Chapter 130

Were pig brains tasty? Of course they were.

That's what Kou Lin thought.

Especially brains this fresh, springy, and perfectly wrinkled—just looking at them smoothed out the folds of her mind, leaving her as content as if she were strolling through a Norwegian forest. No need to boil them in hotpot, no need to grill them. Their original flavor was enough to send her straight to heaven.

After quickly handing the ingredients to the head of the Creative Department, Kou Lin slipped into the bathroom with her brains, locked herself in a stall, and savored them bite by bite.

A wave of satisfaction washed over her. When she returned to her seat and clocked in, her colleagues no longer seemed scary at all.

What a great company. What great colleagues. She was proud to be part of One Big Happy, Joyful, Beautiful Family!

Back to Lin Tu's side—she had followed Peng Yuanzhi back to the office without a word, watching him sit down at his workstation.

She studied his behavior closely. What she saw was both expected and unexpected: he showed not a single flaw. The players around him all seemed to know him, and even the coworkers could exchange a few words with him. But was he really flawless?

Lin Tu watched as that unlucky player who had been killed at the start of the game looked up, met Peng Yuanzhi's eyes, and smiled. She couldn't help but wonder... was this right?

Had she remembered wrong? Shouldn't that player be dead? Not only was Peng Yuanzhi now chatting amiably with him, but even the player who had used an item to kill his companion again was acting like they were old buddies.

She felt that eight out of ten parts of this scene were deeply wrong.

Already resistant to the effect, Lin Tu quietly returned to her office, clocked in, and sat down without moving. After about half an hour, she tore off two pieces of paper, stretched, and walked out of the office—

"How's the work going?" Lin Tu walked up to a random coworker and flashed her badge. "As department head, I need to make sure your efficiency is up to par."

The coworker looked up at her, hesitated for a moment, and said, "Reporting to the department head, I've already reviewed forty product promotional images."

"Very good," Lin Tu encouraged him.

—As head of the Art Department, she had to chat with one-tenth of the people every day, telling them about her position. The department currently had five hundred people, which meant Lin Tu needed to chat with fifty of them.

After putting on a show and checking in on about a dozen employees, Lin Tu finally headed for the bathroom.

As she left, she glanced sideways at Peng Yuanzhi. He was hard at work, unaware of her movements.

She didn't know if she was just fighting shadows, but Lin Tu felt that ever since the name Peng Yuanzhi appeared, everything had become eerily strange, so she wanted to be as cautious as possible.

Once in the bathroom, Lin Tu quickly slipped into the last stall and returned to [Anju].

The moment she was home, her whole body relaxed. She flopped onto the sofa and let out a long breath. Only after that breath had fully escaped did she walk over to the time-frozen cabinet. It was then that she realized—what was stored in this cabinet wasn't food at all. It was her life-saving medicine.

Opening the cabinet, for a split second Lin Tu felt like the things inside didn't look all that appetizing.

But soon, the fragrant smell of spicy hotpot and the aroma of slightly charred grilled pork belly drifted into her nose, and Lin Tu snapped back to reality in an instant.

—Was she crazy? How could she think these things weren't delicious?

She grabbed a handful of teppanyaki squid skewers, lounged back in her recliner, and devoured them one after another. The moment she finished the skewers, she felt the fog in her head lift, and a familiar hunger returned to her stomach.

It was almost dinner time anyway. She should be hungry.

She could only stay in the bathroom for twenty minutes at most, so Lin Tu put a pot on to cook some noodles. She went to the Anomaly Space, picked a head of lettuce, and washed it. By the time she was done, the noodles were about ready. Lin Tu fished out the noodles, rinsed them under cold water, then put them back in the pot with the lettuce and water. She added the luosifen seasoning, pickled bamboo shoots, pickled cowpeas, and all—a bowl of luosifen was ready in eight minutes.

While turning on her tablet to let the luosifen cool a bit, she still had ten minutes left. She managed to squeeze in an episode of Detective Xiao Nan's animation, and by the time she'd watched half of it, she'd slurped down all the noodles.

Lin Tu patted her slightly stuffed belly, pondering who the killer in the detective cartoon was as she rinsed her bowl.

A freshly eaten bowl was easy to clean. It took her less than half a minute to wash the dishes.

With barely any of her twenty minutes left, she took a few more breaths of the "pollution-free" air at home and returned to Happiness, Joy & Beauty Co.

Immediately, a stench hit her nose.

Lin Tu quietly followed the smell and saw a corpse piled at Peng Yuanzhi's feet!

The body was already severely decomposed, with signs of tearing all over it. If she looked closely, she could even spot bite marks on it.

She then glanced at the rest of the people—on the desks of her Art Department employees, there were bits and pieces of the corpse scattered here and there—a finger, a toe...

Several players' desks had not only leftover Mingming Chicken takeout but also parts of the corpse, and their mouths all had strange residual marks around them.

How had she not noticed this before? Lin Tu immediately understood—it was because she'd just eaten a good meal and cleared the fog from her mind.

Suppressing the nausea in her stomach, Lin Tu walked over to Peng Yuanzhi's workstation and, using the same script as before, said, "As department head, I've come to check on how your work is going."

"Not bad, department head," Peng Yuanzhi said, lifting his head. As he opened his mouth to speak, the stench hit her right in the face.

Lin Tu glanced down at the corpse at his feet. Now that she was closer, she recognized it—it was Lu Shishu, the very person who had spoken to her not long ago.

"Very good." Lin Tu nodded, then calmly walked toward another coworker.

After checking in on about a dozen more employees, Lin Tu could no longer bear the stench. She felt that if she stayed any longer, the fog in her head would creep back in. So she smiled, said goodbye to the employees, and returned to her own office.

—Peng Yuanzhi was not one of them.

Lin Tu was now certain of this.

Now that she was well-fed, her mind had gradually returned to normal. When she'd first come back from outside and entered the office, the players she'd seen really had seemed perfectly normal, none of them eating takeout, just as Peng Yuanzhi had said.

But now that she was full, she could see the corpse of Lu Shishu piled at Peng Yuanzhi's feet, and she could see that the players had not only eaten the takeout—they'd even eaten parts of Lu Shishu's corpse.

This was enough to prove that Peng Yuanzhi's claim that no players had eaten takeout was a lie.

This made Lin Tu even more certain that she had never heard of the name Peng Yuanzhi before.

So when had this person appeared? Where had he come from?

Lin Tu pondered this as she opened her phone.

Compared to the company's internal software, she trusted the built-in app of [Infinite Calamity] more right now.

In the group chat, no one had said a word. It was dead silent. The last message was still Guan Suixing telling Luo Yongzhi to pull her friend into the group.

If no one had been pulled into the group, then there should have been six people in it. Lin Tu looked at the group info, and it clearly showed seven members.

Lin Tu went through them one by one: "Lin Tu, Yi Ying, Luo Yongzhi, Guan Suixing, Liu Sheng, Dong Huadan..." After going through the list once, Lin Tu couldn't count a seventh person.

Refusing to believe it, she popped a piece of chocolate into her mouth. As the sweetness surged through her mind, Lin Tu continued counting—

"Lin Tu, Yi Ying, Luo Yongzhi, Guan Suixing... Kou Lin... Kou Lin?"

"Who is Kou Lin?" The taste of chocolate gradually faded from her mouth, and Lin Tu finally saw the name that had been there all along but had been overlooked by everyone—along with the three messages she had sent since the game began, messages no one had ever replied to—

"What department are you guys in?" "Make sure you complete the tasks your coworkers give you!" "Let's find a place to meet up?"

"It was the illusion in the disaster that made us overlook Kou Lin's existence," Lin Tu mused.

Meanwhile, in the company's group chat, Hei Mawu sent a message: "The twelfth and thirteenth floors are the purchasing department. There should be a lot of edible stuff stored inside. Should we go check it out?"

Yi Ying also replied: "We just asked a coworker, and they said employees can go to the twelfth and thirteenth floors and buy things at a 20% discount."

Lin Tu didn't reply. She went back to the bathroom first, pulled a stack of packed takeout boxes from the time-frozen cabinet, and stuffed them into her backpack.

Back in the office, she inserted her badge into the slot. Because she had known Kou Lin from before, once she typed in the name, she found her in the computer system right away.

Lin Tu chose to start a meeting and invited six people—"Kou Lin, Luo Yongzhi, Liu Sheng, Yi Ying, Guan Suixing, and Hei Mawu"—

Wait, Lin Tu froze for a moment. Where did six people come from?

There were only seven people total in the [Infinite Calamity] group. Excluding her and Dong Huadan, there should have been only five. Who was the extra one?

Once the meeting was opened, Luo Yongzhi and the others soon pushed through the door and walked in.

Lin Tu was familiar with the first few people. The last one to come in was a young woman in her twenties, someone Lin Tu had never seen before.

"Kou Lin?" Lin Tu asked.

"Who is Kou Lin?" The rest of the players were surprised. Guan Suixing asked, "Why didn't you invite Peng Yuanzhi, Sister Lin?"

"Who are you people?" Kou Lin was just as confused. She looked at the completely unfamiliar "coworkers" in front of her. "What department are you guys from? Did you invite the wrong people? I'm from the Creative Department. I don't know you."

Lin Tu: "..."

She opened her backpack and dumped out all the food she'd just packed.

There was bubbling hotpot fish, grilled fish, grilled pork belly, milk tea, and a big pot of stew.

The aroma of the food hit everyone's senses, and the players all furrowed their brows, feeling as though the folds in their minds were coming back.

Only Kou Lin frowned, feeling her stomach churn as if something was about to rise up her throat.

Lin Tu noticed her discomfort. Having experience with this, she seized the moment and shoved a piece of grilled pork belly into Kou Lin's mouth.

"Now do you know who we are?"

TL Note:

luosifen (螺蛳粉) is a pungent, sour, and spicy rice noodle dish from Guangxi.