Chapter 26

The cat's head poked out of the backpack. "The whole point of a dungeon is to break the player's nerve — how could it ever leave time for the player to relax? If it's going to hit you, it hits you with a combo, so you never get a breath."

Liu Zhiyi: "…Fair enough."

She propped up her head; her temples throbbed.

"I haven't had a full night's sleep in three nights now… keep this up and I'll drop dead before my nerve does."

The cat hopped onto the shrine and glanced at how far the incense had burned.

"The safe room's active — grab what sleep you can. There's a hard fight ahead."

Liu Zhiyi yawned.

"No wonder in the last dungeon you had me sleep the moment the safe room came on…"

She found a relatively clean patch of floor in the tea room. The tea room was nowhere near as nice as her own living room — no couch to sleep on.

Liu Zhiyi lay on the floor, closed her eyes, and figured she'd take what she could get.

The moment her eyes shut, sleep swept over her.

As she was drifting off, her head jerked and she shot upright.

Bad — her grandmother was still in the ward.

Cat: "What is it? You can sleep a bit longer."

"Grandma — I have to move Grandma into the safe room too." Liu Zhiyi got up off the floor. "This dungeon's out of its mind, dragging in people seventy and eighty years old."

Cat: "A dungeon has no notion of respecting its elders. There's a fruit knife in the cabinet — take it."

At the cat's reminder, Liu Zhiyi felt she should have something to defend herself with too.

She looked up and found the cabinet door above the shrine already open, a little fruit knife tucked among a jumble of odds and ends — some patient's or family's, forgotten.

"Finally, something in hand." Liu Zhiyi drew the fruit knife and gave it a few tosses. "Always being chased around, ducking and hiding."

Only now did she really feel the truth of that line online: all fear comes from a lack of firepower.

Liu Zhiyi: "Just, the knife's a bit small — probably can't do a ghost much harm."

Cat: "Only props can hurt a ghost. That fruit knife can't."

"Then what did you tell me to take it for?" Liu Zhiyi was baffled.

"Because Teacher Yang isn't a ghost." The cat's knitted tail swished. "You can use the fruit knife on her."

"She's like that and still not a ghost?" Liu Zhiyi gripped the knife. "She's human now?"

The cat lay on the shrine.

"If we go by the game's internal targeting classes, Teacher Yang is somewhere between human and ghost right now."

Liu Zhiyi: "Meaning?"

Cat: "She has the intent to stay in this dungeon, but she hasn't fully stayed. Before a person makes up their mind, they mostly go through a stretch of wavering and hesitation — Teacher Yang's about at that stage."

Liu Zhiyi stared at the fruit knife in her hand.

"…She failed her level?"

"Not everyone can break their obsession." The cat jumped down off the shrine, sprang to her shoulder, and rubbed its furry head against her face. "Even now, you can't fully let go of missing your mother, can you?"

Cat: "When a player fails the task and gradually gives in to the dungeon, there's a fusion period — the player's body starts to change."

The cursing rose again outside the tea room.

Teacher Yang: "You bastard… you bastard…"

The cat turned its head toward the tea-room door.

"That change — sometimes the more a player hates a certain kind of thing, the more they turn into that kind of thing…"

"And then a failed single-player dungeon keeps drawing in people who share the same trait — a mother-loss dungeon draws in the bereaved, a grave-illness one draws in the gravely ill… one cornerstone after another failing the task, fusing and warping into monsters inside the dungeon…"

The cat said it all in one breath.

"That's how a multiplayer dungeon comes to be."

It jumped down from her shoulder into her arms.

"We're lucky, and unlucky."

"Unlucky, that you're fresh out of a novice dungeon and straight into a multiplayer one. Lucky, that this one's in the early days of turning multiplayer — not many people drawn in yet, the first cornerstone only just sinking, not fully merged."

Liu Zhiyi: "…Maybe, if we help Teacher Yang break her obsession, we can wreck this dungeon…"

"In theory, that idea could work."

The cat cut her off.

"But do you know Teacher Yang's obsession? Teacher Yang can't resolve her own obsession — do you think you can?"

Without waiting for an answer, the cat added quickly:

"Besides, we don't have that kind of time."

"Can't you feel it? What this dungeon runs on — old age, grave illness, going senile, and children who won't do right by their parents."

The cat let out a low sound.

"I can't bear to imagine this kind of dungeon turning multiplayer — how many people it would pull in, a whole floor of gravely ill old people…"

Liu Zhiyi had half-guessed what it meant, but she didn't want to think it through; she set the fruit knife down on the shrine.

"Is there… is there any other way?"

Liu Zhiyi heard the meow drop out of the tail of its voice; it turned cold.

"Of course — besides resolving the obsession."

The cat sprang onto the shrine and took the fruit knife up in its mouth, its green eyes lighting, fixed coldly on her.

"As long as the person who produced the obsession is gone, the dungeon vanishes on its own."

Liu Zhiyi gazed quietly at the cat.

She found that she seemed never to have known it at all.

Liu Zhiyi: "You want me to kill someone?"

Cat: "Teacher Yang doesn't count as a person now."

Liu Zhiyi pressed her lips together and said nothing.

She and the cat held each other's eyes a few seconds, and in the end it was the cat that couldn't hold, and turned its head away.

"All right, all right — I was only making a suggestion. If you won't, then forget it…"

Liu Zhiyi turned away.

"…I'm sorry."

"What's there to apologize for?" The cat sprang back onto her shoulder. "I'm the one who said what I shouldn't have. Some things aren't for you to weigh right now. Sorry."

"From your tone — did you used to have a lot to weigh?" Liu Zhiyi had long been curious about where the cat came from, but there'd never been time to sit and hear it out.

"Once I've moved Grandma to the safe room, you can tell me about it."

Her grandmother mattered most right now; Liu Zhiyi stuffed the cat back into the bag, and once the cursing outside the tea room had receded again, she stood the watch up.

A person's sight is limited in the dark, and by rights a camera lens shouldn't be much better than the naked eye.

But the watch — maybe because, as a prop, it carried some uncanny power — was like the night-vision cameras in certain horror games: through its lens she could see the scene around her clearly.

At the same time, the task bar in the watch finally updated with a new task.

[Circuit breaker: Dr. Bai and Dr. Ye have quarreled over the treatment plan. Each has his own particular view about the lighting, because patients behave completely differently in daylight and in the dark.]

It was nothing like her Sweet Home dungeon.

Not only did Ankang Hospital update its tasks slowly — she'd had to run a full lap of the hospital before a new one came — but the description was vague too, never telling her what exactly to do.

Was this the difference between a multiplayer dungeon and a single-player one?

It did feel a great deal harder.

Maybe because her eyes lingered a few seconds on the task screen —

the cat spoke up of its own accord: "The government may have turned the uncanny awakening into a game, but that doesn't make the government all-knowing. A prop is still, in the end, an expression of the player's will."

At that, Liu Zhiyi understood.

"If it's about will… then task-release is an expression of the player's own understanding?"

Cat: "Right. The more clues a player collects, the more they know, the faster the tasks come and the more pointed they are — it's like sorting and summing up the scattered clues the player hasn't consciously noticed, and putting them out as a task."

With the cat's explanation, Liu Zhiyi more or less understood.

It was really like different people facing the same math problem: a capable one quickly grasps the information the problem gives and solves it with what they've learned.

But a less capable one, even handed the clues, still can't do it.

And the starting item was the relay that gathered and summed up the clues for those who weren't so capable.

Liu Zhiyi's problem now was that there were pieces of knowledge she didn't have, and the limits of her own understanding — so even with the information laid out in front of her, she still couldn't solve the problem.

That was why the new task's description was vague: her own understanding didn't know how to handle the problem and break the dungeon.

Cat: "A single-player dungeon is different. Working from your own experience, you know the whole story; a lot of it is in your subconscious, and you can do it. But a multiplayer dungeon is another matter… you don't know the first thing about Teacher Yang's past."

"Of course, there's a shortcut."

The cat's gaze slid sidelong to the fruit knife on the shrine.

"The worst option… even if you won't do that, take the knife along. Better to have it, for defense."

Liu Zhiyi looked at the pitch-black corridor outside the tea room, her chest rising and falling a few times, then turned and stuffed the fruit knife into the bag.

The instant she stepped out of the tea room, the dark seemed to turn solid, surging over her like spilled ink and wrapping her in it.

Teacher Yang's cornerstone must have merged a step further with the dungeon.

The light of the emergency-exit sign had dimmed a good deal.

Liu Zhiyi moved the watch to her other arm; in the last dungeon she'd held it up almost the whole time, and this one wouldn't lift anymore.

In the dark she turned her arm toward the source of the sound.

The watch screen was small; she could see only part of a wall.

Teacher Yang was quite tall; Liu Zhiyi crouched, so as not to come into her line of sight.

Teacher Yang's cursing was loud, marking her position precisely in the dark.

It was much easier to dodge than dodging her mother had been.

Liu Zhiyi took off her shoes, so that when she ran later the soles wouldn't scrape and make a sound.

She turned an ear and listened carefully for a while.

Teacher Yang paced up and down the corridor, stopping now and then to pound on a ward door and curse.

Liu Zhiyi would seize those moments to jog forward a stretch.

It was too dark; she couldn't even make out the numbers on the ward doors.

But she remembered there was a small folding bed outside her grandmother's ward, and she felt her way along the wall, bed by bed.

Because Teacher Yang patrolled back and forth, there was no avoiding a stretch where their paths overlapped.

Teacher Yang: "Die!"

The voice came from the left; Liu Zhiyi turned her arm while crawling right, keeping the distance.

She even squeezed under a hospital bed — with something over her, she felt much safer.

Only there was a lot of clutter under the bed, which made the squeezing hard going.

Teacher Yang: "Die, die…"

Liu Zhiyi paused for a second.

Teacher Yang's voice wasn't right.

Liu Zhiyi listened carefully for a while.

The tone and pitch of the cursing hadn't changed much — it was that after Teacher Yang said the first "die," before the death-syllable had fully finished, a second "die" came right on top of it.

It sounded like two "die"s laid over each other.

Could a person make an overlapping sound like that? Or was there an echo in the hospital?

Liu Zhiyi didn't move; she turned the watch, bit by bit, toward the source.

Teacher Yang: "Die…"

The sound came from her left hand.

Her left? Was Teacher Yang really that short?

Liu Zhiyi already had a feeling. She quietly covered the top half of the watch screen — it wouldn't change anything, but at least it might soften the shock of whatever horrible thing she was about to see.

She pressed her arm down, upper arm tight against her body, and turned only the forearm.