Chapter 23
Chapter 23
A small black teddy bear doll.
“How… How did you get a black doll…?”
Hu Jiang’s palms went cold. He trembled uncontrollably, as though an invisible force had bound him in place and left him unable to move.
His voice quavered. The black doll had clearly terrified him.
Holding the black teddy bear doll, Xiao Huai smiled, points of starlight rippling through his eyes.
“How else? I won it by playing a game, of course.” He gave the black doll a gentle squeeze. A tongue of flame abruptly burst from within, or rather, it looked more like a person emerging from the doll.
Xiao Huai murmured, “Miss Hanako, if you please.”
“Hee-hee-hee-hee.” A girl’s eerie, ghostly laughter drifted from the doll.
The next instant, a blood-soaked girl hung upside down from the ceiling, her hollow, pitch-black eyes terrifying to behold.
Her mouth split all the way to her ears. Pointing at Hu Jiang, she asked, “Will you play hide-and-seek with me?”
“No! No, no!” Hu Jiang’s face went deathly pale, and his legs buckled beneath him. He tried to shove Xiao Huai aside and flee, but before he could even touch him, an invisible force dragged Hu Jiang into the depths of the darkness.
The timeline returned to the previous day, when Xiao Huai had entered the world of hide-and-seek. He had played more than a single round.
Although the school and dormitory rules said not to play hide-and-seek, the actual restriction was that the game could not be played at night.
During the day, nothing constrained him.
Each round lasted two hours. He played three in total.
Whenever the physical strain became too great, he simply took a nap in the dormitory matron’s room.
As a result, he also obtained a great deal of information about this world.
The injuries had nearly cost him his life.
At the very least, however, he discovered that an abnormal force was at work behind this world.
Jiang Shuli was a psychiatric patient. Her sisters had cared for her all along, yet her condition did not improve. Instead, it grew worse.
She suffered from persecutory delusions and dissociative identity disorder. She had also graduated from medical school and possessed extensive knowledge of pharmacology.
Madness alone was not frightening. Madness paired with a brilliant mind was.
Behind Jiang Shuli stood an attending physician surnamed He.
Xiao Huai was willing to call him the sickest madman in the entire Jinyan Fifth Psychiatric Hospital. Dr. He was the patient who truly deserved to be locked away.
During Hanako’s game, Xiao Huai learned that Dr. He used patients as playthings and incited psychiatric patients to commit crimes.
If Jiang Shuli had drugged the food in the cafeteria before committing the arson, the drug could have taken effect after the students returned to their dormitories. All she would have needed to do was start a single fire there.
The flames she ignited would have spread rapidly to the upper floors.
Fire spread with terrifying speed through high-rise buildings.
Such fires were also extremely difficult to extinguish, far harder than fires at ground level or on lower floors.
That explained why the students kept repeating the act of jumping from the building.
Some of them might have regained consciousness before they died. They had wanted to live. They had wanted to escape that fiery hell.
The students leaped down, but it was no use.
Within the illusory world, the monsters repeated what they had done before death: jumping again and again, dying again and again.
Xiao Huai needed to help Hanako find her mother. Jiang Shuli did not exist in this false world. She existed in the contaminated world of 1987.
He could not remain here.
So he risked everything to play games with Hanako.
By a stroke of luck amid all that misfortune, he won all three rounds. Difficult as the process had been, he obtained three game items.
One was a white teddy bear doll, a single-use cursed item. Once part of a victim’s tissue was placed inside, Hanako would come out at three in the morning and invite that person to play a game.
The second type of item was different.
[Black Teddy Bear Doll]
[Item Description: A single-use summoning item. Directly summons Miss Hanako and designates a target to play one round of hide-and-seek.]
[Note: Hanako likes you, so she has given you her favorite doll. Make sure you visit Miss Hanako often.]
Across the three rounds, Hanako gave him one white doll. In each of the next two rounds, she gifted him a black teddy bear doll.
Perhaps this was one benefit of becoming closer to Hanako with every game. But if he continued playing with her, he truly feared he would cripple himself.
Hu Jiang vanished completely into the shadows. The poisonous gas he had released dispersed along with him.
Xiao Huai murmured, “My, my. When you killed other people, did you ever imagine you might die the same way?”
That was why Xiao Huai had accepted the Red Finger with a clear conscience.
At least Hui Yulian had realized something was wrong before her death and had tried to ensure Hu Jiang died. She had simply failed.
The Red Finger was not restricted to a particular instance. It could be carried into others.
Hui Yulian had probably obtained it from another instance, much like the black teddy bear dolls Hanako gave him.
He Lecheng’s gaze had never left Xiao Huai from beginning to end.
Nor was he surprised when Hanako dragged Hu Jiang away.
Xiao Huai turned to meet his eyes. “I assume you won’t stop me. After all, if I actually fought you, I would certainly die.”
He Lecheng arched a brow. “For the sake of fairness, I naturally won’t touch you as long as you don’t violate the school rules.”
Xiao Huai looked up at the oil painting. “That’s the passage, isn’t it?”
He Lecheng smiled without bothering to deny it.
Xiao Huai walked straight to the painting. As he removed it from the wall, He Lecheng spoke behind him.
“Remember my warning. The contaminated world is anything but beautiful. Everyone there is mad.”
Xiao Huai curved his lips, unconcerned. “I’m mad too. Perhaps that makes me particularly well suited to the contaminated world.”
Across his three trips in and out of that world, he had started a fire every time he entered.
By the end, the NPCs had become so exasperated that they decided to stop chasing him.
The instant Xiao Huai touched the oil painting, his fingertips seemed to meet the surface of water. A force slowly enveloped him.
The world before him gradually blurred, while static crackled through his mind from the system.
As his consciousness faded, he vaguely heard a notification.
[Identity detected as…]
[Bzzzt… Error loading world…]
[Error. Error.]
* * *
The sun was setting, its golden afterglow spilling across the campus of Ivy Girls’ School and bathing it in warm orange light.
Slightly yellowed tiles contrasted beautifully with emerald ivy, both shining faintly gold in the evening sun.
Tall evergreens cast long shadows over the campus. A breeze passed, and the school bell rang.
It was six o’clock.
Apart from the bell, not a sound could be heard across the enormous campus.
A tall, slender man wrapped in bandages leaned against a tree. The sunset brushed across his face as his dark red eyes slowly opened.
Xiao Huai instinctively turned away from the light and looked around the campus.
This place looked different from the world where he had played the game.
During hide-and-seek, the sky had remained eternally dark, with no daylight at all. Yet here, he could see sunlight.
Viewed from a distance, the campus showed no sign that fire had ever touched it.
Everything looked as though nothing had ever happened.
No monsters. No flames. Only silence remained.
Just then, a voice sounded behind him.