Chapter 184: Zombie Siege Practice (Twenty-one)
Although both the cafeteria and the infirmary hold mysterious injections, their natures are completely different.
The former is conducting a cult ritual, while the latter is seriously tinkering with viruses, which makes it hard not to think of a laboratory.
The thin man with glasses trembled his lips twice. He wanted to change the subject, but suddenly he felt a chill on his head. He raised his eyes tremblingly and saw a black shovel hanging above his head.
Zheng Wanqing shook the shovel impatiently: "Why are you looking at me? Answer the question."
“…Yes, it does matter.”
He closed his mouth and admitted it resignedly.
——But to be more precise, they were related in the past.
Faced with the absolute suppression of strength, they had no room for resistance and soon spilled the beans, telling everything.
It turns out that these people were originally members of the school laboratory.
But after the virus broke out, they disagreed with other laboratory members due to ideological differences, so they left in anger and opened a student base in the infirmary.
Seeing him hesitant, Tang Xin Jue directly asked the key point: "What ideological differences?"
"That's right..." The man with glasses showed a guilty look on his face. "We feel that the laboratory's attitude towards the virus is too conservative, which is not conducive to the rapid development of antidotes and vaccines. So we want to, um, take another approach..."
Tang Xin Jue: "Tell the truth."
The man with glasses drooped his head. "They want to put all their resources into developing an antidote. We think it's a waste. We want to focus on the virus's own uses, explore its human activity, and then research an antidote at the same time."
Guo Guo was a little confused: "Then when you come up with the antidote, the whole school can be wiped out in two rounds!"
The man with glasses lowered his head even more: "Actually, it's not that we don't want to save you, we just have a bit of an evasive mentality."
"Escape from what?"
"Because, the virus was leaked by us..."
“…???”
Guo Guo was speechless. "Do you want to listen to what you're saying? Because you leaked the virus, you don't want to face reality, and then you stop the laboratory from researching the antidote?"
It's amazing that this master of logic didn't go to work at the radio station and exploit loopholes in the rules. The student union is really blind and missed out on such a talented person.
Zheng Wanqing said sympathetically, "You should be thankful that I'm up there, thankful that my roommate is next to me, and thankful that your position is not good enough to just chop directly."
If Zhang You hadn't stopped her, she would have wanted to kill all these things with a knife!
The five former laboratory members and current organizers of the shell stronghold were like daylilies hit by frost. They had completely lost the arrogance that allowed them to bully others and were now frowning as they were beaten and scolded.
Before the last ray of light faded away at dusk, Tang Xin Jue spoke:
"If I ask you to contact the people in the lab now, can you still do it?"
"no!"
All five of them reacted greatly, looking up in horror: "We are traitors now. If we take the initiative to go find them, we will definitely be killed!"
"Maybe not." Tang Xinjue shook his head. "After all, you still have the friendship of colleagues. Will they treat you so cruelly because of the friendship we shared in past research?"
"But we're different." She smiled. "We can do it now without any psychological pressure."
To the left and to the right were five dead people: "..."
The man with glasses made a final effort: "I, I think I need to think about it again."
Unexpectedly, the four members of 606 agreed readily: "Then you should think about it carefully tonight, and see you tomorrow morning."
After saying that, the four of them left immediately, and the empty medical building was suddenly left with only the five tied people.
It wasn't long before they regretted it.
As night falls, zombies gather. However, this time there is no safe house on the third floor, no dozens or hundreds of shields and research subjects, and no sense of security brought by experimental drugs.
Only hunger, calf cramps, and the scratching and roaring sounds of zombies two meters away will undoubtedly accompany them throughout the long night.
That night, before going to bed, everyone in 606 tied all the supplies they could carry to their bodies.
After experiencing a copy of the game being "transferred in a dream" without any warning, no one wants to gamble their safety for the night on the conscience of the copy.
Yu Wei, who was forced to wear snacks, asked: "?"
Why did everyone look so alarmed? Did they have a habit of sleepwalking in the middle of the night? But I didn't have any of that.
But when midnight actually arrived, she immediately realized that it didn't matter whether she sleepwalked or not.
Died of laughter, couldn't sleep at all.
After midnight, the pounding and roaring in the corridor became more intense and terrifying than ever before. Besides the meaningless howling of the zombies, she actually heard more and more whispers and murmurs.
Those voices were like children learning to speak, piecing together syllables bit by bit, from meaningless words to phrases, and then to broken sentences... It made Yu Wei's hair stand on end.
But the most terrifying thing is that even in such a gloomy environment outside, she is the only one awake in the dormitory?
Even the person she was sleeping with, Guo Guo, who was obviously the most timid person in the dormitory, was sleeping soundly - the loud noise of the door almost breaking seemed to have no effect on him, and he even turned over.
In the darkness, Yu Wei couldn't see Guo Guo's frown, so she could only quietly tear open the bag of snacks. While eating snacks to reduce her fear, she thought about how she could die peacefully if the dormitory was attacked by zombies.
She didn't know how much time had passed until the sky started to turn white and the light from the window began to shine into the dormitory. She felt a little sleepy and slowly fell asleep.
Just as Yu Wei fell asleep, Guo Guo suddenly opened his eyes and woke up from his dream!
…
Guo Guo saw the sacrifice again.
Since entering this instance, all her hallucinations have been fixed on the same scene. However, each time, the scene becomes clearer, and the face of the "sacrifice" becomes clearer.
But this time, as she slowly approached the ground from the high altitude overlooking the scene, the last zombie face that came into view was extremely familiar:
That's Yu Wei's face!
But when she looked closely, Yu Wei's eyes were not closed like the other corpses, but her dark pupils were open and she smiled at her.
The moment he saw the smile, Guo Guo's heart trembled and he was immediately awakened from the hallucination.
My consciousness returned to the familiar bed, but the goose bumps on my body lingered for a long time.
The East Gate Canteen stronghold was destroyed, and almost half of the organizers were gone. The future predicted by the hallucination had been changed, so why did she keep seeing this scene over and over again?
Guo Guo couldn't figure it out. Just as she was hesitating whether to continue dreaming, Yu Wei's voice suddenly rang out beside her:
"Potato chips... hehe..."
Yu Wei turned over in her sleep.
…No matter how you look at it, it’s hard to connect the current Yu Wei with the sacrificial victims in the dream.
Guo Guo decided to get up and tell Tang Xinjue what happened.
As the sky gradually brightened, only a few zombies remained outside, banging on the door. In the dim light, Guo Guo caught a glimpse of the broken chain at the door.
——!!!
"Two of them are broken, but the door lock is still there."
Tang Xinjue's voice suddenly came from above. Guo Guo looked up with a start, only to see a familiar figure sitting on the bed opposite, with no sign of fatigue on his face.
After hearing Guo Guo's hallucination, Tang Xinjue was not surprised.
"Perhaps you have ever considered that the phantom you saw might not be the future or the present, but a projection of the past?"
Guo Guo was stunned: "Go over there?"
She suddenly remembered the conversations she heard among the organizers while she was disguised in the East Gate cafeteria.
[…we’ve done this countless times in simulations]
There is no way we can fail...
Even without the blessing of psychic powers, Tang Xinjue seemed to be able to see through her thoughts: "There are also contents in the experimental records from earlier."
[Experiment 091 …]
[Experimental cycle...recovery begins...]
The two pieces of information intersected and collided, and Guo Guo's mind lit up: "This is a copy that has been looped, no, a simulated loop!"
Before they arrived, this instance might have already had an "ending," which was the scene in her hallucination. That was why she kept dreaming about that point over and over again—because it had actually existed at some point in the past.
"Or perhaps we can say that what we are in now is just one of the experimental cycles."
Tang Xinjue looked out the window. The campus, slowly waking up in the morning light, was framed within the floor-to-ceiling windows, a scene both real and unfamiliar.
"Is this what you wanted us to know?"
She spoke softly, her voice hanging in the air, and it was unknown who she was talking to.
Before the sun rose completely, several "uninvited guests" broke into the silent medical building.
After just one night, the stubbornness of the five organizers was worn away without a trace, and they were begging the four people from 606 to untie them.
"I know, I know how to contact the lab as quickly as possible!"
The man with glasses shouted as he was dying.
Seeing the four people looking at him, he quickly opened his dry mouth and said, "Here, give me some water."
Tang Xinjue pulled out the toilet plunger, pressed the button, and the rubber head began to squirt water out.
Man with glasses: "...Is this water for people to drink?"
Tang Xin Jue smiled and said, "It's definitely not for people to drink."
As soon as the words came out of his mouth, the toilet plunger smashed down against the stair railing, breaking the sturdy solid wood stairs in an instant, and the neat cut was facing the man with glasses' ear.
The man with glasses no longer felt thirsty.
He blurted out with trembling lips: "Find the tallest dormitory building! The laboratory has installed the equipment on the roof of that building!"
The others nodded frantically: "As long as we find the equipment, we will have a way to contact them. Wuwuwu... Don't tie us up here, the zombies will really get in!"
As if they were afraid that Tang Xinjue and the others wouldn't believe them, they emphasized it a second time with tearful eyes:
"If the virus successfully completes its fifth round of mutation in just one day, no door will be able to stop it! We will all die!"
