Chapter 623: This Hell Called Reality

The few people who went out were all taken down, and the security guards who arrived later methodically carried them away to the seventh floor, then began driving all the players back to their wards.

During this time, some players refused to believe it, repeatedly trying to use their items and test their powers, but the items didn’t work. To others, they just looked like people standing there making weird, incomprehensible movements… like lunatics.

“Impossible!” a female player screamed, grabbing her hair. “A dungeon can’t truly make us lose our player abilities, so I must be trapped in an illusion right now! Since it’s an illusion, I can break it, right? Why can’t I? Why can’t I?!”

After saying that, she slapped herself twice across the face. When that failed, she rushed to the nurse’s station, snatched a fruit knife, and stabbed it into her own thigh!

The blood flow looked painful enough to make anyone wince, but it still didn’t seem to work. As the nurses pinned her down, she couldn’t help but shriek, “I have a healing potion! I’m a player, I won’t die! Why can’t I open my personal panel?!”

“She’s so crazy,” a player muttered as he walked past the door, hands shoved into the pockets of his patient gown, grinning as he watched the female player. “She definitely didn’t take her meds.”

The two people standing beside him both turned to stare at him, but the man was completely oblivious. He continued, “If she took a couple more pills, she’d become as normal as me.”

His calm tone made the chilling truth even more horrifying.

“I can’t take this anymore.” Wen Xuelin rubbed her arms. “Right now, everyone looks insane to me!”

The most terrifying part was that most of them weren’t even alone. Since entering the dungeon, they’d had at least two or three companions nearby, yet they were still caught in such a chaotic situation. That meant the dungeon had been subtly influencing them all along, through means they couldn’t even detect!

The Player-Eater who had gone upstairs for treatment came back down. He walked up to the Head Nurse and handed her a form. “The doctor says my condition has improved. Can I see my family now?”

The Head Nurse flashed a sincere smile. “That’s great news. I’ll register you first; you should be able to see them this afternoon. Just make sure you cooperate with the doctor’s treatment. Your family cares about you a lot—they’ve been calling nonstop, asking to see you.”

The man looked genuinely excited and nodded frantically. “I’ll do everything the doctor says.”

After the Head Nurse registered him and let him go, the player had just walked over when the Scar Player called out to him. A few of them slung their arms around each other’s shoulders and headed to a corner of the hallway. The others stood at varying distances, sometimes able to hear what they were saying, sometimes not.

Gu Yu and the others stepped back, and they all saw a hint of gravity in each other’s eyes.

It seemed their hearing had also degraded.

“We can’t drag this out any longer. Let’s go find the doctor.”

With that, the group headed upstairs, but many others had the same idea. For a moment, everyone looked at each other, then scrambled to be the first to rush to the third floor.

There were only a few offices and only a handful of doctors. If they were late, they might not find one. Every extra minute in this dungeon came with unpredictable dangers, so of course they wanted to be first.

The doctors in the offices didn’t turn anyone away, but once the door closed, no one outside could hear anything. A few people who wanted to eavesdrop could only sigh helplessly.

The Scar Player also entered an office. The doctor in the white coat sat behind the desk and waved him over. “First, have a seat.”

The Scar Player saw the doctor writing something at the bottom of a page in his medical record: “Mental state still unstable. Cannot be discharged for now.”

*Snap!* The record book closed. The doctor set it aside and smiled at him. “How are you feeling today? Still having auditory hallucinations?”

The Scar Player had no idea what counted as an auditory hallucination, so he simply asked, “Doctor, what do I need to do to be discharged?”

Xu Huo smiled as he looked at him. “You can only be discharged once your condition improves. Your illness isn’t serious—just relax and focus on treatment. It shouldn’t take too long to recover.”

The Scar Player gripped the wooden armrest, a vein on the back of his hand bulging briefly before quickly subsiding. He grinned at Xu Huo. “Doctor, I want to be discharged today.”

Xu Huo naturally noticed the finger indentations he’d pressed into the armrest, then picked up his pen to make a note in the medical record.

The advantage of a mental-illness-type dungeon lay in its influence over people’s thoughts, but a major flaw was that certain strong-willed individuals were hard to sway with external interference.

This was also a pretty good sample.

He set the “Murmuring Sphere” in the open drawer beneath him and continued, “Alright, let’s do a test. If you pass, you can be discharged immediately.”

The Scar Player snatched the medical record from his hand, filled in the answers to the test questions himself, and even added “Permission to be discharged” at the end on his own.

But after writing it, he didn’t receive any dungeon-clear notification. So he tossed the record book back. “You write it.”

Xu Huo chuckled. “That doesn’t follow the hospital’s normal procedure. Even if I write it, you still won’t be discharged.”

“I say you can, so you can!” As he spoke, the Scar Player launched himself from the chair, hurling a punch at Xu Huo’s face.

Xu Huo didn’t dodge or evade. But just two inches from his face, the fist stopped. The Scar Player was shocked and furious to find two straps suddenly wrapped around his arms, yanking him back so hard that even his chair almost tipped over.

Then he saw Xu Huo take out a remote control and press a button. Metal clasps popped out of the chair, completely trapping him in place!

“This isn’t real!” The Scar Player had inspected the hospital building from the outside. Before the dungeon started, it had been an abandoned building with shabby basic facilities—there were no chairs like this!

“Seeing is believing. Can’t you even be sure of what you saw with your own eyes?” Xu Huo picked up his pen in a practiced manner and made another note in the medical record. “It seems your delusions haven’t improved.”

The Scar Player’s eyes turned vicious, but he couldn’t do anything to Xu Huo. So he tried to wake himself up through self-harm, slashing his palm deeply with a small ring-knife. But the pain didn’t pull him out of the illusion—instead, it pulled him deeper. What should have been an ordinary wound now bled profusely, as if he’d cut an artery.

The constant dripping sound came from the floor. The Scar Player heard the doctor across from him say, “Self-harming tendencies. That means you definitely can’t be discharged.”

“I’ll fuck you…” the Scar Player started cursing, but then another dripping sound joined the first. He looked down—there was actually another wound on his left wrist!

*Drip! Drip!*

The sounds of blood falling kept overlapping. In just a few minutes, blood had pooled all around his chair. Countless inexplicable wounds had appeared all over his body, and they were all bleeding, impossible to stop!

“Save me! Save me!” The Scar Player’s face turned pale as he begged Xu Huo for help.

But Xu Huo just shook his head at him, a smile still on his face. “Falling into an illusion you can’t escape. Your illness is quite severe.”