Translator: Noodletown Translations  Editor: Noodletown Translations

The customers in the old shops such as Zong Wu and Gu Tingyun in the Yuanyang City Shop, Su Tianji and Song Qingfeng in the Jiuhua City Shop, and Ning Bi in the Half City shop also showed great attention to the new game.

Of course, their focus was different from the newbies in the new shop.

In the early morning when Mr. Fang opened the door of the shop, the players of the new shop, including the a.s.sa.s.sins such as Elina and elves such as Sala, immediately asked upon entering, “Sir, is Outlast released? When would we get to play it?”

Meanwhile, the customers in the old shops sent Mr. Fang messages while they walked to the counter, [Sir, is Outlast released or not? When will the players in the new shop get to play it?]

[I say… why are you guys asking if others are playing the game!?] They were so diligent that they asked Mr. Fang the same question every day.

“…”

In the new shop, most of the players were still playing World of Warcraft, but some players were waiting to try new stuff.

After all, there were many leisure players in online games. Now that the earliest players had reached the maximum level, Sala and other players like her just followed her teammates and obtained the first victory in battlegrounds each day before going around to see the scenery. Therefore, these people had lots of time to do stuff.

Naturally, such players wanted to try the new game.

“Outlast…?” Mr. Fang looked more confident today. “It's released! It's released today!”

“Really?!” Sala exclaimed.

Mr. Fang knocked on the small blackboard, and Sala followed the direction that his finger pointed and saw the words. [New Game ‘Outlast'. Activation price: 15 magic crystals.]

“Then, can we play it now?” Sala said in pleasant surprise, “Then, I'll go and activate it right away! Would you please pour a mug of Cappuccino for me?”

“Just play the game. Do you have to have Cappuccino…”

“Why not?! Don't mind me!” While rolling her eyes at Mr. Fang, Sala looked quite proud. “I just like it!”

“Okay! Okay! Okay!”

Anyway, I'm making money from this.

Mr. Fang wanted to drink Cappuccino as well, so he took the opportunity to pour himself a mug.

At this moment, a group of elves and a.s.sa.s.sins sat down at the computers close to the windows in excitement. Sala took the mug of Cappuccino from Mr. Fang and sipped it with enjoyment, cheerfully activating the new game with the money deposited in her members.h.i.+p card.

“Nana, would you like to play it with me?” Sala asked Elina who sat across from her.

“It seems like we can't connect the game?” Elina said while loading the game, “We can play it separately and talk about it when we get some inspirations.”

“Okay!” Sala entered the game cheerfully.

After all, Sala wasn't even afraid of the evil G.o.d. After her experience with ‘The Avengers', she felt quite confident when she entered Outlast.

Before Sala was a dim and messy room, which was the background when she entered the game. On the screen were options such as [New Game] and [Load Game] drawn in pale lines.

Different from the original game, the system version only offered two difficulty levels after players entered the game. One was [Nightmare] which was the normal difficulty, and the other was [Insane] which was a higher difficulty level.

At the beginning, the word ‘Insane' was grey, which meant that the players could only choose ‘Nightmare'.

In Insane Mode, the chapters couldn't be saved before they were completed. Once the players were dead, all the progress would vanish, and they had to start from the beginning.

Naturally, this mode wasn't open for newbies to try.

In the original game, when the players entered it, the game would introduce the main character and the background in words.

However, the system version was different. After Sala entered the game, she opened her eyes slowly as if she had just woken from a dream in which she had turned into an elf in a world named the Nora Continent and had lived a long time in there. Now that she had woken up from the dream, she remembered that she was, in fact, a journalist named Miles.

Yes, this feeling was so real that Sala got the illusion that the real world was fake, and this game world was real.

Even after the players entered the game, they would still have a blurry sense of surrealism when they recalled things that they had experienced in the real world.

In the game, players even had the illusion that the whole world was materialistic, and the intangible things such as magic spells, essence, and combat techniques were exaggerated products of movies and TV series.

It was because the players' minds were influenced by the main character.

In the game, Sala opened her eyes slowly and thought, “I'm now… Miles? A journalist? I have a plan to reveal the dark core secrets of that Mount Ma.s.sive Asylum?”

Shaking her head, Sala finally remembered that this was a virtual reality gaming s.p.a.ce and that exiting the game would get her back to the real world.

After she understood the situation, the game finally began.

When she drove to the destination, it was midnight.

Of course, to save game time, the driving part could be skipped. Right now, Sala was driving on the mountainous road near the destination.

The surroundings were pitch-black, as if she was driving in a wildness in midnight.

Even with the headlights on, she could only see a few meters before her. Beyond that was thick darkness.

She continued driving as if she was heading into the endless darkness.

After a long while, she finally saw lights at the end of the mud road.

Yes, in this role-playing game, Sala played as a western journalist who always dreamt of finding a big story.

“Have you guys entered the game yet?” Sala asked while driving.

Since the main character could drive, Sala could do the driving part by following the memories of the character, just as the players did in the offline mode of Grand Theft Auto 5. Since it was night, she drove slowly and thus encountered no accidents.

“I've already driven to the asylum now!” Elina said, “But isn't the game named Outlast? I've covered a big distance now and seen no danger at all!”

After driving through the open iron gates outside the hospital, the main character parked the car and walked in curiously with a video camera that was taken out from the car.

It was very dark, and no one seemed to be in the hospital. In the places without lighting, she could only see the surroundings with the night vision of the video camera.

Walking in from the side door, the main character saw all kinds of greeneries along the curving corridor. The high building in front of her looked like a modern-styled castle.

Of course, this was only a relatively old hospital.

“Should we try that livestream?” Sala suggested.

Although the livestream software had just been released in the new shop, with their knowledge of the Spiritual Spell Visual Projection which was popular on this continent, these people knew that they could show off their gameplay more clearly this way.