Chapter 128

Those corpses were all charging toward the "fragrant delicacies." Thanks to the barbed wire, the three of them managed to escape, and no corpses followed. Once they got out of the Art Department, Luo Yongzhi turned around and locked the door—

"Oh my god..." Liu Sheng braced his knees, gasping for air. Seeing that Lin Tu and Luo Yongzhi had done so much exercise and looked perfectly fine, Liu Sheng felt even more out of breath.

"What's with those things, acting like starving ghosts?" Luo Yongzhi, though he looked okay, wasn't actually much better off. He couldn't help complaining. "Anyway, how did they die? Looking at them, they weren't starved to death, were they..."

Lin Tu and Liu Sheng looked at him. Somehow, Lin Tu had a feeling Luo Yongzhi might have guessed right.

Lin Tu couldn't fully trust what Lu Shishu had said. After all, this was a world full of illusions, and Lu Shishu himself might have had cognitive errors.

In Lin Tu's view, the nightmare space was, in the end, a world based on reality. People needed to eat in it, and here there were only all kinds of filthy takeout that couldn't be swallowed, or the company's even more terrifying "delicacies" that only official employees could eat. If you didn't consider the monsters, starving to death here was the most likely outcome.

"While we have time, let's go check out the eighth floor," Lin Tu said.

As a manager, she could clock in at any workstation, so there was no rush to get back to daytime.

Luo Yongzhi and Liu Sheng both nodded in agreement. From the looks of those corpses that had stirred to life, cleaning workstations wasn't a safe job. They might as well scout things out first. If it really didn't work, they could just clock out at the end of the shift, wipe down a couple of desks as a token effort, and call it cleaning.

The eighth floor was pitch black and utterly silent. All sorts of trash and desks were piled up in the hallway.

"It smells even worse here!"

Dust mixed with a putrid stench assaulted them, and all three players couldn't help covering their noses. This fermented stench was so pungent it made their heads spin; if they breathed it too long, they might get poisoned.

"This way," they retreated, putting on masks. Then, under Lin Tu's lead, they headed toward the vacant office with supplies she'd discovered earlier.

It was a total mess here—desks stacked on top of each other, and for one stretch, they could only get through by crawling under the desks. If Lin Tu hadn't been here before, she probably wouldn't have found the way either.

Finally, they reached the meeting room door. The office doors on both sides were locked. Lin Tu first raised her flashlight and swept it around the open meeting room. It was covered in dust and empty—no sign of the Packaging Department head's corpse.

"Sister Lin, the stench seems to be coming from these offices." With his professional medical mindset, Liu Sheng took off his mask and sniffed carefully. "It smells like corpses that have been piling up in a sealed space for a long time. When you go in, make sure to keep your masks on, or the smell will trigger a physical reaction."

Lin Tu nodded. She found the office she'd visited before, tried pushing the door open—it didn't budge. She took a step back and kicked the door open.

Immediately, a thick, rotting stench mixed with dust rushed at them.

The dust was so thick that even the flashlight beam could barely penetrate it. Lin Tu waved her hand to try to disperse the dust and finally caught a vague glimpse of the scene inside.

It was completely different from the daytime. There was none of the abundant supplies Lin Tu had seen before—only opened cans covered in dust, and beside them, corpses that had rotted beyond recognition.

Even as corpses, you could tell they'd been thin as skeletons in life. Their limbs had almost no flesh, while their bellies were swollen high—that was from excess fluid accumulating in the abdominal cavity.

"They starved to death..." Liu Sheng frowned.

"There's not a bit of food in here," Luo Yongzhi added. "Those cans you mentioned, Sister Lin—looks like they ate them all."

The two players wanted to go in to examine the corpses and search for supplies, but Lin Tu stopped them.

Lin Tu tentatively stepped inside, stopped, and after a moment of hearing no strange sounds, took two more steps in.

"Looks like the night is safe enough to enter," Lin Tu said, raising her bandaged right hand. "This is where I got hurt. Be careful, you two."

Both players nodded in understanding.

While the two searched for supplies, Lin Tu kicked open the other doors one by one to check the conditions inside.

Unfortunately, every room was just like the first—filled with cans, food waste, only abandoned office equipment and the starved dead. Not a single edible thing remained.

After checking about five or six offices, everyone couldn't help frowning—

There was nothing to eat. Even the opened cans had been licked completely clean, not a single scrap left.

"Where's the food?!" Luo Yongzhi was stunned.

"Judging from the situation here, they ate everything before they starved to death," Lin Tu shrugged. "So there's nothing left to eat here."

Luo Yongzhi: He knew that, but he couldn't believe it!

"So what do we do?" Luo Yongzhi looked like he was about to cry. "What are we supposed to eat?"

"The ninth floor of the company has a break room with a communal kitchen. Let's go check it out," Lin Tu said after a moment's thought.

The three players climbed the stairs from the eighth floor to the ninth, made their way to the communal kitchen, and promptly discovered there was nothing to eat here either. Whether it was the fridge, the cabinets, or hidden corners—forget food, there wasn't even any seasoning.

"We're doomed..." Luo Yongzhi felt his future was bleak.

He could handle eating black bread for ninety days—three whole months—but he knew exactly what black bread was like. Without something normal, something even slightly palatable, he'd definitely be fooled by the illusions.

Remembering that arm-sized maggot Lu Shishu had described, Luo Yongzhi felt like throwing up.

"Don't worry." Lin Tu found a chair on the spot and sat down, pulling out the [Spy Computer] to check the supply points.

The supply points were indeed scattered all over the place, just as Yi Ying had said, and they kept shifting positions. Strangely, the computer showed a resource point right on the table next to Lin Tu—but when she turned her head and shone her flashlight at it, she saw nothing.

"It's during the day," Lin Tu realized.

"What's during the day?" Luo Yongzhi and Liu Sheng also leaned in to look. They saw the supply point right next to them too, and it clicked. "So you're saying all the edible stuff is in the daytime, and we've got nothing at night?"

"Yes," Lin Tu nodded. "But the problem is, we can't tell whether the things in the daytime are real or fake, good or bad."

Suddenly, an idea struck Lin Tu—if she brought daytime things into the night, she could tell the difference!

And how was she supposed to bring them into the night? Through meetings! Yi Ying and the others could bring daytime resources to her office, Luo Yongzhi and the others would take them back into the night, check them, and then split the haul.

Lin Tu shared this idea with Luo Yongzhi and the others, and the two immediately used their phones to message Guan Suixing and the rest. Since logistics department employees didn't have fixed workstations, their work software was installed on their phones, so they could clock in from anywhere, anytime.

"Okay, no problem, we'll be right there!" Yi Ying was excited.

"Work's about done, so we'll head up and grab supplies from the communal kitchen in the ninth-floor rest area with Hei Mawu," Guan Suixing also said.

"What about Peng Yuanzhi?" Hei Mawu asked.

"Peng Yuanzhi?" Lin Tu was suddenly taken aback. Who was that...

"I'll come with you all," someone named Peng Yuanzhi suddenly spoke up in the group chat. "I'm heading to the ninth floor now too."

"Okay, okay." Luo Yongzhi agreed. "Message us when you get there."

They discussed what to bring for a bit. After putting down his phone, Luo Yongzhi saw Lin Tu standing behind him, looking a little dazed.

"Sister Lin, what's wrong?" Luo Yongzhi was a bit puzzled.

"Peng Yuanzhi? I have no memory of him at all..." Lin Tu tried hard to recall her earlier experiences. "When did you add him to the group chat?"

"Right from the start, I think," Liu Sheng scratched his head. "Isn't he in your Art Department, Sister Lin? Haven't you met him?"

Lin Tu carefully thought back over the players in her department, a bit uncertain. "But I've never talked to anyone named Peng Yuanzhi..."

"You should be in the same group, Sister Lin," Luo Yongzhi said. "Going by department assignments, we're all paired up two by two. The game wouldn't put you in a group alone."

Is that so? For a moment, Lin Tu wasn't sure she could trust her own judgment.

"How many of us entered the game?" she asked.

"Seven!" Luo Yongzhi said. "Last disaster, the six of us went in. We felt like we were short on people and it was hard to clear, so this time we were still missing one person—Sister Huadan didn't come. Guan Suixing brought in her friend Hei Mawu, and Hei Mawu brought in his friend Peng Yuanzhi."

"He's probably just shy and never came to see you. When the meeting starts, Sister Lin, you'll see him and recognize him at a glance, I'm sure," Liu Sheng said with a smile.

Lin Tu felt nine parts out of ten that something was off, but the two players' explanations were perfectly reasonable.

She nodded in agreement, then, while turning her head and catching them off guard, quietly opened her phone and pulled up the group chat. There—in the player group they'd created during the last disaster—Hei Mawu and Peng Yuanzhi were conspicuously absent. But Guan Suixing had sent a message after the game started, asking Luo Yongzhi to add her friend Hei Mawu to the group.

There was no further message after that, because they couldn't use their phones at their workstations, so they'd created a separate group chat in the company's messaging software.

There was nothing unreasonable about it. Lin Tu frowned and turned her phone screen off.

The ninth floor had several meeting rooms with computers. Strangely enough, although the entire company building had lost power and plunged into darkness, these computers still emitted a faint, eerie glow—rather unsettling.

Lin Tu sent out a meeting invitation. This time, in addition to the previous five people, she also invited Peng Yuanzhi.

Five minutes later, the door was pushed open, and four people walked in carrying bags and packages.

Once they were inside and the door was closed, signaling that the meeting had officially begun, the entire office lit up in an instant. Lin Tu and the others, who'd been in the dark for so long, found it rather uncomfortable.

Lin Tu turned off her flashlight, rubbed her eyes, and then looked at the four across from her.

Yi Ying and Guan Suixing were familiar to her—same faces as always. Hei Mawu she'd also seen before—a young man in his twenties.

Peng Yuanzhi had short black hair and was also a man in his twenties, with a face that looked rather familiar. Lin Tu thought about it carefully and, sure enough, found him among the faces of the Art Department players.

—So the seven of them really had entered the game together this time.