"Bro, bro, bro… Brother Jue… Just, just… now…" Wang Tanzhi stammered, and his Terror Points saw another huge spike. Due to the accumulation of fear, even though he calmed down several seconds later, the Terror Points did not lower to zero but hovered around fifteen percent.
Feng Bujue interrupted his friend expressionlessly and with a calm tone. "According to my analysis, we have two choices."
"What… what is it?" Wang Tanzhi still had trouble getting his words out.
"First, you grab your knife, rush forward, and slash at anything that you see when you turn the corner," Feng Bujue said, "and I will cover behind you."
"I pick the second choice." Wang Tanzhi could suddenly speak normally. He had not even heard the second choice.
"Actually, I'm leaning toward the second choice as well." As Feng Bujue spoke, he walked past Wang Tanzhi and grabbed the handle of the first door on their right. It was common knowledge that doorways were a common prop in scary games or movies; no one could tell what horrifying scene would greet them behind the door. Furthermore, there was the common 'door death' trope, where danger would appear before your eyes the moment you opened the door.
Normally, in this situation, people would use their arm to push the door, squat down, and lean as far away from the door as possible. This posture enabled them to escape should the need arise. However, Feng Bujue's action was so casual that you would think that he was at home, opening the door to the kitchen or something. He walked ahead, leaned forward, and pushed the door open.
There was no light in the room, and the light from the corridor filtered in. The scene within was harrowing.
This was a sickbay around ten meters wide. The cupboards by the walls and the trash cans in the corners were tipped over. The floor was littered with stuff, but most of it looked like useless trash like torn cloth, crumbled balls of paper, a broken vase, dirtied sanitizer cotton, broken medicine vials, and so on. The bedsheets of the patient's bed had been torn into shreds, and the whole room reeked of blood. Everywhere, there was blood.
"Training Mode becomes unavailable after players reach level five, so obviously, this mode is designed for new players, to help them successfully rise to level five."
Feng Bujue gave his comments as he walked over to the cupboards to flip one of them over and start searching through the contents that had been left behind.
"Those 'experts' will at most play one Training Mode before moving on, or perhaps they might skip it altogether. Because this type of players must have read the gaming guide already, they know that completing the game in training mode will get them much worse rewards than if they attempt the official survival mode."
Feng Bujue found a syringe that was still in its package inside the cupboard. He studied its attribute before tossing it into his backpack.
"Based on the rewards, since the Training Mode is much worse than the tutorial, I assume that the difficulty will be no different from the tutorial. There will not be much puzzle-solving and an acceptable degree of scares."
He squatted down to sniff at the contents of the broken vials.
"Actually, we can just ignore the exploration of these few doors and charge at that dark shadow to continue the game. I give it twenty minutes and perhaps a few battles that might harm our Life Points before we finish this scenario."
"So, why are we here?" Wang Tanzhi asked.
"I already told you, there are two choices; you're the one who wanted choice number two." Feng Bujue unfurled the balls of paper on the ground and moved them toward the light to read. "The second choice is to solve the puzzle."
"Hey… but didn't you say…"
"I said that we can clear the scenario without solving the puzzle, not that there is no puzzle to be solved," Feng Bujue interrupted. "However, even if we solve the puzzle, we are not going to get any Skill Points."
He continued to read the paper notes with no change to his expression.
"But there is a benefit to clearing the puzzle; it will lower the difficulty of the scenario. To put it simply… we'll use our intelligence to resolve some of the parts that would have required us to use our strength." Then, he picked out one of the notes and handed it to Wang Tanzhi. "Take a look at this."
"This is…" Wang Tanzhi read it for a few seconds and asked, "Medical history?"
———
Item Name: Medical History of Unknown Patient
Item Type: Plot Item
Quality: Normal
Function: Unknown
Can be taken out of scenario: No
Remark: Most of the words written on this note are covered by blood.
———
"You should be more familiar with this," Feng Bujue said and waved the other stack of paper in his hand. "I'll read the rest."
Wang Tanzhi only glanced at them, and he could feel his scalp go numb. The top piece of paper on the stack Feng Bujue was holding had a drawing of a creepy human face.
The two walked out to the corridor where there was light. They read silently for about four minutes. Wang Tanzhi read closely, but since most of the medical history was blotted out by blood, he had to make many educated guesses. Feng Bujue, on the other hand, was skim-reading; he went through the stack of paperwork quickly. He was a reading maniac, so he was a fast reader, an efficiency that was made better by his good comprehension and memory. Furthermore, the content of the papers did not scare him. To him, they looked no different from the pictures in a magazine.
"Are you done?" Feng Bujue, who had the thicker stack, asked.
Wang Tanzhi was still going through the medical records. He answered, "This is a male, twelve years old… still a child."
"Oh…" Feng Bujue touched his chin. "So, a youth army member."
No one knew how his brain worked…
"Hmm… He was hospitalized for a long time due to leukemia, but…" Wang Tanzhi put the papers down. "From the records, his days were numbered…"
He lifted his head, and his eyes moved to the end of the corridor. "If he's still here, he's a ghost by now…"
"That's not necessary," Feng Bujue said. "There are three doors, and we only know that the first door might lead to the room of the boy on the medical record, but we do not know if the shadow that we saw earlier was him."
He passed his stack of paper to Wang Tanzhi. "There's no need for you to go through them, just look at the attributes."
After a second's pause, he added, "There are six different faces on these papers, and every single page is numbered in the corner."
———
Item Name: Facial Portrait x6
Item Type: Plot Item
Quality: Normal
Function: Unknown
Can be taken out of the scenario: No
Remark: These portraits came from the same hand. This item can be stacked together or separated. When stacked together, they are viewed as one item.
———
"I'm getting more and more confused…" Wang Tanzhi sighed.
Feng Bujue nodded. "That's normal because the clues are still quite insufficient."
Then he walked to the second room door. "By the way, I have a speculation, and this speculation is also why I prefer to solve the puzzle before attempting to clear the scenario."
Pushing the door open, he said, "I believe that in one of these three rooms, we can find at least one useable piece of equipment."