Chapter 187: Sunshine Sanatorium Basement Level 2 (Patreon)

A key and a schedule.

[Ghost item: Master Key]

[Effect: Can open 99% of the doors inside Sunshine Sanatorium, except for the 'Director's Office.' Each use drains a small amount of the player's mental strength.]

A good find.

Shido Makoto's eyes lit up.

With this, their freedom of movement inside the sanatorium would increase dramatically.

He pocketed the key, then turned his attention to the other item.

[Duty Roster]

[Dr. Smile: Day shift patrol, responsible for screening and luring new patients (consumables).]

[Nurses: Patrol around the clock, responsible for feeding medicine and cleaning up contaminants that lose control.]

[Director: Every day at 3 a.m., the director will perform the Ultimate Treatment on the week's most disobedient patient, on the second basement level.]

Second basement level?

Ultimate Treatment?

Shido Makoto immediately checked the time — 2:10 a.m.

Less than fifty minutes remained before the Ultimate Treatment time listed on the roster.

"Second basement level..."

Beside him, Chu He, having just finished dealing with the battlefield, leaned in to look at the line on the roster.

"Second basement level?" he blurted, startled.

"What's wrong?" Shido Makoto looked at him.

"I've seen the building blueprints for this sanatorium! There are only three floors above ground and one basement level — there's no second basement at all!"

No second basement level?

Shido Makoto's brow furrowed.

Was the blueprint wrong, or was that so-called second basement not a physical space at all?

He thought for a moment, then bent down and picked up the pair of glasses from Dr. Smile's corpse.

One arm of the glasses was snapped off, but the frame was intact.

[Special Item: Dr. Smile's Gold-Rimmed Glasses (Damaged)]

[Effect: When worn, you can see through some of the lower-level illusions within the sanatorium.]

Shido Makoto immediately put the broken glasses on.

They sat a little unsteadily on his face, but that didn't get in the way of using them.

He looked at the world anew through the lenses.

The scene before him changed instantly.

The writhing flesh on the walls turned faint and translucent through the lenses, like a texture layered over some real object underneath.

When his gaze swept toward the storage room on the main hall, his pupils suddenly contracted.

Inside that storage room, behind what looked like an utterly ordinary wall, a staircase descending into darkness was hidden.

"So that's where it is."

"If there's no path, we'll smash one open."

"Tonight, we end this dungeon for good, right here."

"We're going down now?" Ruan Luo clenched her fists, fighting spirit burning in her eyes.

"Yes, now." Shido Makoto nodded.

"We're out of time. We have to find this so-called director before 3 a.m.

On the surface, the dungeon had given them seven days to survive.

But in reality, counting from the moment they entered, they likely had less than twenty-four hours to act.

The four of them wasted no more time and regrouped at once.

Ruan Luo remained the primary striker, while Ashu and Chu He handled perception and lookout duty.

Shido Makoto took point, master key in hand.

"Ashu, guide us."

"One, fifteen meters to the front-left. Two, inside the room on the right." Ashu's report was brief and to the point.

"Clear the room first." Shido Makoto made the call.

He walked up to the door of that room and slid the master key into the lock.

The lock clicked open at once.

He gave Ruan Luo a hand signal.

She caught his meaning instantly. She drew a deep breath and slammed the door open with a vicious kick.

"Roar!"

Inside, two mutated nurses gnawing on a corpse were startled and charged out, snarling.

But what greeted them was Ruan Luo's chainsaw, already primed and roaring.

The fight was over in under twenty seconds.

With their information advantage and tight coordination, they carved through everything in their path — the scattered nurses along the way posed no threat to them at all.

Soon, they reached the storage room hiding the secret passage.

Shido Makoto unlocked the door with the master key.

Wearing the glasses, he walked straight up to that wall.

To everyone else's eyes, it was just an ordinary load-bearing wall.

"Move back."

He waved the others back, drew a deep breath, raised his foot, and kicked squarely into the center of the wall!

The wall shattered on impact!

An opening, descending endlessly downward, appeared before them.

The inside of the opening was made entirely of writhing flesh, each step of the staircase resembling the spine of some monster.

A staircase leading straight to hell now lay before them.

Following that staircase of flesh, the four of them descended.

After several dozen steps, they finally reached the bottom.

They found themselves in an enormous basement chamber.

The space was almost unimaginably vast — the size of several basketball courts, with a ceiling too high to make out.

The surrounding walls were also made of writhing flesh, countless blood vessels converging like cables toward the center of the room.

And there, at the center, stood a transparent cylindrical incubation tank.

The tank was made of some unidentifiable glass, over ten meters in diameter, its height vanishing into the unseen ceiling above — like a colossal pillar holding up the entire underground space.

What truly made everyone's scalp crawl was what floated inside that tank.

It was filled with those red pills!

Countless red pills!

The sheer number was beyond estimation — perhaps millions, tens of millions of them.

"This... this is..." Chu He's voice trembled.

"This much medicine... what were they even trying to do?"

No one could answer him.

Shido Makoto's expression darkened.

He stared at the tank through the broken glasses.

Through the lenses, he saw something far more horrifying than what the others could perceive.

He saw that inside every single red pill...

there was a human face, trapped, screaming in agony!

Those faces were sealed inside the pills, denied rest for eternity, doomed to scream in silence day after day.

The truth was becoming clear.

Shido Makoto finally understood.

The file he'd seen in the third-floor records room before the 【Rollback】, the one about the so-called crystal of happiness — its true nature was someone else's soul!

You ate another person's soul, inherited that forcibly injected sense of false happiness, and that was why you felt peaceful and content.

But the price was that your own soul would be corroded and contaminated by that foreign presence, until eventually you'd lose yourself entirely and become just another puppet of the sanatorium — to be drained dry in turn and made into a new pill, to be fed to the next victim.

What a vicious cycle this was!

Treating human beings as consumables — mass-produced, refined, and stockpiled like this — the sheer malice of it went far beyond anything Shido Makoto's mind could accept.

Even Ruan Luo, who killed without blinking, clenched her fists after hearing Shido Makoto's explanation.

Shido Makoto decided that today, he wouldn't just clear this dungeon.

He would also burn everything here to the ground.

He pushed down his rising fury and turned his gaze toward the deeper reaches of the basement.

Behind the incubation tank stood another door.

On it was written a line of text:

[Only those whose hearts overflow with ultimate happiness may earn the right to meet the director.]

Ultimate happiness?

Shido Makoto glanced at the three others beside him.

Ruan Luo's face was murderous, Ashu's grim, and Chu He was still bent over, retching his guts out.

The four of them, right now, had nothing in their bodies except rage and killing intent — not a shred of anything resembling happiness.

And the master key couldn't open this door either.

This door had clearly been designed to keep them out.

"What now? Do we force it open?" Ruan Luo asked.

Shido Makoto shook his head.

He could sense that if the door was forced, it would likely trigger some kind of self-destruct mechanism, collapsing the entire underground chamber and killing them all.

A dead end.

After all they'd gone through to get here, one last door stood in their way.

3 a.m. was drawing closer by the minute.

Just as the group began to grow anxious...

Shido Makoto suddenly did something none of them expected.

Without a word, he turned and sprinted back toward the flesh staircase they'd come down.

"Hey! Where are you going?" Chu He blurted, caught off guard.

Shido Makoto's figure quickly vanished around the bend of the staircase.

The rest exchanged bewildered glances, left behind.

What was he going to do?

...

The three of them waited anxiously.

"What is he even doing? He wouldn't just ditch us and run, would he?" Chu He said uneasily.

"Shut up." Ruan Luo shot him a glare.

"He's not that kind of person."

Though she couldn't figure out his intentions either, she chose to trust him unconditionally.

Just then, the sound of footsteps and something being dragged echoed down from the top of the staircase.

The three of them turned, instantly on alert.

Shido Makoto's figure reappeared at the top of the stairs.

And in his hands, he was dragging a person!

That person wore the same patient's gown as the others, thin and small-framed, a mop of messy yellow hair on his head.

He was in a completely vacant, idiotic state — drooling as he was dragged along, letting out a stream of giggling laughter, his face lit up with a happiness so intense it looked utterly unreal.

It was Baiye — the yellow-haired player who'd been the very first to be drugged in the surface world and had completely broken down!

"You... what did you bring him down here for?" Chu He stared, dumbfounded.

He couldn't make any sense of what Shido Makoto was doing.

This guy, Baiye, had already gone insane, no better than a walking corpse — what use could he possibly be down here?

Expressionless, Shido Makoto dragged the still-giggling Baiye all the way to the door.

[Only those whose hearts overflow with ultimate happiness may earn the right to meet the director.]

The moment Chu He saw the bloody words on the door again, it was as if lightning struck through his mind!

He suddenly understood Shido Makoto's plan!

This player named Baiye fit the door's opening condition perfectly!

He was the key!

Shido Makoto shoved the still-giggling Baiye toward the door.

The instant Baiye's body touched the door—

the entire door flared with red light! It began ravenously drawing that false happiness out of Baiye's body!

"Hee hee... hee hee hee..."

Baiye's laughter grew weaker and weaker.

The blissful expression on his face faded away, and his body began withering at a visible speed.

Once the door had drained enough happiness, it slowly began to swing open on both sides.

Having served his purpose as the key, Baiye's drained body could no longer hold its shape.

His withered husk of a body crumbled instantly, scattering into a pile of dust on the floor.

He didn't even have time to scream.

The gate stood fully open.

A reek of blood a hundred times more overpowering than before came surging out from within!

From beyond the door came the sound of a thunderous heartbeat.

Thud...

Thud...

Thud...