Chapter 78

Manager Zhu

You Jiu trusted his own eyes. The NPC standing outside room four was unmistakably the secretary from the Chen Garden instance.

But NPCs from different instances couldn't cross over. That wasn't how it worked.

Unless — both Chen Garden and a hospital were locations prone to supernatural events, making the instance field unstable enough that he'd been able to slip through?

He turned and found Curly Hair, went over, and said quietly: "Does the person outside room four look familiar to you?"

"Does he?" Curly Hair was scrubbing grout with a small brush, head down. "Not to me."

"You haven't even looked." You Jiu pressed a hand over the brush to stop it. He kept his voice low and controlled. "I'm not joking. He's an NPC from the Chen Garden instance."

Curly Hair let go of the brush. She looked at him with a complicated expression.

What answer was he hoping for?

You Jiu was different from Wu-ge and the others. Wu-ge and his circle still carried a wary, resistant attitude toward the Main God's system. You Jiu had long since learned to navigate instance worlds with ease — always smiling, and thoroughly without sentiment. He didn't trust anyone. His own interests came first. She wasn't confident she could bring someone like that into their coalition.

"You clearly know something." You Jiu handed the brush back. "Give me something, Curly Hair."

He was adaptable when it served him.

"Xiao Juan." A bodyguard passed and produced a box of cake from a bag, holding it out to her. "For you."

You Jiu looked at the bodyguard. Looked at the cake. Looked back at Curly Hair's face.

"Thank you." She took it, acutely aware that every single bodyguard on Chao Musheng's team apparently knew who she was, and felt her face go red.

Wretched Main God. It had stripped away every last shred of her dignity in this world.

When the bodyguard was gone, You Jiu picked up the brush again and began doing her section for her, working the grout with a smile. "How's this technique, Curly Hair?"

Curly Hair: "Ha."

The so-called friendships between players. The performance of it never failed to amuse her.

You Jiu caught the sardonic note in that sound and didn't particularly care. His focus was the fifty-times reward.

*

Qi Shi finished with the table and sofa, switched to a floor-specific cloth, and crouched down to wipe the ground.

"You don't need to scrub it that thoroughly — people will walk through and dirty it again anyway." Chao Musheng had noticed the silent cleaning staff member, bent awkwardly at the waist. "That posture can't be comfortable."

Xu Chenzhu glanced back at the low-profile cleaner in the corner, then fastened the top button on Chao Musheng's hospital gown.

Qi Shi looked at the NPC on the hospital bed. Possibly because this particular NPC was so unusually good-looking — even ill, his eyes were clear and alert — being looked at by those eyes produced an inexplicable sensation in Qi Shi's chest. Something like reassurance.

He registered what he was feeling and felt a cold jolt.

This NPC could influence a player's mental state?

"Thank you, sir." His voice came out rough. He collected all the room's garbage in one sweep and retreated from room four at something close to a run.

He threw out the bags, washed his hands, and came back to the break room to find it smelling of sweet cake.

"What happened to you?" Curly Hair looked up from her slice. Qi Shi's expression was wrong. "Cake?"

The box was large. She'd cut it in two.

"Cake?" Qi Shi pulled off his cap. "Where did you get cake?"

"Someone gave it to me. It's good." She held out the second half. "Try it?"

"Thanks." He took it with minimal hesitation and ate it.

Ding — delicious cake consumed. HP +2.

"You weren't worried I'd trick you?" Curly Hair hadn't expected Qi Shi to eat without any apparent suspicion.

"No." He finished quickly and then said: "I have a friend who was in the same instance as you once."

Curly Hair raised an eyebrow.

"She said you don't go out of your way to harm other players." Thinking of the HP-restoring food Curly Hair had just shared with him, Qi Shi added: "The patient in room four has issues. You should keep your guard up around him."

The patient in room four was her Xiao Chao.

Curly Hair stared at Qi Shi for a long moment. "What did he do?"

"He has a kind of charm that erodes players' judgment." Qi Shi glanced at her — even he had nearly been affected, and he was male. He didn't say the part about her being the opposite gender.

Curly Hair opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again, and after a long internal struggle couldn't hold it back: "The food at lunch today, and the cake just now — that was sent to us by the patient in room four."

"Shi-ge." She looked at him. "Is there any possibility that the patient in room four is just... genuinely like this? That this is just what he's like?"

The two players who'd been out mopping came back as Curly Hair finished speaking.

They'd heard the last part. Their expressions went to immediate alarm.

We said it. We said from the beginning: you don't eat things from NPCs. Look at this — manifestation of consequences, and fast.

What kind of sane player finds an instance world compelling?

Curly Hair and Qi Shi looked at them. They looked away, turned, and left the break room.

Years of experience. When players start losing it, you get distance.

"You've never even seen what he looks like clearly — how do you know so much about him?" Something was nagging at Qi Shi. She'd eaten her lunch today without hesitation. She'd been familiar with the restaurant branding on the box.

From a player's perspective, her trust toward this world's NPCs was excessive. They'd barely been in the instance — and Curly Hair was not a newcomer who didn't know better.

Everything she was doing ran counter to normal player behavior.

"He arrived at the hospital today and I saw his face then." Curly Hair knotted the garbage bag and dropped the box in the bin. "You ate the food he had sent, and rather than any negative effect, it restored your HP. That alone is enough to know what kind of person he is."

She picked up the bag and left. The break room still smelled of cake. Qi Shi stood in the middle of the room, motionless.

From the moment he'd entered this instance, something had felt wrong. That feeling was much stronger now.

*

At six, the director brought all five of them to the hospital canteen for the one-hour dinner break.

"The canteen serves three meals. You're hospital staff — the prices are low."

Curly Hair looked at the cooked dishes section. Everything was pale in color and did not look especially appetizing.

"Take what you'll eat — don't waste food." The director carried his own tray. "You can bring your own container if you don't like the hospital's trays."

The director moved through the line with no trace of culinary enthusiasm — the expression of a man eating purely from biological necessity.

Curly Hair understood that expression the moment she swallowed her first mouthful of the stir-fried winter melon.

Because it tasted even blander than it looked.

She thought of the employee cafeteria at Kunlun — the food, the company, Manager Zhu treating her as someone worth developing.

Those had been good days.

After dinner, with thirty minutes remaining before their shift, the players wanted to use the time to learn the hospital layout.

The five of them stood in the main lobby, eyes moving between the medical navigation robots drifting past and the large 3D route maps on the walls, slightly lost.

Hospital instance. Shouldn't there be peeling walls? Rusted window frames? Cobwebs in the doorways? Dark corridors?

Why were the ceilings this bright? Why were the signs this clear? Why were there robots?

"Hey — waitstaff." A man thick with cigarette smell walked over to them. "Which way to surgery?"

"We're the hospital's cleaning staff," one of the players said. "Not waitstaff."

What hotel had waitstaff?

"Cleaners are service staff." The man was unimpressed by the distinction. He coughed a few times. "Terrible customer service in this hospital."

He complained his way off down the hall.

The player: "Instance scripts are getting weirder. What kind of local calls hospital staff 'waitstaff'?"

Curly Hair laughed quietly. "Not weird at all. Not even a little."

It would be strange in an instance. In the real world, it was extremely normal.

"The doctors here don't know what they're doing — I know a physician, been in the family for generations—"

A wiry old man had worked his way into the queue, whispering grievances about the medical profession. A security guard in uniform stood nearby with a megaphone on loop: beware of hospital touts, protect yourself from scams.

"That's normal too?" A player pointed at the scene and looked at Curly Hair.

Which legitimate hospital instance looked like this?

"Excuse me." A uniformed police officer approached, carrying a thick stack of leaflets. "Fraud prevention information — would you like to take one?"

"Safe practices tip sheet for everyone—"

"That's also normal?"

"Completely." Curly Hair walked out of the outpatient building. Outside was a wide plaza, pedestrians moving at their own speeds, each wearing their own private expression — some glad, some grieved. Every one of them fully occupied with their own life.

That was what a real world looked like.

"Xiao Juan?" A somewhat heavyset man was standing not far away, a bag of medicine in his hand, staring at Curly Hair with the intensity of someone who had looked once and needed to look again. He walked over in disbelief, eyes fixed on the two characters 保潔 — cleaning staff — on the front of her uniform. His eyes looked in danger of departing his face.

"You're working as a hospital cleaner?!"

Manager Zhu was baffled. Furious. Deeply, personally wounded. What had he done wrong?

Why would Wang Xiaojuan rather clean hospital floors than work at Kunlun?

Was he really that inadequate as a manager?

"Manager Zhu?!" Curly Hair looked at the extremely agitated Manager Zhu in front of her and felt her skull ring.

The world was so large. Why was she the one this kept happening to?

"Very kind of you to still remember me." Manager Zhu's tone carried the particular acid of the genuinely offended. "I'm honored."

Curly Hair: "..."

Wretched Main God. You absolute piece of work.

Wang Xiaojuan had held her head high her whole life. This was where it finally snapped.