Chapter 760: The Water Temperature Has Become Scalding!

Chapter 760: The Water Temperature Has Become Scalding!

Regarding this mode, Zhang Yi said he had already seen through everything.

He understood it too well.

Start by giving the player a bait—making them feel that finding a fragment was this easy, so wouldn't it be simple to meet the conditions with just a bit more searching?

If you actually think that way, you'll fall straight into Mr. Chen's trap.

Can a fragment passively handed over possibly be the same as one actively sought?

From the beginning until now, no monsters had even appeared, yet the fear was already overwhelming.

The dead silence, combined with the oppressive atmosphere, made one's heart race with anxiety.

And now, to search for fragments, having to delve into every corner of the Silent Hill town—wasn't that asking for trouble?

Clever as he was, he had already seen through it all.

But then, after checking the time, Zhang Yi felt as if he was starting to sweat.

It had already been nearly half an hour since the game started?

Let’s calculate what he had actually done in the game.

It seemed like all he'd done was trigger a segment of James’s inner monologue and background introduction upon arriving in Silent Hill, and incidentally learned about the town’s oddities and direction from that black-haired woman.

Other than that, he had simply been traveling!

Although, primarily because he was just too slow.

Although the game had a running function, Zhang Yi almost exclusively walked instead of ran.

Because in this environment of utter stillness, the sound of leather shoes stepping and heavy breathing, paired with the faint, almost imperceptible background melody, was suffocatingly uncomfortable.

Walking was slower, but still bearable.

Advancing bit by bit along the map, Zhang Yi suddenly stopped when he reached a place resembling a crossroads.

"Damn it! Blood! So much blood!"

Pools of blood were scattered across the road ahead, already coagulated into a dark red, stretching into the depths of the street around the corner.

Judging by the shape of the bloodstains, it was as if some creature had died, bled out, and then been dragged away.

Before Zhang Yi could speculate further, the monster’s earlier bellow echoed once more in his ears.

Turning toward the sound, he saw within the white mist a grotesquely twisted figure appear—then vanish.

He silently swallowed, the fleeting image of the monster still lingering in his mind.

It looked somewhat like a humanoid creature, but its walking posture and physique were completely unnatural.

Utterly bizarre.

"What the hell is this thing?!"

Zhang Yi’s heart pounded.

Even though earlier he’d casually said things like, "It’d be good if a monster showed up."

But when the monster actually appeared, the feeling was entirely different.

"So next, I should follow the blood trail, heading in the direction the monster disappeared?"

Judging from the map and the bloodstains on the ground, it was clearly a hint.

In a normal game flow, you’d definitely move forward in the direction the monster vanished.

But right now, Zhang Yi felt completely unnerved—just like Lord Ye’s love of dragons.

He’d been shouting for monsters to come, but now that one actually appeared, he was terrified.

After hesitating for a long time, Zhang Yi slowly began groping forward into the white mist.

The blood on the ground acted like signposts, guiding Zhang Yi’s path as he passed a corner intersection.

At that moment, a noise reached his ears.

‘Zi-zi-zi-zi…’

It sounded like electrical interference. The noise was coming from a construction zone.

On both sides were barbed wire, and directly ahead stood a wooden barricade, but there was a large hole just big enough for an adult to crawl through.

After crawling through, Zhang Yi discovered the source of the sound was a radio.

The environment had been deathly silent before, and Zhang Yi had hoped for some sound, even some monsters.

Now, everything he had wished for had appeared.

Footsteps and the sound of glass breaking echoed.

Looking into the shadows ahead, Zhang Yi shivered involuntarily.

Beyond the white mist, a monster was slowly approaching him in an incredibly twisted posture.

Externally, the creature was humanoid, but bizarrely, it had no facial features. Its upper body was covered in a rubber-like material, writhing unnaturally as it moved.

It also had no arms—or rather, its arms were bound within that rubbery substance.

This was the very same shadow that had vanished in the mist earlier. Zhang Yi recognized it instantly.

As the monster appeared, James in the game kept retreating until he slammed into the wooden barricade. He instinctively pulled out a wooden stick embedded with an iron nail.

Next, the game switched to a controllable interface for Zhang Yi.

"I can kill it!" Zhang Yi’s voice was even tinged with tearful joy.

The monster before him moved extremely slowly, comparable to the zombies in Resident Evil, and didn’t even have the zombies’ strong life energy.

Two whacks with the stick and the monster dropped dead, making Zhang Yi exhale in relief.

As everyone knows, fear stems from insufficient firepower. Since this monster was so easy to kill, Zhang Yi suddenly felt confident again.

At the same time, the radio beside him stopped emitting the ‘zi-zi’ static.

Instead, it began playing a series of fragmented sounds that seemed like Mary’s voice, though broken and unintelligible.

After exploring and finding nothing else, Zhang Yi took the radio and continued forward.

When he passed through the mist and reached another intersection, the radio emitted the ‘zi-zi’ static once more.

Simultaneously, the previous monster reappeared within the white mist—and not just one.

In a town that had previously been so dead silent, so many monsters now appeared.

"This… the water temperature seems… gradually becoming scalding."

Looking at the monsters around him, Zhang Yi’s big toe tensed slightly.

However, Zhang Yi also quickly noticed a characteristic: whenever a monster was nearby, the radio in his possession would emit ‘zi-zi’ static.

This made him both anxious and puzzled.

Because usually, horror games aim to suddenly shock the player, right?

But this radio was directly warning the player, “Monsters nearby—get ready mentally.”

But soon, Zhang Yi realized that even with mental preparation, it was meaningless.

In fact, after obtaining this warning radio, the fear didn’t lessen—it intensified.

Not from sudden fright, but from a growing sense of oppression, a paranoid unease.

Before, walking through this dead-silent world, faced with endless white fog, hearing only the protagonist’s breathing and footsteps, Zhang Yi had feared that a monster might suddenly appear and scare him.

Now, although he had the radio, which emitted noise whenever monsters were near, giving him time to prepare, that paranoid feeling remained.

Because Zhang Yi kept thinking: what if there was a scenario where the radio didn’t make a sound, and then a ghost suddenly popped out and scared him?

At first, he hadn’t felt it, but after playing for a while, an indescribable sense of oppression made Zhang Yi’s heart pound rapidly.

Treading carefully through the Silent Hill town, Zhang Yi found an apartment key on a corpse located in a corner.

Wandering the streets in dread and fear for what felt like ages, he finally located the apartment’s entrance.

However, upon entering the apartment, Zhang Yi instantly realized the saying “women are fickle” was inaccurate—because men are fickle too.

Earlier, while facing the eerie fog in the Silent Hill town, he had thought, “This is too oppressive. An environment as dark as Outlast would be easier to handle.”

Well, now he was in the apartment—wasn’t this exactly a dark environment?!

After fumbling around the lobby for a long time, he found a map and barely managed to determine his location.

Then, in Room 205 on the second floor, he found a flashlight.

But what alarmed Zhang Yi was that the moment he picked up the flashlight, the radio on his person began emitting ‘zi-zi’ static.

Then, on the ground, a creature made of two legs joined together—top and bottom—wobbled unsteadily to its feet.

Under the flashlight’s beam, the connection points looked bloody and raw, while the rest resembled mannequin legs.

Though, like the previous monster, it died after a few hits with the stick, its extremely grotesque appearance made Zhang Yi’s scalp tingle to the point of numbness.

"But at least I don’t have to search for batteries like in Outlast. A nuclear-powered flashlight—definitely worth it!"

After confirming the flashlight had no battery mechanic, Zhang Yi breathed a small sigh of relief.

With the flashlight, Zhang Yi continued exploring various rooms. He also discovered that these mannequin-like creatures were particularly sensitive to light—shining the flashlight on them immediately caused them to revive.

In other rooms of the apartment, Zhang Yi found a handgun, and in one room, he saw a man dead beside a television and a strange floor-standing clock.

When he reached the third floor, the path ahead was blocked by iron bars, with a glowing key lying on the floor.

Without thinking much, Zhang Yi controlled the character to go prone and reach his hand through the bars to grab the key.

But the next moment, a little girl suddenly burst out from a room, kicking the key far away.

As she ran deeper into the apartment, she glanced back at James, her face bearing an innocent smile and a mischievous expression: "Haha…"

‘Gulp.’

Watching the little girl disappear into the darkness, Zhang Yi swallowed hard.

If this were any other game and he encountered a troublemaking player, he’d definitely curse them out—after all, griefers in games are so annoying.

The troublemaking kid in New God of War could be excused since it was Kratos’s own son, but he still remembered those money-stealing troublemakers he’d met upon first arriving at Saint Denis in Red Dead Redemption.

But the key point was—this game was Silent Hill!

Although on the surface, this was just a playful little girl.

But with the corpse in the second-floor room, the mannequin creatures, and this dark setting, could a troublemaking kid here possibly be normal?!

Dark scenes, still dead silence, eerie creatures, and a little girl.

Though he was inside a game, Zhang Yi could almost hear the pounding of his own heart.

In that instant, he truly wanted to shut off the game and pull open the curtains to see the sunlight outside.

But then he thought of his birthday, and the look of surprise on Old Song’s face when he gave him that CDKEY.

At that thought, Zhang Yi felt the motivation to keep playing once again.

(End of Chapter) <>