Fu Songcheng’s left arm was still seeping blood, bright red drops sliding down his fingertips.
He didn’t rush to stop the bleeding. Instead, his gaze was locked dead on the Librarian, who had just finished cleaning up the blond youth’s corpse.
Just a minute ago, when the Librarian executed the blond, a few splattered droplets of blood had landed squarely on an old book with a dark brown cover.
In that instant, the book’s once-dim cover seemed to ignite, taking on an eerie dark red glow. The title, Confessions of a Sinner, surfaced, and a heavy, oppressive aura washed over him.
Fu Songcheng stepped forward and picked up the book.
[Life residue detected.]
[Evaluating book value…]
[Rating: A]
Fu Songcheng’s pupils contracted. His guess had been confirmed.
“So that’s how it is.”
He rapidly reasoned it out in his mind. “The rules strictly forbid players from making loud noise or improper borrowing, but they never forbid contaminating books with blood.”
The Librarian’s behavior was the most direct hint: bloodstained books could become higher-value “autobiographies.”
If the Librarian could do it, then as a player, he could replicate it too.
Time was tight—less than nine minutes remained in the first borrowing round.
Finding high-value books in a library this labyrinthine was like fishing a needle from the sea, and relying on reading the contents was pure fantasy.
This was essentially a game of probability—but he had to find a way to make that probability controllable.
Fu Songcheng hesitated no more. He dashed to the nearest row of bookshelves.
He pulled out a gray biography at random, then without hesitation raised his injured left hand and pressed it firmly against the cover.
Gritting his teeth, he squeezed hard at the wound. More blood welled out, and he smeared it liberally across the spine and cover.
At first, the book showed no reaction.
Fu Songcheng’s heart tightened. Did it have to be a dead person’s blood?
Just as he was about to switch to another book, the gray cover suddenly began to writhe as if alive, greedily sucking in his blood.
The once-blurry title sharpened instantly, transforming into crimson characters—The Monologue of a Struggler.
[Player life sacrifice detected. Evaluating book value…]
[Rating: B-]
“It works!”
A flash of sharp excitement crossed Fu Songcheng’s eyes.
It wasn’t as effective as a dead person’s blood, but it still boosted the value significantly.
He immediately repeated the process, weaving between several specific bookshelves.
He deliberately chose books with unusual cover materials, then used the blood from his left hand to “activate” them.
With every book he processed, his face grew paler. The dizziness from blood loss hit him in waves, but the stack of books in his arms grew heavier, and the red glow radiating from them grew brighter.
Meanwhile, to offset his declining physical condition and raise his odds of survival, his right hand stayed buried in his pocket, rapidly stroking the “Sympathy Doll.”
Fu Songcheng’s face was expressionless, but his right hand never stopped moving.
[System Notification: Interaction successful! Gained 5-second bonus: Agility +8%, Mental Resistance +5%.]
[System Notification: High-frequency interaction triggered an extra buff! Stamina depletion rate reduced for 3 minutes.]
As the buffs stacked up, Fu Songcheng’s movements grew more practiced—and the cursing in his ears grew more constant.
He could vaguely sense that Yu Huaiting, in another instance, was enthusiastically inquiring after his and his family’s well-being.
But Fu Songcheng was like a precision machine, efficiently assigning his value to books among the shelves.
Ten minutes was far too short for a library this massive.
Most players, in their panic, could barely find a few books—let alone notice his “blood processing.”
After gathering ten books, Fu Songcheng wasn’t about to head back to the safe zone right away. In the borrowing area, the bookshelves provided cover, and he could still boost the books’ value.
But once he entered the safe zone, and everyone saw his method, his advantage would be wiped out.
He planned to return to the safe zone at the last possible moment.
With three minutes left on the countdown, a few early-returning players had already gathered near the central safe zone.
Most of the book covers in their hands were gaudy.
But unlike Fu Songcheng’s, theirs had no titles.
Just then, a piercing scream tore through the library’s dead silence.
The sound was sharp as a rusted iron nail driven into the eardrum, instantly shredding every player’s taut nerves.
In the shadowed corner, a frail girl had been backed into a dead end by two burly players.
She clutched three ornately covered books tightly to her chest, tears and snot smeared across her face, broken pleas for mercy spilling from her lips.
But greed had long since blinded the two men. They were utterly unmoved.
Sifting through books one by one themselves was a different level of difficulty from simply snatching books someone else had already sifted through.
Besides, only one person died each round—and this girl was the perfect scapegoat these two had chosen.
In terms of brute strength and sheer lack of scruples, they always had the advantage over an unarmed girl.
One of them pinned her shoulder like an iron clamp and slammed her hard against the bookshelf, while the other brutally ripped the books from her arms.
The girl clawed desperately at his arm, her nails leaving pale streaks across his skin—but it was useless.
The one who’d grabbed the books twisted into a mask of wild ecstasy and bolted toward the central safe zone, not forgetting to kick the girl hard in the chest on his way out, sending her sprawling to the floor.
The Librarian, who had been cleaning the scene all along, suddenly froze.
He turned his head slowly. His lifeless eyes, behind thick lenses, locked with precision onto the disturbance in the corner.
“Shh—”
The Librarian pressed his index finger to his lips. His voice was soft, yet piercing—as if it rang directly inside everyone’s skull. “Fighting is strictly forbidden in the library.”
Before the words faded, his figure vanished like a phantom.
The next second, the player who had just grabbed the books—still gloating, about to start evaluating their value—didn’t even manage a grunt before a thin line of blood appeared across his neck.
Blood erupted like a fountain, splattering the books in his arms and drenching the accomplice beside him.
The Librarian’s figure flickered again. A second strike followed immediately, and the accomplice collapsed soundlessly as well.
Two corpses crumpled to the ground, and the books in their hands scattered across the pooling blood.
It happened in the blink of an eye—less than thirty seconds remained before the end of the first borrowing round.
The library, briefly frozen by that scream, was now engulfed in an even more absolute terror.
“Time’s almost up~”
The Librarian maliciously picked up the bloodstained books from the floor. Nourished by the fresh blood, the untitled books revealed their original titles.
The Defeated Eat Dust and Advantage.
Only now did many of the surrounding players realize the truth. They rushed to imitate what they’d seen, trying to smear the blood of the dead onto their own books.
In the chaos, some frantically jammed their fingers into the corpses’ wounds, soaking up blood and smearing it haphazardly across covers.
Others tried to snatch the already-“activated” high-value books from others’ hands.
The girl who’d had her books stolen was among them.
Fu Songcheng leaned back against a row of tall bookshelves, watching the bloody scene with cold detachment.
The ten books in his arms radiated a rich red glow, most of them rated stably at B or above—two had even reached A-.
He calmly calculated his steps.
With the agility boost from the “Sympathy Doll,” he’d enter the safe zone with his books at the final moment.
[Round 1 borrowing has ended.]
[All books not within the safe zone will be forcibly reclaimed.]
[Calculating total submitted book value…]
An invisible ripple spread outward from the central safe zone.
A player still running between shelves, trying to “upgrade” his books, suddenly found them scalding hot—then they dissolved into scattered red light and vanished into the air.
“No! My books!”
He charged desperately toward the already-closed safe zone, but was blocked outside, unable to enter.
The price of greed was losing even more.
As for those who had discovered the secret of “blood processing” but returned to the safe zone too early, they could only watch helplessly as their books were judged low-value by the system for failing to trigger “mutation.”
But it was still better than being stranded in the borrowing area.
[Player Fu Songcheng, submitted 10 books.]
[Special treatment traces detected…]
[Adjusting average book rating…]
[Final evaluation: Average rating B+, Total value: Excellent.]
[Survival confirmed.]
Listening to the cold notification in his mind, Fu Songcheng leaned against the edge of the safe zone’s light barrier, gasping for breath, letting cold sweat soak through his back.
Outside the barrier, the player who had scrambled to process books with blood was cut off—executed by the Librarian in despair.
After one round, only six people remained in the safe zone.
A screen slowly unfurled above the six players’ heads, the cold text ruthlessly adjudicating the value of that bloody farce.
First place: Lu Xiao. Average book rating: A.
Fu Songcheng’s pupils contracted. His gaze shifted to the girl curled up in the corner, trembling all over.
The books in Lu Xiao’s arms were now so red they were nearly black—the viscous blood had congealed on the covers into eerie bas-reliefs.
Those two burly players had been slit open in an instant, and the blood that erupted had almost entirely drenched her.
The dying resentment of those two self-doomed players had made her books—the ones closest to them—extremely high in value.
Second place: Fu Songcheng. Average book rating: B+.
Fu Songcheng’s lips twisted in a self-mocking smile. He’d relied on sharp observation—but in this game, human calculation couldn’t beat bloody accidents.
……
The list continued down to the final line.
Sixth place: Zhang Jianguo. Average book rating: C.
He was an old man over fifty.
He hadn’t stepped onto the crazy track of “blood processing”—he’d simply done his best to pick books from the shelves according to the rules.
“No… I picked plenty of books. They’re valuable.”
The old man pleaded, his aged hands clawing desperately at the safe zone’s barrier.
The Librarian appeared silently at the edge of the barrier, the paper knife in his hand spinning deftly around his fingertip.
“But they have no value.”
The instant the words fell, the old man’s pleas stopped short.
His body was like an old book shoved into a shredder—starting from his fingertips, it disintegrated soundlessly into a sky full of fluttering paper scraps.
A dead silence fell over the safe zone. The remaining five instinctively edged away from that area.
“The second borrowing round is about to begin.”
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