At first, the two terms sounded no different, but taken together with the discrepancy in time, the attendant's words could be interpreted another way.
Li Xian asked Jiang Qiuyue to take out her ticket. After confirming that its train number and times matched his own, he reached a conclusion:
"The attendant just said the 'train's running time' was three hours, but that's clearly shorter than the journey listed on the ticket. If we rule out the highly unlikely possibility that she misspoke, I think this train will probably stop running midway because of an accident and never reach its destination."
"But 'stop running' is a very optimistic way to put it. I think it's more likely that this train will have an accident in three hours. If we haven't cleared the Instance by then, we'll die inside it."
Jiang Qiuyue nodded in firm agreement. "No wonder the Instance is called 'Death Train'..."
Those three hours weren't a lifeline. They were a deadline.
Li Xian looked up at the train's time display. "Actually, we should only have two hours and forty minutes left now."
They had already wasted nearly twenty minutes in the sixth carriage.
Li Xian hadn't lowered his voice as he spoke. Instead, he explained his theory loudly enough for everyone to hear.
The other players listened quietly, their expressions growing increasingly grave. Some even panicked outright:
"Three hours-are you kidding me?!"
No one here had ever experienced an Instance that had to be cleared within three hours!
That was why no one had reacted much when the attendant mentioned the time. They had instinctively treated it as irrelevant background information. Besides, she had started checking tickets immediately afterward, diverting everyone's attention to finding theirs. Once they had passed that hurdle, even fewer people thought to reconsider what she