DSMC Chapter 83.1

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“Ahhh, holy shit, using the kitten’s first-person POV nearly scared me into bouncing off the wall! Dr. Peng is terrifying! Is he good or not?”

“Hard to say. From what we’ve seen of this instance before today, players were all in animal form. Basically Dr. Peng only shows up when doing health checks on animals, and he appears very rarely. Most of the time players are pretty lucky and don’t get caught by him for an exam.”

“Kitty Baby went through so much to finish this mission, it won’t fail at the very last second because Dr. Peng refuses, right?”

“Is Dr. Peng actually a good person or not? So damn scary. Does anyone know why his face was covered in blood? And he even showed a mouthful of white teeth, scared me to death!”

“How is that scary? I think it’s just right. That’s the rhythm a horror game should have. I love seeing players with shocked expressions.”

“Too bad Mimi’s expression was pretty calm.”

“I don’t believe it, he must’ve been scared. Look, he didn’t even respond to Dr. Peng.”

“Hahaha, this is killing me. Kitty Baby definitely didn’t expect Dr. Peng to show up with a bloody face when it’s not even night yet.”

Yan Jiyun really was startled, but then he remembered that the mission was to find Dr. Peng and hand the wolf pup over for treatment.

Seeing that he didn’t speak, Dr. Peng asked again, “Is there a small animal injured?”

To complete the mission, he pretended he didn’t know anything and said, “Yes, a wolf pup is injured. Could you help take a look?”

Dr. Peng opened the door for him and let him go in first. “Alright, bring it in first.”

After returning to the consultation room, Yan Jiyun saw the floor covered in blood and stopped short.

Dr. Peng went inside to get him a large towel. “The pup looks a bit hypothermic. Wrap it up with the towel first.” He seemed to realize how messy the place was and added with a smile, “Sorry you had to see this. I was preparing blood packs for the doctor next door just now, and in a rush that little animal scratched the bag open, splashing blood all over my face. I didn’t scare you, did I?”

Yan Jiyun kept up his honest, well-behaved image in front of Dr. Peng and said, “I was so scared just now I almost didn’t dare to speak.”

Hearing this, Dr. Peng laughed instead. “Being a veterinarian means often facing all kinds of unexpected situations.”

After quickly washing his hands and face at the sink and cleaning the blood off, he called someone to come clean up before starting to examine the pup.

The wolf pup not only had hypothermia, but one front leg and one back leg were fractured, and it also had scratches from the monkeys. Monkey nails carry bacteria, so Dr. Peng first blow-dried the pup’s fur to keep its body temperature stable, then cleaned its wounds. The leg injuries were rather serious, so he took an X-ray first, then fixed both legs and put them in casts.

While Dr. Peng was treating the wolf pup, Yan Jiyun saw the system’s side mission reward. After the countdown ended, the system took a few seconds before issuing the mission completion notice, as if it were doubting that he had completed side missions consecutively.

Was the system a sore loser?

Yan Jiyun didn’t trigger any special missions for the time being, so he stayed in the clinic with the pup. After Dr. Peng fed it some anti-inflammatory medicine, it fell asleep.

He even deliberately checked the pup’s belly while it slept. When breathing normally, its chubby abdomen rose and fell, which proved there was no problem.

The little guy had no sense of crisis at all and slept quite soundly.

Dr. Peng looked rather reliable, unlike other NPCs who wanted to get rid of new zookeepers at the slightest provocation, with all kinds of bizarre problems that together could circle the earth.

Seeing that the wolf pup was safe, Yan Jiyun asked him, “Dr. Peng, will the cub stay here from now on? Will there be dedicated care at night?”

He felt that the wolf zone wasn’t suitable for an injured pup to recover in. It was full of aggressive individuals, and there was also a player who might harm the pup. From the ferocious look of the wolf player today, it seemed he wanted to kill the pup, and the pup would definitely not be safe if it went back.

He had interacted with Dr. Peng twice, and the other party had always done things beneficial to small animals, without any perverted behavior. Or maybe not? Actually, that pool of blood on the floor and the blood on his face just now were quite suspicious. The cleaners were very efficient when tidying up, and showed no reaction to the bloodstains at all. Yan Jiyun knew that NPCs in the game acted very logically, and even unimportant characters followed their own settings. The cleaners should have been somewhat surprised by the blood on the floor, or at least commented on how hard it was to clean, right?

But maybe he was overthinking it. After all, Dr. Peng was a veterinarian, anything could happen, and cleaners cleaned every day anyway, so it wasn’t a big deal.

“You don’t need to worry about that. The pup has to stay here for observation overnight. It’s only a little over a month old and its immunity isn’t strong enough yet. It was also scratched by monkeys today. I’ll arrange for the night-shift nurses to keep a close eye on it, and there will be doctors on duty at night too. If anything happens, it’ll be handled immediately.”

“Then I’m relieved,” Yan Jiyun said.

[Want to be Human] Livestream channel:

“Mimi! Don’t leave the cub in the clinic! It’s very dangerous at night!”

“But Kitty Baby doesn’t know that night is dangerous. According to normal logic, an injured pup should be taken care of by a veterinarian. Right now he is just a zookeeper; treatment and care aren’t his job. Besides, the wolf pup was originally going to die anyway. When that wolf player attacked our kitty-cat, he was actually doing his mission too.”

“Isn’t the wolf player’s mission also to save the pup? I remember someone mentioned that earlier.”

“Different players get different missions. He’s a low-rank wolf in the pack. If he wants to earn points, he has to become the leader of the pack, otherwise how could he stand out later? He has to rule the wolves to have a chance to survive. So he can’t do a rescue mission. Instead he kills the pup to trigger a war between the alpha and part of the pack. When the snipe and the clam fight, the fisherman benefits¹The idiom means “a third party who benefits when two sides is in conflict”. I honestly googled this idiom not because I don’t understand the meaning, but because I don’t know what a snipe is. Apparently it is a marsh-dwelling bird with (comically) long bill… The idiom came from an ancient Chinese story about a snipe that tries to eat a clam, but during the fight, a fisherman caught them both..”

“Why can’t the wolf pup be left in the clinic? I think Dr. Peng seems pretty nice. He’s very gentle when examining animals, and speaks softly too.”

“No one has ever seen players use a Human Form Time Card in this instance before. We don’t know how Dr. Peng behaves either. I’m curious too.”

Yan Jiyun knew nothing about what the audience was discussing. Of course, even if he looked at the comment area, he wouldn’t be able to see the above spoiler-restricted content.

His mission was done. After handing the wolf pup over to Dr. Peng, he left the clinic and headed straight for the cafeteria. At this time, it was time to eat, and he was afraid there wouldn’t be any food left for him if he went late.

That women’s bicycle was still parked at the entrance. Not a single scooter that had been there earlier was left, so he could only use the bicycle.

Yan Jiyun reasonably suspected that the system, seeing him pedal like his life depended on it, had taken away all the scooters.

Just as he put one foot on the pedal, the system suddenly issued a notification.

[The first day of business hours at Xianghe Zoo has ended. Next, today’s popularity values of all players will be calculated.]

Yan Jiyun didn’t bother checking the rankings and rushed into the cafeteria first to see if there was anything he could eat.

Standing at the entrance, he saw that dinner time was written at the door: 05:00–05:30 PM.

So dinner was only half an hour long, very unreasonable. Lunch time had been perfectly normal. What was going on?

But if he had come half an hour later, he would have gone hungry tonight.

He couldn’t go hungry. He had to fill his stomach first before thinking about what he might face next.

Standing at the serving window, Yan Jiyun conservatively chose food he could eat. Only after the food entered his mouth did he start looking at the rankings released by the system.

The system released a routine ranking, no different from what he saw when he woke up from his nap. His own rank was still at the bottom. Catching up would still be quite difficult unless he turned back into a cat and returned to the leopard zone to run the cat-teaser business.

The system suddenly became very quiet and didn’t issue any new rules.

Yan Jiyun scrolled through the public screen. Apart from announcing the popularity rankings, there was nothing else.

There wasn’t even a single message about other players completing side missions.

He felt that the system might be holding back a big move that would terrify all players. After all, twelve hours had already passed since they entered the game, and not a single player had triggered the “main mission.”

Of course, it was also possible that some players had triggered it, but the system had not released any related announcement.

This instance seemed to be constantly protecting the players’ identities.

Did the system not want players to guess who the players were? Why?

Yan Jiyun thought while eating. Soon, the food on his plate was gone.

Most of the people dining in the cafeteria were zookeepers. He didn’t see Uncle Man or Jiang Meiying anymore, which meant the missions related to the two of them had ended, equivalent to them going offline. However, Yan Jiyun still saw the two zookeepers who had been very pessimistic about him after the lunch break. The two of them were sitting together again to eat, and when they saw Yan Jiyun, they looked quite surprised that he was still alive.

The cafeteria was a relatively safe place. The zookeepers were all busy eating. Yan Jiyun quickly finished his dinner and was just about to leave when he noticed something was off around him.

He realized that the cafeteria, which had been almost full just now, now had only one-third of the people left. Most of the zookeepers ate even faster than he did and left in a flash, half of them disappearing at once, as if rushing to do something.

Yan Jiyun was a player who had forcibly cut in line. He didn’t have an NPC work schedule and didn’t know what they were about to go busy with. It was definitely not normal work, since this was a horror game.

Like the other players, he cleaned up his tray and chased after the two zookeepers who always talked badly about him behind his back.

Strangely, the direction the two NPCs walked in was actually the dormitory. One after another, they all went back to their rooms. He also returned to his own room, quietly leaving the door ajar to observe what was going on outside.

After all the zookeepers returned to their own rooms, none of them appeared again. What was going on?

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  The idiom means “a third party who benefits when two sides is in conflict”. I honestly googled this idiom not because I don’t understand the meaning, but because I don’t know what a snipe is. Apparently it is a marsh-dwelling bird with (comically) long bill… The idiom came from an ancient Chinese story about a snipe that tries to eat a clam, but during the fight, a fisherman caught them both.