Chapter 158, 142857: [Give me gold!!!]...
[File No. 142857]:
Instance name: 142857
Dungeon Difficulty: Five-Star - Purgatory
Number of times the instance can be opened: ?
...
Recommended host's role in this instance: [To be unlocked] (This instance does not support free selection)
Recommended number of players: 18
...
Xue Chao woke up in a villa, which made him feel disoriented for a moment.
It occupies a similar area to his house, but the decoration is modern and minimalist. Xue Chao stared at the abstract painting that he couldn't understand for a while.
In the prediction machine, Han Zheng, who had just woken up in an apartment, had already begun to explore. She pulled up the hood of her hoodie, slung her black backpack over her shoulder, and walked into the street. The noise of cars and the flow of people made her pause, but she quickly blended in again.
Xue Chao went to the window, and the bustling city morning came into view. Luxury advertisements were displayed on the big screen, and people were coming and going, just like the real world.
The morning passed uneventfully without any unusual events. Xue Chao's starting point was in a row of villas, the boundary of the instance's explorable area, the furthest from the central square, but still a ten-minute drive away. While exploring the area, he also had breakfast.
Zhuo Yislip moved to the seat opposite him, picked up a sweet fried dough stick, and stuffed it into her mouth: "It's haunted."
Xue Chao elegantly wiped his mouth: "Where?"
“It would be strange if there wasn’t one!” Zhuo Yi said. “It’s too peaceful, like the holiday has been extended.” He had just returned from the real world as well.
As they were talking, the large screen on the building outside the glass window went black, and the breakfast shop, which was completely covered by the building, dimmed for a moment, but the screen quickly lit up again.
Zhuo Yi said warily, "The poster has changed." It used to be a poster featuring a female celebrity endorsing a luxury brand, but now it's a rotating advertisement. Has something finally gone wrong?
Xue Chao showed him his phone, and the trending topic was: "Celebrity scandal, emergency evacuation."
"..." Zhuo Yi sat back down. "Strange, very strange." It was as if he had been tricked.
Xue Chao was scrolling through his phone, searching, chatting, watching dramas, and scrolling through short videos. Right now, the whole internet was discussing celebrity scandals: "...I feel right at home."
Where else in other instances do you get this kind of treatment? Forget about internet access, you don't even have a mobile phone, and there aren't as many NPCs as there are in a breakfast shop in this instance.
Like a real city, far from ghosts, ordinary yet bustling, welcoming yet also arousing a deeper sense of danger.
Zhuo Yi felt increasingly upset, picked up the red bean paste cake and left: "I'm going to take a look at that building."
However, as dusk fell, the players still couldn't find anything unusual worth paying attention to, and the viewers complained, "It's rare to see a room broadcasting everyday life."
One player complained anxiously, "What a waste of a day! The map is huge, there are so many NPCs, how can we possibly..."
Xue Chao didn't hear the rest of the words. His attention was drawn away by a sudden scream from the prediction machine. One of the players with the chronic illness encountered a student being killed in the North Ring Community. He quickly walked around the residential buildings to the scene, but he didn't see the murderer. There was only the student lying in a pool of blood, his eyes wide open in death.
The player did not approach, but cautiously observed his surroundings.
Whether the murderer has left or not, whether the murderer is human or ghost, whether the student is dead or alive, and whether the student is human or ghost—all these questions need to be considered. This is not the real world.
The student was stabbed to death. The killer's method was clumsy, repeatedly stabbing the heart twice to confirm the kill, like a crime of passion. The player searched the surrounding area but found nothing unusual. Instead, they found the killer's broken zipper pull.
After a fruitless night, the player continued searching for clues the next day, only to be arrested by the police on charges of a murder that occurred the previous night, with his fingerprints found at the scene.
The person wasn't murdered, but the player has no way of explaining why they lingered at the crime scene and didn't call the police.
The player was still dazed when he was handcuffed and taken away... No, is that right?
Zhuo Yi, who was pretending to buy a jianbing (Chinese crepe) downstairs, also clicked his tongue in amazement: "This scene is as amazing as someone actually calling the police in a horror movie, and the police actually working."
"It's really not a horror movie," Xue Chao muttered. By the afternoon, the murderer had been found by several players. It wasn't a ghost or monster, and Zhuo Yi had reported it to the police station.
The big screen was reporting on the incident. The deceased was a newly crowned top scorer in this year's college entrance examination, with a bright future ahead of her. The murderer was a failed middle-aged man with a prior robbery conviction who did not know the deceased. When asked about his motive for the murder, he shouted, "Who made her unlucky!" as if he were seeking revenge on society. The crowd was instantly agitated.
One player infiltrated the police force tasked with apprehending the murderer.
Players who were also following the case were discussing within the team: "The trial is tomorrow night?"
"Doesn't this prove we've come to the right place? Otherwise, I would have really thought we were on vacation."
"You're the one treating instance time like real-world time. What if this is just time compression to fit the game?"
"We can't put all our eggs in one basket. This case is too ordinary. Tomorrow will be the third day. How can we not get into the main storyline after three days?"
But by the morning of the third day, nothing unusual had happened, and the player was left alone in fear amidst the agitated crowd of citizens.
"...I'm now experiencing the weirdness of this dungeon. I heard that it can be opened hundreds of times, but the dungeon progress will be reset to zero every time."
Other instances, each time they open, represent the next season, retaining the influence and changes of the previous season.
But this instance always starts with the first episode of the first season, automatically resetting to zero. No matter how many times you open it, it's the same, like a cycle.
However, even the strangest dungeons have a "theme," which might be an anomaly caused by something very small that they couldn't find, so the main quest wasn't triggered.
If they didn't miss it, there's another possibility, like in Xue Chao's first instance, that they weren't in the area that triggered the theme (the core storyline of the instance).
“That’s true,” Zhuo Yi said. “There was a dungeon where the main storyline area was actually in the sea beneath the island. I searched for two days.”
That is, it is still within the scope of the instance, but we need to break out of conventional thinking. The actual scope of the instance is larger than they think.
"Could there be another city beneath this city? An air-raid shelter? Or some kind of aerial activity involving spaceships or hot air balloons?"
The players began exploring spaces outside the usual area. Xue Chao drove around the edge of the instance again, and seeing that the players' exploration was not going well, he first found the game store behind a building with a large screen.
The store sells normal game items, nothing outrageous like the one in the previous instance. However, the store's location caught Xue Chao's attention. It was a music and video store, which could be considered ancient in a modern city.
The shops will be localized within the instance. The "audio-visual store" may be a clue, but the store does not sell discs, so Xue Chao finds another audio-visual store.
He couldn't find any suspicious discs in the music store, so he just randomly picked one from the most conspicuous shelf near the entrance.
An old animated film about a group of children who go on an adventure, accidentally stumble into a witch's territory, and outwit and outmaneuver the witch. The art style is both cute and whimsical.
There are very few lines, only occasional onomatopoeia, and the meaning is mostly expressed through exaggerated body language, which reminds Xue Chao of Tom and Jerry.
Perhaps "adventures of children" and "witch" are some kind of metaphor, so Xue Chao watched them quite attentively, and then watched twelve episodes in a row in front of the sofa in the initial villa, gaining nothing except feeling drowsy.
Xue Chao: "..." He's quite good-looking, but is he sick in the head?
He looked at the various camera positions and realized that everyone had worked for nothing all day, which gave him a strange sense of relief.
Xue Chao played it a second time, but he had already taken out his phone to check the group messages.
Yes, it was a rare opportunity to get online. Xue Chao pulled the players he met into a group and asked them to inform others. The group was already quite large, with 13 members.
[Summer Solstice: There's no air-raid shelter, so I spent the whole day in the underground parking lot.]
[Summer Solstice: The Car God Vomits.jpg]
[Coffee without sugar: Is it underwater too? The largest area is just an artificial lake, and whose shorts are underneath...?]
[Healing Potion Wholesaler: +1]
[Healing Potion Wholesaler: Drowned Chicken.jpg]
[Wholesaler of Healing Potions: (Megaphone) Healing up! (Fireworks) Community perks, grab them! One hit and your stats are back! (Fireworks) Original price... Click to expand]
[Gentle as a Chrysanthemum: You bastard bought so many healing potions? Selling them per person, do you have a gang? You're making a profit without any conscience (middle finger)]
[The ad has been removed.]
[Lop-eared Rabbit: There aren't any aerial events. There aren't any holidays recently, so there are no drone or fireworks displays. The closest thing to the sky, besides airplanes, is a stargazing event co-sponsored by a university and science museum. There are no airports or private airstrips within the instance area; we can't exactly shoot down planes, can we?]
[CaCO3: It's hard to say. These are the only things outside of stereotypes. What if what's outside our blind spot isn't space, but an event? For example, a plane crash in the city center, but the main storyline is actually about a city attacked after the crash?]
Tables and chairs: (Thumbs up) (Thumbs up) (Thumbs up)
[Tables and chairs: But compared to airplanes, there's something closer to us that might be more prone to disaster?]
—Tonight's prisoner trial.
Just as Xue Chao was about to type, the light from the television screen surrounding him seemed to flash.
He quickly looked up, and a flashing image with purple background and red text appeared in less than a second, but it was captured by his retina.
Give me gold!!!
If the entire image is divided into rows, and each row is randomly offset to the left and right, the printed font will appear both neat and strangely garbled.
After the episode of the cartoon ended, no more strange scenes appeared. He then rewound to that place, and the cartoon continued normally, as if those scenes had suddenly been "inserted" into the television.
Xue Chao pulled out the disc. The TV channel was broadcasting an antique appraisal program. A group of experts sat in a row, appraising antiques. The camera randomly zoomed in, and one expert stroked a piece of jade, squinting his eyes: "Obviously a modern imitation. The surface is dyed with strong acid. Look here, there are many traces of electric polishing..."
Jade, gemstones, famous paintings and calligraphy... After a round of appraisal, the program entered a break, but the camera didn't turn off immediately; it continued to broadcast the experts' casual conversation.
"This whole batch is fake? The last batch had an official kiln piece, that's really something..."
They chatted about the treasures they had appraised, and someone suddenly said jokingly, "Gold is definitely more valuable, isn't it?"
There was a faint electrical hum in the sound, like the signal suddenly weakening for a few seconds, which made Xue Chao's eyes narrow.
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