Chapter 730: Outlast Ending (Part 1)

If the first half could be called madness, the latter half of the game Outlast truly entered the realm of the uncanny.

After escaping into the asylum's inner courtyard, the torrential rain poured down with a piercing chill, sending an involuntary shiver through the crowd of elves watching from behind.

It looked freezing.

There was virtually no light outside, and only the occasional flash of lightning across the sky revealed the shape of a flowerbed ahead.

"Now, we scavenge the surroundings first," Boss Fang explained while livestreaming, soon unearthing a key in the room to the left.

Far off in the darkness, a faint glimmer of light hinted at the presence of a door.

It looked like the exit to a boundless, dark abyss.

Boss Fang was seen sprinting over, throwing the door open, and finally reaching the interior, where light at last returned.

Yet the light was confined only to the outer corridor; stepping further inside meant plunging once more into the gloom, as if one were entirely swallowed by the infinite darkness.

The screen showed nothing but pitch black until Fang Qi toggled the camera's night vision mode, exploring the darkness and catching a vague glimpse of a door to the right.

At this moment, Sera and the rest of the elves, alongside the student faction from the Haotian Academy, were watching just as before, munching on potato chips and spicy strips.

Over at the Yuanyang City branch, Yue Bai, Mu Qing, and a group of students sat huddled together on the sofa, holding a communication jade to watch.

It was just then that Gu Tingyun and his companions walked in from the street outside.

Within the livestream room of the virtual projection, upon Boss Fang's screen, the proprietor pushed the door open and stepped inside, just as he always did.

Suddenly, viewed through the night vision function of the camera, deep within the corridor beyond the door, an utterly bizarre figure appeared—immensely distant at first, yet in the blink of an eye, it had drifted right up to his face!

"Ah—!"

The crowd of elves watching behind Fang Qi nearly clutched each other in sheer terror.

Mu Qing, holding the communication jade, suffered such a violent fright that her hand jerked, sending the device flying.

Gu Tingyun had only just pushed the door open to enter.

Clatter!

A communication jade smacked him right on the forehead.

"..."

Mu Qing: "..."

...

By the time they looked back...

"Huh? Nothing happened just now?"

They now saw Boss Fang emerging from the corridor, scaling the wall, and hugging the edge to press forward.

"Now we drop back down. Hear those chains? The fat guy is already hunting us. Crouch down and use the bushes for cover to creep along the wall—you absolutely cannot let him spot you." In this system version, which was far more realistic, being discovered in this physical state meant running would be completely useless.

"Hear that sound around the corner ahead?" Boss Fang continued. "Since he can't find us, he's going to block the only path forward, because we definitely have to go look for Father Martin. At this moment, we back off a little."

Father Martin was also the only relatively sane person the protagonist encountered in Outlast; on one hand, he prevented the protagonist from escaping, but on the other, he guided the protagonist step by step toward uncovering the ultimate truth.

Sure enough, the fat man emerged from around the corner.

On the screen, Boss Fang hid in the adjacent bushes, aiming his camera squarely at the fat man, who resembled a demonic monster as he peered about, completely failing to notice them.

The bullet comments on screen erupted in pure amusement:

"Hahaha 6666!"

"Fat guy: Where are you? I'm so scared..."

"Boss Fang: Observing from the shadows"

"Fat guy: They told me to hunt someone, but I haven't seen a single soul the whole game!"

"..."

"Hahaha, why are these bullet comments so hilarious?" The group of elves was also laughing themselves ragged.

...

As the exploration continued, the protagonist finally descended into the deepest recesses of the subterranean world by way of an elevator.

The elevator did not grind to a halt until it reached over a dozen floors underground.

Here, the surrounding environment shifted into a pristine, white stone tunnel.

Clearly, this was bedrock deep beneath the earth.

Passing through the stone tunnel, everyone beheld a massive underground laboratory laid out before them.

This laboratory deep underground was not dark; the lights remained ablaze, yet there was not a single living soul.

Only horribly contorted corpses remained, making the place feel far more sinister than anything before it.

Even with the illumination, the atmosphere felt biting and bleak.

By now, the group of elves watched without daring to breathe loudly, tracking the protagonist as he ventured deeper into the laboratory.

Suddenly, just around the corner of the tunnel ahead, a dark shadow flashed past.

Controlling the protagonist, Fang Qi turned and fled without a second thought.

Behind the protagonist, a dark shadow pursued at an even greater speed.

The heavy, ragged panting of the protagonist could be heard clearly through the screen, running with absolute desperation, as if a single touch would unleash something cataclysmic.

Fleeing all the way back along the original path, he had just thrown a door open.

There stood a face as bloated and monstrous as a demon.

"Ah—!" This sudden turn of events terrified even the onlookers eating their snacks.

A massive palm seized the protagonist directly, spun him around, and slammed him heavily to the ground.

At this moment, the vision on screen blurred.

Yet, just as this demonic fat man prepared to assault the protagonist once more, suddenly...

He seemed to be yanked into midair by an invisible force.

Then, he was slammed brutally against the wall!

The fat man's body, which could scarcely be harmed by swords or blades, seemed entirely useless; he howled and struggled as if hoisted by something unseen, defying all laws of physics as he was bounced like a leather ball against the walls, the floor, and the ceiling.

Finally, the entire upper half of his massive frame was stuffed into a ventilation duct, torn into a cloud of shreds by the fan blades of the exhaust window.

One could not even fathom how an aluminum alloy exhaust window, which an ordinary adult could bend with a single punch, could shred the fat man's iron-hard body.

He possessed virtually no power to fight back!

"My goodness!"

"What is that?!"

Several elves watching from behind shrieked aloud.

It was certainly not that they had never seen a ghost, but... since when were anyone's ghosts this overpowered?!

Once the ghost departed, they were able to find the doctor, who relied entirely on a breathing apparatus to survive.

The mystery of why the protagonist hadn't been killed earlier was finally unraveled: the phantom was, in truth, a dual consciousness sharing a single form. One of these minds harbored no lethal intent toward him. Thus, while encountering the specter meant certain death under most circumstances, there were two distinct occasions where he had faced it and emerged entirely unscathed.

"How could a normal, living human being still exist in a place like this...?!" a surrounding crowd murmured in sheer disbelief.

"He is taking care of me..." the doctor spoke, breaking his silence. "Perhaps he mistakes me for his father. Do you know what this symbol signifies?"

He wheeled himself closer to the peculiar emblem etched upon the wall. "It is a warning for nanotechnology—nanoscopic machines. We possessed such technology decades ago, yet we have never truly managed to master it."

"Moussaf found a solution within my research, a method to transform the cells of the human body into nanoscale factories. The innate function of a cell is to produce atoms, but we believed we could govern the body through sheer, formidable willpower. We foolishly thought we could control the process... but it was madness. How utterly foolish, using a lunatic to forge something so terrifyingly powerful..."

Indeed, this was no phantom in the traditional sense, but a horrific monstrosity born from the unholy marriage of science and the supernatural.