Chapter 27
Chapter 27
The problem Yu Lingling and the others now faced was how to invite every anomaly in the building down to the first floor.
Brother B looked at Yu Lingling. She was currently the resident of the West Unit on the First Floor.
A trace of schadenfreude flashed through Brother Knife’s eyes, but wary of Yu Lingling’s strength, he kept his mouth shut.
Yu Lingling tugged on the Teddy Bear Doll’s ear. “Give me the diary. I’ll handle it.”
Brother B had no intention of pushing all the work onto someone else. Mutated instances were rare, and their rewards were several times greater than those of ordinary instances. If this was the instance’s first mutation, special items were also more likely to appear.
“I’ll look for his parents’ remains.”
If the Teenage Anomaly truly was the instance Core, then his parents would also be crucial clues.
According to the diary, at least one of their bodies was buried in the flower bed.
Yu Lingling frowned. “I tried earlier. There’s no way to leave this building.”
“I have a way,” Brother B replied.
Yu Lingling suspected it had something to do with the gum Brother B had been chewing the entire time, but she didn’t ask. After glancing at Brother Knife, she took the diary and left first.
Brother B glanced at the visibly shaken Brother Knife but said nothing more. He also headed downstairs, though when he passed the room containing the Teenage Anomaly, he instinctively kept his distance.
Brother Knife hurried after him. He looked like a rabbit frightened out of its wits, but when he reached the fourth-floor stairwell, he subconsciously stopped, his expression dazed.
Brother B didn’t seem surprised in the least. Instead, he gently reassured him, “Leave the rest to us. You should get some rest.”
As if reminded by his words, Brother Knife clutched the knife in his hand and nodded. “Th-Then I’ll rest for a while.”
Yu Lingling’s steps faltered slightly as she descended the stairs. Stroking the Teddy Bear Doll in her arms, she murmured as though whispering to someone, “He can’t leave anymore.”
It seemed he was being assimilated by the so-called anomalies.
Could a mental breakdown cause someone to be assimilated and turned into a new anomaly?
When they reached the first floor, Yu Lingling stopped, making no secret of the fact that she wanted to see how Brother B planned to get outside.
Brother B glanced at her, unconcerned. “Don’t provoke him. Try to delay his breakdown for as long as possible.”
Hidden in the shadows like a fluffy little ball, Yu Lingling asked, “Does he even need provoking at this point?”
Brother B let out a half-genuine sigh. “He already had a Skill during his rookie period. It’d be a shame for him to die here.”
A Skill?
Wasn’t it a gift?
Yu Lingling lowered her gaze, her lashes fluttering.
How infuriating. She didn’t have a Skill. The Horror Game really was targeting her.
It wasn’t that Yu Lingling thought she couldn’t survive the Horror Game without one. She simply couldn’t accept that everyone else had something she didn’t.
Brother B had only made the comment in passing. Brother Knife possessed nothing more than a Normal Skill, yet he relied on his Skill and items to act without restraint. Brother B had never considered someone like that worth his attention.
Right in front of Yu Lingling, a thin, balloon-like membrane suddenly enveloped his body.
The fingers Yu Lingling had wrapped around the Teddy Bear Doll twitched. She was rather tempted to see what would happen if she used her dagger to slice through that membrane.
But she couldn’t.
Brother B wasn’t her enemy.
Yu Lingling lowered her gaze in disappointment.
Brother B appeared outside the building. He gave Yu Lingling a nod, then headed toward the flower bed.
Yu Lingling turned around, but instead of going to the innermost room on the first floor, where that pile of fat was locked up, she went to the room the Four Dolls had just cleared out.
The resident of this room was a man around forty who looked relatively normal from the front. However, another mouth grew from the back of his head.
If Chen Xiaofeng had ended up that way because of eating, then the appearance of the man before her…
Yu Lingling crouched beside him and arched an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me you like talking about people behind their backs.”
Following Yu Lingling’s example, the Four Dolls huddled into squatting positions. Two of them, however, had their feet planted against the ceiling and were squatting upside down.
Yu Lingling suddenly gave the Teddy Bear Doll in her arms an annoyed pat. “Stop rushing me. It wouldn’t be any fun if I solved this too quickly.”
At once, the Four Dolls turned to look at Yu Lingling.
Yu Lingling’s eyes suddenly curved into a smile. “My brother isn’t home anyway, and time flows differently here. What’s wrong with playing a little longer?”
Despite saying that, Yu Lingling stood up and took out the notebook bound in yellow-brown kraft paper. She flipped to a blank page near the back, then held a pencil in her left hand and wrote a line on the paper.
“Today’s my birthday. Grandpa told me to invite everyone to my house to eat meat.”
Both the handwriting and the tone were identical to Chen Xiaofeng’s.
Yu Lingling wrote out several copies, then casually tore them from the notebook. A few even ripped in the process, but she didn’t care. Finally, she folded each one several times.
Chen Xiaofeng wasn’t the careful, meticulous type to begin with.
Yu Lingling handed the notes to the Four Dolls and instructed, “Just slip them through the cracks under the doors. Every unit needs to get one.”
The largest of the Four Dolls hopped in front of Yu Lingling and pulled open the pocket on the front of its clothes.
Yu Lingling stuffed the finished notes inside.
A moment later, the Four Dolls disappeared from the room.
As for how to deal with that pile of fat, if he was eating too slowly on his own, she only needed to invite more residents to help him.
Nor did inviting those residents require anything elaborate.
The residents of this building were all selfish and loved taking petty advantages. If not for what the West Unit on the Fourth Floor had done, they probably would have stopped at minor acts of evil, too afraid to involve themselves in anything truly heinous.
But the cannibal resident in the West Unit on the Fourth Floor had opened Pandora’s box.
Yu Lingling had noticed that Brother B and the others treated these residents as monsters, but in truth, their behavior was no different from that of ordinary people. They were merely people whose desires had been magnified.
Gathering them all in the West Unit on the First Floor didn’t require any complicated tricks. An invitation was enough.
In the real world, if someone from the same building invited everyone over for meat, how could neighbors who loved taking advantage of others possibly refuse? They would undoubtedly bring their entire families along.
And since the invitation didn’t specify a time, they would rush over as quickly as possible to avoid arriving late and missing out.
For Yu Lingling, the only difficult part was making her actions seem reasonable in the eyes of Brother B and the others.
As for why she was going to so much trouble, Yu Lingling hadn’t forgotten what Brother Knife had done to her.
Whatever fate Brother Knife had tried to inflict on her, she naturally had to repay him twofold.
Yu Lingling had emerged unscathed only because she was strong.
Brother Knife’s scheme had backfired only because he was too weak. Did that mean the entire matter should be forgotten simply because Yu Lingling was fine while Brother Knife had suffered the consequences?
The residents here also cherished their lives and feared death. The male resident with a mouth growing from the back of his head was huddled in a corner.
Once Yu Lingling had finished making her arrangements, she began looking through the things in the room. She found quite a few photographs of women in swimsuits, all clearly cut out of calendars.
There was also a pair of women’s stockings at the head of his bed, crumpled into a ball.
Aside from those stockings, there was no trace of any other women’s belongings in the room.
Holding the Teddy Bear Doll, Yu Lingling looked at the male resident. “If you can’t give me any useful information, then all you can do is serve one final purpose.”