Chapter 123

Lin Tu felt like some of her colleague's brain matter had splattered across her eyes. She squeezed them shut, rubbed, and opened them again—the man's head was perfectly intact, as if none of it had ever happened.

But had it really been a hallucination?

She watched him bury himself in work, as if he'd already forgotten what he'd just said about clearing the calamity. Yet Lin Tu distinctly remembered he was a player.

"Hey! Xiao Lin!" The voice on the phone grew shriller. "What are you doing? Why haven't you picked up my food delivery? I'm so hungry! I'm starving! I'm going to die of hunger! It's all your fault!"

The player earlier had mentioned a package. He'd probably received a similar call but failed to complete the task, which was why his head had exploded.

Once that possibility clicked, Lin Tu no longer dared to ignore her colleague's request. She cut off the man's tirade. "I'm heading out right now. You know how eager I am to help. I've just got too many people to assist."

She scooped up all the sticky notes on her desk that weren't yet crossed out and stood up abruptly.

"Oh, well, that's fine then," the voice on the other end softened. "Colleagues should care for and help each other like family. I'm gratified to see you have that awareness, Xiao Lin. Tell you what—I'll give you five minutes."

Lin Tu: Heh. And I'll give you two slaps across the face.

Expressionless, she hung up, grabbed the sticky notes, and headed for the door.

The company was in an eighteen-story building, and Lin Tu was on the seventh floor. She stepped out of the office and turned to see the name of her company and department—Happiness, Joy & Beauty Co., Art Department.

Beside the Art Department's entrance hung a cleaning and fire-safety log, along with a small booklet tied to a string titled "Art Department Employee Handbook." Below it sat a floor-standing folder stuffed with more copies.

Lin Tu didn't hesitate. She grabbed a handful and stuffed them into her backpack.

While riding the elevator, she pulled out her phone and sent messages to the other players, briefly explaining what had just happened and warning them to complete the tasks their colleagues assigned.

At the first-floor front desk, she found a cabinet stacked with countless food delivery bags and packages. Beyond the main entrance, a thick white fog obscured everything. Lin Tu spotted a few people who looked like players, but she pushed that aside for now—she was about to run out of time.

She snapped a photo and sent it to the Butler. Thanks to the AI's power, she quickly located the deliveries and packages written on her sticky notes.

Carrying the delivery bags, she reached the elevator, but it refused to come down. Left with no choice, she sprinted up all seven flights of stairs. She tossed one bag by the restroom door and tracked down the others by the workstations—

Her real intention was to get a look at the people at those desks, so while delivering, she threw in a casual complaint: "So tiring. Maybe someone else could take over next time?"

Based on her experience fobbing off the man on the phone, as long as she didn't say anything too harsh, she shouldn't end up with a blown-out head like that player.

"You won't help me?" The person at the workstation suddenly turned shrill. He lifted his head, his movements turning stiff in an instant. The black of his pupils flooded outward, dyeing his entire eyeballs black.

Every sound in the office died. Everyone raised their heads and stared fixedly at Lin Tu, as if they might devour her the next second.

"I'll do it!" Lin Tu said immediately.

At once, everyone lowered their heads, and the man in front of her gradually returned to normal. "In One Big Happy, Joyful, Beautiful Family, colleagues must care for and help each other like family."

Lin Tu: "..." She walked back to her own workstation, numb.

Back in her seat, messages came in from Guan Suixing and the others. They'd received the same requests from their colleagues, and thanks to Lin Tu's timely warning, they'd completed the tasks and were safe for now.

Lin Tu photographed her "Art Department Employee Handbook" and sent it to the group. She was about to send another message when the computer on her desk suddenly flashed red—

"Warning! Warning! Phone use detected! Continued use for three seconds will result in point deduction!"

Lin Tu hastily pocketed her phone.

Lin Tu: She was done. Truly done.

Still, the photo had made it into the group chat. The players were experienced enough to understand what she meant.

As she thought this, she began flipping through the employee handbook.

The handbook provided a very detailed breakdown of employee wages.

Part One: Base Pay. As an ordinary employee of the Art Department, her working hours ran from nine in the morning to six in the evening, with a break from twelve noon to one. However, the company encouraged employees to work overtime without compensation, so she was required to clock in at six a.m., nine a.m., twelve noon, one p.m., four p.m., seven p.m., and ten p.m.—seven times each day.

Each clock-in earned one point; each missed clock-in deducted one point.

One point was worth ten yuan. So a full thirty days of clocking in would yield 2,100 yuan, with no attendance bonus.

After reading that schedule, Lin Tu nearly blacked out, barely resisting the urge to pinch herself awake. She forced herself to read on.

Part Two: Performance Pay. Every day, she had to review fifty product promotional posters and select the best three, submitting them to her supervisor through the company's internal software. The supervisor would then select the best few from all the posters submitted by employees.

One point for each poster selected.

Part Three: Outstanding Employee Bonus. Every Thursday, the leadership would visit the company to select outstanding employees. Those who truly treated the company as their home and their colleagues as family would receive an Outstanding Employee Bonus of one hundred points! As for those wretched employees—they would face terrible, severe punishment!

Lin Tu did the math. With clock-ins, her work, running errands for colleagues, and currying favor, her maximum monthly salary came to 3,100 yuan.

—Done. She was truly done.

But since the side mission was to earn money, she'd wring the most out of this company. Lin Tu decided to first secure the base pay she could claim, then see if she could bleed the company for anything else.

She looked at the old computer screen. There was no desktop—just the home page of the work software.

The software was minimal. The first module was the in-house chat; the second, the work interface; the third, the clock-in interface; and the fourth, the wage balance interface.

Lin Tu checked the wage interface first:

"April 20, Sunday

New employee this month: Lin Tu

Days employed: 3

Monthly wage balance: 16 points"

The balance displayed the source of the sixteen points. Lin Tu examined it—all her wages came from clocking in. In the past three days, she hadn't received a single point of performance pay.

Not exactly a stellar worker... Lin Tu thought as she opened the work interface.

A nauseating, rotting stench hit her square in the face. A grotesque photo of a decomposing corpse filled the screen. In the corner of her eye, Lin Tu could have sworn she saw the clouded eyeball twitch.

Lin Tu frowned. She was certain she hadn't imagined it.

She gritted her teeth and flipped to the next image—a photo of a student hanging from a noose. This time, Lin Tu stared intently at the student. Sure enough, the student's arm swayed.

What did this mean? Lin Tu wondered, flipping to the next.

She flipped through five more before landing on one that passed as "normal"—though it didn't qualify as normal in any real sense.

A grinning young girl sat in the center of the frame, rosy-cheeked, but her head had been severed cleanly at the brow line, exposing a moist, pink, intact brain.

For some reason, at the sight of this photo, Lin Tu found herself swallowing involuntarily.

—Because that brain actually looked kind of delicious?!

Lin Tu was immediately jolted by this thought from the depths of her mind. She took a deep breath and forced herself to look away. The moment she did, she flipped to the next one—

A photograph of a brutally murdered old man, drenched in blood.

That wrinkled hand gave a slight twitch.

"Something's wrong!" A red dot suddenly popped up on the first module. Lin Tu clicked it—in the in-house chat, Luo Yongzhi had somehow created a group with Guan Suixing, Lin Tu, Yi Ying, Liu Sheng, and Hei Mawu.

"What departments are you all in? Liu Sheng and I are in Logistics. Our job is cleaning the company every night. I took one look around—there are so many corpses! So much blood!"

Lin Tu caught the anomaly immediately. "Night?"

Luo Yongzhi: "Yeah, is it not night for you, Sister Lin? It's 11:30 p.m. here."

Lin Tu: "It's 11:30 a.m. for me."

Liu Sheng: "???!!!"

Realizing there was a time discrepancy and that Lin Tu's side might be missing information, Luo Yongzhi quickly photographed his employee handbook and sent it to the group—

The Art Department and Logistics Department handbooks differed only in the base pay and performance pay sections—

"Part One: Base Pay. As an ordinary Logistics employee, your working hours are from nine p.m. to six a.m., with a break from midnight to one a.m. However, the company encourages employees to work overtime without compensation, so you must clock in at six p.m., nine p.m., midnight, one a.m., four a.m., seven a.m., and ten a.m., in different departments."

"Part Two: Performance Pay. You may freely collect cleaning supplies from the Logistics Department and clean office desks in each department daily. You must clean at least three desks per day. For each desk cleaned to perfection, you earn one point."

Yi Ying quickly popped in: "Me, Xingxing, and Hei Mawu are all in After-sales. Our job is answering customer service calls."

Guan Suixing: "Our time matches Sister Lin's—11:30 a.m."

Thus, their difference from Lin Tu lay only in performance pay—"You must answer at least ten customer calls each day. For every positive review, you earn a point; for every company product sold, you earn another point!"

Luo Yongzhi and Liu Sheng nearly collapsed. Did that mean they were on a different timeline, and their task was handling corpses?!

"Don't panic," Lin Tu said suddenly, an idea striking her. She glanced at the workstation number of the player from earlier and typed it into the screen. "You two, come to this desk in the Art Department and see if there's a corpse on it."

"If there is, maybe you can clean my desk instead. Since I'm sitting at mine, there shouldn't be any corpses or danger on it, no matter what timeline we're on."

Both players quickly agreed.

As for the After-sales Department—it sounded far more lucrative than the Art or Logistics Departments. But Lin Tu knew there was no reward without risk, which meant the After-sales Department carried even greater danger—

"Be careful," Lin Tu said. "Have you figured out what the company's products are?"

Hei Mawu answered: "The company sells a lot of products, but our after-sales department handles crispy cartilage cans."

"Crispy cartilage?" It sounded perfectly normal. Lin Tu mulled it over but found no leads. "If you're not sure, don't push the sales for now. This company is stingy—they wouldn't hand out points for nothing. For me, it's reviewing product posters, and they're very eerie..."

Lin Tu briefly recounted what she'd just experienced.

"Sister Lin! You move too fast!" Yi Ying sent an OvO emoticon. "Don't just warn us! We haven't dared do anything yet! I was thinking we could just skip the performance pay, but you're already going at it?!"

Luo Yongzhi: "We were thinking of skipping performance pay too."

Lin Tu: "..." How could she not be in a hurry when money was on the line?

Still, her teammates' caution was reassuring.

"I'm getting hungry looking at brains right now. I'm worried something's off, so I'm going to grab a bite," Lin Tu said, logging off the chat interface.

She really was extraordinarily hungry, and experience told her this shouldn't be happening—she'd only eaten a midnight snack right before entering the calamity. Which meant something from outside was making her hungry, and the only thing it could be was that brain.

Lin Tu decided she couldn't just passively accept this hunger debuff. She grabbed a couple of tissues and headed to the Art Department restroom.

A sign at the entrance read: "Total time in the restroom must not exceed twenty minutes per hour!"

Lin Tu: "..." Speechless!

She went to the farthest stall and placed [Anju].

She closed the door and opened it again—and there was the scene from her own home.

Lin Tu walked in, relaxing. A faint, pleasant scent hung in the air—a mix of her car air freshener and fresh flowers. She opened the time-frozen cabinet and, seeing the food inside, finally felt the thin fog in her head lift—

This was it! This was real food!

And thinking back to that brain—so tender it practically dripped water, like it had just had a hydration treatment—Lin Tu felt a wave of intense revulsion. The hunger in her stomach turned to a chill of disgust.

At last, she realized she wasn't hungry at all.

She grabbed a bottle of iced orange juice and took a few sips to soothe her discomfort, checked the time—11:47—and left the restroom.

Back at her workstation, she resumed reviewing the promotional posters. After flipping through several more nightmare-inducing corpse photos, she came across an image with a startlingly novel style—

A teenage boy, grinning just as brightly, spinning a basketball on his left index finger. His right hand was raised high against his chest, the skin peeled away, with tweezers neatly picking out the bones to reveal the fresh, muscular finger flesh beneath. The meat trembled, utterly enticing.

Just as the hunger was about to surge up again, Lin Tu suppressed the craving, recalling the orange juice she'd just drunk and all the barbecue, braised pig trotters, and fresh fruit she'd seen... Instantly, the hunger curdled into disgust.

Two bizarre sensations in a row made Lin Tu realize—could these be the "excellent product posters"? If so... was Happiness, Joy & Beauty Co. selling human meat?

She quickly browsed through all fifty posters, singled out the three with the novel styles, and submitted them.

The time was now 11:58. Two minutes until clock-in.

Lin Tu had just opened the clock-in interface when the world around her went dark. The entire office dimmed, leaving only the screens glowing.

On alert, she immediately popped a [Night Blueberry] and surveyed her surroundings. Five or six people around her had risen to their feet.

They exchanged glances, instantly recognizing one another as players.

"Please remain at your workstation at exactly twelve o'clock!" A warning flashed on the screen.

Lin Tu stood still, a chill wind prickling her skin.

"You..." One of the players started to speak, but suddenly, an "employee" standing between him and Lin Tu rose to his feet.

Calling him an employee no longer felt right. His head had burst open, leaving only a neck connected by head muscles and a few scraps of bone, still pumping blood outward.

"So hungry..." Another "employee" beside him stood up, finishing his unspeakable words: "I want to eat... brains, meat, hearts, livers... I want to eat so badly..."

His gaze wandered dazedly before landing on the player who'd just spoken. Then it turned hungry and terrifying.

"Holy shit!" The player shrieked. "Bro, calm down! I don't taste good!"

His instinct was to run, but the warning on the screen kept him frozen.

"One minute, thirty seconds..." Lin Tu watched as more and more "employees" rose hungrily from their seats, including the ones she'd fetched deliveries for. Their gazes soon locked onto Lin Tu and the other players.

Lin Tu was about to draw her blade when a gust of cold wind swept by—

"Holy shit! What's that?!" The player yelped again.

Lin Tu looked up to see a blood-soaked old man clinging to the wall, grinning at her through cracked yellow teeth.

Lin Tu knew this man all too well—she'd just seen his photo on her computer screen moments ago.

Did that mean every character from the photos she'd just viewed would appear?

The thought had barely crossed her mind when a foul stench hit her. A rotting corpse crawled in through the office door, its throat emitting a terrifying rasp. And right in front of Lin Tu, a student hung from a rope, limbs dangling, swaying without a breath of wind.

"Why won't you let us be featured on the product posters!" the student shrieked.

"Why not!"

"Why not!"

The other players, still reeling in terror: "..." They hadn't done anything.

"Looks like they're all here for you, miss!" The players gazed at Lin Tu with sympathy.

Lin Tu: "..."

She raised her long blade and slashed at the student's leg. Blood sprayed—but never actually landed, as if it were a phantom. The student gradually turned translucent.

Behind her, an employee's hand reached for Lin Tu's back—

"What are you doing, family?" Lin Tu recognized him as the despicable employee who'd made her fetch his food. She spun around and slashed at his head. It tumbled across the floor twice before vanishing beneath a desk.

"Whoa! Nice!" A nearby player couldn't help but give a thumbs up.

"Thirty-eight seconds!" Someone called out.

One of the players turned to the one who'd died at the start, shouting "Hey!" twice. When there was no response, he grimly hurled a tool that pierced the man's heart, killing him outright—"Sorry, buddy. Rest in peace."

"Eighteen seconds!"

With the player dead, another "employee" shuffled toward Lin Tu, reaching for some part of her. Lin Tu aimed at its heart and swung down precisely, cleaving it—heart and all—in two.

The "employee" collapsed and went still.

"Five seconds! Four! Three! Two..."

Seizing the moment, Lin Tu killed another employee with a single stroke.

On the final second, she heard a startled cry from the doorway—

Lin Tu turned to see Luo Yongzhi and Liu Sheng standing at the office entrance, one clutching a broom and dustpan, the other holding a mop and a bucket. Both wore yellow cleaning uniforms, staring in shock at the carnage inside.

The next second, light flooded back into the room.

The chaos of moments ago might never have existed. The office was once again a sea of heads. Lin Tu's sharp eyes caught a desk where someone had vanished—on it sat a food delivery bag, the very one she'd brought up not long ago. The seat of the player whose head had burst at the start was empty now too.

—So piercing the heart could kill a "family member" completely.

—And the product poster candidates were easier to kill, as long as their power didn't keep rising.

Lin Tu silently sheathed her blade and returned to her seat. At twelve o'clock, the clock-in showed successful.

Now came an hour of rest.

Lin Tu remembered spotting Luo Yongzhi and Liu Sheng just now. She was about to open the chat to ask how they were when several players clustered around her, whispering—

"Miss, why were so many people... ghosts... chasing you just now?"

"What are product posters?"

Lin Tu: "...Did you not get any phone calls?"

One player shook his head. Four others raised their hands—"I went to fetch hot water for someone." "I delivered a file." ...All done inside the office.

"If you get a call, you have to do it," one man told the head-shaker. "My buddy died because he refused to pick up a package, probably."

The man: "Huh?!"

"That's right," Lin Tu added. "My task was fetching food delivery. I left the office, and that's where I found this Art Department Employee Handbook by the door."

She added: "If you have other tasks on your desks, you might as well do them." The players' interests didn't conflict with one another. Having a few more friendly "family members" meant a little more safety for Lin Tu too.

The players all grew solemn, nodding and thanking her. In the time they'd been there, they'd noticed a few things too—

"One of the Art Department employees seems to be the department head's nephew," a player said. "I found out while fetching water for someone."

"That explains it," another said. "I was delivering a file when I saw the Art Department head on the phone, getting chewed out."

",,,"

The players exchanged a bit more information before agreeing to reconvene during the next break.

Lin Tu watched them leave, an itch of ambition stirring within her. Speaking of making money... was there anything more direct than a promotion and a raise?