Everyone's playing hide-and-seek: This crazy beauty has maxed-out third eyes.

Ivana floated in mid-air, and Lin Sui'an moved a chair down and looked up at her.

"Go ahead and tell me, start from the beginning."

Ivana closed her eyes briefly, and the outline of her soul flickered in the air.

"I died in the third round."

Chen Zheng's pen tip landed on the record board, writing rapidly.

Jiang Lai turned on the recording.

"The instance is called 'Rotten School,' and the eerie element is a group of children in school uniforms."

Li Yu got goosebumps on his back.

Jiang Lai's expression didn't change much. They had already watched the game content that Ivana mentioned many times during the game live stream and replay.

"And then what happened after you died?" Lin Sui'an's attention returned to Ivana. "What happened to you before you became a cat?"

Ivana's soul sank a little, as if recalling something unpleasant.

"When I was torn apart, my consciousness was interrupted for a moment. When I woke up, I was in a certain place."

"Where?"

"It's all black, completely black. I can't see anything, I can't hear anything."

Li Yu subconsciously took half a step closer to Lin Suian.

"I don't know how much time has passed, maybe a second, maybe a year, time has no meaning in that place."

"and then?"

Then I heard a voice.

Ivana looked up and stared into Lin Sui'an's eyes: "The sound of the game."

Lin Sui'an removed his hands from his knees and placed them on the armrests of the chair.

"What did you say?"

"It says—'Soul ID 2941, rating: D, allocation: storage unit.'"

Chen Zheng stopped writing: "Wait, you sacrificed yourself in the third round. Not so many players had sacrificed themselves then. So how was this 2941 determined?"

"I don't know, I just heard the sound."

"Perhaps the anomalies aren't limited to players from our planet!" Lin Sui'an boldly speculated. "Think about it, if it were only players from our planet, where did the anomalies of the first round come from?"

Everyone fell into thought, and Li Yu boldly guessed, "The game has finished destroying other planets, and now it's come to our planet!"

"It's also possible that the game controls multiple planets simultaneously." After saying that, Chen Zheng thought of the act of moving food. "So the game doesn't have such strict control over players, and the degree of freedom is relatively high. Only when it involves the underlying logic, such as awakening a strange soul, will the game mechanism be triggered, or rather, the game's attention be drawn to it."

No one knows the truth; we can only speculate boldly and verify carefully.

"You mean you're allocating storage units? So there are other units to allocate?" Jiang Lai asked another question.

"Yes, the storage unit." Ivana nodded. "After saying that, my consciousness was cut off again, and when I woke up, I was already inside the cat's body."

"In other words, you don't know what happened between the 'storage unit' and the 'cat'."

"have no idea."

Lin Sui'an tilted his head and drew circles on the armrest with his finger.

Soul number.

Grade D.

Storage unit.

Taken individually, each of these three words points to the same thing: the game does indeed collect souls, rate them, and assign them to different locations.

"Ivana, in that dark place you mentioned, are there other spirits?"

Ivana shook her head: "I can't feel it, but according to the game's number 2941, there were at least 2,940 before me."

"If it's not a random number," she added.

No one spoke in the meeting room; there were 2,941 souls, or even more.

"The game takes away the souls of dead players, assigns them numbers and ratings, and then stuffs them into bizarre bodies as batteries," Lin Sui'an said, speaking faster than usual.

"There's one more thing. I can sense something inside the cat's body," Ivana lowered her voice. "The cat's emotions, its hunger, its urge to scratch—I can sense it all."

"It's like I've become a real cat."

Lin Sui'an narrowed his eyes slightly: "You mean, your memories as a human being have disappeared?"

"Yes, or rather, they passively forgot."

Ivana looked at Lin Sui'an: "I have a guess, but I'm not sure if it's right."

"What? Tell me."

"Souls are fuel, but not for the cat; they're for the entire instance."

Jiang Lai paused for a moment: "How did you come to that conclusion?"

"Because inside the cat's body, I sometimes feel a suction force." Ivana's soul outline twitched again. "It doesn't come from the cat, it comes from somewhere much farther away, from the 'walls' of the dungeon."

"Every now and then, a small part of my soul is taken away."

"Remove?"

"It's rare, each time it's like being bitten by a mosquito, but I keep smoking, I keep smoking."

Lin Sui'an stood up: "So your soul is grade D."

Ivana gave a wry smile: "Maybe it wasn't D-rank when it first died, but after being drained for so long, it's only D-rank left. Maybe it was D-rank from the beginning."

Jiang Lai and Chen Zheng exchanged a glance. The game uses the souls of dead players as fuel to keep the dungeon running.

This is a huge amount of information.

Lin Sui'an was thinking about something else. After players die, not only are their memories "wiped" and they become monsters, but the game also extracts their souls to maintain the operation of the dungeon... The game is exploiting players too much!

"There's one more thing," Ivana's voice suddenly turned somber.

She lowered her head, her gaze falling on the card clutched in Lin Sui'an's hand: "In a cat's body, the suction force isn't constant."

"What do you mean?"

"Some rounds draw fewer coins, some rounds draw more coins."

"Depends on what?"

Ivana looked up: "It depends on how many people died in that round."

The air in the room seemed to be choked: "The more people die, the more new souls the dungeon gets, and the slower the extraction speed from the old souls will be."

"The fewer people who die... the faster they smoke."

Lin Sui'an repeated the sentence twice: The game is not only about killing people, but also about using the souls of the dead to power up the dungeons. If there aren't enough dead people, they will accelerate the extraction from the existing souls.

A closed loop.

A meat grinder that keeps spinning faster and faster.

Lin Sui'an clicked his tongue: "So all these souls are inside the 'walls' of the dungeon?"

"It should be that when I was being extracted, I could sense that there were many souls together in that direction." Ivana paused for a moment. "A lot of them, densely packed, like a honeycomb."

She looked at the card in Lin Sui'an's hand, her features trembling: "By using this card to pull me out of the cat's body, you've essentially cut off the dungeon's ability to extract me."

"But what about those souls still trapped in the instance..."

She didn't finish speaking.

Lin Sui'an put the card back in his pocket: "I understand."

She turned to look at Jiang Lai: "Sister Jiang Lai, I'm sealing off the remaining nine cats now."

"all?"

"All of them." Lin Sui'an was already taking out playing cards.

"I suspect that the reason they haven't woken up for so long is because the game is still extracting their souls, and the extraction intensity is even increasing because they 'escaped'."

"Seal it as soon as possible, and break free from the shackles of the game as soon as possible."