Chapter 59: Carlin Asylum

Thus, the third game began.

After everyone was blindfolded, they began to rush away in all directions. Most of the survivors were holding onto one another while rushing out of the hall, quietly approaching the office. Once they rounded the corner and were no longer within Mice King's line of sight, many of them removed their blindfolds altogether.

They were trying to communicate with their eyes, doing their best to round up the people who hadn't been notified of the situation yet.

After that, everyone snuck stealthily toward the office, and they were able to make it into the office before the count of 50 was up.

Following the conclusion of Mice King's countdown, Adam pretended to rush toward the office area to capture people as part of the game, and by this point, most of the survivors had already left.

He opened the office door to find that there was only one person left at the scene. That person was the one who had assaulted Chloe and given rise to the clown anomaly.

At this moment, he was laying on the ground, having already been killed.

It seemed that his throat had been slit open by a utility knife used for cutting paper in the office, and his blood and sprayed all over the floor.

Unsurprisingly, the killer was Karen. She was far fiercer than Chloe, and she also had the motive for the crime.

Throughout this entire process, the young man had made no sound, indicating that aside from the fact that he had fallen prey to a surprise attack, there had to have been someone else helping Karen as well. As for whether that accomplice was Chloe, Karen's lover, or someone else, Adam had no interest in finding out.

In any case, the man was certainly not a saint, and most importantly, with so many people losing their lives here, even if Mechguard were to launch an investigation, his death would only be attributed to the actions of the psychic mutants.

She really jumped on this opportunity, didn't she? This is why you don't mess with strippers!

Adam could see that there was no one else around, and he immediately jumped out of this psychic prison through the rift that Hook had painstakingly opened up.

Upon arriving in the real world, Adam was greeted by the sight of close to 20 people gathered in the office. With a rough glance, Adam was able to determine that 10 out of the 12 survivors from the game had managed to escape. With Chloe, Karen, Hook, and Karen's lover thrown into the mix, there was a total of 15 people at the scene.

"What happened to the other two?"

"We tried to signal for them to come with us, but I think they were too drunk to understand, and they ended up hiding elsewhere," someone explained.

"Alright, we can't do much about that. There's not much time, so we have to get out of here as fast as we can!"

At this point, Adam felt like he had already done everything in his power, and he immediately flung the office door open before rushing outside.

The floor from the office to the hall was littered with bodies.

Most of these people were still breathing, but they had already been reduced to vegetables. The death of one's psychic body would severely damage the neurons in their brain, resulting in complete neuron death in serious cases. Even in the best-case scenario, one would lose all of their memories, becoming a blank slate with no recollection of anything.

Of course, blank slates who weren't adapters weren't considered to be valuable commodities. Not only was there no way to install memories into them, they were considered to be even less valuable than normal people as they had suffered brain damage as a result of their impaired neurons.

After crossing over the body-laden floor, Adam and the survivors arrived at the elevator.

In the psychic world, the elevator had been destroyed by him, but in the real world, it was still completely untouched. Everyone squeezed into the elevator, quickly arriving in the dark alley outside.

"There are attackers on the main street, so we can't go there. Who's familiar with this area? We need to take more discrete paths to get out of here."

"I'm most familiar with this area," Karen's lover declared as he stepped forward.

Throughout his time working at the underground pub, he regularly frequented these streets, so he was naturally quite familiar with the surrounding area.

Under his guidance, everyone began to flee the scene along a discrete path, and only after getting very far away from the scene of the crime did they feel safe enough to call Mechguard.

At this point, Mice King had already been searching for a long time, yet he had only managed to capture two people.

He wandered through the pub in an agitated manner, and finally, he opened the door of the office to discover the hole that had been smashed into the psychic boundary.

"Fuck, he tricked me!" Mice King threw the two people that he was carrying down onto the ground in a furious manner at the sight of the hole. "So I've been the mouse in this game of cat and mouse this entire time?"

After fuming for a while, a thought suddenly occurred to him, and he hurriedly left the psychic world through the hole.

In doing so, he returned to the spot where his physical body was located, which was on the street outside the pub. Immediately thereafter, he set about rousing all of his companions before notifying them of the situation.

"Some people managed to escape. Mechguard officers might be on the way..."

……

"A Shocking and Inhuman Terrorist Attack"

"The Most Unfair Challenge Adapters Have Ever Issued to Humanity"

"What is the Purpose of Carlin Asylum's Existence?"

"Should Adapters Be Given Special Rights? Are Special Rights Really Fair to Humanity?"

"Over 1,000 Deaths: The Most Horrific Terrorist Attack of the Century"

On the same day that Adam and the survivors escaped from the pub, all major news websites, electronic newspapers, and news channels were reporting stories on the attack that had taken place the previous night.

In this day and age, terrorist attacks claiming over 1,000 lives were extremely rare, and it was the most calamitous event in terms of loss of human life outside of wars ever since the founding of Sandrise City.

All major news programs were reporting the incident, and as one of the few survivors of the attack, Adam quickly found himself under intense scrutiny from a litany of professional journalists. As a result, he had no choice but to hide in his dormitory room at the academy.

Hook was also in the same situation, but his personality was completely different from Adam's. There was no way that he would pass up this opportunity to put himself in the limelight, and he had been accepting all types of interviews throughout the entire day.

Furthermore, due to the fact that he was an adapter, he was able to provide a more comprehensive description of the psychic world than the average person. According to his recount of events, he encountered a group of extremely vicious and heinous psychic mutants, against whom he fought valiantly on his own in an epic battle before he was finally able to escape from the psychic prison with the other survivors.

His questionable story was even further embellished and widely reported by all news outlets, and his social media followers swelled all the way from 43 to close to 1,000,000 in what seemed like the blink of an eye.

"With so many followers, I could maybe become an internet celebrity in the future! I heard that live commerce is a really lucrative field for internet celebrities nowadays. It's much easier earning money that way than offering adapter services." After returning to the dorm room, he made his way over to Adam's side while humming a cheerful tune. "What are you up to?"

"I'm looking up information on Carlin Asylum."

Carlin Asylum was a place that was specifically dedicated to imprisoning psychic mutant criminals.

Almost all psychic mutants were clinically insane, and most of them had been locked up in Carlin Asylum at one point or another. Some of them were captured and handed over to the asylum by adapters, while others turned themselves in.

The asylum was a twisted and deranged place, a restricted zone that was overseen by the collective 12 elders of the Psychic Church. The asylum was home to the most resolute psychic prisons in the world, and violent psychic storms in those prisons would instantly spell death for the average adapter.

Carlin Asylum was also where Mice King had come from.

"Mice King, real name unknown. As an orphan, perhaps he never had a name to begin with. The first time he was discovered was in the sewage system. It's speculated that he was born to a drug addict who abandoned him in the sewers right after his birth. There are stories that state that he was initially nurtured by mice. After discovering the infant, the mice didn't feed on him. Instead, they brought him rotten sewer cheese for him to feed on. After that, he was adopted by some homeless people. It's said that even as a child, he was very close with the mice in the sewage system. The mice didn't hurt him, and he didn't hurt the mice, either. In fact, he was even able to issue instructions to nests of mice, and that was where the title of Mice King came from."

Adam was reading information on Mice King, and he wasn't the only one from Carlin Asylum with information available on the internet.

There's information on that maggot-looking psychic mutant as well. So her name really is Lilian, and it seems like she's Mice King's only human friend that's around the same age as him.