Luckily, these tentacles didn’t have eyes.
Yu Yezhou gestured to Gu Zhan, signaling him to wait by the door.
Gu Zhan walked in that direction.
But after only two steps, there was a loud crash above his head. The creature had used too much force, and the plate on the table was split in two! One of the broken pieces flew across the room with great force.
The creature’s head followed the trajectory of the flying plate and happened to spot Gu Zhan standing by the table leg!
He was already at the back of the group, and with this sudden event, he didn’t even have time to react.
The creature noticed that the little one in the room had run out, and with a roar, it lunged toward Gu Zhan!
Sang Yue, standing in front of Gu Zhan, cried out in alarm, but before she could say anything, Gu Zhan shoved her hard.
He used a lot of strength, and Sang Yue fell to the ground. Her knees and wrists scraped against the floor, instantly drawing blood. However, she was now out of the creature’s line of sight. The creature only saw Gu Zhan, locking its focus solely on him.
Without hesitation, Gu Zhan ran towards the back, shouting as he ran, “Get out of here!”
Again!
Sang Yue gritted her teeth in frustration, but there was nothing she could do.
She quickly got up, grabbed Xuyu, and ran towards the door.
The creature chased after Gu Zhan into the corridor, with everyone else behind it. Taking advantage of this opportunity, they pushed open the door to the room.
Meanwhile, Gu Zhan returned to the original room.
His situation wasn’t good. The plate fragment from earlier had hit his arm, worsening an already bleeding wound.
In just a short time, he began to feel weak, his vision darkening.
Once inside the room, the creature stopped chasing him. It slammed against the door, seemingly expressing its anger, but soon, everything outside went silent.
Gu Zhan leaned against the door and sat down, thinking that Sang Yue and the others had probably left the room. What about him? He still needed to rest and figure out how to escape from the house.
In truth, moving alone would be more convenient. If they had stayed, it would only slow him down.
Gu Zhan began to plan how to leave, but as he thought, he couldn’t resist the drowsiness and closed his eyes…
He didn’t want to sleep, but his body’s natural reaction was beyond his control.
“!”
He wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but the forced sleepiness suddenly disappeared. It felt like he had surfaced from deep water, and he opened his eyes abruptly.
The room around him was pure white. Yu Yezhou, Sang Yue, Xuyu, An Heyan... everyone was there, standing in the middle of the room, looking at him with complicated expressions.
“What’s going on?” Gu Zhan asked in confusion.
Yu Yezhou looked as though he was about to cry. “I’m sorry.”
“What do you mean?” Gu Zhan looked around and finally realized that they had returned to the white room where the cycle always began. The wound on his arm had been reset.
This meant that they had failed the last cycle.
He had merely fallen asleep in the room, but the others… after leaving the house, had they all died?
Yu Yezhou said, “We oversimplified things. There are monsters everywhere, throughout the world. There’s no escape.”
“There’s no escape…”
Yu Yezhou’s words echoed in the room, and Gu Zhan’s eyes suddenly widened.
The others’ faces were blank, not calm but rather numb.
They had looped too many times, their sanity rising and falling. Even with the best mentality, it was hard to stay calm and rational.
Maybe it would be better to stay here.
Each of them began to have the same thought: become a monster, no longer bound by the game’s rules, and be free.
Free to live in this world inside the instance.
It was as if Gu Zhan could see their collapsing faith in their silence. Suddenly, he said, “The monsters aren’t free. The door that traps us is thin, and even though they have immense strength, they can’t break through it. They can’t even leave the house. Their massive bodies are confined to small spaces… They aren’t free.”
Every monster in this game was bound by the rules.
Gu Zhan didn’t know what they were like outside the game, but at least in this instance, they were no more free than the players.
Yu Yezhou’s eyes flickered slightly. His expression didn’t change, but a little life returned to his face.
The white room began to shift, preparing to take them into the next loop, but this time, no one was in a rush. They sat down where they were, looking at each other.
Yu Yezhou rubbed his brow in exhaustion, admitting to himself that he had gone mad earlier, even considering staying in the instance forever.
He really had gone mad.
An Heyan no longer kept his guard up around the others, leaning against Xu Ke. He said to Gu Zhan, “I don’t feel like clearing the instance anymore. Let’s just chat for a while.”
“Alright,” Gu Zhan nodded.
The wound from the last loop still ached faintly, as though it hadn’t completely healed. But when he touched his arm, the skin was smooth and intact, with no sign of injury.
An Heyan asked, “You seem to know a lot about the monsters in the instance. Why did you say they aren’t free?”
Gu Zhan replied, “Xiaoxiu—the monster I summoned earlier to help us—she’s always lived in my star disk watch. There’s a complete space inside where they live like humans.”
“She doesn’t like water, and she doesn’t like men, but in the instance, she’s forced to come out of the water and hunt men who meet the rules to kill them.”
“I know,” Sang Yue suddenly said. “That was the instance I cleared with you”
Gu Zhan continued, “Every monster here is bound by rules. They’re a crucial part of the instance. Monsters that break the rules are punished…”
He paused for a moment. This information had been told to him by Mo Tuo.
The dark side of the monsters was something the human world had never touched. Gu Zhan wasn’t sure if what Mo Tuo said was true or not.
But it didn’t really matter since everyone was trapped here, and their mental states weren’t exactly stable.
They could just chat casually, like gossiping about this world.
Gossip, after all, doesn’t need to be entirely true.
After regaining a bit of strength, they started chatting all at once: "Who’s the monster that’s been following you?"
"Why can it appear in different instances?"
"These monsters seem like they’re on the clock. Do they get paid?"
Gu Zhan hadn’t expected that when he suggested gossiping, it would turn into gossip about himself.
But he didn’t know much about Mo Tuo either, so he just chatted a little without going into detail.
As the conversation flowed, Sang Yue suddenly laughed. She lay down on the floor, staring at the ceiling, and said, "It’d be nice if Yang Lin were here."
It felt weird gossiping without her girlfriend around.
But then she added, "Actually, it’s better that she’s not."
Going through this cycle of life and death repeatedly wasn’t exactly a good thing.
"On the bright side, the worst-case scenario is we all turn into monsters. It seems like no one really dies in this instance," Yu Yezhou said.
His dark humor actually cheered everyone up a bit.
They had already considered turning into monsters earlier.
But since the worst that could happen was becoming monsters, there was no need to rush. They could try their best first, and if it didn’t work out, they could always transform later.
Yu Yezhou sat up and looked at the table. There was food prepared, but earlier, everyone had been too focused on escaping to think about eating.
He grabbed a banana from the fruit platter and handed it to An Heyan, saying, "Have something to eat."
An Heyan took it, peeled it, and started eating.
He wasn’t particularly fond of bananas, but at that moment, the taste seemed incredibly fresh, reviving his numbed senses.
The others also started eating, and soon the room was filled with the smell of food.
In this lively, human-like atmosphere, everyone’s spirits seemed to lift a little.
Yu Yezhou opened his personal panel and noticed that his SAN value had actually recovered by two points, which made him smile bitterly.
But regardless, after resting for a while, everyone’s condition had significantly improved.
After taking a break, it was time to focus on how to escape the instance.
"We have to get out of here," Yu Yezhou said firmly. "After all, the guild has just been formed. If we get stuck here, it’d be like working overtime all the time, dying from exhaustion without ever getting to spend your paycheck."
His analogy hit a little too close to home, and for a moment, everyone’s expressions turned serious.
After reconsidering their plan, the focus wasn’t so much on how to get out of the house, but how to survive once they did.
According to Yu Yezhou and the others, there were monsters everywhere outside. Escaping by hiding in blind spots was no longer an option.
They had to come up with a way to leave right in front of the monsters.
Gu Zhan said, "Maybe we can find something to use as cover."
The monsters didn’t seem particularly intelligent, so this tactic might just fool them.
"Then we should test it here in the house first," Yu Yezhou said as he looked around the room and spotted a table. It was just big enough to hide two people behind it.
He walked over, patted the table, and said, "I’ll try it with Xuyu."
"I’ll go with you," Xu Ke volunteered.
Yu Yezhou glanced at him, then nodded.
The two of them lifted the table, holding it horizontally in front of them as they walked toward the door.
"Let’s give it a try," Yu Yezhou said.
They opened the door and walked out with the table, while the others stayed by the door, watching what happened outside.
Yu Yezhou and Xu Ke held the table by their sides and slowly moved into the monster’s line of sight. Soon, they entered its view.
The sight of a moving table immediately caught the monster’s attention. It looked up, but Yu Yezhou and Xu Ke stopped just in time. From the monster’s perspective, it was just a table that had suddenly appeared in the room.
The monster seemed only sensitive to living beings. It didn’t find the sudden appearance of a table strange. After looking for a while, it lowered its head and continued playing with the objects on the dining table.
Yu Yezhou and Xu Ke continued forward, stopping again when the monster looked up.
In this stop-and-go manner, they quickly reached the door.
The method actually worked!
So, what had all their previous suffering been for?
Sang Yue found the whole situation laughable and frustrating. She looked around the room and asked, "Is there anything else we can use as cover?"
The table was gone, a chair wouldn’t be enough to hide someone, and they couldn’t move the wardrobe or the bed.
Gu Zhan said, "Try using the bedsheet."
"…"
The bedsheet?
Sang Yue thought the suggestion was ridiculous. "Won’t the monster find it weird to see a bedsheet walking around the room?"
Gu Zhan countered, "And it didn’t find it weird that a table was moving around?"
"…" She couldn’t argue with that.
When Yu Yezhou and Xu Ke had been approaching the door, they had stopped several times in the monster’s view, and the table had shifted position each time. Yet, the monster hadn’t noticed anything strange.
Sang Yue said, "It’s still not ideal. The bedsheet is soft. What if it moves in the wind as we walk?"
"Then use a blanket," Gu Zhan said, getting up and walking over to the bed. He pulled off the blanket and draped it over himself, saying, "I’ll go test it."
Gu Zhan was determined, and Sang Yue couldn’t stop him, so she let him go.
Gu Zhan soon entered the monster’s range, and everyone watching held their breath.
Yu Yezhou, hiding behind the table, disapproved and kept signaling for Gu Zhan to turn back.
But Gu Zhan kept moving forward.
Soon, the monster looked up, and Gu Zhan froze, lying flat on the ground.
From a distance, it really did look like a blanket thrown on the ground—totally normal. Well, as normal as it gets… Who in their right mind would throw a blanket on the living room floor?
But apparently, monsters weren’t exactly reasonable beings. Just like when Yu Yezhou and the others had walked out with the table, the monster simply stared at Gu Zhan's blanket for a couple of seconds before lowering its head and continuing with whatever it was doing.
"…"
Unexpectedly, Gu Zhan's test had actually worked.
With that, Gu Zhan reached the door and rejoined Yu Yezhou and the others.
If this method worked, they had a multitude of ways to navigate the house. Just the beds alone had three more blankets!
Heavy sofa covers could also be used to obscure their movement, as well as the thick blackout curtains.
Sang Yue even found a suit cover in the closet, and its long, thick fabric could be worn like a cloak.
One by one, everyone found their own way to pass through the living room, and this time, they managed not to disturb the monster.
They gathered at the entryway, using the shoe cabinet as cover, feeling a bit more at ease.
Yu Yezhou said, "There are more monsters behind this door. Are you all ready?"
Everyone except Gu Zhan had already seen what it was like outside. He was the only one who hadn’t, but he didn’t seem scared—in fact, he looked curious about what was out there.
Seeing his expression, Yu Yezhou knew there was no point in trying to convince him otherwise.
So, he simply stopped talking and pushed open the door.
With a soft “click,” the door opened, revealing the surreal scene outside.
It wasn’t quite what Gu Zhan had imagined. The outside world was just as distorted, with buildings towering into the sky, so tall that he couldn’t tell if they were skyscrapers or regular homes. The sky was a gloomy, dark red, with visibility severely limited. Beyond ten meters, everything was obscured by a thick, smog-like haze.
Through the fog, they could barely make out shadows moving slowly between the buildings, as if patrolling their territory.
Even after seeing this sight before, Sang Yue couldn’t help but gasp. In a hushed voice, she asked, "Gu Zhan, you once said that monsters have their own world. Do you think their world looks like this? Where they shed their human skins, living in monstrous forms, full of violence and conflict…"
Gu Zhan thought for a moment and shook his head. "In their own world, they might even be more human than us."
"What?" Sang Yue looked at him, startled.
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