The silence of deep night was shattered by ragged breathing. Lin Xiao's eyes snapped open, her palm still retaining the sensation of something cold and hard.
She instinctively tightened her grip, her knuckles whitening from the pressure. This was no remnant of a dream—it was a rusted pipe that had materialized out of thin air, weighing heavily on her nerves.
Her temples throbbed. Lin Xiao closed her eyes, forcing down the bloodshot redness seeping into them. When she opened them again, the chaotic thoughts that had clouded her mind were swept away like morning mist, replaced by the system interface that only she could see.
This scene was not unfamiliar, yet it made that sense of wrongness in Lin Xiao's heart grow even stronger.
—She had barely left the mall instance, and already she had collided with this kind of bizarre situation again. As if those who could see fate were destined to be tripped up by it repeatedly.
Like the abandoned office building before it, the Naisida Park possessed the ability to subtly influence participants' cognition. Without her past experiences as a foundation, she probably still wouldn't have noticed anything wrong with her surroundings.
Lin Xiao tugged at the corner of her mouth, revealing a strange smile. Counting this time, she had entered three instances in total, and two of them had played games with "employment"—as if some mysterious force was trying to strangle graduates' futures at the root.
Too many people had been swept in this time. On the bed right next to hers, a university classmate who had been deceived along with her was still sleeping.
Right now, Wang Ruofei's breathing was becoming increasingly rapid.
With their shared history in classrooms and dormitories as evidence, Lin Xiao knew very well that this classmate had always had excellent sleep quality—she had never heard of her having nightmares before.
"What's wrong?" Lin Xiao reached out and shook her awake.
Wang Ruofei jolted awake with a dry, hoarse cry. She sat up, dazed for a long moment before murmuring, "...Where am I now?"
This wasn't really a question seeking an answer. After regaining some clarity, Wang Ruofei frowned. "I just had a very uncomfortable dream."
Lin Xiao softened her voice, asking with a soothing tone, "So what did you dream about?"
Actually, she had dreamed too, but had forgotten the content upon waking.
Wang Ruofei thought seriously for a moment, but ultimately just shook her head. "I can't remember clearly."
The content of the dream was like final exam scores—evaporating completely the instant she opened her eyes. All that remained in her heart now was a lingering horror, an eerie resonance.
In the silence, another familiar, scalp-numbing thud came from downstairs.
Without looking, both Lin Xiao and her companion could recall that sound—a human body shattering against concrete.
Wang Ruofei felt a chill. "How is it again..."
Lin Xiao hopped off the bed and walked to the window, gently pulling back the curtain just a crack.
The expected horrors didn't appear—outside was pure darkness. Yet with Lin Xiao's special vision, she could still vaguely make out the situation on the ground.
A scene nearly identical to evening was being copied and pasted once more in the dead of night.
Click.
A faint sound of a window closing came from nearby. If it weren't the middle of the night, with silence so complete that a pin drop would be audible, Lin Xiao might not have heard it.
She wasn't the only one who noticed the anomaly outside.
The terrible scene on the ground seemed to possess some special attraction, keeping Lin Xiao's gaze fixed for a long time. Yet the more she watched, the more she felt her mind being eroded and contaminated.
Lin Xiao slowly looked away. She thought that if she had recovered her memories yesterday afternoon, she would certainly have noticed the strangeness of the falling incident sooner.
—Because the body on the ground was shattered far too completely.
The accommodation building wasn't particularly tall. Even if someone had fallen from the roof, they shouldn't have been reduced to a puddle of flesh.
Shattered corpses, vanished traces—none of the details aligned with Lin Xiao's understanding of normalcy.
When she signed the confidentiality agreement last time, the white-shirted man had told her that the more one knew, the easier it was to be captured by the anomaly.
Lin Xiao now stood with one foot already on the point of no return.
She stood motionless at the window for a long time, until Wang Ruofei called out to her. Only then did she close the window and climb back into bed.
Though nightmares would affect her mental state, Lin Xiao had no better way to conserve her energy.
Lin Xiao burrowed into her quilt. "Continue resting?"
Wang Ruofei yawned and lay back down. "Mm."
Lin Xiao gazed at her companion. Wang Ruofei's cognition had clearly been heavily influenced by the instance—even after discovering someone had fallen from the building just minutes ago, after her initial fear, she hadn't even considered running away.
Her companion on the neighboring bed soon fell asleep. Lin Xiao closed her eyes too, her body sinking deeper into the dry, soft bedding.
。
Seven-thirty in the morning.
The dream-disturbing sunlight was intercepted outside by the curtains, and the lingering horror seemed to evaporate along with the night.
Lin Xiao hadn't slept well. Even realizing it was daylight, she didn't get up. However, the Naisida Park had no intention of letting the new students off. At exactly seven-thirty, a dispassionate broadcast rang through the accommodation area, reminding everyone of the upcoming schedule—
"The bugle of awakening has sounded. Today is the first day of internship life for all prospective employees..."
The cold, grating broadcast was like an electric drill, boring into the skull of Lin Xiao, who was still lying in bed with her eyes closed. She suddenly felt wetness beneath her nose. Reaching up, she discovered she was bleeding.
Her headache grew increasingly severe, yet when Lin Xiao climbed out of bed with a dark expression, all the negative sensations began to drop rapidly, finally settling at a level that wouldn't affect her movements.
—It seemed that as long as she followed instructions, the damage inflicted by the instance could be greatly reduced.
Wang Ruofei, who had risen earlier, had perfectly avoided the intense discomfort of waking by habitually obeying the broadcast. Though she had nightmares all night, she looked quite refreshed after waking—rosy-cheeked and bright-eyed, perfectly suited to immediately throw herself into intense and exciting work.
By comparison, the dark circles under Lin Xiao's eyes were far too conspicuous. If her current appearance were placed at a Naisida Group recruitment fair, it would surely achieve an excellent dissuasion effect.
The broadcast continued: "...The dining location for prospective employees is the Third Cafeteria. The Third Cafeteria is open from 7:30 to 9:00 in the morning, 11:00 to 14:00 at noon, and 17:00 to 19:00 in the afternoon. To ensure health, all personnel please proceed to the cafeteria for meals at the designated times.
"Please conclude your tour of Purification Workshop No. 1 before lunch begins."
Lin Xiao listened to the broadcast while dressing and extracted the key information: they had two tasks this morning—eating and touring.
If she didn't know that instances never harbored good intentions, Naisida Group's schedule for students could " almost have been called considerate, full of a kind of humane concern that refrained from squeezing people dry.\n\nWang Ruofei asked, "Are we going to get breakfast?"\n\n"We are," Lin Xiao replied.\n\nAfter what had just happened, and with her nosebleed finally stopped, Lin Xiao had no intention of confronting the broadcast head-on again for the time being.\n\nBefore brushing her teeth, she checked the time once more. It was seven-thirty-five.\n\nThe Third Cafeteria stayed open until nine in the morning. Under normal circumstances, an hour and a half was more than enough for two college students seasoned by years of last-minute scrambling to finish washing up and eating. But they had no idea how long it would take to get from the dormitory area to the dining hall, so they had to hurry.\n\nAt the same time, the other surviving prospective employees were also pouring out of their rooms.\n\nThe prospective employees resembled worker ants. Once they heard an instruction, they moved in groups toward their destination.\n\nThe accommodation area in this building was made up entirely of double rooms, but Lin Xiao noticed that many rooms produced only one occupant.\n\nProspective employees were not as familiar with the park as official staff, so when they went out they tended to move collectively. Combined with the dull impacts she had heard the night before, Lin Xiao had every reason to believe that the rooms from which only one person emerged contained only one person left.\n\nThe interns who came out alone lifted their heads, their dark eyes moving slowly as they silently watched the prospective employees passing by their doors.\n\nTheir different faces all seemed to carry the same expression.\n\nBefore meeting any of those gazes, Lin Xiao deliberately looked away, tugged Wang Ruofei along the corridor, and hurried down the stairs.\n\nLin Xiao was extremely sensitive to other people's attention. She could feel someone staring at her from behind.\n\nThe prospective employees flowed steadily out of the dormitory corridor, as if each person were absolutely certain of where they were going. As she followed the stream, Lin Xiao kept an eye on the signboards at every fork, making sure each step she took was leading toward food.\n\nPerhaps the wind had picked up during the night, or perhaps the signboards had never been fixed very securely in the first place, because Lin Xiao kept seeing wooden signs lying on the ground along the way.\n\nThe two girls walking ahead of her noticed a fallen sign, casually picked it up, and stuck it back in place.\n\nLin Xiao had not paid much attention to this habit of maintaining the park's environment, but when she passed that signboard, she suddenly stopped.\n\nIt pointed toward the convenience store.\n\nFrom last night, she knew the destination written on the sign was correct, yet the note at the very bottom was obviously different from the one she had seen before:\n\n"If there are no lights inside the convenience store, you may enter."\n\nLin Xiao's gaze froze for a brief instant as her brain fully started working again.\n\nThe line was not hidden at all. The girl who had just picked up the sign must have seen it.\n\nAnd yet the two people ahead had shown no sign that anything was wrong.\n\nWang Ruofei followed Lin Xiao's line of sight, looking equally startled, and whispered, "What's going on? I'm sure the note wasn't like that yesterday."\n\nTwo completely contradictory instructions meant that, unless someone was playing a prank, one of them had to be a trap.\n\nLin Xiao exchanged a glance with Wang Ruofei. Neither of them spoke. After a moment, Lin Xiao chose to set the question aside for now. "Forget it. Let's go to the cafeteria first."\n\nWang Ruofei gave an easy "Okay."\n\nLess than a minute earlier, she had still been confused, yet now she could already cast aside what she didn't understand without hesitation.\n\nThe park blurred the vigilance of its prospective employees.\n\nThe Third Cafeteria was less than five hundred meters away from the accommodation area in a straight line, but there were too many trees around and the paths twisted too much. Lin Xiao and Wang Ruofei spent a full quarter of an hour weaving through the shrubbery before they finally found their destination.\n\nBy the time they arrived, quite a few people were already eating inside. Lin Xiao even spotted five male students who looked vaguely familiar. They were probably also soon-to-be graduates from Xinda University. She had crossed paths with them on campus before, but they had never spoken, so none of them knew the others' names.\n\nJust like at Xinda University's cafeteria, Naisida Group had posted a price list for the food on the wall. Everything was extremely cheap; an ordinary meal cost only one credit point.\n\nLin Xiao raised her brows slightly. She had applied for all kinds of financial aid before, and the university had specifically provided some free dishes for students like her who had good grades but empty pockets, so she knew perfectly well that cheap things were rarely any good.\n\nThe line at the serving window moved quickly. Lin Xiao waited only two minutes before it was her turn. There were no staff members behind the counter, only several steel machines standing there that looked uncannily like giant water bears. Whenever they detected a prospective employee whining for food, they spat out a breakfast set from a serving hatch shaped like a mouthpart.\n\nStaring at the food the machine had disgorged, Lin Xiao suddenly felt a powerful urge to slam the meal and the tray together right into the "water bear's" face.\n\n"Please pay for your meal—"\n\nThe mechanical voice remained dutiful, completely indifferent to the damage the food might inflict on whoever ate it. Lin Xiao fell silent for a second before pressing her temporary employee card against the scanner.\n\n"Beep. Payment successful."\n\nFor some reason, at the exact moment the mechanical prompt sounded, Lin Xiao—who was just about to leave with her tray—felt that slight weakness again.\n\nIt was as if she had stayed up the entire night: her limbs grew faintly stiff, and even her mind seemed to have been drained by an invisible force."