Chapter 184: Zombie Siege Practice
Same as before, despite possessing mysterious injections, the cafeteria and medical building bases were completely different in nature.
The former was carrying out a cult ritual, while the latter was genuinely messing around with viruses. It was hard not to associate them with the laboratory.
The short, bespectacled man’s mouth trembled twice. He had originally still wanted to change the subject, but suddenly felt a chill on top of his head. Trembling, he raised his eyes and saw a pitch-black shovel hanging directly above his head.
Zheng Wanqing impatiently shook the shovel: “Why are you looking at me? Answer the question.”
“…There, there is a connection.”
He shut his mouth and resigned himself to admitting it.
——Only, to be more precise, they used to have a connection.
Under absolute suppression of strength, they had no room to resist either. Very soon, they poured everything out like beans from a pod, telling them all the details.
It turned out that these people had originally also been members of the school laboratory.
But after the virus outbreak, because of differences in ideology, they disagreed with the other laboratory members. Thus, in a fit of anger, they banded together and left, setting up a student base in the medical building.
Seeing him speak so hesitantly, Tang Xinjue directly asked the key point: “What ideological differences?”
“It’s…” The bespectacled man’s face showed visible guilt. “We felt that the laboratory’s attitude toward the virus was too conservative, which wasn’t conducive to developing an antidote and vaccine as quickly as possible, so we thought, um, we should take another approach…”
Tang Xinjue: “Tell the truth.”
The bespectacled man drooped his head. “They wanted to put all the resources into developing the antidote. We thought that was too wasteful, so we wanted to mainly follow the virus’s own functions, develop human activity, and study the antidote along the way.”
Guo Guo found it somewhat difficult to understand: “Then by the time you develop the antidote, the entire school could be wiped out twice over!”
The bespectacled man lowered his head even further: “Actually, it’s not that we didn’t want to save you completely. We just had a bit of an avoidance mentality.”
“Avoiding what?”
“Because… we were the ones who leaked the virus…”
“…???”
Guo Guo was extremely speechless: “Do you want to listen to what you’re saying? Because you leaked the virus, you didn’t want to face reality, and then you stopped the laboratory from researching an antidote?”
A logic master like this actually hadn’t gone to work at the radio station and exploit loopholes in the rules. It really was the student union’s loss of vision that made them miss such a talent.
Zheng Wanqing said grimly: “You should be glad that I’m upstairs, glad that my roommate is beside me, and glad that your positions aren’t convenient for me to chop.”
If Zhang You hadn’t been stopping her from the side, she really wanted to send all these things off with one slash!
The five former laboratory members, current empty-shell base organizers, looked like frost-beaten flowers, completely losing the arrogant manner in which they had thrown their weight around in the base. They could only look miserable as they let themselves be beaten and scolded.
Before the last trace of light disappeared from the dusk, Tang Xinjue spoke:
“Then if we ask you to contact the people in the laboratory now, can you still get in touch with them?”
“No!”
All five reacted extremely strongly, raising their heads in horror: “We’re traitors now! If we take the initiative to look for them, they’ll definitely kill us!”
“Not necessarily.” Tang Xinjue shook her head. “After all, you still have the bond of former colleagues. Seeing the friendship from working together on research in the past, would they really be so ruthless toward you?”
“But we’re different.” She smiled. “We can now strike without any psychological burden.”
The five people who were going to die whether they went left or right: “…”
The bespectacled man made his final struggle: “I, I think I need to think about it some more.”
Unexpectedly, the four from 606 agreed very readily: “Then think it over carefully tonight. See you tomorrow morning.”
After saying that, the four immediately left. The empty medical building was suddenly left with only the five bound people.
It didn’t take long before they regretted it.
Night fell, and zombies gathered. But this time, there was no safe room on the third floor, no dozens or hundreds of human shields and research subjects, and no sense of security brought by experimental drugs.
There was only hunger, cramping calves, and the scraping sounds of zombies constantly clawing and growling less than two meters away. Without a doubt, these would accompany them throughout the long night.
That night, before everyone in 606 went to sleep, they tied all the supplies they could carry onto themselves.
After experiencing once how the dungeon had transferred them in their “dream” without warning, nobody wanted to bet the safety of this night on the dungeon’s conscience.
Yu Wei, forcibly burdened with a body full of snacks: “?”
Why did everyone look like they were facing a great enemy? Did they have a habit of collectively sleepwalking in the middle of the night? But she didn’t!
But when midnight truly arrived, she immediately discovered that whether they sleepwalked or not was no longer important.
It was hilarious. They simply couldn’t sleep.
After twelve o’clock, the sounds of impacts and howls in the corridor were more intense and terrifying than ever before. Apart from the meaningless howling of the zombies, she could even hear more and more whispers and murmurs.
Those voices were like children learning to speak, slowly piecing together syllables, from meaningless single words to phrases, then to broken sentences… Hearing them made Yu Wei’s hair stand on end.
But the most terrifying thing was that even in such a gloomy environment outside, there was actually still only her awake inside the dormitory?
Even Guo Guo, who she had chosen as her bed-sharing companion and was obviously the most timid person in the entire dormitory, was sleeping deeply. The violent noise of the door nearly being smashed apart seemed to have no effect on her at all. She even turned over.
In the darkness, Yu Wei couldn’t see Guo Guo’s tightly furrowed brows. She could only quietly tear open a snack bag, using food to reduce her fear while thinking about how she could die peacefully if the dormitory was overrun by zombies.
She didn’t know how long this went on. It wasn’t until the sky began to grow faintly white and the light outside started entering the dormitory that she finally felt a trace of drowsiness and slowly sank into sleep.
At the exact moment Yu Wei fell asleep, Guo Guo suddenly opened her eyes, jolting awake from her dream!
……
Guo Guo saw that sacrificial ritual again.
Ever since entering this dungeon, all her hallucinations had always been frozen on the same scene. It was just that each time she saw it, the scene became clearer, and the faces of the “sacrifices” became clearer as well.
But this time, as she slowly approached the ground from high above the scene, the last zombie face that entered her field of vision was exceptionally familiar:
It was Yu Wei’s face!
And when she looked carefully, Yu Wei’s eyes were not tightly closed like the other corpses’. Instead, she opened her dark pupils and smiled at her.
The instant she saw that smile, Guo Guo’s heart trembled, and she immediately woke up in fright from the hallucination.
Her consciousness returned to the familiar bed, but the goosebumps on her body still did not fade for a long time.
The East Gate cafeteria base had been destroyed, and almost half of the organizers were gone. The future foretold by the hallucination had already been changed, so why did she still repeatedly see this scene?
Guo Guo couldn’t figure it out. Just as she hesitated over whether she should continue dreaming, Yu Wei’s voice suddenly sounded beside her:
“Potato chips… hee hee…”
Yu Wei turned over in her sleep.
……No matter how she looked at it, it was difficult to connect the current Yu Wei with the victim of the sacrificial ritual in the dream.
Guo Guo still decided to get up and tell Tang Xinjue about it.
As the sky brightened, only a few scattered zombies remained outside, banging against the door. Borrowing the faint light, Guo Guo glanced at the broken iron chains at the door.
——!!!
“Two are broken, but the lock is still there.”
Tang Xinjue’s voice suddenly came from above. Guo Guo jumped and looked up, only to see the familiar figure sitting on the opposite bed, her face showing no trace of sleepiness.
After hearing Guo Guo’s hallucination, Tang Xinjue was not surprised.
“Have you ever thought that the illusion you see might be neither the future nor the present, but a projection of the past?”
Guo Guo froze: “The past?”
She suddenly remembered the conversations she had heard from those organizers while disguised at the East Gate cafeteria.
[……We have already completed countless simulations.]
[We absolutely cannot fail…]
Even without the support of a psychic ability, Tang Xinjue seemed able to see through what she was thinking: “And there’s something even earlier, from the experimental records.”
[Experiment No. 091……]
[Experimental cycle…… begin recovery……]
The two pieces of information collided and overlapped. A light flashed through Guo Guo’s mind: “This is a dungeon that has already looped, no, a dungeon that has undergone simulated loops!”
Before they came, this dungeon might already have produced an “ending,” which was the scene in her hallucination. That was why she kept dreaming of that one point over and over—because it had once genuinely existed at some point in the past.
“Or rather, perhaps what we are in right now is also just one of the experimental loops.”
Tang Xinjue looked outside the window. The campus slowly awakening in the dawn was framed within the square dimensions of the floor-to-ceiling window, both real and unfamiliar.
“Is this what you want us to know?”
She spoke softly, her voice falling into the air, not knowing who she was speaking to.
Before the sun had completely risen, the silent medical building was invaded by several “uninvited guests.”
Only one night had passed, yet the stubbornness of the five organizers had already been worn away without a trace. They came crawling and begging, asking the four from 606 to untie them.
“I know, I know how to contact the laboratory as quickly as possible!”
The bespectacled man cried out weakly.
Seeing the four people look over, he hurriedly opened his dry lips: “Give, give me some water to drink.”
Tang Xinjue pulled out a toilet plunger and pressed the button. The rubber head immediately began spraying water outward.
The bespectacled man: “…Is this water for people to drink?”
Tang Xinjue smiled: “It indeed isn’t water for people to drink.”
As her words fell, the toilet plunger smashed down fiercely against the stair railing. The sturdy solid-wood staircase snapped apart in an instant, its neat break directly facing the bespectacled man’s ear.
His thirst disappeared completely.
Trembling, he blurted out: “Find the tallest dormitory building! The laboratory installed equipment on its roof!”
The others also nodded frantically: “As long as we find the equipment, we’ll have a way to contact them. Sob, sob… Don’t tie us up here, the zombies really will get in!”
As if afraid Tang Xinjue and the others wouldn’t believe them, they emphasized it tearfully a second time:
“Just wait another day. Once the virus completes its fifth mutation, there won’t be any door that can stop them! We’ll all die!”
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