"Stay at the killer's place?" Fan Cong and Fan Dade both looked at
"The most dangerous place is the safest place." Chen Ge clicked furiously on the raincoat man's corpse. When the mouse moved over the raincoat man's jacket pocket, a dialogue box popped up at the bottom of the screen — You turned back the deceased's outer garment and found a room key in the blood-soaked pocket.
"You can actually find stuff!" Fan Cong leaned close to the screen, face full of curiosity.
Chen Ge placed the room key in his backpack, then stubbornly kept clicking for a long while, until the thudding sound of a head ramming against the door in the background music grew louder. Only then did he make his way downstairs with visible reluctance. "Still no knife or weapon. It'll probably be hard to find another chance like this again."
Chen Ge opened his backpack and examined the room key. It was a pure black card splattered with blood, with the number four written on the back. "Fan Cong, how many inns and hotels are there in this town?"
"Just one — that small inn I told you about before. The owner is a killer, the cook is a lunatic, and all the guests have been killed."
"Is the inn far from the apartment complex?"
"Not far, just one street away. But are you sure you want to go?" Fan Cong didn't quite understand Chen Ge's thinking. "Didn't we just deal with the killer in the complex? Now all we need to do is stay here and we'll safely make it through the night."
He saw Chen Ge still hesitating and reached out to grab his shoulder. "You're not seriously planning to… use this little girl to take on an entire inn full of people, are you?"
"We don't even have a fruit knife — how are we supposed to fight them?" Chen Ge steered Xiao Bu downstairs. Strangely, the thudding in the background music didn't diminish as the distance grew — it only got louder.
"Then why are you leaving?"
"Listen to the background music. That thudding is coming from the neighbor's ghost. It's getting faster now, which means after we lured the killer next door, the ghost might go berserk ahead of schedule." Chen Ge brought Xiao Bu to the first floor and stared at the pitch-black street. "Why do you die inexplicably when walking the streets at night? When you played before, were there any warning signs before each death?"
"No warning signs at all. You just die suddenly. There seems to be an invisible killer on the streets."
"Invisible killer?" Chen Ge shook his head. "A lot of the scenes in this game are probably adapted from things that actually happened in reality. There's no way they'd include something that absurd."
"Brother, there are killers and ghosts all over this town — isn't that absurd enough?"
"That's still within reason. At least it doesn't violate the game creator's own rules." Chen Ge had Xiao Bu stop at the corner between the first and second floors, running back and forth.
Fan Cong genuinely couldn't figure out what Chen Ge was doing. He held back for a long time before finally asking, "Boss Chen, what are you doing now?"
"Things aren't looking great." Chen Ge's eyes stayed fixed on the screen as he answered offhandedly. "A game's control scheme usually determines how it scares the player. Have you noticed that Xiao Bu's movement speed has been increasing the longer she's alive?"
"That's a good thing, isn't it?" Fan Cong watched Xiao Bu running back and forth in the stairwell. Her speed did seem to have picked up a bit.
"The game creator isn't that kind. This is a game of hopeless despair where you can't fight back. Xiao Bu's speed increasing means we'll be encountering something faster and even more terrifying soon." Chen Ge propped his chin with one hand. "If my guess is right, by the second half of the night, the killer won't be the only thing we have to dodge."
Fan Cong felt his heart go cold at Chen Ge's words. "Killers, ghosts, traps, and death triggers that activate for no reason — the game creator never intended for players to beat this game."
"Don't treat this as just a game. Think carefully about why the creator made it. Only by understanding what the creator wants to express and going along with their thinking can we find the answer." Chen Ge had been thinking about what the game creator wanted to convey the entire time. Fan Cong was playing the game, but he was experiencing the creator's emotions.
Any game would contain some kind of emotion — resentment, anger, sorrow, and so on. But what surprised him was that despite being overwhelmingly despairing, this game didn't reveal any emotions at all. Xiao Bu was like an emotionless robot: she felt no fear, no pain, no worry for her family. She simply watched everything with cold detachment.
"The protagonist Xiao Bu is quite interesting. After seeing her stepfather's corpse, she even had the thought of turning him into a rag doll. That's definitely not normal behavior for a child. But how did she become like this? What happened to her? Is everything I'm experiencing now something Xiao Bu has already been through?"
Chen Ge was lost in thought when Fan Cong's voice pulled him back to reality. "So what do we do next?"
"Our primary goal is to survive tonight. The stairwell is temporarily safe, so we stay here. Once the neighbor's ghost comes out, we head to the inn." Chen Ge's thinking was perfectly clear. "The only thing I'm worried about is triggering the death mechanism while crossing that street and dying for no reason."
"Is that really what you're thinking? Because I get the feeling you're deliberately waiting for the neighbor's ghost. You want to use yourself as bait to lure it to the inn," Fan Cong said in a low voice.
"Not luring — drawing it out," Chen Ge corrected. He had Xiao Bu running back and forth in the stairwell; he'd already fully mastered her speed and movement patterns. "This is an open-exploration game. We're not going to spend just one night here. Once we pull the neighbor's ghost away, the complex will be completely safe, and we can come back here without worry."
In the background music, that thudding grew ever louder. Chen Ge positioned the mouse in a comfortable spot. "She should be coming now."
Before the words had even faded, a woman appeared at the corner of the second floor on screen, carrying her own severed head. Her outer garment had been dyed red with blood.
"A red-clothed ghost?" Chen Ge had Xiao Bu sprint out of the stairwell, adjusting the viewing angle to observe the head-carrying female ghost. "Counting the red raincoat woman, that makes two red-clothed ghosts in this town."
The head-carrying ghost in the game moved fast. Chen Ge got serious, steering Xiao Bu into a desperate flight.
In just a few seconds, he'd already guided Xiao Bu out of the complex.
The street had no streetlights — it was pitch black. Chen Ge narrowed his pupils and used his Yin Eyes, barely managing to pick out the path between the darkness and the deeper darkness.
He sent Xiao Bu running toward the inn. As she passed a certain window, it suddenly burst open and a hand reached out, trying to grab Xiao Bu and pull her inside.
It was a good thing Chen Ge had his Yin Eyes. His vision far surpassed that of an ordinary person, and the instant he saw the hand extend, he changed direction — narrowly dodging the grab.
"Killing intent hides in the darkness!"
A bead of sweat trickled down Chen Ge's forehead. Beside him, Fan Dade and Fan Cong stared at the nearly all-black screen, completely unable to understand why this man was frantically shaking his mouse and hammering his keyboard.