapse without suspense amidst flashes of blades and swords.

This wasn’t a battle; it was a slaughter.

A completely one-sided slaughter.

The scent of blood on the white-haired youth grew thicker and thicker. Corpse Frost Power diffused from his skin outwards. Even just being in the same space as him, one could feel the bone-chilling cold that drilled into the marrow and threatened to freeze the soul.

“So many, but why aren’t you dead yet? Is it because I’m killing too slowly?”

He tilted his head, his crimson eyes revealing a hint of confusion and doubt. He looked almost childishly innocent. “Sorry, I really am too weak right now.”

“Maybe I should speed up a little, so I can find you.”

He let go of his hands. The two short swords fell, dissolving into grey mist and vanishing.

Then, he slowly closed his eyes and stood perfectly still.

Layer upon layer of plastic mannequins slowly surrounded him, like zombies in a movie. One by one, they stepped on the bodies of their own kind, scrambling wildly upwards.

Just a little more…

The plastic monster on the very top was just one more reach away from grabbing that pale, slender ankle.

Just as it was about to make contact, suddenly, it violently burst apart!

Like fireworks, the plastic mannequins surrounding the white-haired youth exploded in concentric rings. Centered on their newly formed hearts, their entire bodies burst into pieces.

Limbs, like confetti sprayed from a party popper, fluttered down in a shower, dyeing everything they touched red.

“Now, I can find you very quickly.” The white-haired youth smiled happily.

You call that weak?

Then what the hell are we?

The ease of his killing was like a farmer harvesting wheat!

One swing of the blade, and a whole swath fell.

Lin Rudong’s pupils were quaking; her hands were trembling.

Lei Jue sat slumped on the ground, his entire body shaking.

The two of them had already shrunk into a corner, like quails facing a violent storm. Other than shivering in fear, they had no other recourse.

“I think… something’s gone wrong.” The girl in the tracksuit spoke, her voice as faint as a candle flickering in the wind.

She finally understood why Yin Luo had told her earlier to stay far away from him later.

‘Far away’ was an understatement. She didn’t want to face this scene ever again in her entire life.

“He’s gone completely berserk.” Lei Jue gulped down a mouthful of saliva. “This state of his is clearly problematic. He’s barely holding onto his reason. Should we try to snap him out of it?”

Lin Rudong’s face was impassive. “You go?”

“Never mind, then. What if he decides I’m an enemy blocking his path and just slashes me? What then?” Lei Jue gave a bitter smile. “What do we do now?”

“We wait. There’s less than two hours until dawn. We can leave this place then.”

Lin Rudong’s voice was as weak as a thread. “I guess this still counts as a survival quest… it’s just… a survival quest where you have to survive your own teammate.”