When Three Ks was pulled into the instance, he was having something of a breakdown.
It wasn’t as though he had been forced in.
After all, he had personally put the neural headset that connected to the game over his head, then personally entered his account and password and logged in.
He had originally been curled up in his capsule apartment on the standby interface, scrolling through World Chat and the built-in forum, when an invitation suddenly popped up:
[Player ^ ^ (you have previously teamed up with this player) triggered a special encounter instance while wandering through the Lower City map of Rose Island.]
[Matching teammates: 2/5. Would you like to join?]
Three Ks shook his head like a rattle drum, muttering with rejection written all over his face.
“No, no, no. I only logged in because I couldn’t sleep and wanted to idle for a bit. Why is something like this popping up? I’m not running another instance. I know when to quit while I’m ahead. I can’t get greedy. I just want to lie here.”
Then, because his hand betrayed him, he tapped [Confirm Join].
“...I have sinned.”
Standing in the darkness at the start of the instance, Three Ks covered his face in repentance.
“How can a person have this little self-control?”
The moment he finished lamenting, several ghostly echoes drifted back to him.
“Little self-control…”
“Control…”
Three Ks snapped his head up.
He was standing on an utterly deserted street.
The night was pitch-black. There wasn’t even a streetlamp.
The shops beneath the covered arcades on both sides had their doors and windows tightly shut. Several vertical neon signs had faulty wiring and flickered intermittently.
Some shops had small niches carved near the base of their entrances, with tiny deity statues enshrined inside.
Most depicted deities such as the Martial God or Lady Lu, meant to invite wealth and good fortune.
The statues were mechanical and automatically moved their fingers while chanting scriptures.
Except now the chanting had become distorted, every syllable drawn out as though the recording were playing at 0.3 speed.
Three Ks felt his scalp crawl and did not dare look for more than a second.
He backed away until he reached a wall, then pulled out his phone and checked the time.
Huge numbers at the top of the screen read:
9:00 PM.
It’s this dark at nine? It looks more like two in the morning.
Three Ks muttered inwardly.
Fortunately, World Chat was scrolling rapidly.
At first glance, it looked incredibly lively, creating the illusion that there were lots of people around and easing some of the suffocating silence of being alone.
Three Ks simply opened the chat box and tried to send something random to World Chat.
Instead, a notification appeared when he tapped Send:
[Message failed to send. World discussions are unavailable inside an instance.]
After closing the notice, he finally got a clear look at what was flooding World Chat.
They weren’t complete sentences.
They weren’t cheerful discussions either.
From the player nicknames to the messages themselves, everything had become warped, distorted text and strings of gibberish.
Not a single line looked like something written by a living person.
“…”
Three Ks hugged his phone to his chest and immediately began sliding down the wall.
A freezing hand suddenly reached out from behind him.
Smack.
It landed on his shoulder.
Three Ks shrieked and whipped around, only to find a human face looming toward him through the darkness.
“AAAAAAAHHH—!”
“**Why the hell are you suddenly screaming like that?! You scared me to death!”
The face jumped back.
At that moment, one of the faulty neon signs flickered on, illuminating him clearly.
He looked twenty at most, an ordinary male college student.
No dyed hair. No studs. No flashy tattoos.
He was wearing the simplest gray T-shirt and jeans.
It was obvious he had never customized his character’s face. This was just the default appearance simulated from his identification photo, completely unretouched.
Even the dark circles from staying up late were still there.
“Are you human or a ghost?”
Three Ks was still clutching his phone, suspicion written all over his face.
“Oh, come on. If I were a ghost, would you still be standing?”
The other guy rubbed his arms irritably.
“You gave me goosebumps too.”
He pulled out the phone issued to players and waved it.
“I just posted in Team Chat asking, ‘Which teammate is the handsome redhead by the trash can?’ I saw you using your phone, so I thought you’d seen it.”
Three Ks shook his head.
“I was too busy getting scared to death by World Chat. I didn’t even notice Team Chat.”
As he spoke, he opened Team Chat.
A teammate named Definitely Not Scallop had posted a photo.
It had been taken from more than ten meters away and showed Three Ks cowering in the corner.
Three Ks: “…”
The phrase “handsome redhead” suddenly felt exceptionally sarcastic.
He awkwardly climbed up from the corner.
“So you’re one of the newly matched teammates?”
“Probably… Huh? Newly matched?”
Definitely Not Scallop blinked.
“What do you mean? Are the rest of you old teammates?”
Only then did Three Ks carefully inspect the avatars in Team Chat.
He pointed.
“This Sushi Bar and this Smiley were my teammates in the last instance.”
Definitely Not Scallop suddenly understood.
“Oh! So this is that client’s team.”
Three Ks stared at him.
“What? Your client is here?”
Definitely Not Scallop shook his head and pointed at ^ ^.
“I’m sort of a freelance game booster. When the server first launched, this client hired me to create an account.”
“Oh, okay. So are you…”
Three Ks looked puzzled.
“Here to play with your client?”
“No. The client suddenly logged in while I was online. And you know this game tends to bug out when someone force-logs into an occupied account, right? I got worried.”
He had been searching for ^ ^’s account, preparing to send a friend request, when the linked player system sent him the instance invitation.
“I don’t have class tomorrow anyway, so I figured I could stay up a little and joined.”
Three Ks looked at him.
“Are you sure it’ll only be a little? Our last—”
Definitely Not Scallop: “?”
Three Ks changed tack.
“You know, beginner instances are supposed to be easy and quick, right?”
His expression suddenly became ancient and world-weary.
He deliberately made it sound especially grim, salvaging some dignity after how embarrassing he had looked earlier.
“It’s a long story. Two teammates died, and we stayed up basically the entire night. That’s why I was acting so pathetic just now.”
“…”
Shan Bei thought, I acted too impulsively. I shouldn’t have joined.
This team sounded unreliable and unlucky.
“W-Well, what can you do? Hopefully this round goes more smoothly?”
Definitely Not Scallop tried to comfort him.
“Don’t worry, though. Not every round necessarily lasts that long. And I don’t want to stay up all night either. Someone in the department next to ours at school just dropped dead.”
Three Ks stared at him.
“Dropped dead???”
“Yeah. Apparently yesterday. From staying up playing games too…”
Definitely Not Scallop suddenly turned toward the far end of the street.
“Huh? Was that something over there?”
“Other teammates?”
At the thought that it might be the others—especially Smiley—Three Ks immediately felt a little safer.
Without another word, he ran toward the corner with Definitely Not Scallop.
The moment they rounded it, both men skidded to a halt.
The teammates they had expected were nowhere in sight.
Beyond the corner was another eerie street lined with covered arcades.
The closest storefront was extremely narrow and decorated in a somewhat old-fashioned style.
A row of delicate little paper lanterns hung from its red-painted pillars.
They were old enough that the colors had faded.
Each paper lantern bore the same weathered black character:
Noodles.
“It looks like a little noodle shop.”
Three Ks clutched Definitely Not Scallop’s sleeve.
“Yes, yes, yes. Amazing. You can even tell that much.”
Shan Bei was not particularly brave either, but beside Three Ks he practically looked unshakable.
As they arrived, a few scattered customers were filing out of the noodle shop.
Then—
Bang.
The front door slammed shut.
With a metallic crash, the automatic security shutter rolled down and locked tightly into place.
“See? There are a few more people on the street now. Uh… even if they’re probably instance-type NPCs, doesn’t it feel a little less creepy?”
Shan Bei was trying to rescue his arm from Three Ks’s death grip when he caught sight of a familiar face among the customers.
His entire body stiffened.
“No, no, no…”
He stared at the face, murmuring,
“Am I seeing things?”
Three Ks was completely baffled by his reaction.
“What? What did you see?”
Shan Bei slowly raised a hand and pointed toward one of the customers, careful not to make the gesture too obvious.
“That NPC…”
His voice went rigid.
“That NPC looks exactly like the guy from the department next to ours who died suddenly.”
“Don’t fucking scare me.”
Three Ks followed his finger.
The instant he saw the man clearly, he froze too.
After a long moment, he asked uncertainly,
“You’re saying the guy who dropped dead at your school looked like that?”
Definitely Not Scallop nodded.
“Yeah… Why are you reacting even harder than I am?”
Three Ks’s voice cracked.
“Because he looks exactly like the teammate who died in our last instance.”
Three Ks wasn’t face-blind.
That teammate’s death had been especially sudden and gruesome, right in front of him.
There was no way Three Ks could forget that face.
So he recognized him at a glance.
The “schoolmate who dropped dead” that Definitely Not Scallop had just mentioned was none other than Lord Spicy Soup from the previous instance.
And Lord Spicy Soup clearly did not recognize him anymore.
He pulled out a tissue and wiped his mouth, then walked past them with the other NPCs, disappearing into Rose Island’s rain-shrouded night.
Silence returned to the long street.
Only Three Ks and Definitely Not Scallop remained standing there, both utterly drained of color.
When Yu Qing entered the instance, the first thing he saw was precisely these two stunned geese.
Mr. Painted Skin closed his eyes again.
He recognized Three Ks’s red hair, and remembered him very clearly.
After all, there weren’t many people in the world who spent the first two minutes after meeting someone crawling around on the ground.
That sort of first impression was difficult to forget.
The other man was unfamiliar.
He wasn’t the one from last time who spoke like a malfunctioning censor beep, but he didn’t look especially bright either.
Yu Qing swept his gaze over them, barely moving his lips as he murmured to himself,
“You there? Make a sound if you are.”
This time, the blue-green butterfly had followed him into the instance.
After passing through the initial darkness, it had remained circling around him. Whenever it grew tired, it rested on top of the little skeleton’s head.
Logically, with the butterfly present, he should have been able to hear his believer’s reply at any time.
But after he asked, no voice came to his ear.
Yu Qing paused.
He turned toward his shoulder.
“Mi Xiaobai?”
“Mm?”
That familiar voice finally returned.
“Were you asking me?”
“Who else?”
Mi Xiaobai’s voice paused, then dragged lazily on.
“I saw you only grab your steward. I thought you’d decided to throw away your navigation system.”
Yu Qing: “?”
“Although I suppose this is something you really should ask about,” Mi Xiaobai added. “Don’t you think your steward might not have made it inside?”
Yu Qing whipped his head around.
There was indeed no one beside him.
Only the little skeleton and the blue-green butterfly had come through.
Uncle Yuan was nowhere to be seen.
“We’re screwed.”
Mi Xiaobai, acting as though he had been appointed Yu Qing’s personal spokesman, voiced the rich young man’s collapsing thoughts for him.
“Looks like the instance mechanics left the old man stuck outside.”
Yu Qing: “…”
“What are you going to do?”
Mi Xiaobai sounded far too pleased.
“You’ve only got me now.”