Because of what the head nurse had just announced, the atmosphere in the dining hall grew even heavier.
After witnessing the Thriller Trainee dormitory incident and the horrific scene from last night, one newcomer was clearly teetering on the edge of a breakdown.
When the nurse announced the day’s schedule, he suddenly rushed forward and roared at them.
“Someone died last night! Do you people have any conscience as medical staff?!”
His eyes burned with undisguised rage.
“As if I’m the one with a damn mental illness. The way I see it, you’re the ones with something wrong in your heads!”
“This is an asylum. Illness, aging, and death—what could be more common in a place like this?”
A sardonic smile appeared on the head nurse’s pale face.
“Then why don’t you tell me? How can you prove that you aren’t mentally ill?”
Mental illness was an unbearably gray area.
A person who should have faced the death penalty could use it to escape punishment, while an innocent person could be locked away because of it.
No real reason was necessary.
A single sentence—he’s mentally ill—was enough.
As for how to prove that you weren’t mentally ill?
Mentally ill patients never admitted that they were mentally ill.
There was no way to prove it.
In other words, it was an impossible proof.
A chill swept through the newcomer’s entire body. His lips pressed tightly together, and not a single word came out.
Just when everyone thought he would remain silent, he suddenly screamed and bolted out of the dining hall like a madman. Without looking back, he plunged into the darkness of the stairwell.
“Bring him back.”
The head nurse waved to the nurses behind her and gave the order without even turning her head.
Only after the nurses left the dining hall did the others slowly recover from the suffocating pressure.
Outside the dining hall, the bullet chat in the live broadcast room was also boiling with discussion.
After some time, Zong Jiu’s live broadcast room had stabilized at around a thousand viewers. Although that couldn’t compare to the millions of viewers idling in the rooms of powerful contenders, it was already an extremely promising number for a newcomer.
[Look, this is a sign. Something’s definitely going to happen tonight.]
[Exactly. Survive for three days. The first day was just to weed out the cannon fodder. The second and third days are where things really begin.]
[A passerby from the next livestream room here. The main task in the one-man show over there is also to survive for three days. They don’t have mole identity cards or chance tasks, but almost half the trainees are already dead… With the Holy Son here, the survival rate in this instance should be much higher.]
[The system is seriously toxic. This is only the first instance of Thriller Trainee! Setting the difficulty this high—aren’t they afraid of traumatizing all the newcomers?]
[Replying to the comment above: think about how many people were standing in the studio during the preliminary evaluation. With that many people, the system probably can’t be bothered to wait for the newcomers to grow. Might as well throw them into a difficult instance right away and use it as a knockout round.]
Panic spread silently.
Under these circumstances, as the leader chosen by the group, Messiah had to step forward and steady everyone’s morale.
Clearly, this was not Messiah’s first time dealing with such a situation.
The golden-haired Holy Son set down his cutlery and stood at the table.
“Everyone, please remain calm.”
Every pair of eyes in the dining hall turned toward him.
The noise gradually died down.
Messiah gave them a reassuring smile.
“Please don’t worry. I’ll do everything I can to keep everyone safe.”
After the veterans’ explanation the night before, the newcomers now had a deeper understanding of No. 7.
The reason the Holy Son possessed such unanimous prestige and so many followers was not merely because of his compassionate, charitable nature.
Even more importantly, it was because of his strength.
Messiah was not his full name.
More accurately, his full name was Messiah Mu Bei.
In Western religion, the word “Messiah” meant God’s chosen one. It was also a religious title.
Anyone anointed as a monarch or priest could have the title Messiah added before their name. There were famous examples such as Messiah Joshua and Messiah Judas.
Messiah had once obtained the identity card of the high priest of ancient Israel in an S-rank horror instance modeled after the Bible. After accepting the anointing ceremony, he became the representative of God presiding over the human world within that instance, earning the prefix Messiah.
After successfully clearing that nearly insurmountable instance and receiving an astonishing A-rank evaluation, what remained with him was not only the Messiah’s hair color, but also the staff he had obtained as the high priest of Israel.
He had received it after entering the Holy of Holies on the tenth day of the seventh month of the Jewish calendar and correctly speaking God’s true name.
In the Book of Exodus, it was recorded that the prophet Moses and the prophet Aaron each possessed a staff.
Moses’ staff was used to judge and enact God’s will, and it was also used in the famous parting of the Red Sea.
Aaron, Moses’ brother, had a staff that was placed inside the Ark of the Covenant, a sacred relic of the Jewish people.
And what Messiah obtained from that instance was a replica of Aaron’s rod.
Although the prop did not possess the original Aaron’s rod’s absurd resurrection ability, it had extraordinary healing power. At the same time, because the staff naturally emitted the glow and aura of life, it was nothing short of miraculous in supernatural instances.
In other words, Messiah was equivalent to a walking healer.
In this universe, a healer was the one person nobody wanted to provoke.
What the infinite loop lacked most was healers—especially a healer with dispelling abilities.
Among all high-level teams in the infinite loop, the Holy Templars under Messiah had the lowest casualty rate. Every year, when they recruited new members, they received tens of thousands of applications.
After this morale boost, the newcomers—now fully aware of Messiah’s strength—settled down again. The way they looked at the golden-haired Holy Son grew even more fervent.
Messiah himself was calm, and He Jianlan and the others were not surprised by the scene either.
[Sure enough, having the Holy Son in an instance really puts people at ease!]
[Having a healer with you is amazing. That ability is a national treasure among national treasures—even rarer than a psychic.]
The bullet chat sighed with emotion.
[The newcomers in this instance are so lucky.]
“It’s already seven-fifty. We have ten minutes left. We should head over first.”
Although the clock in the dining hall showed that it was early morning, the corridors of the asylum were still as gloomy as ever.
The group filed out. Everyone in line was tense as they headed toward the locked iron door at the southern end of the ground floor.
The distance wasn’t far.
But unease weighed heavily on every heart.
Sheng Yu walked at the very back, accompanied by He Jianlan, who was questioning him in detail about what had happened the previous night.
Perhaps because he had been frightened by the fate of the guy with glasses, the high school student’s complexion was visibly poor. Dark circles hung beneath his eyes all the way to his cheeks.
Only when he saw the white-haired young man look back at him did a small, reassured smile appear on Sheng Yu’s wilted face.
He Jianlan’s eyes immediately narrowed with vigilance.
“You know each other?”
Sheng Yu replied without the slightest suspicion.
“Yeah. That’s my Jiu-ge.”
A string of ellipses silently appeared in Zong Jiu’s mind.
He stopped paying attention to what was happening behind him.
At present, he was the only one being excluded from Messiah’s command structure.
The veterans in the command group looked down on his E-rank and felt that he had no right to sit on equal footing with them.
Those who had failed to enter the command group were even more hostile, convinced that they were better than an E-rank and eager to take his place.
As for the remaining newcomers, their feelings were even easier to understand.
They were all the same rank, so why had Zong Jiu managed to squeeze into that exclusive circle?
Not only had he squeezed in, but he had even latched onto the Holy Son.
At a time when everyone’s life was on the line, there was not a single newcomer who didn’t look at him with envy.
Now that he was sunk deep in this dangerous situation, it was very likely he would become cannon fodder despised by everyone.
And that was without even mentioning He Jianlan, who watched his every move like a hawk.
For example, after washing up that morning, when Zong Jiu went to search the other wards for clues, He Jianlan had secretly followed him, working hard to find evidence that he was the mole.
Zong Jiu felt that none of this was his fault.
He clearly hadn’t done anything, yet he was already being targeted by a B-rank.
Even more irritating was the fact that He Jianlan had a decent reputation within the group. Because of him, several other trainees had also begun looking at Zong Jiu with contempt. One of them was practically drooling with envy.
However, to a certain extent, this was exactly what Zong Jiu wanted.
Working in a team had its advantages, but it naturally came with disadvantages too.
By following the group, Zong Jiu had already obtained the clues he wanted. If nothing unexpected happened next, leaving the team would not cost him much.
In fact, just as this thought arose, the head nurse had conveniently handed him a pillow.
From everyone else’s perspective, Zhuge An was sharp-minded and walked a gray moral line. He never joined any organization, so the possibility that he was the mole was frighteningly high.
But for Zong Jiu, Zhuge An was the first person in the entire asylum whom he could completely eliminate from suspicion.
For that, he had the novel to thank.
The novel had been written from multiple points of view. When the author described the identity card settings, the viewpoint had just happened to switch to Zhuge An.
Therefore, Zong Jiu knew that Zhuge An had received only an ordinary identity card—one that couldn’t even harm a fly.
Who would have thought?
Zhuge An, the person who looked the most like a mole, was actually completely innocent.
As Zong Jiu was thinking this, Messiah finally reached the iron door at the front of the group.
The door was still locked. Not a sound came from inside.
The golden-haired Holy Son glanced at the B-rank psychic on his left.
The psychic immediately closed his eyes.
A moment later, he opened them again and nodded, giving an affirmative answer.
Messiah’s tense brow relaxed.
“Knock, then. It’s safe.”
Qin Ye stepped forward and was just about to knock when the door suddenly creaked.
The heavy iron door opened by itself from the inside.
Qin Ye reacted quickly. Almost the instant the door moved unexpectedly, he retreated half a step and entered a defensive stance.
He was not the only one.
All the veterans standing at the front did the same.
There was no one behind the door.
Nor was there any horrific scene like the one they had imagined.
It was an ancient-looking operating theater, clearly many years old.
The reason they could identify it so easily was because an old wooden operating table stood in the center. The bright oil lamp above it was the only source of light in the room.
Tweezers, arterial forceps, scalpels, and filthy cotton balls lay scattered across a tray attached to the armrest.
Although the scene itself was not immediately horrifying, the operating theater still sent chills down their spines.
The crude surgical instruments on the tray bore obvious signs of use. They were covered in blackened bloodstains.
Inside the trash bin lay an unidentified crimson mass.
Aside from the operating table, an old electric chair with restraint straps had been placed in one corner of the room. Its side was packed full of wires.
A rickety bronze-framed cabinet stood against the wall. Behind the dirty dark-brown glass, something had been placed on display.
A newcomer stared at it and nearly screamed.
It was a shriveled human head.
“It looks like an embalmed corpse specimen,” Messiah said.
Zong Jiu stared at the head with interest for a moment longer, then noticed something strange.
The head had clearly been sitting there for a long time. Its entire surface had turned a dull yellowish-brown.
But the eyes were different.
Not only did they look fresh, but if one looked closely, greenish-gray blood could still be seen around them.
Those eyes had been gouged out recently.
Even the most fragile tissues remained perfectly intact. The technique used could only be described as flawless.
Who would stuff living eyes into the sockets of a dead head?
Zong Jiu narrowed his eyes.
He glanced back at the newcomer whose legs were trembling with fear and considerately chose not to tell him the truth.
In general, Zong Jiu was not an emotionally volatile person. He accepted the sight calmly enough that he even had the leisure to examine the other specimens in the display cabinet.
Every item inside was, without exception, of the same general nature.
There were strange human organs of all kinds, as well as human heads in various shapes and sizes.
Was this Dr. Chu of the asylum some kind of human body collector?
Just as the thought surfaced in Zong Jiu’s mind, the newcomers suddenly screamed.
“AHHH! It moved! It just moved!”
“Over there! That specimen! Its eyes moved!”
The veterans studying the operating theater frowned, but did not take it seriously.
The psychic had already confirmed that there was nothing supernatural behind the door. Even if there truly was something abnormal here, at this distance, the psychic should have sensed it.
Instead, another newcomer spoke impatiently.
“What movement? Everyone’s already panicking, and you’re still exaggerating—”
His voice cut off abruptly.
The black pupils in the head suddenly vanished, revealing only the deathly whites of the eyes.
They stared straight at him.
The newcomer collapsed onto the ground in terror.
It was clearly a horrifying sight, but the veterans had no time to care.
Their burning gazes had fixed on something else.
On the other side of the operating table, a sudden halo of light appeared in every trainee’s pupils.
A tiny letter quietly emerged.
S.
An incomparably precious S-rank special prop.