Chapter 137 Datai City 2

The Game Management Bureau didn't know how long this lock-in period would last, and fearing that there wouldn't be enough time, they quickly announced each one in order of importance, but the game lock-in period had not yet ended.

Most of the advertising spaces on buildings throughout the city are photos of the task force members, and the rest are the locations of the rescue stations arranged by the Tourism Administration in Datai City, and armbands of several colors of the Tourism Administration.

The game has arrived in Datai City. The Tourism Administration's arrangements no longer need to be concealed. There are many drones patrolling in the sky, and the sound just now is still being played again from the drones.

For the first time, Xia Bai realized that the noise of the crowd could be as loud as thunder, one wave after another.

"Is that them?"

"It's them! They are all from the Wangchuan Group!"

After Xia Bai, Ling Changye, and Erwa were recognized, the people around them swarmed towards them.

"Boss, what should we do?"

"Boss, save us!"

"Boss, please take our family with you!"

"Don't be nervous." Ling Changye said, "Did you all hear the announcement from the Tourism Bureau just now?"

"We heard it!" everyone answered in unison.

Ling Changye said, "Now that you've heard it, you should know that our Wangchuan team is only responsible for clearing the game and not saving people. It's the rescue team from the logistics department who saves people. Are you sure you still want to follow us?"

“…”

Ling Changye said: "Did you take pictures of the address of the rescue station? Do you know where the nearest one is? If we go too late, we may not be able to squeeze in."

More than half of their people ran away immediately.

Ling Changye: "Follow us, and you will do as the broadcast says. Listen to our instructions and do whatever we tell you to do."

More than half of the remaining people ran away.

Xia Bai: “…”

When I first entered college, I realized that there was mutual buck-passing between departments at work.

The people on their side left one after another, and in the end only a dozen were left, following them.

Xia Bai said: "There is no internet, so we can't contact them."

The Game Management Bureau held several seminars for this extra-large game map.

During the discussion, someone suggested that if the game were to land in a city, and pull everyone in the city into a game world and create a game world with the same large capacity as the city, the energy required would be too huge, and it is possible that the game would be different from all previous mini-games and would directly use the real city as the game location.

Therefore, there are the 34 rescue stations established by the Tourism Bureau in Datai City, as just reported by the Tourism Bureau. If the game really took place in Datai City, these rescue stations could save many lives.

The Tourism Bureau’s preparations include not only rescue stations, but also supplies at the rescue stations and a city intranet to facilitate communication during the game.

What Xia Bai meant was that the intranet was interfered with by game energy and could no longer be used.

The number of drones in the sky also began to decrease.

The impact of the game on Datai City is gradually increasing.

Ling Changye: "Let's wait until the game lock state ends."

Xia Bai nodded. Now they couldn't do anything they wanted to do. The traffic in Datai City was definitely paralyzed. People were fleeing in panic everywhere. Many people were rushing to the city exit in disbelief. Their side was the hardest hit area.

To avoid becoming the focus of more people, the three of them got back into the car.

Xia Bai asked Erwa: "Are you scared?"

Erwa held the coffee cup and said, "Don't be afraid, I'm protecting my sister."

Sister Xuemu's long hair crawled out of the coffee cup and wrapped around Erwa's wrist, and clusters of small white flowers immediately bloomed there, like a wreath on her hair.

Xia Bai: “…”

The family thought that his worries were unnecessary.

This time the game was locked for a very long time. Because they couldn't wait for the game to start, they took out some food and had dinner in the car early.

Xia Bai: "Isn't the game trying to trap us here and kill us?"

Ling Changye: "In a closed environment with crises, the brewing of human nature may indeed be something that games like to watch."

Xia Bai smiled and was about to speak when he suddenly raised his head.

[The game has been loaded, and the super-large special map Datai City is now online. 】

[Datai City is a typical city among humans. The people in this city are facing a doomsday crisis caused by humans themselves. There are many monsters hiding in the city that are eyeing humans covetously. They may hide in dark corners or walk openly on the road. They have seriously affected the survival of the citizens of Datai City.]

After the mechanical sound ended, Xia Bai did not hear the words "Welcome, corpse collector Xia Bai."

He tried to shout again in his mind: [System?]

No response.

As he expected, he still felt a little suffocated.

There was a flash of darkness, and when Xia Bai opened his eyes, he was no longer in the car, but the room he was in looked familiar. It was the hotel room arranged for him by the Tourism Administration.

The TV was on, showing the evening news.

"Color ghosts are rampant in our city. It is understood that this morning, a color ghost outbreak occurred in Chunhui Primary School. 312 students and teachers in the school were attacked, resulting in heavy casualties. The Security Bureau once again calls on the people of the city to actively eliminate color ghosts. Every time a color ghost is eliminated...ah!——"

On TV, a black object, like a materialized shadow, crawled out from under the anchor desk and instantly spread over the host's entire body.

Xia Bai moved closer to the TV, and the screen suddenly turned into black and white snow, making a crackling sound.

The black dots in the black and white snowflakes twisted and deformed, slowly condensing into a shape that looked like a human yet not a human. On the "human's" long face, a pair of round, black eyes were staring at him.

Xia Bai took a small step back, and his feet made no sound on the cashmere carpet.

“Bang, bang, bang!”

"Xia Bai, are you in there?"

The black people on TV disappeared.

"Yes!" Xia Bai recognized Ling Changye's voice and immediately walked to the door, opened it for him, and poked his head out. "Are other people in the hotel too?"

"He should be here." Ling Changye said, and walked to the front room and knocked on the door, "Erwa, are you there?"

Erwa quickly ran out and opened the door.

The other players were all in the hotel, and time seemed to have gone back to last night. They were all in their hotel rooms at this time last night.

Several people went to Erwa's room.

Hua Haoming asked: "Did you watch TV just now?"

"I saw it." Wen Yuxin said, "The host on TV is considered a guide? And the colorful ghosts she mentioned should be the monsters in the game broadcast. There are such colorful ghosts in many places in this city, and our game mission is to eliminate these colorful ghosts."

Hua Haoming nodded, "That's right, the host mentioned that the Security Bureau called on everyone to eliminate the colorful ghosts, which should be our game mission."

Yang Mei said happily: "Cai Gui should be a ghost, this is my home ground."

"Is it a ghost?" A player named Shi An from the Wangchuan group said, "In the system's opening broadcast, it said that Datai City is currently facing a doomsday crisis. Could this colorful ghost be a monster that looks a lot like a zombie?"

"By the way, the system broadcast also said that this doomsday crisis was caused by humans themselves. People here were researching viruses or something and created colorful ghosts similar to zombies?"

Several people looked at Yang Yi. They wondered whether they should say it or not. If this was true, Yang Yi was an expert in this area.

Yang Yi: "I only saw it on TV, and I can't confirm it now."

"This is one direction." Ling Changye said, "Even if it is a special map, sometimes we need to find out part of the truth. Finding out the truth will help us pass the level."

Yang Mei raised her hand actively, "When I meet them, I can test whether they are real ghosts."

"If I can get out, I will look for the research institute here. If I can't get out, I can only look for newspapers and magazines." Yang Yi said.

"I feel..." Zhou Buyu, another player from Wangchuan Group, said, "If that's the case, these colorful ghosts must be very powerful, otherwise they wouldn't be able to support the difficulty of this game."

Hua Haoming: “Indeed.”

Yang Yi said: "You always think this game is very difficult. Even if the colorful ghosts are not very powerful, a city is so big, wouldn't it be difficult to eliminate all the colorful ghosts? This is very difficult."

Yang Mei: "Indeed."

“…”

Xia Bai: "Otherwise, let's see if we are still in Datai City?"

They are currently in the hotel in Datai City, but it is not certain that they are still in Datai City.

"Let me see." Wen Yuxin opened the curtains and looked outside using his skills.

The other players also looked out the window. Outside were the familiar tall buildings, and it seemed like they were in Datai City.

"Looking at the whole city, it was indeed Datai City. I also saw a rescue station with people from the logistics department there," said Wen Yuxin.

The Game Management Bureau’s prediction was correct, this game is indeed based on the real Datai City as its map.

Xia Bai: "Then there should be NPCs?"

"There should be." Ling Changye said, "There are many reasons why Datai City became the first-level prepared city of the Game Management Bureau at that time. One of the reasons was that it was considered that the game would directly use the city as the real game location. Datai City is vast and sparsely populated, and can accommodate many game NPCs. It is a very suitable landing place."

Game NPCs can help them quickly understand the game background.

"So what should we do now? Go find the NPCs to find out what's going on?" Hua Haoming said, "But we don't know who the NPCs are and who the real citizens are. There are so many people."

"Simple." Yang Mei made a V sign beside her face. "Those who know us are citizens, and those who don't know us are NPCs. Our photos have been on the screen for so long, we are big stars!"

"When you go out later, wear a mask and a hat." Ling Changye said.

Yang Mei's V was autistic, "...Oh."

They decided to go out and take a look, but not everyone went out. They let three people go and try it first.

Xia Bai went with Yang Mei and Zhou Buyu.

If you encounter a colorful ghost, Yang Mei's skill can be used to test whether the colorful ghost is really a ghost. Zhou Buyu's skill is [Fusion], which is a more advanced invisibility. She can merge with many things into one. This skill has many uses, and escape is one of them.

Xia Bai acts as a thug and he can resist in group fights.

While the others were still standing at the window looking out, the three put on hats and masks and set off.

Xia Bai could understand why Ling Changye asked them to do this. As Yang Mei said, everyone in Datai City knew them now. As soon as they appeared, they would be surrounded by a lot of people. They would have no chance of completing the game, and their only task was to complete the game.

The Taiguang Hotel in Datai City has a total of six floors. It is a low-key hotel in Datai City that is above average. The sixth floor has the largest rooms and was originally reserved by the Tourism Administration. No one else lived there. But now in the game, this is no longer the case.

Xia Bai saw lights coming out of two rooms, but these two rooms were not where they lived.

The three of them ignored the two rooms and walked down the stairs to the fifth floor. When they were about to go to the fourth floor, the door of a room on the fifth floor was opened, and a boy in his twenties with dyed yellow hair showed his head, "Hey, are you human?"

“…”

"I mean, are you normal people?"

The three people who might not be normal did not answer him. They went down to the fourth floor silently, walked down one floor at a time, passed through the small garden of the hotel, and came to the hotel gate.

The door was closed. Yang Mei went up to try, but it didn't open.

Xia Bai tried it, but it didn't open.

Zhou Buyu didn't try. They all realized that they couldn't leave the hotel now.

When they pulled the door, it made some noise. People who had been paying attention to the noise outside now stuck to the windows and looked out. An enthusiastic brother threw them a hammer that he got from somewhere and instructed them: "Smash it! Smash the lock."

“…”

Xia Bai picked up the hammer and smashed it twice, then pulled it to show him that physical damage was useless.

Regardless of the eldest brother's other instructions, the three of them went back.

"What does this mean?" Yang Mei asked, "Has Datai City been divided into small game maps?"

"We should be able to get out. If they are sealed off areas, there is no need to land in the same city." Ling Changye said, "There should be some conditions."

Hua Haoming: "Maybe it's to eliminate all the colorful ghosts in this hotel."

Yang Yi: “It’s possible.”

"It's 10:30 p.m., game time. Let's look for clues before going to sleep." Ling Changye said, "We must leave here as quickly as possible and pass on the clues."

Obviously, in this game, if they find a way to deal with the colorful ghosts later, there will be many more deaths, and as members of the assault team, they must hand in the answer as soon as possible.

Xia Bai was in a group with Ling Changye and Erwa. Erwa and sister Xuemu were searching for clues in their room. Xia Bai turned into a mint green girl and used [Harmless Face], and knocked on the door of a room on the sixth floor with Ling Changye.

There is light coming through the crack in the door of this room, but no one of them lives here. The people inside may be NPCs from the game world.

There was no response from the room, and a wooden sign saying "Do Not Disturb" was hung on the door.

Xia Bai looked at Ling Changye. Ling Changye copied Zhou Buyu's skills and integrated into the wall.

In a few seconds, the door of the room opened from the inside. Ling Changye opened the door for Xia Bai and let him in.

After entering the room, Xia Bai realized why Ling Changye was so bold. The person living inside was already dead, and it didn't look like he died today.

Xia Bai squatted beside his body and performed a simple autopsy. "A man around 35 years old, dead for at least two days. It seems he committed suicide by cutting his wrists."

He probably had booked a room in this hotel a long time ago, and with the "Do Not Disturb" sign, no one noticed he had been dead for two days.

"There are two bottles of medicine on the floor and on the table." Ling Changye said, "Paroxetine tablets and imipramine tablets... antidepressants. He was a patient with severe depression and needed drugs to suppress his condition. Even with so many drugs, he still committed suicide."

"Are these medicines... too many?" Xia Bai said.

The deceased was lying on the ground with a medicine bottle next to one of his hands. There were only two or three white pills in the bottle, and there were many empty medicine bottles on the table and in the trash can.

Ling Changye knew what Xia Bai meant. The first question was, taking so many medicines, this person must be very depressed, even to a terrible degree. The second question was, normally, would a doctor give a patient so many medicines at once? Even they knew that many antidepressants had obvious side effects.

Xia Bai opened the drawer of the desk, "There are still a lot of medicines here."

Ling Changye walked over, took out all the medicine bottles, and looked at the production dates on them: "It's the same as the one in the trash can. The production dates are all the same day."

This shows that it is very likely that the samples were obtained from the doctor at the same time, rather than being obtained from the doctor in several times at different time periods.

He looked at the books on the desk again. The hotel suite had a very small study room with a desk but no bookshelf. There were only a few neatly arranged books on the desk, which should have been brought by the deceased from home.

Finding Happiness in Nature

The Power of Happiness

How to be happy

Be a Shining Person

Please give yourself a hand

These books are indeed very suitable for him, a person with severe depression. Looking at the titles of the books and then looking at the room with all the curtains drawn and only one light on in the study, it is easy to bring people into the sadness of the death.

He tried hard to pull himself up, trying to find ways to be happy and joyful in the books, but he couldn't do it. Those happy and joyful plots in the books were all filled with his tears, and drops of dried tears made the smooth pages of the book bumpy.

[I heard him crying again, his tears were dripping.]

Xia Bai pointed at this sentence and said, "Captain, there are study notes."

Ling Changye glanced at his serious expression and suppressed a smile, "Is this a study note?"

The thoughts and records of what you think while reading are reading notes, as are your feelings, but this record seems to be reality. Xia Bai said with a blank face: "You are such a nitpicker."

Ling Changye: “…”

He didn't know if it was his illusion, but Xia Bai was getting more and more "bold" towards him. If he thought about it carefully, it was probably after they slept together. Ling Changye analyzed himself very fairly to see if there was such a change. It seemed that there was.

He smiled and said, "Yes, I am the one who argued."

Xia Bai was satisfied, and soon became serious again, "Did he take too many pills and have hallucinations? He was clearly crying, and his tears dripped onto the notebook."

"How do you confirm that these tears are his and not the 'he' in his notebook?" Ling Changye asked.

Xia Bai was stunned. Yes, how could he be sure that the deceased was the one who was writing reading notes?

When he sees a person with severe depression reading these books about seeking happiness and joy, and seeing the tears on the books, he instinctively thinks that they are the tears of the depressed person who died while reading the books.

Is this note actually a possible cryptic hint?

What if those tears were shed by “him” as the person who wrote the reading notes said, and they were shed when he was writing, or shortly afterward, then… it’s a bit chilling to imagine that scene.

Ling Changye also picked up a book and said, "Let's look for other books together."

Together, the two of them sorted out the messy reading notes hidden in several books one by one.

【Why is he crying so sadly? 】

[Can this method stop tears? ]

【I want to go to nature, to bask in the sun, the warm sunshine, where is it? 】

[I don’t want to go out. I just want to hide alone, hiding from everyone, hiding from the whole world. ]

[I have listened to him crying for a long, long time. Every night at this time, he cries the most sadly.]

[It’s so wet, my world is wet, it’s wet here, it’s wet there, and my body is wet too.]

【Tick, tick, tick, tick! Tick! Tick! Tick! !!!】

[Don’t cry! Don’t cry! Don’t cry! ]

Xia Bai frowned, "He seems to have a mental problem. He regards his depression and sadness as others', and his tears as others'. This is the aftereffect of taking too much antidepressant drugs."

The note said that he just wanted to hide alone, which is consistent with the deceased's environment. He hid in this hotel alone, not wanting to be disturbed by anyone, and no one even discovered his death.

"That's the first possibility." Ling Changye said, "The second possibility is that he really saw a 'him' who was crying all the time, and he couldn't get rid of this 'him'. If people get along with this kind of sad emotion for a long time, they will also become sad and prone to depression and irritability."

Both of them thought of the possibility of this "him".

Colorful ghost.

A colorful ghost who keeps crying.

But these are just possible guesses.

"It seems that in this game world, humans and colorful ghosts are completely opposite. If he found the colorful ghost and was tortured by it for a long time, why didn't he eliminate the colorful ghost like the security bureau called for? Even if he couldn't eliminate it himself, he should find someone else to eliminate it instead of being tortured into depression and hiding in a hotel to continue being tortured."

While analyzing, Xia Bai told Ling Changye his ideas.

Ling Changye: "That makes sense."

Xia Bai: "Let's look for more, maybe we can find other evidence to confirm our guess."

The two searched the house carefully. Having played the game several times before, they knew where clues might be found, so they searched carefully and specifically.

However, apart from a letter, they found no other useful clues.

In fact, there are not many clues in this letter. It may have been stuffed into the bag of the deceased casually. The only thing revealed on it is the identity of this person.

[Doctor Wang, your phone has been turned off, so I can only write to you at the address you left. The medicine you requested is ready, please come and pick it up as soon as possible.]

Xia Bai: "He's a doctor, so that explains why he has so many antidepressants from the same batch?"

Ling Changye: “Maybe.”

"Captain, Xia Bai, are you in there?" Hua Haoming shouted at the door: "I found something."

There were no clues to be found here, so the two of them immediately walked towards the door.

After taking two steps, Xia Bai stopped and looked up at the roof.

Ling Changye was the first to notice that he had stopped and looked up like him.

This hotel is the Taiguang Hotel in the real world. Datai City is located on the border. There are buildings in different national styles here. Each room on the sixth floor of the hotel has a different style. The roof of this room has complicated plaster patterns, which is dazzling. Ling Changye looked for several seconds before he found where Xia Bai might be looking.

"There's a crack in the roof." Xia Bai said, "Captain, can he see the sun during the day?"