Chapter 148

Chapter 148

Fire burned across their bodies.

Their hands and feet were bound, leaving them with no way to escape. All they could do was roll on the ground, screaming in agony.

“Zhao Yingguo, let us go!”

“Zhao Yingguo, you’ve lost your mind!”

“Ah!”

“Help!”

“…”

“Zhao Yingguo, you’ll die a horrible death!”

“Zhao Yingguo, I won’t let you get away with this!”

Listening to their curses, Zhao Yingguo laughed even more brightly. She tilted her head, admiring their suffering, her lips moving as she said, “Didn’t you love watching other people get tortured? What, now that it’s your turn, you’re cursing? I thought you would enjoy it.”

Enjoy it?

How could anyone possibly enjoy this?

But then why was it that when they were the ones being tortured, they hated it, yet when they tortured others, they were so happy?

Zhao Yingguo sneered. “Watching you struggle in pain feels wonderful.”

“Murder is illegal!” someone roared at Zhao Yingguo.

Zhao Yingguo gave a faint “oh” and asked in return, “And intentional assault isn’t illegal? You’re talking law with me now? Are you trying to make me laugh?”

She looked at the group, her expression calm. “We’re all adults. If you do something wrong, you pay the price. You hurt me, so you have to pay the price. Don’t worry. If I kill you, I’ll pay the price too.”

As she spoke, Zhao Yingguo lifted her head, looked out over the sea of Fire, and smiled. “I never intended to leave this place.”

Those words sent a shock through the people watching in front of the television.

Zhao Yingguo was a victim.

She had been hurt, yet she had no power to change anything. All she could do was watch the people who hurt her go on living happily. She hated them, and so she chose to demand justice for herself.

She wanted these people dead.

At the same time, Zhao Yingguo knew what she was doing was wrong. That was why she had never planned on surviving. What she wanted was for all thirteen people, herself included, to die in this sea of Fire.

Because of that, Qin Nan and the others sympathized with Zhao Yingguo.

The Fire kept burning.

The great Fire burned through the ropes around those people’s wrists.

They finally regained their freedom, but by then their bodies were covered in Fire, and all around them was already a sea of Fire. There was no way out anymore.

No one knew who moved first, but someone staggered to their feet and lunged at Zhao Yingguo.

“Ah, Zhao Yingguo, I’ll kill you!” With that, the person threw himself at Zhao Yingguo.

Zhao Yingguo did not dodge.

She had never planned to live anyway. Besides, with the sea of Fire all around her, there was nowhere for her to hide.

That person tackled Zhao Yingguo to the ground, and his actions reminded the others. As soon as they regained their freedom, they all threw themselves at Zhao Yingguo, venting their hatred on her.

Zhao Yingguo had no way to fight back.

Nor did she intend to.

She had long since gone numb to pain.

Until-

“Ah!” Zhao Yingguo let out a scream of agony.

Someone had actually jammed their fingers into Zhao Yingguo’s eyes and gouged out her eyeballs by force.

Zhao Yingguo screamed in pain. Blood streamed from her eyes. Then, suddenly, she began to laugh. The more she suffered, the louder she laughed.

“You don’t deserve it. How could any of you be worthy of having me sacrifice my life for you?” Zhao Yingguo suddenly said.

No one cared what she said. By then, those people had completely lost their minds. They pinned Zhao Yingguo down beneath them, and even before they lost consciousness completely, they were still doing the same thing they had always done-abusing and oppressing Zhao Yingguo.

And Zhao Yingguo?
Before she completely lost consciousness, she spoke her final words.

“I will come back.”

After that, the entire dorm room was swallowed by the blaze. In the end, everything settled back into silence, and the television screen went black.

There was no sound in the room, but the group was still shaken by the scene they had just witnessed. For a long time, none of them could recover.

Zhao Yingguo had been prepared to die together with the people who bullied her. But at the very end, after her eyes were gouged out, she had clearly regretted it. And that regret, those words of hers…

So she had come back, in the form of a ghost?

But hadn’t all of those people already died? What was she coming back for?

Given the situation they were in now, of course they understood that Zhao Yingguo wanted them dead. But from the perspective of the backstory, why had Zhao Yingguo returned?

Her enemies were all dead. If she came back again, was it for revenge? Revenge against whom?

And there was something else…

“Who filmed this footage?” Jian Fan raised an important question.

The very first section had taken place in the classroom, where there was Surveillance. The earlier part might have been recorded by Zhao Yingguo herself, with a camera she had set up in advance. But the part inside the blaze-how had that been recorded?

Where had this footage come from?

And since it was campus Surveillance, was the truth really limited to only what they were seeing now?

When Zhao Yingguo went through all of that, had there really been… no one else who knew?

The deeper Mu Xin thought about it, the more her skin crawled.

What Zhao Yingguo had suffered was far more terrifying than what they had seen so far.

No.

Qin Nan suddenly snatched up the diary beside him and looked at the contents of the last page.

“Who wrote this sentence?” Qin Nan asked.

The dormitory supervisor should have died in the same place as Zhao Yingguo. Even if she had not died, she should have been sent to the hospital. How would she have had time to write anything in a diary? Then on the last page of this diary, the words saying she had died-who exactly had written them?

And who had torn out these diary pages and hidden them in this metal box?

There was someone else behind the scenes in this story.

And that person might be the real key to what came after.

From the very beginning, Zhao Yingguo seemed to have believed she would be able to return. Why had she been so certain?

This story was by no means as simple as what they had seen. There were even more things hidden behind it.

Jian Fan lowered his eyes. He did not answer Qin Nan. Instead, he raised another question. “Fire. The dormitory was burned.”

Qin Weiyi and the others all looked toward Jian Fan.

“What are you trying to say?” Qin Weiyi asked.

Jian Fan gave a short laugh. He swept his gaze over the dorm room they were in and said, “Does this place look like it’s been burned before?”

“It was the student dormitory that burned, not the dormitory supervisor’s room,” Yellow Hair replied instinctively.

But after he answered, Jian Fan did not need to say anything more. Yellow Hair realized the problem himself.

Who had ever seen a fire burn only one room?

With a fire that big, the surrounding rooms would probably have been affected too. Besides, 6103 was Zhao Yingguo’s dorm room, yet there were no traces of it having been burned. Did that mean the place burned in the video was not on this floor?

“Looks like we’ve only scratched the surface of this game,” Qin Weiyi said with a sigh.

Yellow Hair’s expression instantly turned ugly.

This was still just scratching the surface?

They had already been tormented half to death, and one person had already died. If the real show was only just beginning, how were they supposed to keep playing?

Qin Nan’s heart also felt heavy, but then he suddenly paused. He turned his head toward the balcony and said, “The sound stopped.”

Whether it was from the balcony, the bathroom, or the dorm room door, all the noises Zhao Yingguo had been making had disappeared.