Chapter 1
Chapter 1
The last threads of gold faded from the clouds as starlight climbed the mist-shrouded peaks.
Moonlight washed over the school cut off from the rest of the world.
“Who the hell do you think you are? What gives you the right to keep us here?”
A muscular man seized Smiling Tiger by the collar. He pressed a gleaming dagger against Smiling Tiger’s stomach and glared viciously at him.
Smiling Tiger kept his false smile firmly in place. “The players are still assembling. Please wait patiently.”
“Players, my ass.”
With a roar, the muscular man made to drive the dagger into him.
A girl’s voice came from behind. “If I were you, I wouldn’t do that.”
The muscular man looked back. The short-haired girl appeared to be seventeen or eighteen and wore the uniform of Beijiang No. 3 High School. Her eyes held a maturity and coldness far beyond her years.
“Why not?”
She gave him a sidelong glance. “Nothing good ever comes from angering an NPC.”
Beneath the moonlight, the stone marker for Ivy Girls’ School stood in the square. To the south were the school’s main building and athletic field. At first glance, it looked no different from an ordinary high school.
“What did you say?” The muscular man’s brow arched.
Before he could demand whether she knew something, a spike of pain lanced through everyone’s skull. Blue light poured down, and a mechanical female voice sounded in every ear.
[Welcome to the gods’ horror game. First-floor instance: Ivy Girls’ School. Players, do everything in your power to survive until the seventh day!]
There were more than thirty people in the square. Some stared in shock at the system interface that had appeared before them.
[The Gods’ Livestream is starting. Connection to the livestream pool established automatically.]
[Please enjoy the game to the fullest. Entertainment comes first; the more entertaining you are, the more attention you’ll receive from the gods~]
Smiling Tiger spoke. “Students, welcome back to Ivy Girls’ School. It’s time for evening study.”
“Evening study? I’ve already graduated! Why the hell would I go to evening study? What is this place? I’m not going! I’m going home!”
A bald man paced about in a panic, looking as furtive as a guilty thief. He started shouting that he wanted to leave.
Once one person began, others soon followed. More and more of them cried out that they refused to enter the school.
After all…
Students had been leaping from the buildings of Ivy Girls’ School ever since they arrived.
Bodies struck the ground like sacks of garbage, piling into a small mound of corpses.
“Tch. So loud.”
A low voice sounded without warning, slightly hoarse with sleep.
It wasn’t loud, yet everyone turned toward it.
The speaker’s tone was simply too scornful and impatient, a jarring contrast to the terror all around him.
When they saw him clearly, they couldn’t help drawing a sharp breath.
His face was so strikingly beautiful that a single glance made him impossible to forget, even in a crowd.
Dark red eyes swept lazily over the people around him. Xiao Huai’s face was a little pale, and irritation lingered in his gaze at having been woken.
He rose from behind the Ivy Girls’ School marker and walked into the middle of the crowd.
Clearly, he had been sitting behind it asleep this entire time. Everyone else had been too busy panicking to notice him.
He was tall and lean, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist. As he approached, every head tilted up toward him. The crowd held its breath, waiting to hear what he would say.
After a moment, Xiao Huai looked at Smiling Tiger. “Sir, I lost my uniform. Could you give me another one?”
Smiling Tiger froze, then his false smile deepened.
“What a good student. Of course I can. It is a school rule, after all.”
The instant he finished speaking, a wardrobe full of Japanese-style school uniforms appeared beside him from thin air. Some skirts were blue; others were pink.
The bald man: …
The muscular man: …
Every man present: …
They were men! How could a man dress like a girl?!
Under everyone’s stare, Xiao Huai unhesitatingly chose a pink uniform. He pulled the skirt on over his trousers, then casually draped the jacket bearing Ivy Girls’ School’s crest over his shoulders.
When he was done, he even yawned.
“??”
Did he have no masculine pride at all?! Even the muscular man found the sight unbearable.
A handsome guy over six feet tall, wearing a woman’s skirt. Was he some kind of pervert?
“Evening study is about to begin. Hurry upstairs, students! Our Class 44 is going to get the best scores on this exam!” Smiling Tiger raised a fist in a gesture of victory.
Thirty-four players had assembled in all, split evenly between men and women.
Xiao Huai had spent nearly all his time asleep since arriving in this world.
In his dreams, a voice had repeatedly insisted that he must wear a uniform. That was why he had wandered over and made the request of Smiling Tiger.
Whether it meant dressing as a girl did not matter to him. He only had a vague feeling that something bad would happen if he went without a uniform.
He didn’t remember why he had come here. He had no memories of his past at all.
So Xiao Huai opened the system interface and tapped through it, trying to find information about himself.
For the moment, only the livestream and item inventory looked remotely useful. As for the system’s rules, he had memorized them all in under two minutes.
[Viewers in the Gods’ Livestream: 1]
[Item Inventory: God’s Tear]
[God’s Tear]
Item Description: Passive Effect: Raises non-player character (NPC) affinity by 10% within an instance. When a character carries God’s Tear, nearby NPCs sense an indescribable warmth and care from them. Their affinity toward the holder increases by 10%, making them more likely to offer support and assistance within the instance.
[Note: Your very existence makes the gods weep, the earth tremble, and all creation go mad for you. Don’t cry, or your crown might fall, and that would break a god’s heart.]
Xiao Huai closed the interface, slipped his hands into his pockets, and trailed lazily after Smiling Tiger toward the teaching building.
The others still had no idea what was happening, but they had all heard the mechanical voice: survive seven days, and they could leave.
They couldn’t stand this eerie place for another moment. People kept jumping from the teaching building, and the sight chilled them to the bone. Better to get inside as quickly as possible.
One after another, they followed Xiao Huai, no longer caring whether he was a pervert in women’s clothing.
They did their best not to glance at the ground. Thick blood had dyed the earth red, and warm streams of it flowed past the teaching building’s entrance.
Every light was ablaze in the five-story building. The faint sound of students reciting lessons drifted from within.
The bald man clung close behind Xiao Huai. Cold sweat beaded on his forehead, and his lips had gone pale. Whenever he saw one of the female corpses, his whole body shuddered as he shook his head and muttered to himself.
“It wasn’t me… It wasn’t me…”
When they were only fifteen feet from the entrance, the bald man suddenly shoved Xiao Huai aside as if possessed and rushed for the doors.
But the instant his foot struck the ground:
A flash of silver sliced through the air. The sound of flesh being severed reached their ears.
Before anyone could react, the bald man’s upper and lower body had already parted.
Blood sprayed in every direction. His intestines spilled across the ground.
He did not die immediately. A scream tore from his throat. “Aaaagh! It hurts! It hurts!”
The agony did not last long. A moment later, his head was cut off too.
Dead silence.
The square fell so quiet they might have heard a pin strike the ground.
The killer stood right before them.
It was none other than the smiling man who had greeted them at the beginning.
He still wore that same smile, scarlet blood streaking his cheek and lending him the sinister air of a specter.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you. Don’t break the school rules~ Loud noises aren’t allowed in the corridors.”