Chapter 11: Traps in the Dungeon

Running a dungeon is never a simple matter.

In large-scale online games, after a new dungeon is opened, major guilds first send people to figure out the process, which is called “clearing the wasteland.”
The manpower and resources consumed are countless.
Even if a highly skilled player goes in alone with great skill and courage, they would generally prepare a considerable amount of resources for unforeseen needs.

Right now, it was the third day since the server opened.
At the entrance of Sea Realm‘s first dungeon, Old Li’s three-person team had brought almost nothing, yet they stood before it.

If one had to say they had any decent weapons or equipment, it would probably only be Old Li’s golden machete, which had been stained with the blood of two fish.

But they were still quite confident.

Old Li was just approaching it with a pioneering attitude; any bit of progress was a victory.
Yan Shuangwen was a gaming novice and had no concept of dungeons, but he firmly believed that since the mechanisms were man-made, they could definitely be deciphered by man.

As for Hua Yibing, he had already changed the title of his stream room to “[Sea Realm Dungeon First Kill],” with an incredibly arrogant tone, attracting many haters to mock him.
Of course, the fans were not to be outdone, rolling up their sleeves and jumping into the fight.
The back-and-forth caused the stream room’s popularity to skyrocket, pushing it to the top of the splash screen.

Gradually, posts about this dungeon team also appeared on the player forums.

[LT¹, can Team One Two Three get the first kill of the Sea Realm dungeon?]

[-RT, I’m back from the splash screen stream on a certain platform. Old Li and his team have discovered a new dungeon in Sea Realm, and it looks quite difficult. The flying arrows in the first stage are terrifying to watch. Does anyone know what number two does? Do the three of them have any hope for the first kill?]

[-Reserving a spot.]

[-Damn it, the big brother floor was snatched, but I’ll say it anyway. I think except for their team, no one else can do it for now. After all, Sea Realm‘s gameplay is hardcore. You have to learn how to swim with a tail at the beginning. What normal human knows how to do that?]

[-I think so too.]

[-I saw another Sea Realm streamer still learning to swim by watching the goldfish in his fish tank. The square is filled with a bunch of people crawling around. I guess only the three of them can swim smoothly.]

[-Brothers above, isn’t it just swimming? Is it really that hard?]

[-I suggest you watch the stream before commenting. Swimming isn’t hard. What’s hard is swimming while dragging a fishtail that weighs dozens of pounds, and also having to go up and down as you please. The one learning from a goldfish earlier might look ridiculous, but it might actually be the fastest way.]

[-Good lord.]

[-Indeed, if a crawling player went to the dungeon, they’d probably be turned into a fish sieve in the first stage.]

[-Hahahaha, the person above is giving me a mental image.]

[-Eh, are they about to pass the second stage? This scene looks so hard. Who knows which of the bricks under their feet will explode?]

[-The exploding bricks have a pattern. I just roughly counted. Horizontally, it changes according to a pattern of exploding every 4 squares, every 3 squares, and every 2 squares. Vertically, it explodes one row at a time, moving upwards row by row. Is anyone in the stream room? You can tell the clearing team.]

[-…Kneeling to the expert above. I almost went blind trying to match the pattern. How did the expert count it?]

[-Kneeling +1, thanks to the expert for the reminder. I’ve already gone to the stream room to tell Huahua.]

Hua Yibing’s group was currently stuck at the second stage.

Yan Shuangwen found it a bit strange.
Just yesterday, it was merely a path full of traps, but today after entering, it had turned into a series of checkpoint-style rooms.

The first room was a pitch-black space where you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.
You could only see a faintly lit large door opposite, pointing them in the right direction.

And while passing through the room, they had to be wary of both sides, as flying arrows could ambush them at any time.
Yan Shuangwen relied on his natural reflexes, and Old Li on his experience accumulated from multiple games, to narrowly pass this stage.
Huahua was dragged along and protected in the middle by the two of them, forcibly carried through.

If the first room was extreme darkness, then the second room was extreme brightness.

On the ceiling was a fluorescent creature as bright as a two-thousand-watt light bulb, slowly stretching its limbs above their heads.

To say it had four limbs wasn’t quite right.
Whether it was due to degeneration or something else, it only had four short, thick legs supporting it on the wall.
Its body was translucent, and the glowing substance flowed within it.

As for its skin surface, it was like a pile of melted mud, slowly flowing along the wall, as if some unknown liquid would drip down at any moment.

“This design is a bit grotesque, isn’t it…” Old Li sighed, rubbing the goosebumps on his arm, feeling his SAN value dropping.
He turned his head only to find his new companion’s eyes shining, looking at the ugly, large alien as if looking at a beloved lover.

Yan Shuangwen’s eyes were burning as he muttered to himself, “So beautiful…”

Old Li: “??????”

‘No, where is it beautiful??’
Old Li risked blinding his eyes to examine the thing from head to toe again, but still couldn’t see how such a grotesque thing could be associated with the word ‘beautiful’.

Huahua, however, was already used to it and instead comforted Old Li, “You’ll get used to it. This guy studies marine biology. You know how strange creatures under the water can look. There are many even uglier than this. He’s as affectionate towards them as if he’s seeing his girlfriend. Let alone this one.”

“Is this professional spirit?” Old Li was filled with awe.

“No, this is this guy’s personal hobby,” Huahua ruthlessly exposed.

There was nothing in the room except for that jellyfish, but the floor was somewhat special.
Near the doors on both sides, where they were standing, there was a long, thin rectangular area separated out.

The rest of the ground was square, densely cut by many regular horizontal and vertical lines, divided into square floor tiles about fifty centimeters long and of uniform size, somewhat like a chessboard magnified several dozen times.

“Are we supposed to play chess?” Hua Yibing tentatively stepped on it, but was grabbed by the collar by Yan Shuangwen, who had come back to his senses, and was dragged back from the floor.

“What are you doing!!”

Yan Shuangwen ignored him and glanced at the floor he had just stepped on.
Nothing happened.
Unexpectedly, this guy was quite lucky to have stepped on a safe square—is this what they call a fool’s luck?

He took out a stone from his backpack.

Hua Yibing found that stone very familiar.
Wasn’t it the basic building material everyone went to the quarry to pick up every day?
What was Yan Er’mao doing with this?

Yan Shuangwen rolled the stone from his feet.
It rolled across three or four rows of floor tiles with a ‘clatter, clatter’, and then, to Huahua’s shocked expression, detonated that entire series of areas.
As far as the eye could see, there were flashes of explosions, and the ‘bang, bang, bang’ sounds were incessant.
Even the seawater in this area was blasted with splashing foam, and the temperature rose quite a bit.

After the sound of the explosion stopped, everything returned to its original state, even the tiles were restored to their initial appearance.

Hua Yibing: “…Holy crap, what is this thing? An illusion? High-tech? Magic?”

He walked back and forth a few times in the narrow safe zone at the edge of the room, looking at this minefield with clicks of his tongue.
Suddenly, as if he had thought of something, he clenched his left fist and punched his right palm.

“We’re fish now! Can’t we just swim over?”

Old Li shook his head.
“I’ve seen this trap before. The trigger mechanism isn’t pressure, but something like light induction. Even swimming over it will trigger an explosion.”

He recalled, “Back then, it wasn’t such a large explosion area, but just a short path. You could just endure it and rush through. But this one probably won’t work.”
Old Li looked at the distance of at least fifty meters with difficulty.
“Before you can swim over, the aftershock of the explosion will probably sweep you in.”

Yan Shuangwen looked at him.
“The dungeon can change?”

Old Li shook his head.
“Under normal circumstances, it won’t change. Even if it does, there will be a special explanation. It seems that the cave we encountered before was the plot that triggered the dungeon for the first time. In the plot, this trap was made into a short path by the developers cutting corners. But now that we are in the real dungeon, we can’t just brute force our way through like before.”

Hua Yibing: “Then what should we do? Use stones to scout the path first and then remember the floors that don’t explode?”

Then he also took out a stone from his backpack, raised his hand, and threw it hard onto the floor that hadn’t exploded just now.

Bang!

Unexpectedly, it was the familiar series of explosions again.

“The floors are changing,” Yan Shuangwen said definitively.
“There must be some kind of pattern. You guys keep throwing stones and let me observe.”

Hua Yibing and Old Li followed his words, one on each side, throwing stones at the floor to scout the path, while Yan Shuangwen frowned, his eyes fixed on the quiet floor, trying to find its changing pattern.

At this moment, off-site support from the stream room also arrived.

Hua Yibing glanced at it and shouted excitedly, “The audience has figured it out! It’s…”

Yan Shuangwen’s eyes lit up, and he also came to the answer, “Horizontal explosion interval of 4, 3, 2. Vertically, one row at a time, moving upwards.”

The second half of the pink-haired merman’s sentence was stuck in his throat.
He hammered the wall with his tail in frustration.
“Damn it! How did you get it first again.”

The target of his frustration glanced at him lightly.
“It’s not like you figured it out yourself.”

“The audience’s meaning is my meaning!”

“Are you going or not?”
Yan Shuangwen made a gesture of leaving him behind.

“…Going.”
Hua Yibing quickly surrendered.

Next, it was Yan Shuangwen commanding from the edge, while Old Li and Huahua, following the commands of ‘left one, right two’, strenuously passed through the tiles one by one.

The black-tailed merman walking at the back took on the important task, successfully obtaining the key from among the dense exploding tiles, and successfully reaching the opposite bank.

“Phew, that was really hard. Is this the first dungeon? I thought running a dungeon just required being able to fight. I didn’t expect to have to find patterns too!”
Hua Yibing let out a long sigh and said to the audience in the stream room with a face full of emotion, “See? Everyone needs to have a good brain, or find a teammate who knows the way.”

Then he was the first to open the door to the third room and rushed in headfirst.

Yan Shuangwen was just about to remind him of something, but the other person had already disappeared before he could speak.
He closed his mouth and walked into the door with schadenfreude, and sure enough, he saw a fish struggling in a net.
It was none other than Hua Yibing, who had just passed through the door.

“See?” he said slowly and methodically towards what was probably the stream room’s position.
“This stage requires a large stone, or sacrificing a brainless teammate.”

[-Back from watching the stream, I almost died laughing at the roommate’s words.]

[-Hahahahahaha, who would have thought the third stage would be a ‘door-opening kill’? Huahua in the net really looks like a caught fish. First, he thrashed around trying to get out, then after accepting reality, he went limp like a dead fish.]

[-Who’s to blame but himself for being so impulsive? I saw that both the roommate and Old Li wanted to remind him, but he was too fast, and they couldn’t stop him.]

[-I’m in class, and I’m actually here watching your stream thread!
So can any big brother give a detailed account of what’s happening now? Satisfy a child with not enough data traffic, QAQ.]

[-Person above, pay attention in class.]

[-Representative here. The roommate threatened to leave Huahua, then Huahua started crying, which made Old Li’s heart soften. He used a golden machete to cut the net and rescued Huahua.]

[-Succinct. By the way, that golden machete is really powerful.]

[-My focus is on this golden machete. Is Old Li actually a whale player?]

[-No, this is a feature of Sea Realm. The exchange post is full of shiny gold and silver jewelry and various tools made of gold, silver, and gems. I seriously suspect that merman is a reincarnated dragon. Why does he like gold and silver jewelry so much?]

[-Which one?]

[-The most beautiful one. Pointing the way to [Shocking! The beautiful merman lord actually did this to me!]. It has a full-body picture of the big merman and has already attracted almost all the female fans on the forum to check in… Poor my big forum, there are so few girls, and they’ve all been lured away by a fish. (PS: I actually think he’s quite good-looking too).]

[-Wait! You all went to read the post? Is no one watching the stream anymore? Team One Two Three has reached the BOSS stage!]

Footnotes:

1. LT is an abbreviation for 厘讨 (lǐtǎo), a forum slang that means “to rationally discuss.” It’s similar to “discuss” or “let’s talk.”