The puppy had grown.
“Let’s go. Off to find Fang Yu in 101 again.”
Fu Songcheng withdrew his gaze and was the first to stride downstairs on his long legs.
Du Yunhao and Zhu Xiang naturally had no objection. The group went all the way down to the first floor and stopped before the bedroom door of 101.
The door was locked dead tight.
Yu Huaiting couldn’t be bothered with words. He simply raised a leg and bang—kicked the door panel, the huge noise echoing through the room.
“Open up! Stop playing dead!”
Yu Huaiting’s tone was unfriendly.
From inside came a flurry of panicked crashing sounds. Only after a long while was the door pulled open a tiny crack.
Fang Yu’s bloodless, sweat-covered face appeared behind the crack, his eyes shot through with red veins, peering out in terror.
Yu Huaiting shoved the door open and strode in, grabbing Fang Yu by the collar like a chick and dragging him from the dim entryway to the center of the living room.
“Ah! Don’t touch me! Don’t kill me!”
Fang Yu let out a shrill scream, both hands clamped dead over his head, his whole body hunched into a ball, resisting all contact from the outside world.
He was still that same cowardly, timid creature, trembling all over like sifted chaff. No matter how the group pulled and dragged, he was like a piece of rotten meat grown into the 101 floor, absolutely refusing to step half a foot past the bedroom door.
“What the hell are you so afraid of?!”
Yu Huaiting was thoroughly enraged by this hopeless, can’t-be-helped attitude. He grabbed Fang Yu’s hair and forced his head up. “Staying here alone waiting to die?!”
Seeing Fang Yu like this, Zhu Xiang also frowned and tried to apply pressure in a somewhat gentler tone: “Fang Yu, you heard the system announcement just now—someone’s already died. We’re all players of the same faction now. If you hide clues or leave the team, the next one to die could very well be you. You’d better think it through.”
Carrot and stick, taking turns.
And yet—useless.
Fang Yu said nothing about leaving, nor would he reveal the reason.
Lu Xiao and Zhu Xiang and the others were all present, and Fu Songcheng didn’t want to retrieve the clue Fang Yu had hidden under the floorboard in front of them. He wasn’t as generous as Lu Xiao—he was willing to share information, but clues obtained through items, he wasn’t willing to reveal lightly.
Just as the group and Fang Yu reached a standoff, a bone-chilling sound fell clearly into everyone’s ears.
Tap… tap… tap…
The sound of high heels on a cement floor.
Neither hurried nor slow, yet it seemed to tread on everyone’s hearts.
Immediately after, a plaintive, ethereal female voice, carrying a hint of hoarseness, drifted eerily in from the corridor outside the door:
“In life and death… never forsaking…”
Fu Songcheng and Yu Huaiting looked up almost simultaneously, their gazes meeting in midair—both seeing a trace of gravity in the other’s eyes.
The voice had changed.
Compared to the ethereal, water-membrane-muffled sounds they’d heard earlier in Fu Songcheng’s room, the female ghost’s voice outside the door was now clearly louder, clearer, and even the bone-piercing yin chill had multiplied several times over.
After someone had died, she’d absorbed some kind of power and was gradually growing stronger.
Hearing this death-knell-like singing, Fang Yu—already trembling with fear—now collapsed to the floor, his knees giving way.
He clamped his mouth dead, curling his body into an extremely agonized ball, not daring to make even the slightest sound of breath, tears and snot smearing his face.
The group looked down at his miserable state from above.
Lu Xiao’s tone carried some sympathy and helplessness: “Look how scared the kid is… With this kind of psychological quality, how on earth did he get into this instance?”
Yu Huaiting sneered, released his tightly clenched fist, and shook out his wrist.
He looked down at the puddle of mud that was Fang Yu on the floor, not a shred of pity in his eyes.
“The best way to face fear is to overcome it.”
Before the words faded, Yu Huaiting suddenly bent down, grabbed Fang Yu’s back collar with one hand, and lifted him whole without effort.
“What are you doing?!”
Sensing the weightlessness, Fang Yu’s eyes went wide with terror.
“Curing your cowardice.”
Yu Huaiting strode to the door, yanked open the door of 101, and—like tossing a bag of trash—flung Fang Yu out without mercy.
“Ahhhh—no!!!”
Fang Yu’s scream reached its peak the instant he was thrown out the door.
Almost the same second Fang Yu hit the corridor floor, that shrill singing abruptly soared higher, transforming into an extremely sharp shriek!
There was even excitement and a shrill craving in the voice.
Fu Songcheng turned sideways and, through the half-open door crack, calmly observed the scene outside.
The corridor, which had been fairly bright before, was now shrouded in a thick darkness.
And at the center of that darkness, a roiling mass of viscous black qi, like a living thing, instantly coiled around the Fang Yu thrown onto the floor.
Within the black qi, a twisted outline of a figure in red faintly surfaced, radiating endless malice.
The black qi was like countless chains, clamping dead around Fang Yu’s neck and limbs.
Fang Yu’s mouth gaped wide, yet he couldn’t make a sound. His face went purple, his eyes nearly bulging from their sockets.
He desperately clawed at the black qi around his neck, but could only grasp uselessly at the air.
The black qi wrapped around him and, like dragging a corpse, slowly pulled him step by step away from the doorway of 101.
“Follow.”
Fu Songcheng said low, pushing the door open and stepping out.
The group suppressed their inner discomfort and followed far behind the black qi.
The temperature in the stairwell was frighteningly low; every step upward felt like a pair of icy hands stroking their ankles.
They watched the mass of black qi drag Fang Yu, step by step, moving upstairs.
As if sensing the tails behind it, the black qi wrapping Fang Yu paused slightly at the stair corner.
The red-clothed outline tilted its head slightly in the darkness. Though its features couldn’t be made out, everyone could feel a venomous gaze sweep over them.
But the female ghost didn’t abandon Fang Yu to attack them—instead she kept dragging him upward, that bone-chilling singing rising again.
“Together in life… together in death… on the road to the Yellow Springs… not lonely…”
The singing seemed to carry some kind of mental contamination; Du Yunhao and Zhu Xiang went deathly pale listening to it.
They followed all the way to the fourth floor.
The black qi dragged Fang Yu straight to the door of 401.
Accompanied by a grating sound of metal friction, that tightly shut door actually opened on its own.
The female ghost carried Fang Yu and vanished into 401’s dark entryway.
Just as Fu Songcheng and Yu Huaiting quickened their pace, wanting to rush in right after to see what was going on—
Bang!
The door of 401 slammed shut in front of them without warning, the gust it raised even brushing past their nose tips.
“Fuck!”
Yu Huaiting cursed, raised a long leg, and kicked viciously at the lock.
Bang! Bang!
Two consecutive kicks, so forceful that even the surrounding walls shook loose a layer of dust—but this seemingly ordinary security door didn’t budge.
Fu Songcheng pressed down on Yu Huaiting’s still-kicking posture and jerked his head around, his gaze sharply sweeping toward the nearby room 402 with its door half-open—
The room of the first male player to die.
“Go! To the balcony next door!”
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