Ox and Horse Admin Discussion Group.
It was a small group chat of only four people.
The group owner was Fleeting White Horse, and the other members were three beasts of burden from the neighboring group—in other words, the dog admins: Up Ten Times a Night, Gale Force 8, and Ample Time Ahead.
Ye Shi: [Did you guys all get the helmet???]
Old Bai: [Got it... This thing is super spooky. It was dumped right at my front door.]
Fang Chang: [I found mine in front of my garage door...]
Kuang Feng: [Mine was on my office desk... I thought it belonged to a coworker at first.]
Ye Shi: [None of yours are as spooky as mine. The package was delivered straight into my dorm room! All three of my roommates were there, and not one of them saw how the thing got in! And here's the freakiest part—I don't know if you guys noticed, but when you put the helmet on, you can see a countdown, yet nobody else can see a thing.]
The chat fell into an eerie silence for a moment.
The first to break the silence was the group owner, Fleeting White Horse.
Old Bai: [...Now that you mention it, that really is pretty creepy.]
Fang Chang: [What kind of game company do you think is so resourceful that they not only know our addresses, but can also deliver packages right into our hands without anyone noticing?]
Kuang Feng: [Yeah, that's what bothers me the most. The addresses are one thing—if they used the IP addresses from when we clicked the link to determine our real-world locations, that's theoretically possible. But the logistics... I can't wrap my head around it. I'm in Jinling, and if I remember correctly, Ye Shi goes to school in Jiangcheng. That's a five-hundred-kilometer gap between us, yet we found our helmets almost at the exact same time.]
Ye Shi: [Yeah... and it was shortly after clicking the link, too.]
Old Bai: [Fuck, should we call the police?]
Fang Chang: [There's no financial loss, so the police probably couldn't do much anyway. Besides, what would you even tell them? That a package was misdelivered? That something's wrong with the helmet? Except for the intended user, anyone else who puts it on can't see anything.]
Kuang Feng: [Mm, that's the biggest issue. It's really hard to explain to anyone else what this thing actually is. I even tried stuffing my phone inside while wearing the helmet earlier, but the phone couldn't capture anything even though I could clearly see it.]
In real life, Kuang Feng was a teacher, likely in the sciences, and tended to speak systematically. His reasoning won the immediate agreement of Fang Chang and Old Bai.
Ye Shi: [How about... we take the helmet apart to see what's inside?]
Kuang Feng: [We could do that, but there's a risk. At least for me, I haven't found any visible seams or screws. If we force it open, there's no guarantee we can put it back together.]
Fang Chang: [True, and we can't screw over Ah Guang, either.]
Having the incredible ability to place this helmet right outside his garage door had already made him start to believe what that guy with the ID "Guang" had said.
Could this company be some mysterious research institution backed by state authorities?
Whatever it was, for now, at least, they hadn't suffered any loss. Besides, he personally was quite interested in a fully immersive VR game.
That countdown had successfully piqued his curiosity.
Kuang Feng: [I sent Brother Guang a private message on Penguin, but he hasn't answered yet. The official website's URL doesn't look like a domestic one; honestly, it doesn't even look like a normal domain name. I couldn't find any registration info on it.]
Ye Shi: [The dark web?!]
Kuang Feng: [No idea.]
Old Bai: [Let's leave it at that for now. There's no point in endlessly discussing it. In three days, we'll find out what this helmet is all about anyway!]
***
While the players were discussing among themselves, Chu Guang, out in the wasteland, was still busily making final preparations.
Five kilograms of green wheat and several iron tools.
It had taken Chu Guang considerable effort to move these items three kilometers from Bet Street to the wetland park without drawing attention.
Shelter 404 was concealed beneath this park, its entrance located inside an unassuming sanatorium.
The vegetation here was lush and bordered a lake; theoretically, plenty of wild animals should be active in this area.
As he approached, Chu Guang exercised extreme caution, watching out for any potential dangers lurking nearby.
Fortunately, nothing went wrong.
After checking the marks he had left at the sanatorium's entrance to confirm no mutants or marauders had slipped inside while he was away, Chu Guang used the sharpened water pipe in his hand to nudge open the door and stepped in cautiously.
The entrance to Shelter 404 was the elevator located at the furthest end of the sanatorium's lobby, and it was the only elevator whose indicator panel showed a B1 floor marker.
Chu Guang took a trip down first, dumping the grain in the corridor between the elevator shaft base and the outer airlock door of the buffer chamber.
This was an open space roughly forty to fifty meters below the surface.
To be honest, it wasn't an ideal place to store food, but keeping it here was far better than leaving it in the sanatorium where passing rats or mutated cockroaches might target it.
Passing through the buffer chamber's two airlock doors, Chu Guang walked into the main lobby, looked at Xiao Qi squatting in the corner, and asked, "Is the forum feature on the official website ready?"
"All done."
"What about the players? Have they received their helmets?"
"They've already received them!"
*So fast?*
Chu Guang was slightly surprised.
He remembered leaving the shelter at six in the morning, and it was only around one in the afternoon now—a gap of just seven hours.
"Does time in the wasteland really flow one-to-one with the modern world?"
"Of course it does, but time here corresponds to UTC-4 on Earth."
Back in the modern world, China was in the UTC+8 time zone, roughly a twelve-hour difference from UTC-4. That meant it was currently one o'clock in the morning in eastern China.
Chu Guang sat down at the computer and logged into the website's backend.
Xiao Qi had added the forum feature as instructed, but since there was no traffic yet, there naturally wasn't a single post.
The database and creature compendium were the same.
"How do I upload photos from here to this place?" Chu Guang asked, pointing at the gallery on the screen.
"Just upload them directly!"
"...What I mean is, how am I supposed to take photos? Or do you have something like a camera?"
For such a massive shelter, having absolutely nothing on the entire B1 floor was ridiculous.
Even if they hadn't left behind any weapons, they could at least have provided some basic survival tools, couldn't they?
"Uh, probably no camera, but my optical sensor can take photos for you... What kind do you want to take? Right here?"
Looking at the wastebasket-like robot in the corner, Chu Guang sighed.
"What the hell good does taking pictures in here do?... Forget it, I'll figure something out myself."
It wasn't like he could drag mutants down here.
However, taking Xiao Qi outside was worth considering.
Most mutants had little interest in inedible hunks of scrap metal. With a little camouflage, planting it on a rooftop as a ward would make it the ultimate lookout tool!
The more Chu Guang thought about it, the more feasible it seemed.
Logging into his Penguin account via the computer in the residents' hall, Chu Guang saw that all four players had sent him private messages, asking which company he worked for, what a fully immersive game actually meant, and what was really going on with the gaming helmets.
Frankly, Chu Guang didn't know how to answer those questions either, nor could he tell them the truth about this world.
Only by making them believe this was a game world could they descend as the "Fourth Calamity"—fearless, tireless, and becoming his greatest tool.
"Master."
"What is it?"
Seeing Chu Guang shut down the computer and rise from his chair, Xiao Qi asked curiously from the corner, "Aren't you going to reply to their messages?"
"No need."
The more you explain, the more holes appear. Better to brush it off as a corporate or state secret.
As for the rest?
Let them guess for themselves.
After all, what were brains made for?
Weren't they meant for letting the imagination run wild?
Chapter 5