Chapter 5
Chapter 5
A hidden, old reading room was tucked away on the second floor of the library.
A seal was pasted on the door, the characters on it so faded that I could only barely make out the words “Psychological Counseling Room.”
We pried the door open, but it wasn’t a counseling room inside.
It was a Confession Training Room.
The walls were covered with photos of Lin Xia.
Photos of her crying, trembling, and being held by the shoulders in front of a mirror.
Seven lines of dialogue were written on the blackboard:
[Gu Wenzhou, I like you.]
[I’ve liked you for a long time.]
[Please look at me.]
[I can do anything for you.]
[I’ll die without you.]
[Please don’t reject me.]
[As long as you agree, I’m willing to do anything.]
Looking at that last line, my stomach churned.
Zhao Mingyuan’s voice trembled. “Was she driven insane?”
Jiang Xu shook his head. “No, she was trained to be an offering.”
“What do you mean?”
Jiang Xu pointed to the clock in the corner. The clock face had no numbers, only a red heart, and the hands were stopped at ten o’clock.
“The ghost story of this school might not be because Lin Xia loved Gu Wenzhou, but because everyone treated her emotions as a game. The System rules state ‘No Romance,’ but what’s actually killing people might be love that is exploited, manipulated, and used as a sacrifice.”
As soon as he finished speaking, the chalk on the blackboard began to move on its own.
[Players, please complete the Graduation Confession Reenactment.]
[Groups of two: one person confesses, one person rejects.]
[The one who fails the confession stays in the Bell Tower.]
The door slammed shut with a bang.
Everyone’s red thread was forcibly pulled taut, and each pair was pushed in front of a different mirror.
Jiang Xu and I stood face-to-face.
In the mirror, my face was paler than a ghost’s.
A countdown appeared on the blackboard.
[Three minutes.]
Zhao Mingyuan’s group was the first to break.
The girl opposite him cried, “I don’t want to die.”
Zhao Mingyuan cried too. “I don’t want to either!”
The girl suddenly grabbed his sleeve. “Then you confess. If you fail the confession, you stay.”
Zhao Mingyuan froze.
Yellow text from the System popped up.
[Detected player Liu Man developing a tendency for sacrificial demand.]
[Danger level: 72%.]
My heart went cold watching this.
The most terrifying part of this Dungeon wasn’t that romance would lead to death.
It was that it forced people to turn the question “Do you love me?” into a knife in the face of death.
Jiang Xu suddenly said, “Shen Zhi, look at me.”
I gritted my teeth. “I won’t.”
“If you don’t look at me, we’ll die together.”
I looked up.
He was very calm, but there was a depth in his eyes that I couldn’t quite read.
“Say exactly what I say,” he said. “Jiang Xu.”
My scalp crawled. “Are you crazy?”
“It’s not a confession,” he whispered. “The rule requires a reenactment, not a profession of love. We can rewrite the meaning of the sentence.”
The blackboard countdown had only thirty seconds left.
Jiang Xu spoke each word deliberately:
“Jiang Xu, I like you.”
The System’s danger level instantly flashed red.
I spoke almost at the same time: “…this name.”
All the prompts stalled.
I stared at him, my voice tight but steady as I followed through:
“Jiang Xu, I like this name of yours. The ‘Xu’ that means ‘to narrate’-it’s perfect for unraveling a story.”
My reflection in the mirror wasn’t subjected to Erasure.
Jiang Xu continued, “Shen Zhi, I reject you.”
My heart skipped a beat.
He finished the rest of the sentence: “I reject your attempt to turn yourself into a sacrifice.”
With a loud crack, the mirror shattered.
Every mirror in the training room exploded simultaneously, and the seven lines of confession on the blackboard were replaced by seven lines of blood-red text.
[It wasn’t love that killed me.]
[It was them forcing me to turn love into a plea for mercy.]
The door opened.
The girl in Zhao Mingyuan’s group collapsed to the floor, sobbing so hard she couldn’t catch her breath. Zhao Mingyuan hadn’t died either; he had followed our lead and changed “I like you” to “I like you to stay far away from me.”
It was a smart-aleck way to phrase it, but it worked.
Before I could breathe a sigh of relief, I saw Jiang Xu’s nape reflected in a shard of mirror.
There was a faint silver mark there.
It looked like an inverted eye.
I had seen the same pattern on the last page of the school rulebook.
Underneath the pattern, it read:
[Administrator Patrolling.]
I looked up at Jiang Xu.
As if sensing something, he turned around.
We locked eyes across the floor covered in broken glass.
A new prompt from the System popped up in my vision.
[Warning: Do not identify a High-Privilege Entity.]