"Go die?" Fei Youliang was puzzled. He had simply asked for the name of his future wife — how did that produce these three words?
There was no connection between the two. He had followed the rules of the pen spirit game perfectly, hadn't violated any taboos. There was no way he had angered the pen spirit.
After a brief moment of thought, he arrived at an answer — this had to be the haunted house owner's pre-programmed response. No matter what question you asked, these three words would always appear.
Fei Youliang felt he had seen through every trick the haunted house owner had up his sleeve, and a sense of "so this is all?" gradually swelled in his mind.
"The way these three words appeared was clever. I haven't figured out the exact mechanism yet, but the haunted house owner is too heavy-handed in forcing the fear and neglects plausibility," he analyzed with great conviction. "If it had been any other visitor, in their panic they might have aborted the pen spirit game or broken one of its taboos. At that point, seeing these three words on the paper would feed right into their psychological suggestion — they'd think the pen spirit had really appeared, and they'd be terrified. But unfortunately for him, he's dealing with us today. We haven't made a single mistake at any step, and yet the answer on his paper has absolutely nothing to do with my question. Clearly, the pen spirit is nothing but a scare tactic."
After talking for a while, Fei Youliang realized that Zhu Jianing hadn't responded at all. It was as if he were the only person in the room.
"Zhu Zhu? Why are your hands so cold?" He looked up and saw Zhu Jianing staring blankly behind him, mouth agape, features twisted in horror.
"What are you looking at?"
Zhu Jianing's expression at that moment was genuinely terrifying. He seemed not to hear Fei Youliang's words at all. His entire body was shaking, shaking harder and harder — just like the battered ballpoint pen clutched in his hand.
A bad premonition crept into Fei Youliang's heart. He too noticed that the atmosphere in the girls' dormitory had shifted — there was an indescribable oppressive weight that hadn't been there before. And its source seemed to be directly behind him.
He wanted to turn around, but his back felt as though something were pressing down on it, and every muscle in his body had gone rigid.
What was happening? What kind of mechanism was this?
Question after question flashed through his mind, and the desperate urge to look combined with the inability to do so drove him nearly mad.
"What did Zhu Zhu see? What the hell is behind me?!"
An icy chill spread through his entire body, as though he had been tossed into a pit of ice. Fei Youliang shuddered. Patches of bluish-purple discoloration surfaced on his skin, as though invisible hands had seized him from every direction.
He felt the thing behind him trying to squeeze its way into his body. Worse still, a frigid weight was slowly settling onto his shoulders — growing heavier and heavier!
Across from him, Zhu Jianing had finally reached his breaking point. With every ounce of strength he had, he screamed out one sentence: "There's someone behind you!"
"Behind me?"
There was a difference between "someone on your back" and "someone behind you" — one meant clinging to your back, the other meant standing right behind you.
Fei Youliang's brain was still instinctively trying to analyze the distinction when Zhu Jianing leaped to his feet, wrenched his hand free, and bolted out the door.
Zhu Jianing left without a shred of hesitation.
Abandoned by his partner, Fei Youliang sat frozen on the floor. The ballpoint pen wrapped in clear tape in his hand was practically fused to his grip — no matter how he tried, he couldn't shake it loose.
His arm was rigid. He hadn't moved at all, yet the tip of the pen began writing on the blank paper all on its own.
"Go die! Go die! Go die!"
Grimacing red characters appeared one after another on the white paper. Zhu Jianing was already gone — Fei Youliang was the only one left holding the pen. He knew with absolute clarity that his hand hadn't moved once from beginning to end. These words were being written by something else in the room.