Chapter 97
How much courage would it take to shoot your own head?
The question was quite complicated and would depend on the situation.
Despite knowing that this was a game, the “memory” of growing up would still be vivid.
How would you describe this feeling? Well, imagine this: you’ve been living a good life, then one day, you suddenly had the urge to question the authenticity of the world as there was an extra bit of memory added. Despite being fully confident that the newly added memory was the real memory and all the previous memories were fake. And now you had an idea that as long you as die, you could escape the game and return to the real world.
There was no pain.
It’s just like closing his eyes for a while.
Jiang Chen woke up from the “dream” again.
<7:37 pm>
At that moment, however, his hand was not holding a pen but rather a black revolver.
“Looks like you can’t escape the game through death… Make sense, if it’s that easy to escape then the easiest way would be to jump down from the window.” Jiang Chen let out a self-deprecating smile and glanced outside the window.
The pistol following him after death was a huge BUG.
Jiang Chen played with the gun in his hands and unloaded the magazine.
16 rounds—the magazine was full again, so this gun should also play a “role”. Although he didn’t know how it happened, it appeared that the bullets were being replenished after every reset of the game.
With the gun stuffed in his pocket, Jiang Chen opened the bedroom door, passed through the living room and headed towards the door.
It was already night time but there shouldn’t be no difference inside the game.
He pulled out his terminal and opened the map. The position marked by the triangle was gone, but he firmly remembered it.
The Xinpu Hospital in the northern district.
He put the terminal away and rushed to the direction of the subway.
<8:07 pm>
There were only a few pedestrians in the subway. Perhaps it was because the situation was a bit tense recently, everyone avoided traveling. After the rush hour, only few people could be seen in the subway. Sitting on a cold chair and waiting for the train to slowly accelerate, Jiang Chen sighed as he looked at the small TV on the wall.
The host was cracking jokes with his assistants and the audience was all laughing; he, however, couldn’t smile.
[If everything is fake, then what about the memory of these past 17 years?
Am I too deep into this?]
Jiang Chen shook his head and touched the gun in his pocket. The cold, metallic feeling gave him a trace of comfort.
Not only could he integrate into another world, but he even acquired another set of memory. Even after experiencing death a countless number of times, only seconds passed by in reality. Had the future of technology and science been developed to this extent?
Or rather had it already been terrifying to this point?
He somehow felt a little despondent at the moment and gave a wry smile.
He just wanted to end this bloody game, and then return the memory that wasn’t his back to the server.
CreaK!
The light suddenly went out without warning, and the carriage shook violently. As soon as it happened, Jiang Chen immediately reached out his hands and grabbed the handrail beside him.
Jiang Chen’s muscles stretched violently as the pain almost made him broke his teeth, but his hands grasping the handrail did not let go.
“Ah—!” The passengers, who didn’t keep their balance, began to fall as they smashed into the front of the train like thin paper.
PA!
Blood covered his line of sight.
Enduring his churning stomach, the forceful pulling almost made his eyes burst, and the veins on his arm were about the explode.
BOOM!
The force was so strong that eventually, Jiang Chen could not hold on anymore and fiercely crashed into heaps of dead body.
A trail of gruesome sparks flashed across the window. The train appeared to have a rear-end collision. It crashed into the rear of a preceding train and derailed with it.
Jiang Chen frantically scrambled to his feet. He dragged his dizzy head and hit the emergency door release button, however, the door failed to open.
[Has the emergency circuit been destroyed too?]
“Damn!”
He couldn’t think for long because if he delayed any longer, another train would have come from behind…
While shivering, he took out the terminal in pain. He pulled out the cord beside the emergency exit button and connected it to the terminal.
Fortunately, it was still functional.
After gaining access, Jiang Chen hurriedly pressed the release button and unlocked the access to the safety hammer through the direct connection.
Jiang Chen gritted his teeth as he took out the red safety hammer from the partition wall. He used his entire body’s strength to smash the window.
A layer of white mist along the hammer spread from the point of impact.
Another swing.
CRUSH!
The double-pane window was smashed into pieces as white mist burst forth.
Just as Jiang Chen was about to climb out of the window, he felt a hand grabbed his leg. He turned around and saw a woman with dreadful face and pale, white eyes, and then she opened her badly mutilated mouth.
He swung his hammer and smashed the woman’s head into pieces.
[Fu*k? Zombies?]
“This time it’s a biochemical plot.” It appeared that the plot that Secret Guardian could trigger was not limited to NATO invasion.
There was no time to think as Jiang Chen noticed that there were some limbs twitching in the heap of bloody corpse. He carried the safety hammer in his hand, jumped out of the window, rolled on the ground, and climbed onto the platform on the other side.
SCREECH!
From afar came a screeching sound; it was another train!
Jiang Chen desperately ran 100 meters outside the underground tunnel exit. Almost as soon as he had just turned into the groove on the wall of the tunnel, there was another explosion behind him. The broken parts left screeching noise on the concrete wall. The train twisted into a ball as the door plate broke off and embedded into the wall not far away behind Jiang Chen.
Jiang Cheng suppressed the violent throbbing of his heart. He pulled the sliding door with all his strength, but the door didn’t budge.
Another swing.
The door didn’t break, but the concrete holding the door was shattered by his brute force.
Jiang Chen pushed the door down and followed the zigzag shaped stairs and quickly ran outside. When he opened the security door and stepped on the ground, the scene that greeted him stunned him.
Like a scene straight from an apocalypse.
The entire street was in mayhem: cars collided into each other or exploded or broke down on the road. The entire area was a mess.
Horrified screams came one after another. People fought…or more accurately, zombies were hunting the fleeing humans. The pairs of pale, white eyes were much more frightening under the light.
Occasionally, there were people who would smash the window open and frantically jump out, but their fate was either to fall to their death or to be devoured by the zombies below.
“Hungry—”
Jiang Chen felt a sudden chill on his back as he turned around and found a zombie was heading towards him.
He didn’t think as he swung the hammer, then the zombie’s head flew out like a golf ball.
Suppressing the nausea, Jiang Chen hurriedly took out the map to verify his location. He was only two streets north of the hospital. Fortunately, the train collision was close to the destination.
After confirming his location, he immediately ran to the other side of the street.
Zombies were stronger during night time. The night devoid of UV lights couldn’t restrict its fighting prowess.
Of course, these zombies were still within the first stage of mutation. The useless fat was still attached to the body. In a few years time, once the zombies metamorphosed the body fats into dense muscles, their speed would be more than double.
However, there was no use talking about this as even “fresh” zombies would be impossible to defeat once they banded together. Jiang Chen smashed another zombie in front of him before jumping on top of the car. Before he got surrounded by the zombies, he hopped on another car three meters away.
Jiang Chen’s shoes left a huge dent on the roof. Not stopping to take a look, he then landed on another vehicle.
With the power of <Fury>, the distance was nothing to him, and by hopping on the vehicles, he narrowly escaped from the zombie-infested street.
His feet landed heavily on the concrete ground before the howling zombies could swarm around him. His hammer swung and killed off two zombies as he desperately ran to the direction of the hospital.
100 meters!
20 meters!
He darted to the stairs in front of the door. The hall was infested with zombies. Fortunately, it was night time so there weren’t many people in the hallway. With a couple of dim lights, he could roughly make out the situation inside the hall. There were few women in nurse clothes rushing towards him with gaping bloody mouth.
Jiang Chen gritted his teeth as he motioned his already sore arm muscles to make another hit. It shattered the zombies into pieces; however, another zombie rushed towards him from the side and attacked him.
“Fu*k! Ah…”
His left arm was firmly bitten. It was the first time that he had been made keenly aware of the danger of zombies.
The zombies were beginning to circle him. Jiang Chen kicked the zombies away and took out the revolver.
BANG!
The bullet penetrated the zombies head.
BANG!
Jiang Chen’s facial muscles twisted because of the pain in his left arm, but he resisted the pain while shooting with his right hand and scrambling towards the safety hammer.
He put the pistol in his pocket and picked up the safety hammer from the ground. He glanced at the fallen zombies on the floor as he spat fiercely on the ground, and then…
Jiang Chen was momentarily lost.
He’s at the hospital but what now?