Meanwhile, at the dormitory building.
The night was as dark as ink too thick to dissolve. Wind slipped through the cracks around the window, stirring the dust on the floor into little spirals beneath the moonlight.
Several fresh scrape marks marred the windowsill, wiping away years of grime and making it obvious that someone had climbed out through here not long ago.
Before long, the window creaked open twice. Jiang Heng and Xie Zhi climbed in one after the other, shook the dust from their clothes, then turned and latched the window behind them.
Earlier, the three groups of players had agreed to split up and search for clues. In reality, not long after Lu Jin's group and Jiang Sui's group left the dormitory, Jiang Heng and Xie Zhi secretly doubled back.
The manager had already warned them that leaving the dormitory at night was dangerous. They were not stupid enough to go wandering around outside.
Besides, they already knew the answer to Task Two.
"There are still too many people alive."
Xie Zhi dragged over a chair and sprawled into it. "I thought Task One would wipe out at least half of them. I can't believe we're almost at the deadline and there are still six alive."
The System had acted as though it had crashed all night. It had only chimed twice and had not announced a single player's death.
Jiang Heng leaned back against the bed and tugged at his collar. "Let's wait a little longer. They were lucky earlier, that's all. Once the time limit for Task Two runs out, someone will have to be punished if they haven't completed it."
After a task failed, the System would give the players another six hours to attempt the game again. If they still failed, another player would be punished. The cycle would repeat until someone completed the task or every player died.
At exactly midnight, with half an hour left before Task Two's deadline, the players gradually returned to the dormitory.
Lu Jin and Xu Moyang came back first. They had interrogated Huang Youquan, swept through the logistics building, and returned without encountering a single NPC along the way.
Jiang Sui and Fang Yuan returned next. Compared with Lu Jin's group, the two of them looked far more battered. More accurately, Fang Yuan looked battered. His ankle was twisted, his clothes were covered in clawed tears, and several dark-brown stains clung to the fabric.
Jiang Heng and Xie Zhi came back last. Only after both of the other groups had arrived did they put on a show of climbing through the window.
Seeing that everyone was still alive lifted the players' spirits. They might have been strangers who had met by chance, but they had survived danger together, and Fang Yuan genuinely hoped no one else would die.
"Why don't we compare clues?" he suggested.
Jiang Heng and Xie Zhi had made no real progress and were afraid of giving themselves away, so they spoke first. "We went to the guest building and found out about a guest who used to come here often a few years ago. The boss's wife personally received him every time, and the two of them were very close."
Xie Zhi paused before continuing, "But he was just some traveler who happened to visit. We don't know exactly who he was."
They had fabricated this false clue long ago. A mysterious guest with no known identity was impossible to verify one way or the other.
Besides, the remaining players were all inexperienced newcomers. They should have been easy to fool.
Instead, their lie was exposed almost immediately.
"That's impossible!" Xu Moyang frowned. "This guesthouse was only built three years ago. Even if such a guest really existed, he couldn't have traveled back in time four years and gotten the boss's wife pregnant, could he?"
Jiang Heng and Xie Zhi froze, unable to come up with an answer. Who would have thought the others had even dug up something as irrelevant as the year the guesthouse was built?
"Did you find anything else?" Fang Yuan asked.
The two became even more awkward. Afraid that another lie would be exposed, they could only shake their heads.
The other players did not press them because time was running out. Xu Moyang immediately poured out everything they had found. "We went to Boss Huang's office. He was investigating the other man too. Based on when his wife became pregnant, he discovered that she attended a class reunion around that time. Everyone there was one of her high-school classmates."
"Later, Boss Huang often invited those people to stay at the guesthouse for free. Several groups have come just within the past six months."
Fang Yuan suddenly understood. "He was looking for the other man!"
"Exactly. So the other man could have been a guest, but definitely not some random traveler she'd only met once." Every word Xu Moyang spoke felt like another slap across Jiang Heng and Xie Zhi's faces, highlighting just how useless their supposed investigation had been.
Unable to save face, Xie Zhi cursed roughly, "That's what happens with a shameless woman like her! Does she lose the ability to walk every time she sees a man? She dragged all of us into this damned instance!"
"What happened to those guests?" Jiang Sui suddenly asked.
The question came so abruptly that Fang Yuan paused, and even Xu Moyang did not react at first.
Lu Jin answered instead. "They're dead. They're all buried on the mountain behind the guesthouse."
Everyone sucked in a breath.
Xu Moyang's voice trembled. "Boss Huang killed them?"
Lu Jin raised an eyebrow. "Who else?"
After learning that his wife had supposedly cheated on him, Huang Youquan went insane. Unable to identify the other man, he killed all those former classmates instead. The "drunk" in the executive suite had been one of them.
Huang Youquan had a group photograph from the reunion. A dark-red cross had been drawn over the drunk's face, along with the faces of nearly twenty other men. Every one of them had been buried on the mountain behind the guesthouse.
A cold gust slipped through the crack in the window. It was June, yet every player felt chilled to the bone.
"We're running out of time. We found some clues too." Fang Yuan laid out the postcards the boss's wife had hidden. "She hid these extremely carefully. The person who sent them might be the other man."
Xu Moyang immediately took out the reunion attendance list Boss Huang had given them. Every name on it had been handwritten, and so had the messages on the postcards. The postcards had no signature, but perhaps the handwriting would match.
They immediately began comparing the writing. Time ticked away second by second. There were nearly fifty names, and matching all the handwriting took effort.
With only two or three minutes left before half past midnight, Xu Moyang and Fang Yuan finally identified someone.
"Li Ye! It has to be him!"
Whenever this man wrote the fire radical, he connected the two side dots, an obvious stroke-order error. The handwriting itself was similar too, both carrying the same thin, scholarly elegance.
The players grew excited. Their answer was supported by evidence from Boss Huang's side and corroborated by the boss's wife. More importantly, Li Ye was one of the few men in the photograph whose face had not been crossed out in red, which meant he was still alive. That perfectly fit the fact that Boss Huang had never found the other man.
They hurriedly submitted the answer.
The System gave no response. The dormitory became so quiet that they could hear one another breathing.
Xu Moyang stiffened. "Brother Lu, how did you complete the last task? Do we have to write the answer down?"
Lu Jin had just opened his mouth when that irritating childish voice suddenly sounded beside his ear.
[Ding——]
[The six-hour time limit has ended. Unfortunately, the players failed to complete Task Two!]
[According to the rules, the game will continue, and one player will be randomly punished!]
The instant the announcement ended, Lu Jin disappeared.
He vanished so quickly that even Jiang Sui failed to react. In the space of a blink, the person who had been standing across from them was simply gone.
Jiang Sui had been leaning lazily against the windowsill. He immediately straightened.
Xu Moyang was even more dumbfounded. The shock was so great that he had no idea how to put it into words. He looked toward Xie Zhi and the others. "What happened? Where did Brother Lu go?"
"What else could have happened?" Xie Zhi's tone was cold. "You failed the task, so he got punished."
Fang Yuan hurriedly asked, "What exactly is the System's punishment?"
Xie Zhi gave the two of them an unreadable glance. "Nobody knows. It's always like this. The punished player disappears first. A few minutes later, the System announces their death."
He had seen the process so many times that his voice remained completely calm.
Xu Moyang stood frozen in place, his face bloodless. Fang Yuan also looked lost, his lips moving without producing a sound.
Only Xie Zhi and Jiang Heng pretended to look regretful while secretly rejoicing. Things had finally begun moving in the direction they had expected. When Xu Moyang and Fang Yuan produced so many clues earlier, the two veterans had genuinely grown nervous, afraid the newcomers might actually complete the task.
But they knew those clues did not reveal the real truth. If instances were that easy to clear, the mortality rate would never be so high.
Lu Jin was merely the first.
The number of players would inevitably decrease little by little.
At that thought, Xie Zhi raised an eyebrow, already imagining the rewards. If only two players survived to the end, how enormous would their share of the Points be? If only one remained… perhaps that would be even better.
Just as he was feeling pleased with himself, the System suddenly made another announcement.
[Ding——]
[Congratulations! The BOSS has returned to the instance!]
[Due to changes in the NPC lineup, this instance has been upgraded to a C-rank instance!]
[More danger! More challenges!]
[We wish all players a pleasant game~]
The instant the announcement ended, Xie Zhi and Jiang Heng turned deathly pale, even worse than Xu Moyang had moments earlier.
The BOSS had returned?
This was actually a C-rank instance?!
To clear a D-rank instance, two veteran players like them, combined with the key piece of evidence, might have been enough.
But a C-rank instance? Even ten of them loaded down with every kind of item might not be enough!
*
Clear River Guesthouse, third-floor guest room in the small three-story building.
"Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!"
A few minutes earlier, the previously silent building had suddenly filled with pounding noises, each blow landing against a partition with dull urgency.
Lu Jin's vision was completely black. His body had been forced into a cramped space in a twisted position. His hands and feet were bound, and wherever his skin touched the surface around him, everything felt sticky.
——The System had not only used hemp rope. It had also poured glue over him, clearly intending to seal him completely inside.
The sharp smell of formaldehyde filled the air. Lu Jin's hands were tied behind his back, although his elbows could still move. As his skin brushed the surface of the partition, he felt countless densely packed scratches.
The players who had been punished before him had probably been locked in the same place. Unable to escape, they would have slowly run out of oxygen, clawing madly at the walls until they finally died in despair.
This punishment was more unexpected than Lu Jin had anticipated.
A man could be heard humming outside. Compared with the oppressive darkness around Lu Jin, the voice sounded positively cheerful. Light footsteps approached before the third-floor room was pushed open.
"Ha! So what if you're a Reaper? So what if you're some big shot? You still wanted to capture me? This is an instance! My territory, my rules!"
"I wonder which player they sent me this time? Hehehe! I can finally have a proper feast~" Huang Youquan thought happily. After spending the entire night imprisoned inside Lu Jin's phone, he truly was starving.
He pried open the wardrobe partition and saw the person trapped inside.
Huang Youquan: "…"
Lu Jin: "…"
Huang Youquan reacted on pure instinct. Without the slightest hesitation, he slammed the partition shut, turned around, and ran!
He had gotten too smug! How had he forgotten that the lowest-ranked danger-zone player was this terrifying ancestor?!
Of course the player most likely to be punished would be him! Was there something wrong with the System? Why would it deliver him here?
It expected Huang Youquan to deal with a Reaper?
Huang Youquan sprinted for his life. Even though he knew perfectly well that no matter how fast he ran he could never shake Lu Jin, survival instinct overruled everything else.
He charged all the way to the stairwell, but the expected pursuit never came. Exhausted and panting, Huang Youquan looked back in confusion and discovered that Lu Jin had not followed him at all.
"Oh, right!" Huang Youquan suddenly realized. "The System trapped him!"
The rope and glue were ordinary objects, but the glue was extremely strong. Without alcohol, tearing himself free would probably cost him a layer of skin.
Huang Youquan immediately relaxed.
So the System could occasionally do something decent after all!
He cautiously returned to the room, inching toward the wardrobe before poking his head around the edge. Sure enough, Lu Jin was still trapped inside and had not escaped.
The rope and glue held him tightly, and the partition had been sealed completely. There was no way he could crawl out without losing a layer of skin.
Huang Youquan instantly regained his confidence. Planting his hands on his hips, he laughed loudly. "Hahaha! Look at you now! Trapped and unable to get out, aren't you?"
"Who told you to lock me inside your phone? You even wanted to kill me! What goes around comes around! Don't think you're always going to be the one in charge. Right now, you're meat on the chopping block, and I can do whatever I want with you——"
Before he could finish, Lu Jin left his body.
His shadow puppet remained imprisoned inside the wardrobe, but his spirit transformed into his Reaper form. Wearing that immaculate black suit, he appeared directly in front of Huang Youquan.
"What did you just say?" Lu Jin looked at Huang Youquan without expression. "I didn't hear you clearly. Say it again."
