The First Round of the Death Game

Inside the instance, a smile curved Bai Yang's lips. His gaze settled on Qin Rang, who had just finished searching a room, and he stepped back out of sight before Qin Rang noticed him.

Qin Rang frowned at the empty corridor, then soon resumed his search.

Once Bai Yang was sure no one was outside, he went straight to the long staircase outside the room.

Darkness instantly swallowed his vision.

Bai Yang waited where he was for a while. If he wanted to move around here in relative safety, he had to figure out the anomaly on the staircase first. Otherwise, if it caught him while he was fleeing, his chances of dying would be far higher.

A dozen or so seconds passed, but no anomaly lay on his shoulders. He hadn't triggered the rule.

Bai Yang squeezed the head of the doll in his arms and confirmed that walking up the long staircase in the dark wasn't the rule that triggered the anomaly on their shoulders. Perhaps they had happened to get on the staircase just as they triggered the rule.

He climbed the stairs one step at a time and soon felt his way to the next door. It wasn't securely shut and was easy to push open.

Bai Yang was in no hurry to leave. He rested his fingers on the door and tapped lightly.

"178, 179..."

Just as he reached 300, a familiar heavy chill slowly settled on his shoulders. He immediately pushed the door open, and as the world before him lit up again, the weight on his shoulders lifted.

Only when the chill had completely faded from his body did Bai Yang turn to look at his shoulder. This time, he had been injured on the neck, but because so little time had passed, there was only a tiny cut that could be ignored.

In the short term, this anomaly couldn't kill him.

He knew what the rule was now. It was a very strict rule related to time: in the dark, they couldn't rest for more than five minutes. But how "rest" was defined remained unclear.

Earlier, downstairs, they had been idle for more than five minutes, but they hadn't encountered the anomaly until they were on the staircase. So darkness had to be another condition for triggering it.

The complete rule should be: in the dark, rest must not exceed five minutes.

Rubbing his sore shoulders, Bai Yang quickly checked the rooms on this floor. The gambling tables here were still mainly for card games, but once again, he didn't see a single playing card.

He searched several rooms in a row, finding nothing but dice, betting chips, and some leaflets about "get rich quick" traps.

Bai Yang stopped searching and stared at the lantern hanging on the wall for a while. He stepped onto a gambling table, climbed onto the door, and reached out to pull one down.

The red lantern swayed restlessly in his hand, but Bai Yang acted as if he didn't see it. He set the rabbit he carried with him on top, and it fit just right in a groove in the lantern's pattern.

But soon, he stopped in his tracks. A line of bloody text suddenly appeared before him.

[Instance time: 0:30. The first round of the death game begins.]

Bai Yang glanced at the message, then looked through the bloody text toward the end of the corridor.

The instant the instance notification appeared, a deformed anomaly with long arms and legs also appeared at the end of the corridor. It stood there with its head drooping, carrying a nail hammer a meter tall.

Bai Yang turned without hesitation and ran back down the stairs.

The moment he stepped onto the long staircase, darkness surrounded him as before. But the lantern in his hand slowly glowed with a faint light. Using it, he quickly found the door he had come through and rushed inside.

"Where did you go?"

He had just slipped through the door when the voice coming from ahead brought him to an abrupt stop. Bai Yang looked up. Qin Rang stood at the doorway with a smile, looking as though he had been waiting for him for quite some time.

Bai Yang waved the lantern in his hand, his face full of innocence and bewilderment. "I didn't think there was anything to investigate here, so I went to pull down a lantern and take a look. Then I heard the instance announcement and hurried back."

"By the way, what exactly is going on with this instance? And what's the first round of the death game about?"

Qin Rang glanced at the red lantern in his hand and didn't press him further. Instead, he smiled again. "We're discussing the instance. We were just waiting for you."

"Okay."

Bai Yang looked back to make sure the anomaly hadn't followed him, then walked with Qin Rang to the covered corridor. The other three had already brought over chairs and sat down by the wall, speaking in low voices with frowns on their faces.

Seeing Qin Rang and Bai Yang return unharmed, Tao Yuan didn't ask any questions and went straight to the point. "Our signal to the outside world just cut out."

"As expected." Qin Rang sat down beside Bai Yang. He spoke to Bai Yang while also explaining to the people in the livestream, "This Weird Instance is more complicated than we originally thought."

"As everyone knows, every anomaly creates a world of its own, which is what we call an instance. An instance contains killing rules set by the anomaly, and there's always a condition for clearing it."

"If we don't clear the instance, the Weird Instance will grow stronger and expand further and further, until it covers every region and turns the world into its instance."

"Only by clearing the Weird Instance can we stop the anomaly's world from expanding. But the anomaly won't die once the instance is cleared. It can also move freely and harm more people."

"Ordinary instances have anywhere from one to ten people, but once an instance goes uncleared for a long time, a larger, hundred-person instance will emerge. Without exception, every hundred-person instance has a battle royale theme." At this point, Qin Rang's voice grew lower. "It could be people killing people, anomalies killing people, or an indiscriminate hunt."

"Hundred-person instances usually have a common, simplest way to clear them: only one person survives to clear it. Kill everyone, and the last person left is the final winner, able to leave alive and clear the instance."

"But today, we're not just in a hundred-person death-game instance. It's also an even rarer open instance."

"In an open instance, as long as the Weird World's instance hasn't been cleared and the world hasn't ended, the instance's door won't close. Once enough humans in the Weird World have died, the instance will reopen and bring in new people from outside, until the instance is cleared."

"In other words, this instance might have required 120 people to open. Once 60 have died, another 60 will be brought in to join the original 60, making 120 people to continue the game. The method of clearing it by leaving only one person alive no longer works."

"Of course it doesn't. If only one person can be left, we'd all die," Bai Yang said.

"That's a last resort." Tao Yuan sighed as she looked at the somewhat confused expression on Bai Yang's face. "We won't use it, but plenty of people will. So from now on, we have to be wary of not only anomalies in this instance, but our own kind as well."

Bai Yang nodded to show he understood.

Bai Yang asked, "Should we hide now so the anomalies don't find us?"

"Let's wait and see. Didn't it say the first round of the death game had started? But why is it so quiet outside?" Tao Yuan pulled the window open a crack, puzzled.

Sheng Qingqiao rubbed his arms, somewhat uneasy. "I hope the ones doing the killing in this death game aren't anomalies."

Bai Yang thought of the thing he had encountered upstairs. "What happens if the anomalies do the killing?"

"People will die horribly," An Ying said, his pink eyes cold. "Against humans, anomalies carry out a slaughter on every front. Anomalies whose rule is to actively kill are completely different from anomalies that can only kill passively when their rules are triggered."