[Welcome to the game “Battle Royale.” You will enter the dungeon in three minutes. Please prepare yourself.]
[Data transmission in progress…]
[Anping Hospital is an old facility located in a remote area. During the War of Resistance Against Japan, it was once occupied by enemy forces. It was later recaptured, renovated, and converted into Anping Mental Hospital.]
[Your identities are: patients.]
A cold, mechanical voice echoed overhead.
In the white space below, twenty people stood scattered about. They varied in age, with some adults in their thirties and forties, as well as young people in their teens and twenties.
They had all heard the voice, and their faces were filled with confusion and bewilderment.
“What the hell is this?! I want to go home! I don’t have time to play some stupid game!”
A middle-aged man shouted angrily at the sky.
He had not even made it home from work when, for no apparent reason, he had been brought to this place. He had no idea what was going on.
[Warning. A player has violated the rules of the game. Punishment will be administered.]
As soon as the mechanical voice sounded, the middle-aged man’s shouting abruptly stopped. His entire body began trembling uncontrollably, his hands and feet shaking as though he were being electrocuted.
Several people who had been about to curse along with him immediately swallowed their words when they saw the man’s sudden condition.
After roughly half a minute, the man’s body finally stopped shaking. His eyes rolled upward, and he collapsed onto the floor, his lips moving weakly.
“Help… help me…”
The remaining dozen or so people turned pale, their expressions chaotic as they lowered their heads, each lost in their own thoughts.
Yet, without exception, none of them made a sound, nor did anyone take even a single step toward the fallen man.
Jiang Si stood at the edge of the crowd, her fingers clenched tightly as her body trembled uncontrollably.
What… was this?
Five minutes ago, she had still been at home, sitting at a steaming dining table.
And now, she looked around at this sealed, brilliantly white space. The people around her all kept their eyes lowered, pretending not to see the middle-aged man lying on the ground.
Perhaps, like her, the people in this space had been inexplicably brought here to participate in this “Battle Royale” game.
But where exactly was this place?
[The game is about to begin. Players, please do your best to find clues and clear the game. The first player to successfully clear the game will receive a reward of ten million yuan.]
The moment these words were spoken, everyone erupted in an uproar.
Ten million yuan!
Many of the people here were ordinary office workers. To them, ten million yuan was an unimaginably distant fortune.
And now, all they had to do was clear a game, and they could immediately receive ten million yuan.
In an instant, the expressions on many people’s faces changed. They were no longer frightened and uneasy but instead wore expressions of excited determination, as though the prize were already theirs.
Under the temptation of such an enormous sum of money, they had even forgotten how easily that middle-aged man had just collapsed.
Jiang Si could not smile at all. Cold sweat broke out all over her body.
If the reward for clearing the game was this high, then the game itself was bound to be extremely difficult.
Moreover, she noticed that the mechanical voice had only told them about the reward for successfully clearing the game. It had not told them what punishment awaited those who failed.
[Dungeon map activated.]
[Teleporting players…]
One person after another disappeared from the crowd after flashes of white light.
Then Jiang Si was enveloped in a beam of white light as well and teleported into the dungeon world.
[We wish all players an enjoyable game.]
…
Cries and screams came from all around her. The smell of disinfectant filled her nose, and something heavy seemed to be fastened around her ankle. When Jiang Si moved, it felt rather uncomfortable against her skin.
She opened her eyes and discovered that she was lying on a hospital bed.
She turned her head slightly and found herself staring straight into a pair of pitch-black eyes.
A woman in her thirties, with greasy, disheveled hair and wearing a hospital gown, was leaning over the head of her bed. She grinned foolishly and stared at her while swaying her head from side to side.
She was also muttering to herself.
“Xiaosi, wifey, Xiaosi, hehe…”
Jiang Si took a deep breath and forced herself to calm down.
Whatever the case, she had already entered this so-called game. As for the punishment for failing the game… she really did not want to find out.
She had played plenty of online games before. Since this was a game, this person should be an NPC.
“Who are you?”
Hearing Jiang Si’s question, the woman blinked. She suddenly stopped smiling, glanced around, and leaned mysteriously toward Jiang Si’s ear.
Jiang Si thought she was about to reveal some secret and listened carefully.
“I’m secretly telling you—I’m Xiaosi’s husband!”
Jiang Si: “…”
She had almost forgotten that this was a mental hospital.
Wait.
Could this “Xiaosi” be her?
Jiang Si silently shifted farther away from the woman. A metallic clanking sound rang out, and she discovered that there was something around her ankle.
She lifted the blanket and saw a metal ankle shackle locking her foot in place. A long iron chain extended from it, with the other end firmly fixed to the wall.
There were three other women in the room besides her. All of them were wearing hospital gowns, and all of them looked dirty and disheveled.
Aside from the short-haired woman who had been talking to her, the other two were fighting and pulling at each other, panting heavily. Judging from their condition, they had probably been at it for quite some time.
The cries and screams Jiang Si had heard earlier were probably coming from those two.
They also had ankle shackles on their feet.
“Tap… tap…”
Faint footsteps came from outside the hospital room.
Jiang Si’s heart jolted.
The footsteps stopped outside the door. The hospital room door opened, and a masked doctor walked in, followed by a nurse pushing a medical cart.
Jiang Si watched as the doctor observed the two women who had been fighting for a while before lowering his head and writing something in a medical record.
He said to the nurse, “These two don’t need to take their medicine anymore.”
Then his gaze shifted toward Jiang Si.
Jiang Si’s heart skipped a beat. She immediately realized that she did not look much like a mentally ill patient.
Sure enough, the doctor paused for two seconds and narrowed his eyes.
“Give her the medicine.”
The nurse nodded and skillfully prepared the medication before walking toward Jiang Si.
Why was he no longer giving the two women who had been fighting their medicine, yet he wanted the seemingly normal her to take it instead?
There had to be something wrong with the medicine. She could not take it.
Jiang Si made up her mind. Her expression turned solemn as she raised her chin high and looked down disdainfully at the nurse.
“What medicine is this?”
The nurse sneered contemptuously. “Of course it’s medicine to cure your madness.”
Jiang Si slapped her across the face, then stood on the bed and looked down at her.
“I am the Son of Heaven, the ruler of all under heaven. How could a lowly wretch like you possibly deceive me? How dare a mere nobody try to poison me? What delusion!”
The nurse seemed completely unprepared for Jiang Si to react this way. She froze for a moment, then took a tranquilizer from the medical cart and prepared to inject Jiang Si.
The doctor glanced at her and suddenly stopped the nurse. He tapped the tip of his pen twice, his expression inscrutable.
“There is no need to waste medicine on this kind of lunatic.”
He then glanced at the foolish-looking woman beside Jiang Si, wrote something else in the medical record, and left the room.
“Clang—”
The door shut, and the footsteps outside gradually faded into the distance.
Jiang Si finally relaxed, but she still did not dare let her guard down.
“Hmph! Peasants! With such pathetic abilities, you actually dare plot against me!”
One moment, she called herself “I, the Emperor” and furiously cursed the insolent commoners. The next, she switched to calling herself “your concubine” and coaxed the Emperor not to lose his temper. She single-handedly took her split-personality performance to the extreme.
About ten minutes later, footsteps sounded outside again before gradually fading away.
Only after confirming that there was truly no one outside did Jiang Si finally relax.
The NPCs here were more intelligent than she had imagined.
If she had not been cautious enough just now and had relaxed her guard without considering that the doctor might remain outside the door, she might already have been forced to take the medicine.
Perhaps she would even have become genuinely insane after taking it.
Jiang Si lay back down on the bed, her expression solemn.
She wondered: If she had failed to avoid taking the medicine and had been forced to take it day after day until she became insane and lost her rationality, would she still have a chance to return to reality?
The answer was no.
The game system would not be so kind. This was already evident from what had happened to the middle-aged man who had been punished for refusing to participate in the game.
So there were two obvious outcomes before her now—
Either she became mentally ill and accepted the punishment for failing to clear the game, or she desperately tried to clear the game successfully. If she succeeded, she might even be able to return to reality.
Therefore, what she needed to do now was find a way to clear the game.
Thinking of this gave Jiang Si a headache.
The system had only told her that this was Anping Mental Hospital and that she was a patient. It had not even issued a mission, leaving her completely clueless.
The name of the game was “Battle Royale.” Could that be connected to her current situation?
This Anping Mental Hospital gave suspicious medicine to people who were not sick and locked its patients up. It was clearly a place of utter desperation.
So could the players’ mission be to successfully escape?
“Boohoo…”
The short-haired woman beside Jiang Si suddenly began crying. Like a child, she buried herself in the hospital bed and rolled around.
“What’s wrong?” Jiang Si collected herself and instinctively patted her back gently.
“Xiaosi has become the Emperor, and she even has an Empress now. She won’t have me in her heart anymore. I’m so sad.”
Jiang Si fell silent.
She couldn’t believe the woman had actually taken all that nonsense she had just spouted seriously.
And could this woman really think of herself as Xiaosi’s husband?
Jiang Si herself was a woman…
“Xiaosi used to tell me stories. Now she won’t tell me stories anymore. She definitely won’t tell me any in the future either. Boohoo…”
Jiang Si’s brows twitched slightly.
Stories?
Could this be a breakthrough point?
“What stories did Xiaosi tell you before?”
The short-haired woman bit her finger and recalled, “Little Red and Little Blue were caught having an affair. Little Green was so sad that she broke up with Little Red. Little Red got cursed by everyone online…”
What in the world was that supposed to mean?
Jiang Si was both amused and speechless. She had thought she had found some kind of breakthrough.
She comforted the short-haired woman a little. “Don’t cry. Xiaosi definitely still has you in her heart.”
Although she had no idea whether Xiaosi actually did, Jiang Si certainly did not have her in hers.
Jiang Si got up and began examining the room. The chain on her ankle was long enough for her to move around in the bathroom, but she could not reach the hospital room door.
A nameplate at the foot of the short-haired woman’s bed read: You Xiaoqin, 379.
When Jiang Si walked over to the area belonging to the other two women to inspect it, they bared their teeth at her menacingly and scared her back. She had no energy to get into a fight with them right now.
Still, she could see from a distance that there were also nameplates at the foot of their beds, with the numbers 380 and 381 at the end.
All three of them had nameplates.
Only her bed did not.
Judging from the order of the beds, she should be patient number 382.
Other than that, she had found nothing else.
Apart from the four beds, the hospital room contained only some empty cabinets placed beside the beds, with a few water cups sitting on top.
Jiang Si crouched down beside one of the cabinets, dejected.
“Ah! You found me!”
Only then did Jiang Si realize that You Xiaoqin had somehow crawled under the bed. She had probably thought that Jiang Si’s earlier frantic searching for clues was actually an invitation to play hide-and-seek with her.
Jiang Si smiled bitterly at her.
“Yeah. I found you.”
You Xiaoqin tilted her head and giggled.
Jiang Si suddenly froze.
Then she stared intently at the section of wall revealed by You Xiaoqin’s tilted head.
Her heart gave a sudden, heavy thump.