Chapter 1
Chapter 1
[Jincheng University Women’s Dormitory]
[Objective: Escape the dormitory through the correct route before dawn.]
[Rabbit Keeper has sent you a friend request.]
Lin Yinxi jolted awake in her dorm bed for the ninety-ninth time. Cold sweat trickled down her neck and into her collar.
Something heavy crashed to the floor in the corridor.
The girl in the bunk below her shouted irritably toward the door, “What, are you slaughtering pigs out there in the middle of the night? Are we supposed to sleep or not? Give it a rest!”
The girl in the lower bunk finished her outburst.
The sound-activated light outside the door came on.
Then something dragged along the floor, slowly passing their dorm room.
Beside Lin Yinxi’s pillow, her phone was still vibrating like mad.
[Rabbit Keeper has sent you a friend request.] kept popping up.
Covering the screen again and again.
She flexed her underexercised fingers.
Ten minutes from now, this body would fail to climb out over the balcony as nimbly as her roommates. She would be left alone in the room, and a Flayer would drag her into the corridor.
Then she would become the first flayed corpse in the room.
She remembered every second clearly.
Because this was the hundredth time she had gone through it.
Every time, even if she racked her brains and avoided the first death, her lack of agility still made her the first in the room to kick the bucket.
Then she went back to square one.
For that monster, catching her and peeling off her skin was no different from catching a fat rabbit kicking its legs.
After all sorts of miserable deaths, her poor little heart had been through so much that it had gone a little numb.
Die enough times, and it starts to change you.
What differed from the previous ninety-nine attempts was her ringing phone.
Lin Yinxi picked it up. The battery was down to thirteen percent. She accepted the friend request from [Rabbit Keeper].
He sat quietly in her contact list without saying anything.
Lin Yinxi got out of bed quickly.
Her longest survival so far had been a little over three hours: she had evaded the Flayer, left the women’s dormitory, and run as far as the sports field.
She had to be faster this time.
Because Lin Yinxi could already feel her body growing weaker with every death and rebirth.
Of course, it was also possible that she had stayed up too many nights and had been weak to begin with.
In any case, Lin Yinxi crept down from her bunk. Without waking her other roommates, she took the fruit knife from the table, left the room, and turned toward the toilets.
The Flayer would enter the last dorm room first.
It was by the stairs.
She had to wait three minutes. Once the Flayer had moved away from the room beside the stairwell, she would time her exit and tiptoe out of the toilets.
Lin Yinxi held her breath and peered outside through a gap in the toilet stall.
The Flayer was tall and large, its waist and abdomen drawn tight, its body hunched. The enormous shadow dragged the dorm matron’s unrecognizable corpse toward the far end of the corridor.
The matron’s keys had fallen right outside the toilets on this floor.
Just then, her phone alerted her to another message.
Damn it!
Her phone was vibrating.
Lin Yinxi took it out, pressed her finger over the speaker, and tried to force it to shut down.
But the phone would not turn off.
She could not simply mute it either.
Then the person named Rabbit Keeper sent her a group invitation.
Rabbit Keeper invites you to join [Women’s Dorm Building 1 Flayer Work Assignments].
[Join group chat?]
The dragging outside stopped in front of Room 401.
Lin Yinxi shrank farther into the stall and tapped Join.
Members were muted in this group.
[Pinned announcement: Colleagues! This assignment takes place in Women’s Dorm Building 1 at Jincheng University. The work area comprises all five floors, including the exterior walls and the rooftop.
Flay all living creatures that make a sound before dawn.
When coordinating your work, do not step outside the work area, to avoid conflicts with other departments.
Anyone who fails to complete their assignment on time will be dealt with as an anomalous individual.]
Group members: 5.
They were Rabbit Keeper (group administrator), Flayer 001, Flayer 002, and Flayer 003.
Now she was the fifth.
Wow. After ninety-nine deaths, her special advantage had finally deigned to show up.
She was using her default handle: Organizer (Socially Anxious, No Job Too Small, Full-Fat Workhorse Edition).
That was the name of a part-time job she used to do. She had never changed it because it made picking up weekend jobs easier.
Pinned to her profile was a price list for all sorts of odd jobs. Besides organizing, she also fed cats, cooked, unclogged toilets, modeled for print magazines, and did all kinds of other work.
Now Lin Yinxi realized that her handle had made them mistake her for one of their own and pull her into the monsters’ work group!
[Rabbit Keeper: Welcome to our new colleague, Organizer.]
[Rabbit Keeper: All humans on the fifth floor of the women’s dormitory have been slaughtered. Organizer, proceed to the fifth floor and stack all flayed corpses by the emergency exit within half an hour.]
[Rabbit Keeper: The remaining Flayers will concentrate on clearing the interior areas of the fourth and third floors.]
Lin Yinxi said nothing in the muted group.
Joining meant accepting the work by default.
She watched the group messages.
The Flayers had left the fifth floor for now.
To keep the group from discovering that she was human, Lin Yinxi needed to complete Rabbit Keeper’s assignment. Then she could keep lurking and use the group messages to escape.
Lin Yinxi timed it precisely, stepped out of the stall, picked up the keys, and, following her experience from before, ran straight to the bend in the stairwell.
This time, she did not go down.
She went up!
The keys were still sticky with the dorm administrator’s fresh blood and scraps of flesh.
She clenched them tightly in her hand so they would not jingle.
Blind people generally had good hearing. The same went for monsters.
Flayers had poor eyesight but keen hearing.
They located their prey by sound.
Lin Yinxi ran, panted, walked a couple of steps, then ran again until she reached the fifth floor.
She looked up. Bloody drag marks covered the floor.
The walls were covered in bloody handprints.
“Something’s coming up. Is it a person or a monster?”
“Definitely a monster. I heard her panting just now. That has to be a monster breathing.”
Lin Yinxi turned her head and saw someone furtively poking their head out of Room 501.
She had read the group messages. The Flayers had already left the fifth floor.
Lin Yinxi walked straight to Room 501. She caught the door with her hand, braced it with her foot, and leaned her head inside. Several survivors were still in the room.
“Deng Miao, who are you calling a monster?”
At the sight of Lin Yinxi, Deng Miao went pale and clapped a hand over her mouth to stop herself from screaming. Her words to the older student leaked between her fingers. “Y-you… Yinxi, you run so slowly, and you’re still alive…?”
Lin Yinxi was famous for excellent exam scores and terrible stamina. The most exercise she got in a day was the walk from the classroom to the cafeteria.
Chen Hongmei tugged Deng Miao’s sleeve and whispered fearfully in her ear, “Deng Miao, our upperclasswoman’s cerebellum isn’t as developed as her cerebrum. Yinxi couldn’t have got away. That thing in front of us might be a monster wearing her skin…”
Other survivors from this floor were hiding in the dorm room, huddled together, grimy and disheveled. Some were classmates; others were unfamiliar faces.
They whispered to one another.
“Exactly. Our senior fails her fitness tests all the time. Even our class sports representative was killed by a Flayer. How could Yinxi have dodged one and run up here?”
“It must be a monster in disguise…”
“Push her out!”
There were two corpses in the room.
One lay on the floor.
The other had been flayed and hung from the balcony’s clothes rail.
Blood dripped from the hanger, drop by drop.
The balcony window was open.
Lin Yinxi took a deep breath and grabbed the leg of the mangled, bloody corpse, glancing from the corner of her eye at the shadows in the corridor beyond the gap in the door. “Deng Miao, quick. Help me carry the bodies to the emergency exit.”
Deng Miao stood there in a fluster, on the verge of tears. “I… I… There are so many people here. Why are you only asking me?”
Lin Yinxi had a faint, bad feeling.
The people in the room were talking too loudly!