The light screen slowly dissolved after devouring the burly man, leaving behind only a nauseating smell and a deathly silence.
The four surviving players—Fu Songcheng, Lu Xiao, and two other male players who had scraped through by luck—returned to the borrowing area to await the final round.
The air was thick with the stench of scorching—the residue left after fear had burned itself out.
Lu Xiao’s gaze was glued to Fu Songcheng, filled with doubt and jealousy.
“How did you do it? Besides blood, what other way is there to upgrade?”
Fu Songcheng was unhurriedly smoothing his cuffs with his uninjured right hand. He paid Lu Xiao’s question no mind.
But Lu Xiao had actually already guessed.
She looked at the neat stack of paper and the pen beside Fu Songcheng’s hand, and the image flashed through her mind of him sitting alone in the corner during the second round, writing furiously.
A flash of insight.
She should have known—a reader’s evaluation was also a book’s greatest value!
[Round 3 borrowing begins! Time limit: 10 minutes!]
[Players, please begin as quickly as possible. The one with the lowest value will be eliminated!]
Fu Songcheng ignored Lu Xiao’s sudden realization. Following this method, all he had to do was keep steadily writing reading responses for another ten minutes.
He had already figured out the way to raise a book’s value.
Fu Songcheng quickly walked to the shelves and continued selecting books at random.
He was confident that no matter who the author was, he could criticize them until they broke down.
His gaze locked onto a black-covered book at the deepest part of the shelf.
On its spine, there was actually a name—Quan Heng.
Without any blood infusion, this book had a name of its own!
Fu Songcheng’s heart skipped inexplicably. A strange feeling—both repelling and attracting—rose unbidden.
He strode over, swapped out the other books in his hands for this one, and headed for the safe zone.
There were still seven minutes left—more time than the previous round. So Fu Songcheng read this most unusual book a little more carefully.
Quan Heng.
Quan Heng, co-founder of a tech startup.
Possessed of top-tier technical talent, yet isolated and socially inept, he was sidelined and stripped of power within the company.
Much of the book was venting—the author railed against those petty men.
Later, amid countless suppressions and doubts, Quan Heng—in order to protect his life’s work and his position—resorted to desperate measures. Late one night, he stole a collaborator’s core R&D technology, and ultimately rose to the pinnacle of business.
“Interesting.”
A mocking curve tugged at Fu Songcheng’s lips. “Self-righteous hypocrite.”
The author denounced underhanded means, yet for fame and fortune, abandoned all bottom lines.
By now, Lu Xiao had also rushed back with her chosen books—clearly she’d decided to imitate Fu Songcheng’s “annotation style” strategy.
Fu Songcheng flipped to the last page of Quan Heng.
At the end of the book, a line of bold black text appeared:
“If anyone has read this book, I want to know—if it were you, what would you choose?”
Just then, a violent burst of pain exploded across Fu Songcheng’s back!
“Fuck your ancestors!”
Yu Huaiting’s furious roar seemed to pierce through the instance’s barrier, exploding directly in Fu Songcheng’s mind.
…
Wasteland Forbidden Zone.
Yu Huaiting was being driven into a corner by mechanical puppets—and even so, Fu Songcheng hadn’t let up, constantly stroking the Sympathy Doll.
His “dear lover” and the NPC in front of him were cornering him together.
Yu Huaiting had no choice but to spin around and flee. But the mechanical puppet seized the opening, its claw swinging out and gashing his back.
Once he got out of this instance, he was going to chop off the hand Fu Songcheng used to stroke that doll!
…
[System Notification: Bound target Yu Huaiting has suffered a heavy blow. HP lost: 10%.]
[Damage Synchronization activated: You share 5% of the physical damage.]
“Mmh.”
Fu Songcheng let out a muffled grunt. A patch of blood instantly seeped across his originally fair back—the burn marks left on him after Yu Huaiting’s 5% HP deduction.
The searing pain made the veins on Fu Songcheng’s temples bulge, but the hand holding the pen was steady as a rock.
He stared at the question on the page, his eyes gradually turning mad and cold.
What would you choose?
If it were him—Fu Songcheng—he would never agonize like this waste of a man called Quan Heng. And he would never, after succeeding, hypocritically pose questions to anyone.
On that blank white paper, Fu Songcheng wrote his response:
“I would have struck first. While those fools were still drowning in dinner parties and social niceties, I’d have already claimed the technology for myself.”
“Then I’d kick them out at top speed and take the whole cake. Winners write history—only losers need to repent.”
When the last character was finished, he slammed the bloodstained paper hard onto the book’s page.
[Re-evaluating the value of Quan Heng…]
[Emotional weight: Extremely high.]
[Rating increased: S!]
The red light blazed, nearly blinding to the eye.
On the other side, Lu Xiao was sweating profusely as she wrote her reading response.
She looked at the dazzling red light from Fu Songcheng’s direction, envy and jealousy churning in her heart.
She didn’t know what Fu Songcheng had written, so she could only pile on more flowery rhetoric, praising the protagonist of the autobiography she’d chosen.
She looked at the book in her hands, Ordinary Hero—the biography of a firefighter.
“A great soul lives forever in the flames…”
Lu Xiao gritted her teeth and wrote line after line of panegyric.
“He is the light in the darkness, he is…”
Her pen also triggered resonance, but the bonus simply couldn’t match Fu Songcheng’s.
[Rating: B+]
Lu Xiao’s face went instantly pale.
She glanced at the two players still picking books from the shelves, shook her head, and forced herself to focus.
…
Time was up.
The light screen rose, and the system began settling accounts.
First place: Fu Songcheng. Average book rating: S-.
(System Comment: A selfish answer. May you stay true to it from beginning to end.)
Second place: Chen Kou. Average book rating: A-.
Third place: Lu Xiao. Average book rating: A-.
Fourth place: Lü Weiming. Average book rating: B+.
The third round’s screening was even crueler.
Of the two in the bookshelf area, one was ultimately eliminated because the value of the books he’d chosen wasn’t high enough.
Lu Xiao, who’d taken a different path, also ended up second-to-last—her life hanging by a thread.
Out of ten people, only three cleared the novice instance.
Lu Xiao collapsed to the ground, gasping for breath, cold sweat soaking through her shirt and back.
She had survived—mostly by luck—but she had survived.
Fu Songcheng, meanwhile, was staring at the system panel before him.
[Player Fu Songcheng, instance “Silent Library” cleared!]
[Backpack system unlocked.]
[Rating: A-rank.]
[Reward settlement: 500 points issued.]
The scenery around him began to warp, the gray-white walls flowing like melting wax figures.
The wound on Fu Songcheng’s back was still throbbing faintly. The blood loss left him a little dizzy, and he forced himself to hold on until he was out of the instance.
The light faded, and they were back in the Death Party loading hall.
A book materialized out of thin air before Fu Songcheng.
Its cover was a deep, dark blue, with only one name embossed in gold: Fu Songcheng.
A system prompt rose before him:
[High instance completion detected. Rewarding A-rank item “Book of the Self,” which records the player’s life trajectory.]
[Once unsealed, the book’s contents will interfere with reality. You will no longer be able to maintain the calm of “the unknown.” Are you prepared to peek at fate—or remain in ignorance?]
[Item function: By questioning the Book of the Self, you will receive your truest answer and blessing.]
Fu Songcheng reached out, his fingertip hovering above the spine.
This book was too dangerous.
Once some truths were revealed, he could never again pretend not to know.
In the end, he withdrew his hand.
“No.”
Fu Songcheng let out a soft laugh and tucked the book into his backpack.
[The next game will arrive in one week.]
[Players may choose to start early, or wait for the mandatory time to participate.]
[Supplies in the loading zone are unlimited. Items must be exchanged with points.]
Just then, Lu Xiao came stumbling over, a fawning smile on her face.
“I owe you this time. Um… next round, want to team up?”
Fu Songcheng turned around and looked at her calmly.
“I’m not in the habit of teaming up with people. Let’s not drag each other down.”
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