Chapter 30
Chapter 30
Ms. Zhao looked at Yu Lingling. “Aren’t you curious why it had to be our family?”
Yu Lingling honestly wasn’t, but while she might be a little mentally unhinged, she wasn’t stupid.
Ms. Zhao chuckled a few times. “Because my husband was having an affair with Chen Xiaofeng’s mother, and that man caught them in the act.” Once she finished, her expression abruptly went blank as she stared at Yu Lingling. “What do you think?”
“Holy shit. That look is terrifying.”
“The newbie had better answer carefully. She can’t afford to trigger a death condition.”
Yu Lingling took off her hat, revealing a young face still rounded with baby fat. “I’m a minor. I’m not allowed to watch R-rated content.”
Ms. Zhao was speechless.
“…”
“What does she think? She can’t watch it.”
Ms. Zhao stared at Yu Lingling, who was about the same age her son had been when he died. Her expression grew complicated. At last, she looked away and continued speaking. This time, her voice was utterly flat, like an NPC rushing to advance the plot.
“You killed that man and found me. Bring me my husband’s remains, and I’ll let you clear the level and leave.”
Yu Lingling still had questions. “Who’s on the second floor? Why is she strong one moment and weak the next? And what’s her connection to you?”
Ms. Zhao answered with a question of her own. “Who do you think it is?”
“A woman to be pitied.” Yu Lingling had formed a theory as soon as she heard that Ms. Zhao’s husband had been having an affair with Chen Xiaofeng’s mother. She deliberately phrased it that way to test Ms. Zhao’s reaction. “Why is the second floor the only one with two vacant rooms?”
At the words “a woman to be pitied,” Ms. Zhao’s gaze went unfocused for a moment. Instead of answering, she looked toward the pipes in the corner.
A woman with disheveled hair crawled out.
She wore a knee-length red plaid dress and the same kind of stockings Yu Lingling had seen in the first-floor apartment of the resident with a mouth on the back of their head. Garish makeup covered her face, and her long, blood-soaked curls clung to her head.
Yu Lingling watched as the two women stood facing each other.
A ligature mark circled the woman in the red plaid dress’s neck. Her voice was hoarse and grating, every word hissing out of her like air from a punctured ball. “Because he’s coming.”
He was coming?
Yu Lingling felt as though she’d just unlocked a new character.
But what did “he’s coming” mean?
The woman in the red plaid dress continued in that leaking, breathless voice. “I traded my body for-”
Ms. Zhao cut her off. “This outsider is still young.”
Yu Lingling already understood. “So you’ve been supporting the unregistered man, his father, and his son all this time?”
Once she realized what the woman in the red plaid dress meant, she couldn’t bring herself to call those people the woman’s husband, son, and father-in-law.
The woman looked at Yu Lingling as two streams of bloody tears ran down her face. “We had no jobs and nowhere to live. To keep us alive, he became a thief, then a robber. Then he accidentally killed someone.”
Yu Lingling didn’t ask why they couldn’t simply find other jobs, but the viewers in the Livestream Room did.
“She won’t look for another job. She’s just making excuses because she’s lazy and wants something for nothing.”
“Crime is crime. Stop making excuses for it.”
“You people really are saying, ‘Let them eat cake,’ huh?”
The woman in the red plaid dress stared blankly ahead. “His father was sick and needed a lot of money. I became the mistress of a manager from my old factory. He was willing to find my family a place to live, but he wouldn’t let me live with them. I begged him over and over. I agreed to help entertain his guests, and he finally let me continue taking care of my family and allowed me to live on the second floor.”
“They all hated me and looked down on me, but I had no education. I needed a lot of money. My son had to go to school, my husband’s father needed medical treatment, and my husband needed good food and decent clothes.”
“I wanted to save money, but I could never save any. When he demanded money and I couldn’t come up with it, he made me sleep with other men.”
“As long as they stayed with me, I was willing to do anything.”
“I’m not like you. You’re educated, you have a job, and you earn your own money. You… you even took me to see a doctor.”
“Your husband came to me for sex. I didn’t want to, but… but he gave the money to my man.”
“That man set his sights on you too. I had nothing left, and even my husband liked you.”
“You… you… That man got proof that your husband had slept with me. He wanted to sleep with you and threatened to make a scene if he couldn’t. Your husband agreed.”
Her account was incoherent and jumbled, but Yu Lingling understood. Chen Xiaofeng’s father had obtained proof that Ms. Zhao’s husband had slept with the Woman in the Red Plaid Dress. He used it to blackmail Ms. Zhao’s husband, demanding to have his way with Ms. Zhao, and her husband agreed for the sake of his own future.
“They planned to stage your son’s kidnapping and use it to make you agree. Then they’d take pictures, and then… then they’d make you earn money the way I did. No, no, that’s not right. I wasn’t making money anymore. They wanted to make even more money.”
“I’m dirty now, but you… you’re still clean. I killed him.”
So the teenager’s father had not been killed by Chen Xiaofeng’s family after all. The Woman in the Red Plaid Dress had killed him.
“It hurt so much. He hit me. He was always hitting me, but this time it hurt so much. I wanted you to run, but… but my son told that man. They hung me up in the bathroom. I… It doesn’t hurt anymore.”
Yu Lingling watched the filthy water drip endlessly from the Woman in the Red Plaid Dress. “Ms. Zhao wasn’t the only one you wanted to save. You also wanted to save Sister A, Brother Knife, and the others who hid in the bathroom. But you couldn’t.”
The state of the residents here after death was tied to what had happened to them in life. The Woman in the Red Plaid Dress had been unable to save herself or Ms. Zhao while she was alive. Even after death, she still could not save those who fled their pursuers and hid in the bathroom.
Tears streamed endlessly down the Woman in the Red Plaid Dress’s face as she looked at Ms. Zhao. “Run. Run! Don’t worry about anything. Don’t care about anything. Just leave it all behind…”
Ms. Zhao was silent for a moment. “I already escaped.”
The Woman in the Red Plaid Dress was clearly no longer in her right mind, yet those words calmed her completely. “That’s good. That’s good.”
Yu Lingling looked at Ms. Zhao. “You discovered your husband’s relationship with her a long time ago.”
“Yes.” Holding the pink bunny towel, Ms. Zhao walked over to the Woman in the Red Plaid Dress and gently wiped the dirty water from her body. “Everyone in our building knew about her situation. I looked down on her at first too, but… but she truly was pitiful. She sacrificed everything for her son, yet he called her a dirty woman and would not even let her come near him.”
After thinking for a moment, Yu Lingling asked, “Why didn’t you get divorced?”
Ms. Zhao’s voice was cold. “Divorce is humiliating.”
Yu Lingling considered that. “So you chose to lose your life instead.”
“Isn’t she afraid of angering the ghost?”
“I’m leaving. This is so annoying. I came here to watch ghosts kill people, not some tragic melodrama.”
“They brought their fates upon themselves. Love-addled idiots deserve to die.”
“They couldn’t even stand on their own, yet they expected someone else to prop them up?”
Brother B had already returned to the building with the remains he had dug up and was making his way to the fourth floor.
Yu Lingling pondered the situation. Among the native inhabitants of a Horror Game Instance, some naturally suppressed others. Even though Ms. Zhao was the core of this instance, she was still at a disadvantage when facing the person who had killed her entire family.
“You wouldn’t let your son leave the fourth floor, but you wouldn’t let him go home either. Deep down, were you trying to protect him because you didn’t want him to go home and be killed, or did you simply not want to see him?”