What made Xia You's lungs hurt was the sudden inhalation of an excess amount of oxygen. Unlike the real world, it was completely untainted by pollution, pure fresh air.
The splitting pain in her lungs jerked Xia You back from the brink of shock; almost instantly, several words invaded her mind: "Pure oxygen toxicity." She quickly held her breath, pinched her throat with her index and middle fingers, and breathed in small gulps, as though in the final kilometers of a marathon.
At the beginning of her marathon training, the school team's coach had suggested she inhale some pure oxygen and taught her how to avoid over-inhalation.
Calm, two words that hovered in her mind, allowed Xia You to slowly regain consciousness.
Besides Xia You and the several dozen lieutenants following the tracking screen, those who survived the darkness all exhibited varying degrees of hyperoxia reactions—to differing extents: suffocation, convulsions, shock, and even death.
Out of the four hundred and forty-nine brain scanners, over twenty suddenly stopped working.
Panic filled the tracking room all at once; someone swallowed audibly, the sound crisp and clear. So this was what the world inside Military Road was like.
Thick, sinewy tree trunks and a canopy that blotted out the sky, rare ancient forest flora were everywhere, sights even the National Tropical Park seldom offered. Grass half a person's height suggested no trace of human habitation.
Those Experimenters who had burst out of the darkness, upon gradually regaining their senses, also scrutinized their surroundings in detail.
For the past seventy-two hours, with no light, everyone seemed to be confined in a sealed space. Unable to feel the movement of air or the passage of time, but correspondingly, the function of human sensory perception also dulled, unable to feel hunger or pain, a person's consciousness rotting painlessly like maggot-infested carrion.
The moment sunlight appeared, all the lost sensations from the last three days returned in a torrential rush.
Human instinct compelled everyone to react differently; once the hyperoxic reaction subsided, the Experimenters began to search the forest.
Xia You stayed in her original spot longer than the others, first sitting on the ground to examine herself. She noticed some changes in her body and saw that her shadow, cast upon the ground, glinted with several bright numbers, Physical Strength: 35/100, spiritual power: 100/100, anger value: 0/100, cumulative military merit: 0.
It wasn't long before Xia You gave up on trying to understand the meaning of those numbers.
She had been trapped in darkness for seventy-two hours, and due to an illness years earlier, she had learned to estimate time based on heart rate while awake. After calculating the correct time, Xia You knew her body, starved for three days, needed replenishment of food and water. Moreover, she must control the intense hunger in her body to avoid overburdening her physiological functions with too much food after extended starvation.
When she had just awakened from a coma four years ago, like a vegetable, she had completely lost the ability to care for herself. It was her mother, Xia Yun, who fed her liquid food spoon by spoon to recover her bodily functions. But in this unfamiliar forest, liquid food was undoubtedly a luxury.
After her brain regained normal thinking capability, Xia You searched the area within her sight, picked some fruits with bird peck marks – deemed safe – and nibbled on them in small bites.
There were only a few people who shared Xia You's understanding. Most players, upon finding a drinkable water source and some consumable fruits in this deserted forest, devoured the food greedily after finding it.
"Are these really the elites from each military region?" Lin Yi muttered a curse while looking at the images reflected on the screen. Judging by this, aside from a few military regions who had sent real soldiers, the rest seemed to have sent mere placeholders.
Hyperoxia followed by binge eating increased the number of people feeling unwell by dozens. By the fourth day, the number of operational brain scanners had decreased by several dozen.
After the initial shock, the lieutenants monitoring everything shifted to relief. Taking advantage of the surviving players' search, they whispered to each other: "Lucky we sent people in first, otherwise we would've been the ones suffering."