Underworld Player

In many ways, the corpse that lay before Bai Zhi was the most wretched thing imaginable.

The eyes, mouth and ears had all been sewn tightly shut, while the bottom half of the body had been completely severed. The steel wires that bound the corpses limbs cut deep into the bone, which made gave the whole thing an unspeakably macabre look...

From any angle, this was a terrifying vision, guaranteed to give anyone nightmares upon seeing it. Even Traveler and Viridescent were loath to look in its direction.

"So, did you find any clues on the body?"

Holding his nose with one hand, Traveler limped his way over to Bai Zhi, his injuries clearly hampering his movement.

"Dead men don't wag their tongues, but a qualified coroner might tease out a corpse's final thoughts... All I can say is, what I'm seeing doesn't add up to anything good."

Bai Zhi mumbled, narrowing his eyes.

"When Temperance and I were trapped by the 'Sketchy Stairwell' entity, you guys were already facing off against the 'Ghostwall' entity, am I right?"

Traveler nodded. "Indeed. We know that Douchey,SoWhat was alive at the time. From my analysis of the clues, I believe this body was left behind from the last reload."

If even Temperance Gentleheart could determine the true nature of the quest based on the name and some prompting from Bai Zhi, so too could Traveler, and more easily besides, what with the body as proof before him.

"The type of quest we got this time is..."

"Save and Reload, right?" said Bai Zhi

Peeling off the latex gloves, he tossed them next to the body and stood up.

"Once a certain number of us Players end up dead, all of us will automatically be reloaded so we can start over."

"Exactly, took the words right out of my mouth."

Traveler nodded firmly.

"In fact, we've already been reloaded once, without realizing it. This doesn't bode well."

Traveler grimaced as he looked down at the body.

"I had thought that Players gradually turned into supernatural entities over time, judging by Douchey,SoWhat's case, but now I see that I was jumping to conclusions out of my pain and exhaustion... The true meaning behind the lack of time limit in this quest is far more terrifying than I thought."

"Terrifying? What do you mean?"

Temperance Gentleheart could not help reacting to Traveler's words.

"Isn't no time limit a good thing? Besides, if we can reload as many times as needed, we never really die, we just get reloaded... Isn't this a kind of advantage for us? We can take as long as we need..."

Reloading is the most insidious trap... After listening to everything we've said, this is the conclusion you arrived at?

Bai Zhi rolled his eyes derisively.

"Dumbasses shouldn't be running their mouths..."

"You...!"

"Indeed, the reloading is the biggest trap we have to avoid." Traveler sighed as he glanced at Bai Zhi. "If we just hope to break through by reloading, ultimately... we will be trapped in an endless cycle."

"Yep, so we gotta get going. Chop-chop!" said Bai Zhi, pointedly ignoring the infuriated glare from a certain young girl as he clapped his hands.

"The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry, so we'd better hurry and find the so-called survivors from our quest objective. The longer we take on this quest, the more likely we are to run into unexpected setbacks."

Bai Zhi narrowed his eyes at the burnt corpse again.

The moment he set eyes on it, he understood that the plan he had tried to set in motion during the last reload had completely fallen through—it was no use looking for the traitor in the party now.

Why did he intentionally cause the deaths of everyone else in the team during the last reload? Besides bringing the others back, the main reason for doing so had been to prevent the traitor from realizing that they were being reloaded, then take advantage of their ignorance to catch them out. But if the dead bodies from previous reloads were showing up, it rendered his plan useless. Nonetheless, thanks to that, he finally understood the true difficulty of this challenge.

On the surface, it would seem that the lack of time limit and the ability to revive from death by reloading made this quest less dangerous than most. However, with each reload, the supernatural entities formed from the dead bodies of the fallen Players during the last reload would accumulate in number, eventually cornering them into an endless loop of despair.

This was what the "Life's Hard Disk" quest was really about.

If the team of Players was strong enough, they would naturally avoid triggering a reload and simply clear the two quest objectives with no trouble. In reality, due to the number of Players in the team and their varying levels of competence, the chance of this happening was quite low, and at least one reload was almost guaranteed.

Normally, this was how things would unfold: after the first reload, the slightly more intelligent among the survivors would notice the lost items in their inventory and realize how the quest really worked, but if, having learned this, they treated the reload as a failsafe option, then they were headed for a truly tragic end.

If they triggered another reload, any Players who died in the last reload would become new, much deadlier supernatural entities this time around—after all, the Ghostwall and the Vampire Corpse that Traveler's and Iron Blood's squad had encountered, respectively, were many times more deadly than the strange stairwell that had trapped Bai Zhi and Temperance Gentleheart.

Thus, with the second reload, it was only a matter of time before the quest would spiral into a vicious cycle. On the third, fourth and fifth reload... the Players would find themselves in terrifying levels of danger.

Such was the knowledge that Bai Zhi had gleaned from the corpse before him, as well as the clues he had gathered before—the true nature of this quest.