Another Player Team

Every time Su Bai changed his clothes and appearance, he had to return to the Mist Shop through a door with a handle.

Unlike the door in the lounge that could be linked to a hospital room, the Mist Shop's entrance was rather special.

The shop had no fixed location, and different people might encounter it in different places. Perhaps to keep space from falling into chaos, when someone opened the Mist Shop's door somewhere in the Nightmare World, they would return to that same spot in the Nightmare World when they left.

Previously, after Su Bai opened the Mist Shop's door from his mother's hospital room, he had walked back out through the shop's entrance and returned to the bus stop where the Route 444 Last Bus had once stopped. That was where he had been when he opened the Mist Shop's door in the Nightmare World.

So if Su Bai used the door of Room 401 to return to the Mist Shop now, he would still return to the fourth floor after changing his clothes and leaving the shop. That was quite convenient. After all, at this point in his previous life, the clothes he wore most often were still the uniform of Rainbow Locust No. 1 High School, which he had decided to leave without graduating. The uniform was simple, easy to move in, and hard to tear.

After some thought, however, Su Bai abandoned the idea of returning to the Mist Shop and decided to continue acting as the dark-skinned male student "Su Bai." Perhaps it was caution, or perhaps it was that maddening bad habit of his.

For a Nightmare World player like Su Bai, having more hidden cards meant a better chance of survival. That was why the players who called him "Monster" saw him as a lunatic obsessed with keeping his cards hidden. His favorite pastime was concealing himself under as many layers as a mille-feuille.

Even if someone spotted something wrong with his identity as a dark-skinned male student, Su Bai would merely peel away one thin layer and disappear.

After leaving Room 401, Su Bai tilted his head and listened for a while. Compared with the earlier bouts of meowing and pounding against the walls, the fourth floor was now so quiet he could have heard a pin drop.

"Maybe this is what it feels like when the place stays the same, but the people are gone." The utterly unremarkable rookie player Su Bai walked toward the elevator, stroking the black cord around his left wrist that the little black cat had happily transformed into. His face beamed as though the fourth floor's "silence" had nothing whatsoever to do with him.

"Lan, what exactly are they doing?"

Hiding in the lobby of Residential Building Two was a temporary team of three players. Standing at the front was a man with short hair dyed blue-black. He was around thirty, no longer particularly young, with broad shoulders and long legs. His features should have looked handsome and regular, but a deep scar had narrowly missed his vital spots, slashing from his right eyebrow all the way to his left cheek and giving his face a rather fearsome look at first glance.

Wounds of varying depths covered his exposed arms and even his neck, leaving no way to tell just how many terrifying dangers he had survived.

Yet the two women hiding behind him did not seem afraid of Mr. Lan. They even seemed to trust him. Their faces bore a fair resemblance, but one also looked around thirty and wore a business suit, as though she had been sent into the Nightmare World while at work. The other was a high school girl in uniform. Had Su Bai been there, he would certainly have recognized the girls' uniform of Rainbow Locust No. 1 High School.

"What they're doing isn't the important part. The important part is what you two are doing here." Mr. Lan looked displeased. "Didn't I tell you to wait for me in Room 101? What can you accomplish by coming here now, other than holding me back?"

"Lan Xingchen, do you think Room 101 is any safer than here?" the older woman asked. "My sister and I both heard strange coughing in Room 101. That place isn't normal either."

"You're overthinking it. Everything abnormal is already standing outside." The man named Lan Xingchen pointed at the rows of ghostly creatures standing like gravestones outside the residential building, then at Building 1 beside Building Two. "Anyway, Qiu Man, you need to take Qiu Lei somewhere safe. If you don't want to stay in Room 101, go to Room 303. I can give you the key. Right now, I need to find a way to get from here to Building 1. If the players on its third floor are signaling us for help with a flashlight, they must be in trouble. If I can help them, I should."

"Lan Xingchen, you weren't like this before." The older sister, Qiu Man, looked at him in confusion. "When you first joined the company, you were so arrogant. You didn't care about anything except getting promoted. You even threw me under the bus a few times. But three years ago, you were hospitalized with serious injuries, and your face was scarred. Anyone could tell something terribly dangerous had happened to you. Was that when you became a Nightmare World player? Then why did you tell the Relevant Authorities you'd just fallen while hiking when they asked?"

"Then you quit the company straight away, and we didn't hear a word from you for three years. You wouldn't even let us know you were safe! Now we finally meet again, and it's in this hellhole." Qiu Man seemed to have a bellyful of resentment. "I'm truly grateful that you showed up and saved Qiu Lei and me. But can't the three of us find somewhere to hide together? Didn't you always say your own life and future mattered most? Why do you have to go save strangers when you don't even know whether they're people or ghosts?!"

"Qiu Man." Beside her, her younger sister Qiu Lei, dressed in her school uniform, made a feeble attempt to stop her, but it clearly had little effect.

"You haven't changed." Lan Xingchen smiled as he watched the situation outside. "Don't forget, I only came downstairs because I saw the distress signal from Building 1. That's how I ended up helping you and your sister. Put that way, the people in Building 1 aren't strangers. They're your lifesavers."

"It's too dangerous outside!" Qiu Man gritted her teeth. "You can't go."

"It is dangerous outside, so hurry up and take your sister back to Room 101. There really is nothing in there." Lan Xingchen turned and urged them on. "Go on. I'll come back."

"...No." Qiu Man had no intention of leaving.

"Lan, there really is coughing in Room 101." Qiu Lei looked frightened too.

"I already checked. There really isn't any coughing..."

While Lan Xingchen was caught in this endless argument with the sisters, who had only recently entered the Nightmare World, a dark-skinned figure wearing black-framed glasses had silently appeared deep in the corridor. He looked utterly unremarkable, though for some reason he was carrying a black long-handled umbrella.

It was none other than the ordinary high school student Su Bai, who had slipped into Building Two and had already been nearby, eavesdropping for a while to get a sense of the situation.