Fu Songcheng didn’t rush her. He waited quietly for her to continue.
“I took my mother’s surname.”
“In this village, women don’t deserve names. They’re just tools for bearing children.”
Shen Ning’s voice trembled slightly, as if sinking into extremely painful memories. “When I was sixteen, my father took a thirty-thousand-yuan bride price from an old bachelor in the neighboring village and prepared to sell me to him.”
“I didn’t want to accept my fate. The night before the wedding, I took a woodcutter’s knife and wounded that old bachelor when he came to fetch me. Following my mother’s guidance, I fled over the mountains that very night.”
Shen Ning took a deep breath, struggling to steady her emotions.
“I made it to the city. I thought escaping the mountains meant heaven.”
“But I had no education, no household registration, no ID card. I could only do the dirtiest, hardest labor—living in a basement, working as a stock clerk and cashier in a supermarket. My boss withheld my wages, customers pointed at my nose and cursed me. I suffered untold hardships.”
“But as long as I didn’t return to these mountains, in the city, I’d eventually carve out a way to survive.”
Shen Ning’s tears finally fell. She bit her lip hard until blood seeped through.
“But I never, ever imagined.”
She lifted her head and looked at Fu Songcheng with utter desolation. “I survived in the city, only to be inexplicably dragged into Death Party.”
“After all that running, the instance actually teleported me back to these mountains! Back into this nightmare I’ve been fleeing in my dreams!”
Fu Songcheng’s heart sank slightly.
The system’s perverse sense of humor always paired up two people who loathed each other.
Playing the most painful memories in front of their owner.
“What about Li Guoping?”
Fu Songcheng asked the last key question. “The night before last, he called you out alone for a long time. You looked terrible when you came back. What did he want with you?”
At the three words “Li Guoping,” Shen Ning’s body jerked violently. A flash of instinctive fear crossed her eyes, then was replaced by intense hatred.
“The Li Guoping in the instance isn’t really a living person.”
Shen Ning spoke through gritted teeth. “But he has all of the real Li Guoping’s memories, personality, even his habits.”
Shen Ning pointed at the faint bruises visible on her arm—something Fu Songcheng hadn’t noticed in the dim light last night.
“He knows who I am. He recognized me.”
“My so-called father was a grand principal, after all.” Shen Ning spat. “How ridiculous—I never spent a single day in school in these mountains.”
“And yet the identity I was assigned was to come back as a volunteer teacher.”
Shen Ning lifted her head and looked straight at Fu Songcheng, word by word: “Yesterday he called me out alone. He wanted me to do him a favor. He’d taken a liking to ‘Zhang Xinci.’”
Fu Songcheng’s eyes turned instantly cold as a blade.
“He told me to use my identity as a fellow female player to gain your trust, then find an excuse to lure you out alone and bring you to him.” Shen Ning closed her eyes. “He said if I pulled it off, I’d be free.”
“You refused.”
Fu Songcheng’s tone was certain.
If Shen Ning had agreed, last night’s situation wouldn’t have played out the way it did.
“Right. I refused.”
Shen Ning opened her eyes. “I wouldn’t do it. I called him a beast. So in the office’s back room, he clamped his hand over my mouth and beat me viciously.”
“How can an NPC be this faithful a reproduction—even down to Li Guoping’s habit of domestic violence, replicated exactly.”
At this moment, all the clues finally clicked into place.
Li Guoping’s vile intentions, Shen Ning’s desperate counterattack, the male players’ gradual corruption, and Fu Songcheng’s unexpected last-stand counter-kill.
“Your main mission is complete. You can leave this instance whenever you want, right?”
Fu Songcheng stood up, walked to the window, and glanced at the desolate village outside.
“In theory, yes.”
Shen Ning nodded. “The system prompted me that I can choose to submit the mission and exit the instance. But I didn’t click confirm.”
“Why?” Fu Songcheng turned around.
“Because I’m not reconciled to it.”
Shen Ning stood up, her eyes more resolute than ever before. “I finally have a chance to face this nightmare head-on. Li Guoping is dead, but he wasn’t the biggest cancer in this village.”
“You want to kill others too?”
Fu Songcheng turned around, his fingertips tapping lightly on the cold windowsill.
“More than that.” Shen Ning took a deep breath, a nearly destructive fire igniting in her eyes. “I want to save my mother. Save ‘Shen Ning.’ Save ‘Zhang Xinci.’”
Fu Songcheng was silent for a moment, recalling the silent woman in Li Guoping’s house that first night—that must have been Shen Ning’s mother.
“Shen Ning, look clearly. This is an instance. What you save might just be a string of data, a pile of phantoms simulated by the system. Is it worth risking your life for these?”
“So what if it’s not worth it!”
Shen Ning’s voice suddenly rose, then quickly lowered again, as if afraid of startling the prowling demons. “You’ve seen my mother. She was bought too. She once had a name, but now she’s just ‘that one from the Li family.’”
“Her surname is Shen!”
“Her name is Shen Ming!”
Shen Ning strode up to Fu Songcheng and clutched his sleeve with both hands, her grip astonishingly strong. “And the other women in the village—behind every stone house is a soul with a cut-out tongue or broken legs.”
“You can’t see it. None of you have seen it!”
“Even if this is fake, I want them to be seen!” Shen Ning looked straight at the sun through the window. “I want to save people!”
Fu Songcheng looked at her faintly trembling fingertips, patted her shoulder, and gently soothed her emotions.
Li Guoping’s death had struck Shen Ning hard, and his questioning had added fuel to her anger.
Decades of oppression—from a patriarchal society, feudal and backward, objectifying—erupted completely at this moment.
Li Guoping’s death stirred the heart of Zhang Xinci, who had originally not dared resist and ultimately fallen into the demon’s clutches; it also ignited the fighting spirit of Shen Ning, who had struggled to escape and hadn’t even dared choose to kill Li Guoping in her instance mission.
Now she could leave the instance, yet she wanted to stay—to seek another answer to life amid the illusory instance data.
This fire came from Fu Songcheng. He had lit the flame of resistance, the flame of revenge—a mayfly shaking a tree could still topple Ya’nan Village’s decades of oppression.
“Alright. I’ll help you. We’ll save everyone together.”
“We’ll escape these mountains together.”
Fu Songcheng was infected by Shen Ning too. After killing Li Guoping, he’d originally planned to rely on force and intimidation to hold out until the instance ended. Now he wanted to join Shen Ning’s cause.
This decision didn’t stem from gender, nor from oppression—Fu Songcheng even felt his actions weren’t particularly praiseworthy.
It was simply the echo a normal person gave after hearing the cries of the suffering.
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