Chapter 2: Madmen’s Mime: 1

【Now logging into server: Utopia.】

【Announcement: Welcome to the Infinite Game World. Here, the victors win a precious chance to survive, along with the wish they desire most.】

【Player’s past points: Wiping save data. Please wait.】

【Player’s past items: Wiping save data. Please wait.】

【Player’s past attributes: Wiping save data. Please wait.】

【Loading personal interface…】

【Player ID: 7332078.

Player Name: Nan Lin.

Starting Health: 500 (far below average).

Starting Attack: 2000 (extremely dangerous).

Sanity: 50 (far below average).

Weapons: None.

Items: None.】

【Summary: A humanoid self-destruct device with absurdly high attack power, who dies at a touch and is half out of his mind besides.】

【Good luck.】

【God waved you off and, while He was at it, booted you into hell.】

The game’s announcements droned on. Nan Lin kept his head down the whole time, but at that last line he raised his eyes and shot a flat, expressionless glance toward a certain point.

Game: “…”

Scanning… extremely dangerous.

Kick him into a dungeon first. Deal with the rest later.

【Loading dungeon…

Initial Dungeon: 《Madmen and Madmen and Madmen》 Briefing—

[My plan is to be a romantic madman, and a free, absurd scavenger.

As long as I live one more day, that is one more day of loathing revenge against this place, this madhouse.]

[You ask how far gone my mind is now?

About as far as this: one second I can close my eyes in peace and lie down into a grave, and the next, pain crashes into my coffin like a nuclear bomb.]

In the old streets of Kang City stands an asylum of considerable age.

In recent years, the city hospitals transferred a great number of psychiatric patients here.

The patients cry injustice and clamor for freedom, insisting their minds are perfectly sound.

But we all know, and we tell them again and again: it is you who is sick.】

【Players in this dungeon: 6.

Special note: The initial dungeon will always contain two veteran players.

Dungeon historical survival rate: 50%.

Note: The initial dungeon does not currently generate save points.

Safehouse???】

【Loading map…

Enjoy the game.】

The game’s flat voice faded away. When Nan Lin woke, he was still somewhat dazed.

He pressed a hand to his head and blinked very slowly.

At least the game had kept a shred of conscience, restoring his body to average condition.

But even inside a game dungeon, people would inevitably hear the news and come hunting him down.

The one thing he could count as good news: the [Monarch’s Face] had shattered completely not long after Murder Day, and he had already succeeded in stripping away the tracking marks the traitors had planted.

Almost no one had ever seen the true face hidden beneath the [Monarch’s Face].

There should be time to recover his strength.

He would absolutely fight his way back.

His thoughts settled. Nan Lin smoothed the complicated look from his eyes and swept a rough glance over the surroundings.

This had to be the asylum mentioned in the briefing. Black graffiti dotted the grimy walls in patches, and the curtains used as dividers were covered in stains. Looking out the window, the entire asylum was steeped in a desolate silence.

He swung off the bed. Before he could even check his main quest, he spoke sharply toward the corner. “Who’s there?”

He was not alone in this ward.

In the corner, the other person said nothing. He simply crouched on the floor hugging his knees, pressed close against the cramped wall.

Nan Lin stood by the window and met his gaze without a trace of emotion.

Because of the angle, Ruan Yu in the corner could only look up.

He saw the orange-red afterglow of sunset through the glass. Nan Lin’s cheek was snow white, its lines clean and fine, like a piece of flawless jade wrapped in a golden edge, and at this moment he was watching him, still and unmoved.

Exquisite beyond words.

Ruan Yu ducked his head a little lower before speaking in a very light, very faint voice: “New player, Ruan Yu.”

Nan Lin answered, “Nan Lin.”

“Nan Lin?” Ruan Yu repeated in a low voice, a well-judged flicker of fear and hope in his eyes. “This… game. Is what it said true?”

Almost every new player fell into this same confusion, and then stumbled blankly to their death in the initial dungeon.

Nan Lin gave a small nod. Ruan Yu seemed to see hope, a few touches of smile rising on his bewitching face as he slowly stood up out of the shadows.

He needed only to stand in the light to take a person’s breath away.

A beauty who ran warm to the touch.

And Nan Lin, whose gaze had gone from looking down, to looking level, to looking very slightly up: “…”

But once he had a clear look at Ruan Yu’s face, his pupils contracted almost imperceptibly.

This person looked a bit familiar. He thought he had seen him in the last game…

Not certain. Better keep watching.

He turned toward the ward door and began receiving his main quest.

【Player Nan Lin Main Quest: Within one week, survive and escape the Cartagena Asylum.

No items available.

No skills available.

No weapons available.

Personal inventory: Empty. (Don’t bother looking, there really is nothing)】

No one could have guessed that the once-lofty king had been stripped of everything and now stood in an initial dungeon of the Infinite Game, bare and bedraggled.

Yet Nan Lin showed no discomfort whatsoever. At least, not on the surface.

He pushed open the ward door. At the same time, players were filing out of the wards on both sides of the corridor.

A young man with a kindly smile. A girl wearing a sour expression. And two more… new players, visibly panicking.

Nan Lin looked them over, lips pressed together, saying nothing.

Six people in the dungeon. All present.

In the corridor, which was not particularly wide, the group exchanged a brief round of introductions.

The kindly-faced young man wore a long-sleeved shirt and trousers, with a loud, garishly patterned scarf around his neck. His smile was perfunctory. “You can call me Lin Yi.”

The girl frowned. “Qiu Xinxin. My spawn point was the same ward as his.”

She pointed at Lin Yi.

Ruan Yu covered his mouth and coughed twice, glanced at Nan Lin, who seemed to be off in his own world, and then said: “Ruan Yu. Nan Lin and I were also in the same ward.”

The remaining two were struggling to hold themselves together. The man with the buzz cut spoke first: “My name is Zou Zhiming… but I wasn’t in a ward with the other player. By the time I woke up, someone in the room was already dead.”

“Right!” The last one, Song De, nodded. “And when I woke up, I was clutching something. It said, ‘This asylum has no single-occupancy wards.’ But there was nobody else in my room!”

“What if your wardmate isn’t a person?” Nan Lin said mildly.

The instant the words left his mouth, the overly bright corridor lights flickered out for exactly one second, then came back on a few moments later.

The atmosphere curdled at once.

Qiu Xinxin looked up at the ceiling, seeming to catch some faint sound. Then she drew a sharp breath. “Watch out!”

A bone-grating crack came from overhead, and several fragments dropped without warning.

Nan Lin moved fast, sidestepping and dragging Ruan Yu out of the way with one hand. Ruan Yu, seeing that something was wrong, reached out at the same moment to brace a wide plank that was about to collapse.

Nan Lin’s brow furrowed: Not good.

Ruan Yu’s smile vanished: Oh no.

Those wounds from Murder Day the other night…

They had torn open.

If anyone noticed… should he explain now, get ahead of it?

Nan Lin swept a discreet glance at Ruan Yu. The man looked pale, as though frightened, yet he still kept his composure.

Nan Lin: Not bad. Good potential.

The key thing was that he talked little and caused little trouble.

Nan Lin liked that in a person.

Ruan Yu tilted his head slightly in visible confusion and tightened the bandage, his voice gentle. “What is it?”

Nan Lin brushed a hand lightly over his left lower abdomen, which was oozing a little blood. “Nothing.”

Qiu Xinxin, meanwhile, was studying the old suspended ceiling. “This asylum has to be decades old. What just happened looked like an accident caused by years of neglect. It’s just… a little too convenient. Too coincidental to be an accident.”

A flicker of doubt crossed her eyes.

The same doubt gripped several viewers on the other side of the screen.

The display had lit up only moments ago, and the reason they had stopped in front of a new player’s screen was simple:

“No joke, I have never seen a new player with mental power this low.”

“The average stat is around 100. This is the first time I’ve ever seen 50. At first I thought the game system glitched.”

“Is he going to snap and go insane mid-fight? No wonder the game’s evaluation called him a humanoid self-destruct device.”

“Who knows. But by the usual rules, the new player dungeon always has two veterans. This time the veterans are that Lin Yi and Qiu Xinxin?”

“Just glance at the personal stats and you’ll know. My sympathy goes to the players stuck in the same dungeon as this time bomb.”

“Agreed. And those two are seriously easy on the eyes… no, stop looking at me like that, I was just making an observation.”

“God, I’m blind. Look.”

On screen, Lin Yi was inspecting the fallen debris at close range when hurried footsteps sounded from outside the door.

Heeled leather shoes, by the sound, moving toward them at a fast clip.

Everyone turned toward the source of the sound, until a female nurse’s severe face appeared behind the wide-open door.

She swept the room with her gaze and immediately began berating them, the heap of pills on the metal tray in her hand trembling with each sharp motion. “Since when are you allowed to cluster together like this?!”

Qiu Xinxin was fast on the uptake: “He was having an episode. Sorry about that.”

Nan Lin, meanwhile, was staring at the objects in the nurse’s hand, his gaze flat and unbothered: “If we have caused offense, we have much to apologize for.”

Everyone: “…”

Ruan Yu tugged at Nan Lin’s sleeve and murmured, “Brother, I don’t think that’s how the saying goes.”

Nan Lin: ?

The nurse’s face visibly twisted. She said, “Back to your wards. I need to register your information.”

Nan Lin’s head snapped toward Song De, brow creasing as he opened his mouth to speak, only to see the man scurry back into the ward he had started in.

Doors opened and closed in quick succession. The corridor emptied fast, and the players’ varied expressions appeared behind the glass windows.

But the nurse seemed distinctly pleased. A smile that could only be called sickly surfaced on her face.

The clicking of heels started up again. She carried the metal tray back and forth among several adjacent wards, like a gaunt wolf patrolling its meager territory.

In his single-occupancy ward, Song De muttered quietly, “They say we’re the lunatics, but the medical staff here are the ones who look insane… Aaah!!!”

Before he could finish, he found himself staring straight into the nurse’s bloodshot, muddled eyes.

They were extremely close, with only a cracked pane of glass between them.

Song De swallowed hard, his feet retreating several steps of their own accord.

The nurse’s smile twisted further. “There are no single-occupancy wards here… Why don’t you say hello to your wardmate?”