Chapter 6: The Doctor in the Hallway

The rebar went against apartment 3B's wall in a neat line. Li Hua stacked the crowbars beside it, then the bolt cutters. Four pieces of rebar, two crowbars, one pair of bolt cutters. Enough to arm three people properly, or five people poorly.

Zhang Wei set his legal pad on the kitchen counter and opened his notebook. Hardware store page. Item count, weight estimates. He crossed out "axes — gone when they arrived. Probably Fang Lei. The man had been busy.

"He killed twelve in twelve hours," Zhang Wei said. "One per hour, sustained, in a confined building. The spawn replacement rate for interior zones runs on a thirty-minute cycle at current density. He clears a floor, the System respawns within half an hour, but the new wave is one tier higher."

Li Hua was filling a pot with water from the bathroom tap. It ran brown, then clear. "You're saying he's making things worse."

"I'm saying he's converting a static threat into an escalating one. The second floor is already Level 2-3 spawns. Before he started his clearing run, it was Level 1-2. He's dragged the building's difficulty floor upward by a full tier."

"So we tell him to stop."

"He won't listen. He thinks XP solves everything." Zhang Wei flipped to a fresh page. "The real problem is the spawn anchor. Every building has one — a fixed point where the System hooks new entity instances. Ours is in the basement parking garage. Fang Lei clears enough floors, the spawn anchor compensates by pulling higher-level mobs from the wider zone radius. Two blocks out. Three. He's widening the danger zone by killing too efficiently."

Li Hua set the pot down. "Can you find this spawn anchor?"

"Code Sight can see spawn point markers. I haven't scanned the basement yet." He paused. "There's something else down there. The hidden quest points to Sublevel 1."

"Below the parking garage."

"Below the parking garage."

She absorbed that. No follow-up. Li Hua had a habit of letting silence do the work — she'd heard him, she'd file it, and she'd act when the information became actionable rather than speculative.

"First," she said, "we get these supplies upstairs. Then we map the building. Every survivor, every floor, every stairwell. If Fang Lei is pulling spawns outward, we need to know which corridors are still safe."

"Agreed."

They moved. Li Hua carried the backpack. Zhang Wei took a crowbar in one hand, the rebar lengths strapped across his back with electrical cord. The stairwell door opened onto the third-floor landing — empty, quiet, the air carrying the faint ozone smell that every System notification left behind.

They were halfway down to the second floor when Zhang Wei heard it.

Breathing. Fast, shallow. Panic and pain. Coming from the stairwell landing between the second and first floors — the concrete platform where the stairs turned back on themselves.

Code Sight triggered:

[ENV_SCAN] Stairwell B — Landing 1.5 Active entities: 2 Entity 1: Human Player — Level 1 Entity 2: Human Player — Level 1 (Incapacitated)

Two humans. One incapacitated. Zhang Wei held up a fist — military stop signal, probably wrong, but Li Hua understood. They descended one step at a time.

The girl was hunched over the second person, hands pressed against something red. Late teens, maybe seventeen, wearing a torn hospital volunteer jacket two sizes too large. Her dark hair was pulled back with a clip that had lost its grip. Blood — not all of it hers — stained her forearms to the elbows.

The person on the ground was a middle-aged man. Conscious, barely. His left arm was wrong below the elbow — a bite wound, the edges blackened with residual venom. The girl was pressing a torn strip of fabric against it, hands trembling so badly the bandage kept slipping.

She looked up when she heard them. Her eyes were wide, red-rimmed, focused on the crowbar first, then his face.

"Don't—" Her voice cracked. "Don't hurt us. He's hurt. He was bitten. I tried to stop the bleeding but the wound won't close and there's something wrong with his blood, it's turning black—"

"Venom residue," Li Hua said, already kneeling. "System-applied toxin. Standard healing won't close it because the venom is an active debuff." She pulled the bandage back. The man groaned. "How long?"

"Forty minutes? Maybe an hour. I found him on the first floor. Got him up here because the stairs were safer than the lobby." The girl's hands wouldn't stop shaking. "I'm not — I was a volunteer. At the hospital. I know first aid but I don't know what this is."

"Name?" Li Hua asked.

"Lin Mei."

"Li Hua. Zhang Wei. We're from the third floor." She pointed at the arm. "That debuff needs a Purifier-class cleanse. We don't have one. Neither do you?"

"I don't have a class. I'm Level 1."

"You said something unlocked when the System activated."

Lin Mei's jaw tightened. "It's not reliable. I tried to use it on him and it — flickered. Like a lightbulb about to die."

Zhang Wei crouched beside her. "Can I see your hands?"

She turned them over, palms up. Blood. Trembling. And there — Code Sight caught it — a faint luminescence under her skin, pulsing in time with her heartbeat:

[ENTITY_SCAN] Lin Mei — Human Player Level: 1 | Class: None STR: 6 | DEX: 8 | CON: 7 | WIS: 14 | INT: 12 HP: 78/80 [SYSTEM_TAG] Passive Trait: Healing Resonance (Lv. 0.3) [SYSTEM_TAG] Implementation Status: INCOMPLETE

WIS 14 at Level 1, no class. Most survivors he'd scanned had WIS in the 6-9 range. Lin Mei's healing resonance was raw, unstable, unfinished — but the foundation was real.

"The System gave you a healing trait," he said. "Not a class skill. A passive that grew out of your medical background — knowledge interfacing with System mechanics." He paused. "It's marked incomplete."

"Incomplete?"

"The System registered the trait but hasn't finished deploying it. The feature exists, but the full version hasn't been installed. It should stabilize as you level."

Lin Mei stared at him. "How do you know that?"

"I can see things others can't."

She didn't ask how. She didn't have the bandwidth. The man on the ground was getting worse — breathing thinning, black discoloration spreading up his forearm.

"If the debuff isn't cleansed in the next twenty minutes," Li Hua said, "the venom reaches his torso. System-level organ failure. He dies."

Lin Mei pressed her hands against the wound again. The luminescence flickered — brighter, then sputtered out. She gasped.

"I can't hold it."

"Focus on the wound, not the pain."

"I am. It keeps—" She shook her head. "It feels like something is missing. Like the ability is there but there's no interface. No framework."

No framework. A half-deployed feature. The System had granted her a trait without supporting architecture. Another piece of incomplete code.

Li Hua looked at Zhang Wei. "Can your Code Sight do anything?"

"I can read. I can't write. Not yet." He watched the black venom creep another centimeter. "If we had a purifying item — a healing crystal, a mana shard—"

"Check his pockets."

Lin Mei moved aside. Zhang Wei checked the man's jacket. Left pocket: a crumpled bus ticket. Right pocket: a small crystalline shard, faintly blue, no bigger than a marble.

[ITEM_SCAN] Mana Shard (Minor) Type: Consumable Effect: Restores 15 MP or cleanses one minor debuff Quality: Common

One-use cleansing item. He held it out to Lin Mei.

"Press this against the wound."

She didn't ask where it came from. She pressed it against the blackened skin. The shard glowed, pulsed once, and dissolved. The black discoloration stopped spreading. Slowly, so slowly, it began to recede.

The man's breathing steadied. Color returned to his face.

Lin Mei slumped back against the wall. Her hands were still shaking, but her breathing was evening out. She looked at Zhang Wei.

"What are you?"

"Confused. Like everyone else."

"No. You're not." She wiped blood from her forearm. "You knew what that was. You knew what it would do. And before that, you looked at my hands and told me something about myself that I didn't know." She studied his face. "That's not confusion. That's something else."

He didn't answer. Explaining Code Sight to a frightened teenager in a blood-soaked stairwell felt premature.

"We need to move him upstairs," Li Hua said. "Third floor. There's a barricaded apartment we can use."

"On it." Li Hua was already checking vitals — pulse, pupil response, the archaic pre-System techniques she'd never lost. "He's stable. Venom receded, but the bite damage is real. He needs rest, water, and watching for secondary infection."

"You can come with us," Li Hua told Lin Mei. "Or stay here. But he's going up either way."

Lin Mei looked down the stairwell toward the first floor. Then up toward the third. She stood.

"I'm coming."

They carried the man between them — Li Hua supporting his shoulders, Lin Mei his legs, Zhang Wei leading with the crowbar and Code Sight sweeping every landing. No monsters. The stairwell was quiet except for their breathing and the man's occasional groan.

On the third floor, they settled him into apartment 3C's empty bedroom. Li Hua found water. Lin Mei found clean cloth for bandages. Zhang Wei stood at the window.

He needed data on the building. All of it.

Code Sight at full intensity. Items first. He scanned the room:

[ITEM_SCAN] Crowbar (Common weapon) — Base Damage: 8-12, Durability: 84/100 [ITEM_SCAN] Li Hua's backpack — Contains: Bolt cutters, crowbar, rebar (×4), 2× Minor HP Crystal, 1× Mana Shard (Minor)

Inventory scan worked on opened containers. He tried scanning the backpack's sealed side pocket:

[ITEM_SCAN] Access denied — Container sealed. Scan requires physical access.

Fair enough. Code Sight wasn't omniscient.

People next. He turned to Lin Mei wringing out a cloth over the sink and focused:

[ENTITY_SCAN] Lin Mei — Level 1, Class: None Healing Resonance (Lv. 0.3) — Implementation Status: INCOMPLETE

The scan worked, but there was resistance — faint static at the edges, like reading through frosted glass. The System was partially encrypting other players' information. He could see basic stats and tags, but deeper layers — skill trees, inventory details, quest logs — were blocked behind a privacy wall.

He pushed through. The static intensified. His temples throbbed:

[SYSTEM] Access to restricted player data blocked. [SYSTEM] Player privacy protocols active. [SYSTEM] Warning: Persistent attempts will trigger monitoring escalation.

He pulled back. The headache subsided. Code Sight had limits. The System actively defended player data against unauthorized scanning. His ability was a reading light in a dark room — useful, but it only illuminated what the System hadn't bothered to lock down.

Environmental scans were more productive. He turned to the window and looked down at the street.

[ENV_SCAN] Zone 7-Alpha — Radius 200m Spawn Points Active: 3 Spawn Point 1: Building 7 Basement — Status: ACTIVE — Type: Interior Mobs Spawn Point 2: Parking Structure (East) — Status: ACTIVE — Type: Mixed Spawn Point 3: Park (North) — Status: ACTIVE — Type: Ambient Creatures

Three spawn points in 200 meters. But the scan returned additional metadata — information he hadn't seen before:

[META] Spawn Point 1 — Implementation Status: PLACEHOLDER [META] Note: Spawn table populated with temporary asset set. Replacement scheduled for Patch 1.0.

Placeholder. The System's own spawn point was a placeholder. Filled with temporary assets that would be swapped out when the first patch dropped.

He scanned the others:

[META] Spawn Point 2 — Implementation Status: INCOMPLETE [META] Spawn Point 3 — Implementation Status: PLACEHOLDER

All three. None were finished. The entire local monster ecosystem was built on placeholder content — temporary assets designed to be replaced in thirty days.

This wasn't a fully deployed system. This was a test environment running on scaffolding.

"Zhang Wei." Li Hua's voice from the doorway. "Fang Lei is back."

He lowered his gaze. Li Hua stepped aside, and Fang Lei filled the doorframe — construction jacket, fire axe over one shoulder. Level 4 now. He'd been busy.

"I hear you've got a healer." His eyes swept the room, settled on Lin Mei, who had gone very still against the far wall. "Good. More bodies means the spawn anchor pulls wider."

"We're managing the spawn density," Zhang Wei said.

"You're managing nothing. Second floor's producing Blue-type crawlers now. Faster, more HP, better XP." He tapped the axe handle against his palm. "But I'm level four, so the trade-off works."

"You're describing the exact problem I warned you about."

"I'm describing progress." He looked at Zhang Wei steadily. "I heard about the basement. There's a dungeon marker down there — blue light, System interface. When it spawns, I'm running it. Bring the healer. She levels up inside."

"She's Level 1."

"Then she gets XP. Everyone starts somewhere."

He left. No goodbye — just boots on the stairwell, descending toward the second floor where more monsters waited. The axe thunked against the railing on every third step. A rhythm. A heartbeat.

Lin Mei exhaled. "Is he always like that?"

"That's him being polite," Li Hua said.

Zhang Wei wasn't listening. He was staring at the wall — or rather at the data superimposed over it. His last environmental scan had caught something in the ambient code. A log fragment, half-corrupted, visible only because it had been tagged for automated deployment processing. Not a notification. Not a debug report.

A changelog.

[DEPLOY_LOG] // Fragment recovered — automated processing queue Patch: v1.0.1 Internal Designation: Difficulty Recalibration Scheduled: T-29 days, 14 hours

[CHANGELOG — Partial Read] — Replace placeholder spawn tables with curated mob set — Reduce low-level XP farming efficiency by 18% — Add environmental hazard zones (Phase 1) — Modify dungeon loot tables: Weight toward class-appropriate gear — [REDACTED] — Remove safety nets for players below Level 5

[NOTE] Safety-net removal applies globally. No exemptions. [NOTE] Affected systems: Monster aggro range, spawn timing, new-player protection buffer [NOTE] Projected impact: Increased casualties in unprepared populations

He went through it three separate times, each pass slower than the last.

Difficulty Recalibration. That was the internal name for what the broadcast had called the First Patch. Not a content update. Not new features. A recalibration — adjusting the kill pressure on survivors who hadn't leveled fast enough.

Remove safety nets for players below Level 5.

He looked at Lin Mei. Level 1. No class. Healing trait at 0.3, half-deployed, flickering.

He looked at Li Hua. Level 2. Armed with a crowbar and a nursing degree. No safety net for either of them.

Remove safety nets for players below Level 5. No exemptions.

The countdown had been abstract — thirty days, a number, something to plan around. But it had a name now. It had a changelog. And in twenty-nine days, the System would rip away whatever thin protection had kept low-level players alive and replace it with curated mobs, harder spawns, and no mercy buffer.

"Zhang Wei?" Li Hua was watching him. "What did you see?"

He closed his eyes. The changelog burned behind his eyelids.

"The first patch has a name," he said. "And it's designed to kill anyone who hasn't leveled past five."

Silence. Lin Mei's breathing. The hum of the emergency light.

"That's twenty-nine days," Li Hua said.

"That's twenty-nine days."