Absolute Death Game

Xiao Buli took step by step forward, and the scene in the room came into full view. Although the underground base had been abandoned for decades, due to the damp cold underground and the excellent sealing, there wasn't a large accumulation of dust. Consequently, the glass window before him was surprisingly clear. The lights in the room had been turned on as soon as Qin Shimoon had entered, giving Xiao Buli an extremely broad view. Thus, the hellish scene appeared even more vivid and astonishing. Seeing all this, Xiao Buli felt as if a heavy punch had struck him in the chest. But this blow didn't hit his body, it hit his nerves fiercely.

The space behind the glass window wasn't large, only about thirty to forty square meters. In this cramped room, several dozen bodies—nearly reduced to skeletons due to decay—were either sitting, standing, or sprawling. They still wore their original clothes, recognizable as the uniform grey-green cloth pants and shirts, resembling sleepwear or patient gowns, but in Xiao Buli's eyes, they looked more like prison uniforms. Some people's clothes were torn and tattered, barely hanging onto their remains.

All the people were in a state of dying struggle. Some were tearing at their own clothes, others seemed to be scratching their own bodies. What Xiao Buli found most horrifying was one body facing the wall, hands in front, fingers hooked into the wall, dug in deep. His body was twisted, and through the ripped rags that once were clothes, one could clearly see his spine twisted into an S-shape that would be difficult for a human to achieve. It was imaginable that he must have been suffering intense agony. Through the glass, Xiao Buli seemed to see their dying struggles and hear their piercing howls.

"How could this be?" Xiao Buli stood there stunned for a while before he spoke softly, as if muttering to himself, his voice inevitably hoarse.

"This might be the true face of Case 113. Judging by their state of death, it should be poison gas. They were herded into this room and then executed by poison gas," Qin Shimoon turned her head to look at Xiao Buli and said seriously.

"Hmm," Xiao Buli responded verbally, but his heart was not as calm as he appeared. Although since he started playing this game, killing in both reality and the game didn't give Xiao Buli any psychological burden, these people in front of him kept tugging at his nerves. From the moment he read that line on the document until now, seeing their tragic state, he couldn't understand why but felt like there was a heavy stone lodged in his heart.

"Let's check the other rooms," Xiao Buli, not wishing to see anymore, turned and left.

Qin Shimoon followed him, and the two headed towards the second room. They could tell without entering that the second room was likely the control room for a supercomputer, with a huge bulletproof glass window next to the door. It seemed the experimenters observed the subjects through this window.

Xiao Buli grabbed the doorknob and turned, but it wouldn't budge. He turned to look at Qin Shimoon, who shrugged at him, indicating she didn't know the situation either. Xiao Buli thought she knew how to open the doors since she had entered the first room, but it seemed that the door to the first room was already open.

With this in mind, Xiao Buli drew his sword, and with a single slash, he destroyed the lock, and it fell to the ground with a sound. He pushed the heavy door, increasing his strength, and it slowly opened. A foul smell emanated out, causing Xiao Buli to retch.

After waiting for a while to acclimate, Xiao Buli then stepped inside, with Qin Shimoon hurriedly following. The light outside shone through the glass window, and Xiao Buli saw several shadows lying haphazardly inside. With the lights on, just as he suspected, there were several bodies. The closest one was by the door, which explained the difficulty in pushing it open. Their lab coats indicated they were staff members or scientists participating in the experiments.

Unlike the gas chamber, these people had large penetrating wounds on their bodies. One man's neck was askew, the broken bones indicating his neck had likely been chopped by a blade. The others had either chaotic chops to their chest bones or had been forcefully twisted--their necks or limbs broken. Given the dried dark stains on the ground, the machines, and clothes, blood must have splattered everywhere in the room at the time. Xiao Buli, trying to suppress the urge to vomit from the stench, pushed open another door inside the lab.
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Following him, Qin Shimoon covered her nose and occasionally used her foot to poke the bodies nearby, checking their name badges.

"There's another one here," Xiao Buli said, pushing open the door, only to find the air quality had not improved; the nauseating stench still lingered inside. Yet, different from the other room, there was an experiment bed set up, very similar to the ones in the main hall. However, this bed had a body on it.

The body was also dressed in a large lab coat, unbuttoned to reveal an old-fashioned military uniform underneath. The body lay straight on the bed, with only the right hand hanging down the side, matching a revolver that had fallen to the floor. It looked like the person had lain here and committed suicide by gunshot.

When Qin Shimoon heard Xiao Buli's summoning, she entered. From afar, she glanced at the body on the bed, her face suddenly jolted, and she quickly walked over to the body, searching it frantically. Although Xiao Buli had recently lost his earlier fear of personal matters, he still preferred to avoid corpses if possible, especially rotting ones—he'd simply observe from a distance. Watching Qin Shimoon's fearless approach, he was shocked to the point of his jaw nearly dropping, admiring her courage deeply.

Suddenly, Xiao Buli could clearly see Qin Shimoon's body shudder. Thinking, "Serves you right, searching so recklessly, and now you're scared," he suspected she saw something disgustingly creepy like corpse maggots. Curious and unobtrusively, he moved closer to see for himself.

Upon looking, he, too, froze on the spot.

Qin Shimoon held a work ID in her hand, obviously just retrieved from the corpse, with three black characters emblazoned in the name column: Huo Guangxiong.

"Is he General Huo?" Xiao Buli exclaimed in surprise.

Qin Shimoon's hand shook slightly as she held the work ID. Although the man in her dreams had been repeating this message to her, confirming it now still shocked her immensely.

The organization she had always worked for, the Ancestral Dragon Group, and Huo Guangxiong, whom she had always been loyal to, was now dead.

"Oh, I see. This work card must have been picked up or stolen by him," Xiao Buli speculated, as the identity of the skeleton couldn't be discerned, prompting the most logical assumption in his moment of shock.

"Look at his military uniform," Qin Shimoon said, regaining her composure as she spoke to Xiao Buli.

Military uniform? The white lab coat on the corpse had been pushed aside by Qin Shimoon's earlier search, revealing a gray-green army uniform underneath with three red lines forming a pentagonal star on the shoulder.

General, if there was anyone in this base who could hold such a rank, it would likely only be Huo Guangxiong. Moreover, this negated Xiao Buli's initial guess that the man had stolen Huo Guangxiong's identity card. If it were conceivable that he stole Huo Guangxiong's identity card, the act of wearing Huo's military uniform and then committing suicide in a sealed room clearly deviated from normal logic.

Back then, everyone had seen Huo Guangxiong's face, so even if he stole Huo's clothes, he couldn't possibly successfully disguise himself. Therefore, the person who had died on this bed was very likely Huo Guangxiong himself.

That raised a question, as Qin Shimoon had conversed with an aged Huo Guangxiong through a computer screen on the base. Thinking of the person on the other side of that conversation, Xiao Buli glanced at Qin Shimoon, who was clearly having an even harder time accepting this reality.

"Huo Guangxiong is dead?" Xiao Buli asked hesitantly.

"It appears so now," Qin Shimoon replied, her face no longer showing the initial shock and panic as she returned to calm.

"Hmm, I wonder what exactly happened back then that led these people to die so tragically," Xiao Buli mused. "Let's check the other rooms," he suggested, taking the lead to walk out.

The two went through each room on the lower level. It seemed that Huo had divided the rooms into a living area on the top and a working area on the bottom, the core part of the latter being the computer in the central hall, while the rest included a processing room (essentially an execution room), an operations room, and two rooms that looked like interrogation rooms. Qin Shimoon confirmed Xiao Buli's guess, as the Dragon Group's base had similar inquiry rooms to understand players' progress in the game and whether they exhibited symptoms of Soul Departure Syndrome. What puzzled Xiao Buli was that the space on the entire lower level was noticeably smaller than the floor above, with several rooms clustered together, occupying about half of the arc. The other half of the lower level had no room distribution and was just a bare rock wall. They speculated that the infrastructure within the base had been sufficient at the time, so there was no need to waste labor on further excavation, or there could be other reasons that are now unknown.

"Alright, it looks like this base is safe and has all utilities, including water and electricity. All we have to do now is bring in enough food," Xiao Buli said lightly to Qin Shimoon after having almost fully explored the base. Since finding the base was a tentative mission, they couldn't carry a lot of supplies. Thus, aside from essential water and food, Xiao Buli only packed a laptop. Initially, they had been prepared to bring a diesel generator over, thinking there might be no electricity, but now that was resolved. Since there was power, everything else was much easier. Xiao Buli planned to leave the base to purchase daily necessities.

Qin Shimoon gave a rare gentle smile, "Yes, no more dodging and hiding in the future. Oh, we haven't checked the storage behind the kitchen yet. Maybe there's still food stored there."

"Uh, if there is, do you think it would still be edible after several decades?" Xiao Buli questioned Qin Shimoon's suggestion, feeling it was far-fetched.

(To be continued. If you like this work, you're welcome to vote for it with recommendation tickets and monthly votes at Qidian (qidian.com). Your support is my greatest motivation. Mobile users please visit m.qidian.com to read.)