Chapter 132

Lin Tu rubbed her bleary eyes and glanced at the time—it was five in the morning, still an hour before clock-in.

The night had passed uneventfully. Why someone would suddenly jump to their death this early in the morning was beyond her.

Lin Tu poured mineral water onto a disposable face towel, gave her face a quick wipe, then took down the ["I love my home" Wind Chime] and left the office.

The Art Department staff had already scattered at some point, leaving only a few players hesitating about whether to follow.

"Someone just jumped off the building, and then the locals suddenly got really weird, like they'd come alive," one player said. "They're all buzzing about who it was, then swarming out in groups to gawk."

Lin Tu glanced at her phone. In the group chat, players in the After-sales Department and the Creative Department were reporting the same thing, debating whether to go check it out.

Soon enough, they wouldn't need to deliberate anymore.

Lin Tu heard a phone ringing at a workstation—not just hers, but every phone on every desk, all ringing at the same time.

She picked up one at random—

"Little Lin? Busy?"

The voice on the other end called her by name with eerie precision.

Lin Tu: "..." At five in the morning, you're asking if I'm busy? Are you out of your mind?

She smiled. "Not busy. What's up?"

"Good!" The voice on the other end sounded frantic. "A colleague of ours just committed suicide by jumping off the building! Please come down to the first-floor lobby immediately—we're holding the funeral in ten minutes!"

Didn't they just jump? The body's not even cold yet, and they're already holding a funeral?

A funeral felt a bit inauspicious. Lin Tu didn't really want to go, so she tried to find an excuse: "The first floor is packed—surely all the colleagues can't fit down there? I can donate money instead. Any amount, I don't care."

"Our family member is dead! How can donations alone make up for that? You have to come! Every family member has to attend the funeral—do you think he'll ever get a second chance to have another one?"

The voice grew sharper and sharper. Lin Tu knew she couldn't refuse, so she relented: "I'll be right down."

She looked up at the other colleagues—all of them were setting down their phones with grim expressions, clearly having failed to talk their way out of it and being forced to attend.

The caller had given them ten minutes. Taking the elevator would definitely not make it in time, so Lin Tu arranged to meet the other players on the second floor so they could head down to the first together.

Because of Peng Yuanzhi, Lin Tu suspected that similar imposters might exist among the other players, so she deliberately separated from the Art Department players and regrouped with Yi Ying and the others instead.

On her phone, the players in daytime were also checking in on Luo Yongzhi's situation.

Nothing like a colleague's suicide had happened in nighttime—it was totally calm. This seemed to target only the daytime players.

"It really is Xiao Hu!?" Nearby, some employees were discussing how the woman had died.

Yi Ying sidled over and easily slipped into the conversation.

"Who's Xiao Hu?"

"You don't know Xiao Hu?" The person clicked their tongue in surprise. "You've never heard of her? Before, when our boss's friend's family ran into major trouble and needed fundraising, everyone in the company donated a few thousand or tens of thousands. But Xiao Hu? She said she wouldn't give a single cent!"

"She's insane! The boss would definitely make her life hell!" another person chimed in.

Yi Ying, following company rules, asked in confusion, "Aren't we all family? Can you really refuse to donate?"

The two employees stared at her in shock. "You're crazy too! They call you 'family' and you actually take it seriously? Who the hell wants to donate to that guy!"

"Exactly! They say he's in debt, but he's sitting on a few hundred square meters of luxury apartments—who knows how many! Isn't it just to fleece us? Squeeze us wage slaves dry to maintain his own lifestyle!"

"If we weren't afraid of getting on the boss's bad side, who'd want to donate! And those brownnosers keep one-upping each other—this one donates a few thousand, that one donates tens of thousands, making us look bad if we only give a few hundred. They even read us out for it."

"But no one else dared to be like Xiao Hu and donate nothing."

"I heard she got a termination notice from the company a couple days ago! Probably jumped because she didn't want to lose her job."

"Really? I never heard anything about a termination notice," another unfamiliar employee joined in. "What I heard was that she'd taken out a loan to buy an apartment, the building got abandoned mid-construction, she had nowhere to live, and she still had to pay the mortgage every month. The stress was too much, so she jumped."

"You guys are behind the times. She was pregnant! The company wanted to transfer her to a different position with half the pay, and she probably couldn't handle it, so she jumped."

"God! What a shady company. Why doesn't anyone do something about it?"

"Yeah, let's drop it."

After soaking in the gossip, everyone returned with solemn expressions. Lin Tu, especially, wasn't just solemn anymore—her brows were twisted into a knot.

"Two minutes left," Guan Suixing noted, glancing at the time.

They finally made it down the stairs, darting into a corner of the first floor near the emergency exit.

Along the way, they picked up more gossip, all of it sharing one common thread—the employees were all convinced that Xiao Hu's suicide was definitely linked to the company.

Oddly enough, these employees no longer seemed affected by the illusions, the hunger, or the employee handbook. They'd regained their own thoughts, could reason, even push back against company rules—just like normal people.

Lin Tu wasn't sure if her eyes were playing tricks on her, but she thought she spotted Lu Meiliang and Lu Shishu among the crowd. However, the first floor was packed so tightly that when she tried to look again, they'd vanished.

As the funeral dirge began to play, a foul stench wafted in from the entrance.

Lin Tu hopped onto a nearby water dispenser and, standing on top of it, watched as a coffin was carried in by a group of people working together.

The moment the coffin appeared, the chatter among the employees immediately ceased. Tears streamed uncontrollably down everyone's face, and in an instant, grief blanketed the entire first-floor lobby.

In the center of the hall, the crowd cleared a circle, and in the middle of it sat a ring of funeral wreaths.

A slightly overweight middle-aged man in a suit stood at the front, his expression one of utter misery.

He held up a script: "Today, our friend, our family member, Hu Lulu, has left us forever!"

"Her death was a complete accident. A cleaner forgot to lock the window while washing it, and Hu Lulu's family wanted to get some fresh air. When she opened the window, she pushed too hard and fell from the eighteenth floor!"

"Waaah!" Instantly, wails of bitter crying filled the hall.

"Doesn't this feel a little off?" The crying was far too synchronized. Guan Suixing poked Lin Tu's ankle with her left hand and elbowed Kou Lin beside her with her right.

The players under the water dispenser were using Kou Lin's skill [Camera Intrusion] to watch the funeral in high definition on their phones.

"Extremely off," Yi Ying replied.

"Maybe they're just genuinely mourning for their colleague? Unlike some people..." Kou Lin also found it strange, but she couldn't resist taking a jab at Guan Suixing.

Guan Suixing rolled her eyes. "Worry about yourself."

The funeral continued.

After explaining Xiao Hu's cause of death, the man in the middle—reportedly the chairman's assistant—ordered the employees to carry the coffin to the center of the wreaths.

As soon as the coffin touched the ground, just as everyone was about to step forward to pay their last respects and bid Hu Lulu farewell, the coffin lid suddenly swung open from the inside.

Then, a figure whose face had collapsed completely into a flat pancake, features unrecognizable, sat up from inside the coffin.

"Viewing is over. Time for cremation." She raised a match, flicked it casually, and tossed it toward the entrance.

In an instant, a roaring blaze erupted from the main doors of the first-floor lobby, then began creeping toward everything in its path.

At the same time, as if the flames had thrown open the gates of hell, skeletal figures—nothing but bones—stepped out of the fire.

Their jaws clacked as they moved, and they began attacking every single employee in the lobby indiscriminately.

Lin Tu watched as an employee grabbed by a skeleton stared at its face in terror, screaming "Sister Zhang!"—only for the skeleton to drive a claw into his chest, yank out his still-beating heart, and shove it into its mouth—

"So fragrant... so fragrant..." Dimly, Lin Tu heard someone muttering.

The heart was chewed up and swallowed, but it didn't land in the skeleton's stomach. Instead, it fell straight through to the floor, becoming a smear of pulp trampled underfoot.

Meanwhile, another employee who'd been gossiping had their eyes eaten; another had an arm ripped clean off.

The chairman's assistant, standing in the center, stared in terror at the skeletons surging in from every direction. He made a desperate scramble toward the stairs, only to have a claw catch him.

In a frenzy of tearing, his head was wrenched off. The skeleton cradled his skull, pried open the cranium, and savored the "delicacy" inside with sheer ecstasy.

"Go! Move!" Lin Tu jumped off the water dispenser and led the players sprinting up the stairs.

The main doors of the first-floor lobby were sealed off. When she'd come down to grab takeout earlier, she'd seen that the outside was nothing but fog with no way out, so none of the players even tried to run for the exit.

Fortunately, they'd had the foresight to stand near the emergency exit, and they reached the door in no time.

"Shit! That idiot locked the door!" Guan Suixing roared.

Lin Tu exchanged a look with Luo Yongzhi, both about to shoulder the door together, when Kou Lin stepped forward: "My turn!"

She quickly pulled a strip of metal from her phone, kneaded it a few times in her hand, and the strip became a key. Kou Lin inserted the key into the lock and smoothly opened the emergency exit.

"Go!" Everyone dashed up the stairs, taking them two or three at a time.

Lin Tu glanced back. A crowd of people was running behind them, and others were jamming their fingers against the elevator buttons in a panic.

The elevator was fast, sure—but too many people were crammed at the door. A full load went in, immediately triggered the overload alarm, and the elevator shut down. Of course, at this critical moment, no one volunteered to get off.

More and more skeletons gathered at the entrance. The people inside the elevator found it nearly impossible to squeeze back out.

One person was kicked out of the elevator. Just as the doors were closing, a skeleton shoved its way in—followed by a chorus of screams from inside.

No need to see what happened next; they all knew. Lin Tu turned her head and kept running for her life.