The disinfectant unique to Ninth Hospital always felt sharper and colder than the smell in an ordinary ward. Even through the heavy door, you could still catch it faintly in the air.
Lin Xiao sat on the edge of the bed with a morning paper she had no idea how she had managed to get her hands on, staring blankly at a long string of dizzying price data in the livelihood section. During these two days in the hospital, aside from the necessary examinations, she had barely spoken at all. Most of her time had passed in this dry, exhausting silence.
Her feelings about this "long leave" caused by job-hunting were complicated. The sudden collapse in the Nice Star park had only left her with superficial wounds, but the erosion on the spiritual level was not something that could be shaken off quickly. Fortunately, the Bureau that had brought her here had been generous enough to cover all follow-up treatment costs, which meant a fresh graduate with an empty wallet like her did not have to worry about the bills.
Still, this Bureau seemed rather different from the institution she had always known as the agency that cleaned up every kind of mess.
On the front page of the paper was a large photograph of Bureau Director Lou Qiuyun, impeccably dressed in a suit, smiling with polished ease beneath a headline about enhancing urban happiness and competitiveness. The overly positive propaganda style made Lin Xiao wonder for a moment whether she had somehow wandered into a model display room.
She had just started wondering whether eggs had gone up in price again when a nurse pushed a cart into the room.
"Your temperature is normal." The nurse made a few marks in the record book and reminded her casually, "Someone from the Bureau will come to visit at three-thirty this afternoon. We can either move your free activity period forward by an hour or push it back by an hour."
"Then move it back," Lin Xiao said, folding the paper and setting it on her lap.
The nurse nodded, recorded the request, and wheeled the cart out.
15:25.
The knock on the door came five minutes before the appointed time.
Before Lin Xiao even had to answer, the door was pushed open from outside. The Bureau employee who had come to visit her was a young man with gold-rimmed glasses who looked to be not yet thirty.
Lin Xiao had seen him two days earlier. His name was Zhao Bailu. At the time he had introduced himself as an ordinary clerical worker from the Bureau and had immediately contacted his colleagues to send her and Wang Ruofei to the hospital after finding them in the park.
Her instincts told her that in his entire self-introduction, the only part worth trusting was probably the word "person."
Today Zhao Bailu was wearing a uniform as well, but in a much looser fashion. His jacket hung open, his sleeves were rolled to his elbows, and there were traces of fresh printer's ink smeared near the edge of his palm, as though he had come straight from some office.
He inclined his head. "Hello. How are you feeling mentally..."
As a matter of routine, he was supposed to confirm the survivor's mental condition before beginning any formal questioning, but the words caught slightly in his throat when he noticed what Lin Xiao was doing.
She had spread the newspaper over the white quilt. The headlines on the page in front of her read, "How to Positively Guide Enterprises Toward Innovation" and "Improving Employment Rates Cannot Be Delayed; All Departments Must Perform Their Guidance Work Well." Lower down were several job listings she had marked for herself.
For an ordinary person who had spent more than a day inside a dungeon, the odds of showing no obvious mental instability were essentially zero. Zhao Bailu had heard from the medical department that one of the survivors had recovered with unusual speed, but he had not really believed it until now. Meeting her in person, he could only admit that her mental toughness far exceeded that of an average person.
And if he remembered correctly, this entire batch of students had entered the dungeon because they were job-hunting.
He had not expected that after brushing so close to death, Lin Xiao would still be paying such close attention to the employment situation, as if everything she had experienced in Nice Star Park had been nothing more than a thoroughly unpleasant internship.
So he changed his opening line.
"Looking for work?"
Lin Xiao set the newspaper aside. "My phone's dead, the signal in the room comes and goes, and apparently the ward doesn't provide novels. There really aren't many options left for passing the time."
Zhao Bailu knew very well that this hospital, though publicly described as belonging to the Bureau, was in fact under the Special Affairs Bureau. Strictly speaking, the patients were not even supposed to have access to newspapers, much less fiction. Wherever Lin Xiao had found this copy, it had probably come from some nurse's personal kindness.
He looked her over again and felt that she truly had recovered enough to be questioned.
Before coming here, he had also learned something from a colleague in the secretariat: the student named Lin Xiao was not entering a dungeon for the first time. In fact, her previous performance in one had been remarkably good, and she had played an important part in raising the number of survivors.
Human mental resilience was like muscular strength. It could be improved through repeated exertion. That theory would explain why Lin Xiao seemed calmer than the others after getting out. Although she too needed bed rest, she had shown none of the violence or loss of control that often appeared in survivors.
Zhao Bailu thought that, strictly speaking, as an employee of the Special Affairs Bureau he ought not to hope ordinary civilians would encounter abnormal incidents too often. But given Lin Xiao's aptitude, if she went through a few more dungeons, she might well become the sort of rising star the Bureau dreamed of recruiting.
Today's visit served two purposes: to observe her current condition and to record her experience inside Nice Star Park.
Without waiting to be invited, Zhao Bailu pulled over a chair, sat down in front of her bed, and crossed one leg over the other. "You look like you've recovered pretty well."
"Honestly, I think I could already be discharged," Lin Xiao replied. "Unfortunately, the doctors here disagree."
"Two more days of observation means a little more peace of mind." Then he added, "Actually, the main reason I came was to ask how you got into Nice Star Park, what you experienced inside, and how you finally got out."
The purpose of the visit was exactly what she had expected. Lin Xiao took a sip of water, then began from the recruitment presentation, continuing all the way through the guided tour of Purification Workshop No. 1. As for what happened in the abandoned Industrial Zone No. 17, she only touched on it lightly, summarizing it as sudden chaos breaking out in the park that afternoon.
She was not too worried that Wang Ruofei would expose any inconsistencies. That dungeon had spent the entire time eroding the participants' ability to reason. The damage it did to the survivors' rational faculties was severe. Even after escaping, she herself felt parts of her memory had become blurred and disordered. The other students, whose thinking had collapsed much more badly than hers, would be even less capable of recalling everything clearly.
Yesterday she had visited Wang Ruofei, who was recuperating in another ward of Ninth Hospital. His condition was exactly what she had expected: of many events he retained only a vague, muddy impression.
Perhaps that, too, was a kind of psychological self-protection.
When she had mostly finished recounting events, Lin Xiao added a few personal judgments on top of the objective facts.
"Thinking back on it now, we were already exhausted while sitting through the presentation. That may have been one of the methods it used to lower the participants' guard."
Zhao Bailu had switched on a recorder at the start of the conversation, and he was writing a summary by hand as well. His temperament seemed rather casual, but his expression was serious.
Then Lin Xiao deliberately added one more patch to her account.
"But after getting out, my headaches never really stopped. My impressions of many things aren't especially clear, so I can't guarantee there aren't mistakes in what I just told you. You'd better compare my account against the others' afterward."
Her attitude was frank, careful, and entirely unafraid of comparison. That only made Zhao Bailu more reassured.
"Don't worry. What you remember is already exceptionally detailed."
Lin Xiao immediately understood the implication beneath his words: under normal circumstances, survivors of this kind of dungeon did not retain very deep or coherent memories of what had happened.
Since the conversation had reached that point, she took the opportunity to ask after her former fellow applicants.
"Do you know how the others are doing now?"
Nice Star Company might not have cared in the least about its employees' safety, but it truly had operated on the large scale it had boasted of in the presentation. There had been far too many people involved in this dungeon, and many survivors had been scattered among different wards and facilities. Lin Xiao rarely saw anyone and had no direct way to gather information for herself.
Zhao Bailu hesitated a moment. In the end, feeling it was better not to make an ordinary civilian worry too much, he only told her what was safe to say.
"A lot of the survivors suffered psychological trauma, though the severity differs. The lighter cases are already recovering, and overall the progress is good. The more serious ones need to remain under observation for a while longer."
He did not say how long "a while longer" might be, and Lin Xiao did not ask.
She adjusted the angle of the pillow behind her. "While I was recovering, I kept wondering why something abnormal had to happen to me in particular."
"According to statistics, people who have encountered this kind of thing before are more likely to encounter it again in the future," Zhao Bailu said.
Lin Xiao raised one eyebrow at that.
"Of course, that's only relative to ordinary people," he added. "Under normal circumstances, even if someone has entered a dungeon before, the frequency of entering another one afterward usually won't be too outrageous."
Lin Xiao pressed a hand to her temple. "...After I get discharged, I'll remember to burn incense on some website."
In this age, very few buildings connected to traditional mysticism still survived, but plenty of websites had sprung up under slogans about sincere faith and miraculous response, offering exactly that sort of psychological comfort to visitors seeking safety.
Once the questioning was over, Zhao Bailu stood up, opened his briefcase, and carefully stuck strips of something that looked very much like tape onto the four walls.
"Next, I still have a few tests to do," Zhao Bailu said. "They're harmless, so don't be nervous."
Lin Xiao let her gaze linger on his face for a moment before nodding. "All right."
After finishing with the tape, Zhao Bailu took out something that looked rather like a test strip.
"All you have to do is place your hand on it and wait quietly. You don't need to do anything else. If the color changes later, don't be surprised."
Lin Xiao carried a special ability and a game system. Looking at the strip before her, she could not help feeling curious whether the item would be able to detect her secret.
Following Zhao Bailu's instructions, she pressed her fingers onto the tool.
The strip looked perfectly smooth, yet when she touched it, it felt prickly and faintly itchy. Lin Xiao had the odd sensation that it was not her finger resting on the strip, but rather the strip itself that had latched onto her skin.
The discomfort lasted only a brief moment and then vanished. An inexplicable thought crossed her mind: perhaps the design of this paper-like tool had been modeled on the feeding habits of a leech, except that what it drew out was not blood, but special abilities.
She stared at her fingertip with complete concentration. Gradually, mist like threads of fate flickered there. The mist remained in contact with the test strip for quite some time, yet the strip's color never changed, nor did Zhao Bailu show any reaction at all.