Chapter 9

Chapter 9

When I was alive, I always used the pen name “Yan Huideng” for my writing.

But this black book wasn’t any of the books I had published in the real world. It was more like an ongoing collection, a work in progress. The titles that constantly surfaced and vanished on the cover were all names of discarded drafts I had written but never released.

The Rule Hunter placed the book on the lectern like it was presenting a piece of evidence.

“Unfinished texts belong to the System,” it finally provided a clear definition. “Upon the author’s death, creative rights are automatically transferred to the Rule Material Library. You have the right to use them, but not the right to dispose of them.”

So that was it.

It hadn’t come simply to hunt me down; it was here to reclaim an “overstepping author.” By using my foreknowledge of the Dungeon to alter the rules, I had essentially tampered with the System’s material warehouse.

The female teacher in the mirror slowly began to smile.

She didn’t look at the Hunter; she only looked at me.

That gaze made me extremely uncomfortable, as if I owed her something.

“All examinees, please hand in your papers,” she said.

After the test papers were collected, the blank ones were set aside in a separate pile. The teacher didn’t grade them immediately. Instead, she picked up the black book and casually flipped to a page. A passage of text immediately surfaced on the paper:

“She will rely on her own memory, so she is most likely to die within modified old settings.”

It was my handwriting.

My heart sank violently.

The Rule Hunter was reading my discarded drafts-it might have even finished reading them before I did. This meant that from this moment on, my “foreknowledge” of the Dungeon was no longer an absolute advantage. The System could completely use my unfinished versions to counter me.

I looked up at the mirror on the back wall of the classroom and finally remembered who that female teacher looked like.

She looked like my middle school Chinese teacher, Shen Qinghe.

She died when I was sixteen.

And Silent Middle School was a story I had written to commemorate her, yet never dared to address directly.

This wasn’t just some random skin the System had grabbed.

It was using my guilt to give it shape.

“So you knew all along,” the teacher in the mirror said softly. “You wrote me in, but you never gave me an ending.”

Those words were more terrifying than the Hunter’s pursuit. It meant that the characters in the Dungeon weren’t just pure programs. At least some of them, after being written and rewritten over a long period, had begun to possess a sense of self.

The Rule Hunter closed the black book.

“Surrender your rewriting permissions before midnight tomorrow.”

“And if I don’t?”

It looked at me, speaking with a hint of emotion for the first time.

“Otherwise, I will write you back into the rules and ensure you are forever responsible only for dying.”

The bell for the end of class rang.

The corridor outside the classroom had become filled with mirrors at some point. In every mirror stood another version of me. Some had faces covered in blood, some had their necks snapped, and some sat before computers, typing incessantly until the bones of their fingers were exposed.

Xu Zhibai gripped my wrist tightly, her face as white as a sheet.

I stared at those mirrors and said only one thing:

“It wants to use my own stories to kill me.”

“Then what are you going to do?”

“Then I’ll write something it can’t understand.”