The girl transformed into an infinitely multiplying entity, and my numbers became a disaster.

Ye Xin narrowed her eyes, staring at this guy with a strange look.

What kind of absurd idea was that?

"Forget it, I was joking. Let's go downstairs and kill the remaining doctors."

Dealing with the doctors was much harder, because there were more people on the first floor. Once a fight broke out, it could cause the entire floor's occupants to attack them at once.

They couldn't force an assault. Ye Xin's plan was to lure them to the second floor one by one and kill them.

Pick a random target: "There's something on the second floor. Please come with me to take a look."

"What is it?"

The duped guy followed them up to the second floor.

Before the doctor could react, the others struck from behind with a heavy blade.

Target dead on the spot!

They repeated this trick many times in a row, and soon everyone on the first floor was taken care of.

But... even so, the task still showed as incomplete.

"What's going on?" Seeing the countdown had turned blood-red, Shi Wenshan's face darkened. "We've checked every room, even the bathrooms. We killed everyone we could."

"There really is no one left on the first floor. So... could the target be on the fourth floor or above? Or maybe outside the hospital?" the middle-aged man asked nervously.

"Upstairs." Shi Wenshan didn't overthink it and directly started walking.

There were still two hours left until the deadline.

The group reached the fifth floor and began attacking the patients there.

Ye Xin continued to secretly release Spirit Threads, helping the team take down over twenty people without them even noticing.

Soon they breached the sixth floor, the top floor of the hospital.

There were no more rooms left. They had basically searched the entire hospital.

Looking at the countdown, which still showed 35 minutes remaining, Shi Wenshan fell completely silent.

"We've killed so many people, and the task still isn't done. Did we misunderstand something?" Xuan Ya's voice trembled. Participating in such bloody battles continuously took a toll on one's mentality. After all this, she seriously doubted whether she'd have nightmares when she got back.

"That's right. There's only that one room on the third floor left, and it's full of ordinary people who can't even fight back. Do we have to kill them all?" The middle-aged man grew uneasy.

"I don't know. Let's go back to the third floor and take a look." Shi Wenshan was clearly lost too.

After discussing for a while, the group changed into clean doctor and nurse uniforms and returned to the ward on the third floor.

The patients inside had no idea what had happened outside, nor did they know that almost everyone in the hospital was dead.

Some of them were chatting among themselves.

It looked just like an ordinary hospital ward. If anything, the conditions were a bit shabby.

Shi Wenshan walked over, poured himself a glass of water, confirmed it wasn't poisoned, and downed it in one gulp.

"Hah." He let out a breath.

Ye Xin sat down nearby, resting her chin on her hand. She poured two glasses of water as well, then touched one with her finger.

[Purifying...]

"Tch."

Even though it had turned into Water of Purification, it had no effect on the patients earlier.

She let out a quiet sigh and was about to drink it all when a male patient walked over to get some water.

So she pushed the glass she was about to drink toward him. "Here."

"Huh?" Seeing the sexy nurse in black stockings pour him a glass of water, the young man shyly took it.

"I, I..."

"Drink up." Ye Xin said casually.

"Heh heh." The guy scratched his head awkwardly.

He downed it all in one gulp.

Then the patient sat down nearby, his face red.

Seeing that this guy seemed quite interested in her, Ye Xin rolled her eyes.

Just then, the middle-aged man from the team also walked over and picked up the other glass.

"Is this water safe?"

"If it were poisoned, a prompt would have popped up. Don't underestimate the system's power." Shi Wenshan answered in Ye Xin's place.

"Alright."

So the middle-aged man raised the second glass of purified water and drank it down in one go.

Before he could even swallow, a sudden cry rang out from a distance.

"Ah--"

Everyone looked over and saw that the patient who had drunk the water earlier had suddenly undergone a mutation.

Bulging veins and blood vessels burst forth, his eyes turning bloodshot, and he abruptly launched a fierce attack on those around him.

"Not good!"

Shi Wenshan immediately grabbed a nearby hammer and charged forward.

Ye Xin extended her finger, instantly releasing threads that bound the target.

Bang!

The hammer came down, and blood plasma splattered everywhere like sauce.

The patients let out screams.

Ye Xin's face darkened.

Just at that moment, another strange cry sounded behind her. Turning around, she saw the middle-aged man who had finished drinking the water suddenly reach out, grabbing for her neck.

"Danger." Xuan Ya, beside her, was the first to block in front of Ye Xin, swinging a blade down at the rampaging middle-aged man.

Slash!

The guy's arm was injured.

But terrifyingly, the middle-aged man then acted as if he didn't recognize the three of them at all, charging forward recklessly to bite and tear.

After stalling for over twenty seconds, forced into a corner, Shi Wenshan killed the man with a single hammer blow.

[Teammate "Wei Ruize" has died.]

[You have been deducted 50 exchange points, and 80% of this round's rewards have been reduced.]

[You have received one "High Risk" mark.]

Shi Wenshan heard the prompt in his ear, his face darkening: "Damn it."

Ye Xin's heart skipped a beat.

She realized that those two seemed to have turned this way after drinking her Water of Purification.

Not only that, but thinking back, the young man earlier had also gone mad after drinking that water.

Could it be that the water she purified was driving them insane?

Or did these people already have a virus inside them, and the Water of Purification just accelerated the onset?

If that were the case, it couldn't explain the change in the middle-aged man... or rather, Wei Ruize, because he was an outsider and shouldn't have had any virus on him.

"What the hell is going on?" Shi Wenshan asked.

Ye Xin furrowed her brow slightly, lowering her voice: "Water touched by my hand can purify Pollution. That's a talent I got from the system. Could they have gone mad because they drank that water?"

"Really?" Xuan Ya looked astonished.

"You're saying... the purification ability certified by the system actually triggered those two?"

Shi Wenshan pondered for a moment, then walked over to the table and picked up a water cup.

He glanced around at the patients; most of their expressions were terrified.

The rest all seemed normal.

"The water I drank earlier—you didn't touch it, did you?" Shi Wenshan looked at Ye Xin, his expression turning serious. "When you come to this world to take on a mission, the first thing to confirm is that the system never makes mistakes. If it says it can purify Pollution, then it definitely can. If your ability is fine, how could those two go mad after drinking it?"

Ye Xin: "..."

Chapter 9: Mission End

"Are you doubting me?" Ye Xin met his eyes squarely.

"No, doubting a teammate is a stupid thing to do." Shi Wenshan laughed once, crouched in front of the middle-aged man's corpse, and narrowed his eyes.

"Shi Wenshan." Xuan Ya suddenly spoke up. "You just said the system never makes mistakes. So can we assume that Ye Xin's water purification ability actually works, and she really did remove the patients' toxins?"

"They get cured, and then go mad attacking us?"

"Let's assume that!" Xuan Ya spread her hands. "Have you noticed that we're actually possessing bodies similar to our own, rather than physically arriving here?"

She raised her hand as she spoke: "In reality, I have a mole on my hand. It was there in all previous missions, but it's gone this time. That probably means we're soul-transmigrating here, right?"

At that, Shi Wenshan and Ye Xin exchanged a glance.

Though there was no mirror, careful observation did reveal some differences.

"A soul-transmigration mission?" Shi Wenshan looked thoughtful.

Ye Xin had a faint idea forming in her mind, but she couldn't quite grasp it.

After a moment, she smiled slightly and sat on the edge of a nearby table: "Then, let me recall the suspicious points."

Both teammates looked at her.

Ye Xin raised her fingers:

"One: When the doctors were performing surgery, they injected the patient with a virus, but they had no protective gear during the operation, even directly touching the patient's bodily fluids with their hands. Under these circumstances, the doctors still didn't care, as if they weren't worried about infecting themselves."

"Two: The newspaper earlier said that the infected at West District Hospital included both patients and doctors, and the area was designated as a quarantine zone. If the report is accurate, doesn't that mean aside from the patients, the doctors aren't normal either—that everyone is infected?"

"After drinking water that can purify Pollution, people go mad instead. But drinking normal water is fine. Let's assume the system is absolutely correct—that means the person who drank the water was actually cured of their illness, in other words, made healthy. Yet a healthy person goes berserk and attacks."

"Since we're calling them healthy, they definitely wouldn't go mad and attack. So maybe we should consider: the ones who are mad aren't the ones who drank the water, but us? In the eyes of us lunatics, those so-called normal people become the mad ones instead." Ye Xin finished voicing her thoughts and glanced at her teammates present.

Xuan Ya's eyelid twitched. "What kind of logic is that?"

Shi Wenshan set down his water glass. "Let's use the remaining time to search the whole building's files one more time, see if there are any other clues. We can't just treat this place as a level-grinding dungeon—maybe we need to use our brains."

"Will we make it in time? Forget it, let's try." Xuan Ya sighed.

She didn't want to fight anymore.

"Let's go. Start searching from the room we're in now."

And so, under the patients' trembling expressions, these three doctors and nurses began ransacking the place.

After a quick rummage, Ye Xin simply dashed out and headed straight for the first floor.

Because most of the doctors' offices were down there, the chances of finding useful materials again were higher.

However...

Arriving on the first floor and opening a certain cabinet, Ye Xin's face still twitched at the densely packed file bags inside.

"That's way too many."

Forget it, she just needed to skim the file titles.

Then she quickly started checking.

"All case records?"

After finishing one cabinet, she moved to the next.

Until the moment she pulled open a certain drawer, a document caught her eye.