Dream shattered, Su Er gave a rueful smile.Dream shattered, Su Er gave a rueful smile.
Green Lotus Sage clapped his hands, and attendants all with rabbit ears carried trays to the tables. Their faces were covered with white fur, so that even though their features were delicate, when they smiled the whole expression looked strangely eerie.
Contrary to expectations of bloody, meaty dishes, only fresh vegetables were served. The colors were bright, carrying a light, clean fragrance.
The staple was porridge, accompanied by a small plate of thin sesame cakes.
The players’ expressions grew even more serious. Ever since entering this Deception realm, everything had been unnervingly calm. The ever-kind host made things all the more unfathomable.
Just as Su Er hesitated about whether to pick up his chopsticks, a few of the rabbit-eared attendants transformed into ordinary rabbits, each leaping into the arms of different players.
“Don’t fight back,” Green Lotus Sage spoke before the players could instinctively resist. “Winners can earn the qualification to raise a rabbit for one night.”
The rabbits stayed in the players’ arms for just a moment before hopping down again. Within a few breaths, they transformed into identical human figures.
The Sage looked toward Su Er.
“My hint goes to him.” Su Er pointed toward Ji Heng.
The Sage of Green Lotus: “You’re sure?”
Su Er nodded.
The Sage stared at Ji Heng for a few seconds, then suddenly said, “Originally, I should have let you raise a rabbit for one more night than the others. But you don’t seem to need it.”
Feigning troubled thought, he propped his chin for a moment, then snapped his fingers. A slip of paper appeared in front of Ji Heng.
The two beside him instinctively focused on it, but Ji Heng didn’t bother to hide it—he unfolded it openly. The slip was blank.
“This is a priceless item, the sort that can save your life,” the Sage of Green Lotus said with a smile, eyes narrowing. “But its method of use must be found somewhere in this city.”
Ji Heng rubbed the paper’s edge with his fingers, said nothing, and put it away.
The host didn’t force anyone to eat dinner, considerately remarking that if they weren’t used to vegetables, they could go to the supermarket and take whatever they liked.
Su Er noticed that everyone else chose to eat. Compared to their gaming experience, his was lacking, so he casually picked up a couple of bites as well.
“The guest rooms are just upstairs,” Green Lotus Sage said only after the last player had set down chopsticks. “Room cards are at the front desk—find them yourselves. Which room you stay in, and with whom… you decide. If there’s an emergency, you can call me.”
With that, he was the first to leave.
Soon after, sounds of “whoosh, whoosh” came from outside, followed by a loud bang—the sky erupted in dazzling fireworks.
The players who remained inside the hotel couldn’t help but twitch their lips.
“Might as well be playing some deadly battle royale,” muttered a man named Li Zicang. He walked to the drinks counter, poured a cup of orange juice, and asked, “Anyone want some?”
Only a few responded, shaking their heads.
Li Zicang returned to his seat. “This instance’s calmness is unsettling.”
The words voiced what everyone felt.
With no bursts of life-and-death struggle, and even failure in the first round bringing no punishment, the calmness instead resembled the suffocating stillness before a storm.
Just as he raised the cup to his lips, it was suddenly snatched away with force, juice splattering across his hand.
Li Zicang’s brows furrowed, but he swallowed the curse rising to his lips.
The thief was none other than the human-shaped rabbit. Snatching the cup, it gulped the juice down, then stood silently to the side again.
The rabbits looked identical to the players, but their eye colors were different, making them distinguishable.
A female player named Yi Zhu stood and poured a glass of juice too, but the rabbit by her side didn’t try to grab it. It seemed only the rabbit in Li Zicang’s likeness had a habit of snatching food.
Ji Heng walked wordlessly toward the front desk.
All the room cards were placed in a basket for easy taking.
Above the fourth floor were guest rooms, so Ji Heng chose the fourth floor. Turning back, he gave Su Er a meaningful glance.
Su Er followed, along with the rabbit that had transformed into Ji Heng.
“Wait.” Yi Zhu came over, speaking in a very soft voice: “Tomorrow’s weather—flowers in full bloom.”
At first hearing, the words made no sense.
But as Yi Zhu deliberately spoke with her back to the “rabbit Ji Heng,” Su Er immediately understood her intention. It was a code phrase for players who had rabbits, a safeguard against someone truly being replaced by a rabbit the next day.
The elevator doors opened. Ji Heng gave a faint nod and stepped inside first.
Su Er carefully observed the rabbit Ji Heng. From its eyes, no emotion could be seen. He deliberately told two jokes, but those eyes remained utterly unshaken. As though none of it was funny to him, yet he also didn’t dismiss it as boring.
Su Er extended a finger, itching to poke that seemingly soft cheek, but before testing it, he asked Ji Heng, “Would it bite?”
Ji Heng gave him a long, deep look. Just then, the elevator doors opened.
The corridor was lined with a red carpet stretching over ten meters, with green potted plants placed at intervals, and the lights were bright. As Ji Heng swiped the key card, Su Er looked around. “Can’t see anything eerie at all—really feels like we’re here on vacation.”
Inside was the standard double-room setup.
What interested Su Er most was still that slip of paper, so he asked if it had any special property.
“It’s just an ordinary piece of paper.”
Ji Heng had no reason to lie. Su Er frowned. “Did the host trick us?”
That didn’t make sense logically. To hand over a scrap of paper and exaggerate it as life-saving wasn’t the kind of cheap trick a host would usually use.
Ji Heng only smiled without replying.
In this Deception, night fell a little later. By the time Su Er finished washing up, night had fully descended. He crossed his arms and stood before rabbit Ji Heng, sinking into thought. Both stood utterly motionless, like stiff wooden figures.
Now that they were alone, after a brief silence Su Er recounted in detail the scene of walking out of the Deception that day. When he finished, he flung his arms out and fell back onto the bed. “Makes no sense.”
The cold ceiling brought no inspiration. He turned his head toward Ji Heng.
“You don’t need to search for hope…” Ji Heng stood by the window, repeating what Green Lotus Sage had said, his eyes shadowed and unreadable. “I probably know what order was disrupted.”
Su Er blinked, then suddenly sat bolt upright with the agility of a carp flip, staring at him intently.
“I need to confirm it first,” Ji Heng said. “We have to find where the surveillance recordings are stored.”
That was no small task. Starting from the front desk computers, they began searching floor by floor. Along the way, they bumped into other players, but since everyone was busy with their own matters, no one asked too much.
Su Er disliked riddles. He nudged Ji Heng with his elbow. “Can’t you just explain while we walk?”
“This time is for getting you mentally prepared,” Ji Heng replied.
Su Er answered seriously, “A math problem is enough to calm me down.”
But since there was no problem at hand, he could only recite digits of pi.
Rabbit Ji Heng silently followed behind, seemingly also finding the chatter annoying, his pace slowing half a beat.
Searching floor by floor, stairs were more convenient. By the time they reached the ninth floor, Su Er was a little thirsty. At last fortune favored them—in the second-to-last room in the corridor, they found several computers.
Inside stood a man and a woman: the man was Wan Yi, and the woman Su Er didn’t recognize. A glance at her chest plate revealed she even shared his surname—Su Tangyi.
Su Tangyi smiled. “I’m the fake Su, and you’re the real Su.”
The kind of Su with protagonist’s aura.
Su Er said honestly, “If you and I both entered an instance called the Book of Answers, that conclusion would be overturned.”
Except for him, everyone else had rabbit-human doubles by their side, making the not-so-large space feel crowded.
Su Tangyi’s rabbit-double loved mischief—whenever someone passed her, it would stick out a foot trying to trip them.
At that moment, Wan Yi yielded his spot. Ji Heng sat down and began to rewind the evening’s footage, bit by bit, including the scenes after players entered the elevator.
Having already watched once, Su Tangyi spoke at the right time: “Every rabbit-double has a different personality.”
Li Zicang’s was the most obvious—greedy for food, never leaving even a crumb behind.
“This whole place reeks of strangeness,” Wan Yi said with a shrug.
Without lifting his head from the mouse, Ji Heng replied, “Deception is only the name of the instance. This city is called Hope City .”
His sudden emphasis on the city’s name startled Wan Yi. As for Su Tangyi, her smile faded, as though she’d thought of something unpleasant.
“I’m going back to my room,” she said after a pause, her expression looking strained as she hurried out.
Su Er noticed her steadying herself against the wall as she turned, like someone shaken badly.
Ji Heng was too inscrutable. Wan Yi hesitated, then chased after Su Tangyi, perhaps hoping to pry something out of her.
Ji Heng watched almost frame by frame. Twenty minutes later, he finally stood. “Let’s go.”
On the way back, Su Er mulled over the purpose of the surveillance room. Ji Heng’s eyes hadn’t just been on the rabbits in the footage, but also on the corresponding players—he was probably drawing comparisons of some kind.
Head lowered in thought, Su Er suddenly realized they were already at their room. As Ji Heng swiped the key card, he said, “Long ago, the major organizations kept a record of everyone who entered Deception, trying to find a common trait among them.”
Once inside, the first thing Su Er did was drink some water, easing the fatigue of climbing stairs. “Any discoveries?”
“The focus isn’t the individuals, but the number,” Ji Heng said, taking the water Su Er handed him. “In the past three years, the total number was under thirty.”
Su Er froze. Just this round in Deception already had twenty-two players—almost as many as the last few years combined.
“Earlier, Divine Seer said Deception was opening, and the hosts were busy handing out tickets.” Ji Heng’s voice grew heavy. “If that’s the case, then in previous years the number of entrants must have been high too.”
Even as he spoke, the oddity grew clearer. Green Lotus Sage had admitted the survival rate was high, which confirmed that many players had indeed walked out alive.
“The only reason no one remembers is that the game tampered with part of the memory,” Ji Heng said, leaning lightly against the table, eyes lowered. “It made players forget those who got tickets and walked out alive.”
The theory sounded bright—according to the optimistic script, those who left Deception completely escaped the game’s grasp and lived normal lives again.
Yet a chill slowly crept up Su Er’s heart. It was an indescribable, complex feeling, as though he had stumbled into a soft, sticky spiderweb, forced into the open before the predator’s eyes.
Jing Heng suddenly asked: “Do you still remember Xu He?”
Su Er nodded. He remembered Xu He vividly. In their final clash, the other had leaned close to his ear and said some strange words.
“Some players are destined to die in that instance.”
“One day, you’ll encounter the dead-end instance that belongs to you.”
Gloomy, helpless, disappointed.
Too many emotions had been hidden between those words.
The memory broke off abruptly. Su Er suddenly stood up from the bedside: “The reason this place is called Hope City…”
Jing Heng nodded: “Here, you can find clues about the dead-end instance.”
After a moment’s thought, he said: “I investigated Xu He’s background. In reality, he was a police officer, but in the instance, he was a drug dealer who committed every crime imaginable. As for Qu Qingming, in reality her identity was that of a model, yet in the instance, when you saw her with the Mysterious Eyes, she appeared as an extremely ugly woman.”
The instance world and the real world—two completely different lives.
Su Er’s eyelashes trembled. One of those worlds had to be false, but given the unconscious mistakes in writing names, it was obvious which world was real.
Silence began to spread through the room.
Jing Heng’s tone carried a trace of mockery: “The real us were originally meant to live in some instance world.”
And one day, when they returned to that world as players to complete missions, they would face the so-called dead-end instance.
Su Er quickly steadied himself: “Inside Deception there must be something hidden that allows one to survive the dead-end instance.”
He suddenly stopped halfway.
Order.
The two characters surfaced abruptly in his mind. For the first time, Su Er couldn’t conceal his expression.
“The dead-end instance is without doubt the highest-difficulty instance,” Jing Heng voiced the words that Su Er was too shocked to say: “The normal order is to keep clearing instances. If you survive, one day you’ll enter Deception, and then eventually face the dead-end instance.”
Su Er opened his mouth, wanting to stop him from continuing, but in the end chose silence.
Jing Heng sighed: “A surname Zhou, who hated rules, and couldn’t feel grief at his parents’ death…”
“Wudu.”
Su Er closed his eyes and spoke those two words himself.
In the dungeon world of Wudu, family affection was thin, everything revolved around strict rules, requiring everyone’s speech and actions to conform to a rigid standard. He still remembered the young man giving a speech by the roadside, proudly claiming that as a child he had refused to study and was beaten by his parents until one arm was broken.
And “Li” and “Zhou” just happened to be the two big surnames in the town.
Thinking of this, Su Er took a deep breath.
Like Xu He and Qu Qingming, in reality, he too had lived an opposite life. Before his second year of high school, his parents had loved him, his family was happy, and he wasn’t bound by those suffocating rules—people abided by the law instead.
“Your classmate must have used some method to disrupt the order, sending you directly into a dead-end instance right after the novice field.” Jing Heng said, “At that time, you were just a newcomer, with very low stats.”
According to instance mechanics, the game adjusted instance difficulty based on a player’s strength.
If the standard of measurement was ten, players who entered Deception were at least a seven or above. The dead-end instance’s difficulty could be many times higher than seven. Su Er was different—just out of the novice field, he was practically a blank slate, with at most a one in strength, which paradoxically gave him a natural advantage from the very beginning.
“Wudu was about rules, yet you were skilled at finding loopholes, and you had a stun gun as a lifesaving tool.”
Su Er chuckled: “Not to mention, at that time you were still my teammate.”
The heavy mood lightened a little. Jing Heng’s lips curved faintly: “The right time, the right place, and the right people—you had them all.”
His fingers brushed along the edge of his badge. Su Er let out a soft sigh: “That’s why the game didn’t hesitate to award achievement points, and why Hope City has no hope for me.”
His dead-end instance had already been safely overcome not long after the game first began.
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