Life Game In Other World
Chapter 294: The Factory Escapee (Major - Please Favorite, Subscribe, and Vote for Monthly Tickets)

Chapter 294: Chapter 294: The Factory Escapee (Major Chapter Please Favorite, Subscribe, and Vote for Monthly Tickets)

"My parents are dead...uh,"

The teenager grabbed a bottle of water and forced the bread in his mouth down with it. He glanced at He Ao, nibbling on the bread in small bites. At the moment, they were sitting on the rooftop of a nearby factory, overlooking the brightly lit city,

"Our family was hit by an exotic beast. The chief died, and everyone was scattered.

I was supposed to head to another Wanderer Camp with my parents and my brothers and sisters in an off-road vehicle, but we were attacked by an exotic beast on the way, and we lost all our stored food. We walked for a day on an empty stomach, and then..."

He stiffened as he spoke, as if recalling something horrific. He looked at He Ao, paused for a moment, and whispered,

"Then we came across a big tree that had fallen to the side, blocking the road ahead. A car next to it was also stuck there.

Their car was out of gas. We gave them some of our fuel, and they gave us some dried food. It was already too late that day, so we set up a temporary camp nearby. When they cooked dinner, they took out some kind of creamy white small mushrooms.

Those mushrooms were incredibly fragrant, more so than roasted meat sprinkled with spices. They sliced the mushrooms and put them into the soup, cooking them with the dried meat. It smelled divine, like the most delicious thing in the world. My father, my brothers, my sisters, and those few people drank the soup together.

But that day, I had a stomach problem and couldn’t digest dried meat, so my father made me a mixture with a nutrient solution. My brother even showed off the soup in front of me that day, but something felt off to me.

That night, when I got up to relieve myself, I saw my parents, brothers, sisters, and those people all standing together,"

As the youngster spoke, even his voice began to tremble. He looked at the bread in his hands but didn’t continue to bite into it, "Creamy white mushrooms were growing out of their cheeks, their arms, their necks, and their eye sockets, densely covering their bodies and even bursting through their clothes.

They saw me and walked over, trying to give me a piece of mushroom they had broken off from their bodies."

The teenager curled up slightly, his tone growing more and more shaky, "They ran towards me, creamy white mushrooms falling to the ground one by one, new mushrooms sprouting from the tears in their skin, more and more of them."

His eyes widened, his pupils shrinking, his body reacting with a startle, gripping the bread tightly. It took him a while to recover.

He looked at He Ao, took a deep breath, and said,

"That’s when I finally realized it was the ’Phantom Mushrooms’ the chief had told me about.

Phantom Mushrooms look just like regular mushrooms but have an especially inviting fragrance, constantly luring people or animals to eat them.

Then its spores extract the flesh and blood of the one who eats them for nourishment, growing new Phantom Mushrooms and using the mycelium to animate the corpses that have already died, bringing them back to their collective to attract more of the same kind to eat them.

I knew my parents and siblings were dead, and what chased me were just corpses manipulated by the Phantom Mushrooms. I figured out a way to distract them, then went back to the off-road vehicle and rammed through the big tree.

And then I saw,"

The young man gazed ahead, speaking softly,

"Phantom Mushrooms as far as the eye could see.

Under the light of the Moon, they reflected a faint, creamy white brilliance.

The bones of countless dead were strewn across the ground, but at the time, I did not find those bones frightening, only the Phantom Mushrooms seemed so delicious.

Later, I bit my tongue tip, shocking my senses, and floored the accelerator to escape that place.

I drove the car very fast that day. I don’t know how long I drove until the car completely ran out of gas, and I stopped. The smell of the crushed Phantom Mushrooms still lingered on the car wheels.

Two Wilderness Hunters found me. I stopped them from eating the Phantom Mushrooms, and as thanks, they offered to take me into the city and find me a steady job. I had never been to a city before and only knew there were no exotic beasts there,"

The teenager looked at He Ao, "And then I was brought to this factory."

"What happened to those two Wilderness Hunters who brought you here?"

He Ao asked casually.

The young man paused, speaking slowly, "You just killed them."

He Ao was taken aback and then let out a wry laugh before asking quietly,

"How do you work and live in the factory?"

"Once you enter the factory, management directly assigns new wanderers to the Wilderness Hunters or the middlemen who brought them, and then we all go into a workshop together.

There is one or two foremen in the workshop, usually gangsters hired by the Wilderness Hunters or middlemen. The factory does not manage us; they leave it to the foremen who arrange the work. If you do a bad job, the mild punishment is a kick, the severe one is a whipping.

If there is a mistake, the foremen might even hang you up and beat you.

Basically, all our time outside of sleeping is spent working. Different people have different working hours; I’m on a three-shift system.

I start work at six in the morning and finish at ten at night, which is the early shift. There’s also an afternoon shift and a night shift. The afternoon shift is from two in the afternoon to six the next morning, and the night shift is from ten at night until two in the afternoon the next day."

Worked seven days a week.

"The specific shift arrangements depended on the situation at the time. The most anyone in our workshop had ever worked was three days and nights in a row, and then died in the workshop."

"Sixteen-hour workdays?"

He Ao asked softly.

"Not necessarily. Our workshop worked sixteen-hour shifts, some workshops had eighteen-hour shifts, others fourteen. Their scheduling was a bit more complex."

The young man took a deep breath, slowly exhaled, and then bit into a piece of bread,

"As for living conditions, sixteen of us were crammed into a dormitory, where walls over two meters high were fitted with four bunk beds in a row, making for a total of sixteen beds in the dorm. The dormitories were centrally located in the building, convenient for getting to work and preventing escape, and the foremen’s dormitories were generally right next to those of the Wilderness Wanderers, for easy management.

We had an hour for lunch break at noon, but in reality, we could only rest for fifteen minutes, as the foreman would have someone bring up buckets of mushy food.

I don’t know what was in it, only that it tasted a bit sweet. Others said it was a poor-grade nutrient sludge made from synthetic starch mixed with synthetic protein and some vitamins, with the sweetness mainly coming from saccharin.

Breakfast and dinner were much the same."

As he spoke, he glanced at the bread in his hand. "I haven’t had bread for two years."

"How did you manage to escape?"

He Ao asked, looking up at the towering building opposite him.

"Surveillance cameras are everywhere in the factory; it’s easy to go in but not so easy to get out. Many Wilderness Wanderers come in and never leave,"

the youth pondered for a moment. "But those cameras don’t cover every corner. Every Friday, the factory arranges a big cleanup to take care of the unassigned public areas of the factory. They wouldn’t hire outside cleaners; naturally, this job fell to the various foremen and their Wilderness Wanderers.

The foremen took turns providing workers according to a set rhythm. During these times, they’d pick out the well-behaved and sensible people to do the cleaning. Every two months, it came to us.

Cleaning was much easier than factory work. We had time to slack off, and given that the foreman was keen to prevent the Wilderness Wanderers from scouting the layout during cleaning, they were very strict about selecting the workers. So, getting chosen for cleaning duty wasn’t easy.

It took me three months of fetching water and doing odd jobs for the foreman before I got close enough to him to finally get a chance to clean. But the first time I was tasked with cleaning, I didn’t get to work; I only familiarized myself with the layout of the area I was supposed to clean.

While cleaning, there was always a foreman supervising, but they slacked off too. Around noon, when the sun was at its peak, the foreman would find a shadow to sneak into and doze off for a while, sleeping for about fifteen minutes.

During those fifteen minutes, I would carefully study the surrounding walls and surveillance, looking for blind spots, then briefly stray from my area to check out the nearby walls.

Back at our family camp, I enjoyed finding such surveillance blind spots, and I gradually figured out some patterns.

But I hadn’t completely scoped out the walls. After my fourth time cleaning, the foreman stopped letting me clean and hung me up for a beating.

At first, I thought I’d been discovered. Later, I realized it was just a warning.

I waited half a month to be sure there was no problem, then I began studying the factory’s elevators. The factory building had thirty-five floors; the first three were offices for the factory management, and the fourth floor up was where the factory began.

All the windows were fitted with burglar bars, and iron thorn barricades were placed all around close to the building. If you jumped directly from above to escape, you’d be impaled and die.

But there were two places without iron thorn barricades.

One was the main entrance of the building, guarded by armed factory security personnel,

The other was a small door at the back of the building for management personnel to use, but this door was locked during work hours. When the door was locked, the iron thorn barricades would pop up from the ground, and opening the door required identity verification.

My workstation was by the window, just above the small door. I’ve always had good eyesight, so I often looked down to observe the door’s comings and goings.

Then I realized that the factory management cared a lot about appearances. Whenever the big boss of the factory or some honored guests arrived, the main door would be closed, and the small door would remain open for the factory workers to pass through.

At such times, all of the factory’s security resources would be focused on protecting the big boss and honored guests.

Whenever the boss or guests were coming, the foreman would let everyone know a week in advance to work hard. They’d even briefly improve the food, allowing the workers to barely recover their spirits, so that if the big boss came to inspect, they’d be able to demonstrate their full working capacity.

In the past two months, I’ve been using my good relationship with the foreman to eat a bit more, to recover my strength. Finally, one week ago, I got the ’work hard’ notice and took the chance of the improved meals to hide away some food.

Today came, and while everyone else was outside, I took the elevator to the fifth floor. Then I pried open the burglar bars, crawled through, made my way down by grabbing onto the bars, reached the small door, and followed the planned route to escape.

You know what happened next."

"So, the factory boss is in the factory now?"

He Ao looked at the young man.