【Team member: Young Master Atobe, deceased.】
【Team member: It's Really Hard to Name, deceased.】

The system prompt rang in his ears. Wang Tanzhi quickly opened the game menu and checked. Next to the names of the two people, the words "deceased" were indeed displayed. After a moment's thought, Xiao Tan opened his mouth and said, "Brothers, could they have died in the underground research institute of this building?"

"Oh? What makes you say that?" Pan Feng continued forward without turning his head, asking. Listening to his tone, he didn't really care about the life or death of the two. It felt like… whether those two lived or died, it wouldn't have much impact on his clearing the level. Of course, with the combined strength of him and Hua Xiong, they were indeed confident.

"Think about it, one is level fourteen, and the other is level twelve, at least stronger than me, right? Even I'm not afraid of the Blood Wolf Zombies on the street, so they're even less likely to die at the hands of those monsters. But if they also came to this I Love Butt Building, and went to the underground research institute after seeing the schematic diagram of the bottom floor…" He paused, and then continued, "We haven't cleared that place yet, so there might be danger there, maybe even a Boss. If they encounter a Zombie Werewolf…"

"Hmm… that makes sense." Hua Xiong said, but the tone of his voice suggested that he had already thought of this. Saying "that makes sense" was just a perfunctory response to Xiao Tan. "However, now that they're dead, there's nothing we can do by turning back. Besides, we're very close to the top floor now, so let's just clear our way to the top first, and then…"

"How about this," Xiao Tan interrupted him. "Brothers, you continue towards the top floor, and I'll go back to the bottom floor alone." As he spoke, he took the baseball bat out of his knapsack (because there had been no room for him to intervene in the battle, Xiao Tan had even put away his weapon). "The remaining player is a friend of mine, and he may not have come to the building yet, but I think he will definitely come. Now I'm going to the bottom floor to wait for him, so I can tell him not to go underground, and to come and join you first before taking action."

Pan Feng and Hua Xiong stopped and glanced back at him, exchanging a look. Hua Xiong shrugged and replied, "Alright, then little brother, be careful yourself, we'll go ahead."

Xiao Tan responded, then turned around and went back the way he came, charging into the fire escape after turning down a corridor. At this moment, he didn't know that Feng Bujue was already in the underground research institute, and he also didn't know that he had misjudged the location of Young Master Atobe and Xiao Ming's death. He was simply acting based on his own reasoning.

After he had gone far away, Pan Feng suddenly opened his mouth with a very serious tone and said, "For a long time before those two players died, they were at the same coordinates, and that place is quite far from this building."

Hua Xiong replied, "Ah, I noticed it too. There won't be any small Bosses in that kind of place. Before dark, there will only be sporadic Blood Wolf Zombies wandering around the city. And… their deaths were only a few seconds apart, hehe… unless they jumped off a building together, otherwise…"

"So it was really done by a 'Derivatives'," Pan Feng pondered. "They've already started attacking players so quickly… we should speed up our actions too, and avoid the other two from coming into contact with the Derivatives."

"It's good that the little brother left, so we can go all out. Anyway, the way back is relatively safe, and the monsters have basically been cleared, so he should be fine in the short term," Hua Xiong continued. "That player named 'Feng Bujue' is in bad shape, although his survival value is still at 73%, the problem is that he has already been infected. Players will be judged to be dead when they reach the mutation stage, so we better get things done before that happens." He took a deep breath. "There are only four players in total, and the two who died don't count, but if three or even all of them die before we clear the level, our work will be too much of a failure."

Pan Feng nodded. "Hmm… that's right, we need to quickly 'kill' Ashford. As long as we enter 'that' storyline, we can clear the level quickly. In any case… let's send the players out of the script first, and then we can concentrate on dealing with the 'Derivatives'."

…………

Feng Bujue walked through the corridor of the research institute with the Winchester in his hand. The lighting equipment here was operating normally, and the number of zombies wasn't too large. Apart from the wave he encountered outside the elevator door, the frequency of encountering monsters at other times was similar to that on the ground, and he would only encounter one or two monsters at most after passing through three or five corridors.

The shotgun in Feng Bujue's hand was very useful in this narrow corridor. He only needed to wait for the monster to get a little closer before firing, and he didn't need to be too accurate to solve the battle. Anyway, as long as he hit the hands and feet, the limbs would be directly severed and they would fall to the ground, and if he hit the torso, they would either fly out or be torn apart on the spot.

He searched a considerable area, and most of the electronic doors could be opened. Many rooms only had a few rows of iron racks filled with cardboard boxes, and inside were full of paper documents and file bags. Feng Bujue certainly looked at some documents, but the contents were basically meaningless. Many were identical experiment reports, and the key content of the documents had been blacked out.

Some rooms were filled with large computers, and the walls and tables were covered with monitors and inexplicable operating rods and buttons, but without exception, these devices had been damaged and couldn't even be turned on. These kinds of rooms were also worry-free, he could just open the door, take a look, and leave.

After several twists and turns, Feng Bujue finally found a higher-security electronic door. This door required both iris and fingerprint scanning to open, and the game also considerately arranged a zombie wearing a white coat a few meters away from this door…

Feng Bujue shot the zombie in the waist, and the monster was knocked to the ground, its intestines spewing out. Feng Bujue took out the baseball bat from his knapsack and went over to smash the bones in the zombie's arms and knees. After he was done, he switched to the kitchen knife, pressed the zombie's face down, and cut off its head, and also cut off one of its palms. He also searched the zombie's clothes and pants to confirm that there was nothing in the pockets before he was finished.

After the scan was completed, the electronic door opened. Feng Bujue casually threw the corpse's head and hand into the distance and stepped into the door.

This was obviously a room related to the plot. On the wall facing the door, there was a huge metal gate, which looked exactly like the kind of gate in a bank vault. On the left wall was a row of glass columns, one meter high and about thirty centimeters in diameter. They should have originally been filled with liquid, but now the glass shells had been shattered, and almost all of the contents had flowed to the ground. It was a translucent pale green liquid, and at this moment, a large pool of green traces remained on the floor in that area.

The computers in the room were also out of order, the screens were black and could not be turned on. Next to an operating table, lay two corpses wearing white coats. Feng Bujue approached vigilantly, observing for a while to confirm that these two were just ordinary corpses and not lurking zombies.

Both of the dead were male. One looked to be in his fifties, balding, and wearing glasses, and the other had gray hair and a small mustache, and was a few years older. The balding one had been shot in the head, and the small mustache had a gunshot wound in each of his chest and abdomen. They didn't seem to have been dragged after their deaths, and the position and posture of the corpses indicated this.

Feng Bujue reconstructed the situation when the shooting occurred in his mind… the murderer should have been someone they were familiar with. He entered the laboratory through the electronic door, suddenly pulled out a gun, and at very close range, pulled the trigger at the unsuspecting balding man, the bullet entered his head, killing him instantly. This balding man was originally sitting behind the operating table, and after his death, his body slid off the chair and fell to the ground.

At the same time as the gunshot, the small mustache, who was a few steps away from the operating table, happened to be facing away from the door. He heard the gunshot and turned around in shock, but unfortunately, the murderer didn't give him any chance to react, and immediately fired two shots, killing him. The small mustache tilted forward as he fell, and grabbed the edge of the operating table with his hand before he died, cushioning the fall slightly before falling sideways.

Looking at the posture of the corpses, the bloodstains, and the expressions, Feng Bujue made the above judgment. As a mystery novelist, he should be familiar with the thinking of inferring the crime process from the crime scene. He had deduced similar plots in his mind countless times. Sometimes, in order to write some "ingeniously arranged" locked-room murders, he would even do related experiments. It sounded troublesome, but after all, those were mechanisms that he had racked his brains to come up with, and it would be meaningless if it was proven that their feasibility in reality was too low.

"Heh…" Feng Bujue smiled when he looked at the two corpses. "They weren't infected even like this, so the two of them must have been injected with serum…" He said to the corpses, talking to himself, "There are so many people in this base, and only the core researchers who deal directly with the virus every day would have this treatment."

He reorganized the course of events in his mind, thinking: regardless of his purpose, let's first assume that the murderer was also a researcher who had been injected with serum. He killed these two people, smashed the container containing the original virus solution, then carried a small amount of liquid out of this room, killed some more people in the corridor, and used the original virus solution to mutate the corpses… then escaped from the research institute, allowing the infection to spread to the ground, but for some reason, the people on the ground all turned into another kind of zombie.

Or… the murderer didn't escape from the research institute at all, but was subdued or even killed by the guards. The virus that produced the Blood Wolf Zombies outside the research institute was unrelated to this, and was completely two different things.

Thinking of this, Feng Bujue remembered another question and muttered, "That guy at the door also had permission to enter this room, he should also be one of the researchers and should have been injected with serum, but why did he turn into a zombie…"

Feng Bujue needed more information and clues to figure out the situation here, so he went to check the two corpses again, and then found a key in the small mustache's pocket.

There was a desk a few meters away. After Feng Bujue got the key, he walked over without thinking and opened the drawers of the desk one by one, finding two syringes, a pile of white paper, some stationery, a stapler, paper clips, sticky notes and other sundries… Only the bottom drawer was locked. He tried the key he had just found, and it opened.