Chapter 3

Hearing Chen Ying's words, Ning Buwen froze as well.

He realized that this game instance might be very different from what he had previously assumed.

"It's all right." Ning Buwen lowered his head and gave Chen Ying a gentle smile. "Whatever you knew before, I'll make you tell me every last detail."

As he spoke, Ning Buwen looked down and rubbed his fingers. "Don't let appearances fool you. I've had some training in torture and interrogation too."

Chen Ying shuddered without warning.

She realized that the man before her might be far less harmless than he appeared.

Gripping Chen Ying by the feet, Ning Buwen went down the stairs and into a small sporting-goods storeroom.

Chen Ying's head was battered and bloodied against the floor along the way, leaving her in a wretched state.

"Sorry, but to keep you from screaming, I'll have to cover your mouth first." Ning Buwen looked utterly innocent, as though he were merely asking what they should eat later.

"There's quite a full selection of things here."

...

"That's all. I really don't know anything else."

"Please, spare me."

"We're all going to die. You might as well come with me."

"Don't kill me. I only like you—I only wanted to be with you forever!"

Terror filled Chen Ying's face. She seemed to see something different, and she began to unravel completely.

"I'm not trying to kill you. I already untied you, can't you see?" Ning Buwen tried to bring Chen Ying back to her senses. She had been fine before, but when he started asking for the dead female teacher's name, Chen Ying went mad and became thoroughly strange.

"No—no!"

"You all like her. You all like her. She'll make everyone die."

Ning Buwen tried to calm her down, but nothing worked. The moment his attention slipped, Chen Ying slammed herself viciously into the wall.

"Don't!"

Chen Ying's entire face was nearly smashed out of shape. Who knew where she had found such tremendous strength?

She died.

A near-relieved smile still lingered on her face.

Her lips parted slightly, and clarity gradually returned to her eyes. She silently formed a few words, then, like everyone else who had died in this school, her body vanished without a trace, leaving only a little blood on the floor.

He understood her perfectly. She had said, "I'm sorry."

Ning Buwen stood where he was for several minutes before he finally managed to steady himself.

He wanted a cigarette, or something—anything.

His hands were shaking. He could not stop them.

He had never meant for Chen Ying to die. He had only wanted to know what she was hiding.

Reason told him that Chen Ying had died under the influence of some mysterious force, but emotionally, he could not cast it off so easily.

Chen Ying was different from the companion who had jumped from the building earlier. Her death was partly his responsibility.

Ning Buwen washed his face and hands in the restroom for a long time. The icy water splashed over his face and finally restored a measure of his composure.

If he panicked and lost his head now, he too would become another stain of blood somewhere in this school.

Ning Buwen looked at his reflection in the mirror and sighed softly.

"With a face this pale, how did I not notice something was wrong?"

Thanks to Chen Ying, he had learned quite a few things.

The campus's strange circumstances had begun with several students courting disaster.

They had found a spirit-summoning ritual from somewhere and attempted to call back the ghost of a female teacher they liked.

That teacher had only recently graduated from teacher-training college. Young, beautiful, and exceptionally gentle, she treated the struggling students in her class exactly the same as the top students. Quite a few boys liked her very much and were willing to listen to her.

But to the parents of high school boys, their sons being so close to a young, beautiful female teacher made them deeply uneasy.

At first, the school merely issued veiled warnings. The teacher also began dressing in an especially severe, dowdy fashion and kept her head down for a while. But as more and more male teachers at the school began confessing to her, and even some wealthy, powerful fathers started taking notice of her, disaster began.

Isolation, abuse, rumors, and mistrust among students and colleagues soon left the teacher utterly disheartened. She jumped from the school building.

From then on, several "bad kids" whom the teacher had always looked after came to hate the school even more. They felt it was profoundly unfair, and they wanted to bring back the teacher they liked and do something big.

The original owner of the body Ning Buwen had possessed was one of them.

Once the spirit summoning began, so did the changes.

The boys who had participated in the ritual grew irritable and strange one after another. They were always spouting mad things: saying another so-and-so had disappeared from class today, that no one in their class could escape, that they were all going to die.

Teachers and parents could do nothing with them, but the people in their class began having the same nightmares. They too dreamed of being brutally killed in all manner of ways.

And so these high school students, whose nerves had already been stretched to the breaking point, began their own "resistance."

The boys who had taken part in the summoning would acquire different wounds every day whenever they were alone. As long as one was caught alone, someone would throw a sack over his head and beat him. The more they were beaten and cursed at, the more it stoked the rage in their classmates' hearts.

Then it became murder.

But the school itself was shrouded in something strange.

The bodies of the murdered boys swiftly vanished without a trace. The people in class who had bullied them forgot they had ever existed after they died, and even the students in the class began repeatedly disappearing, being forgotten, and cycling through it all again and again.

But in the midst of that process, an unexpected variable appeared.

Chen Ying had always liked the original owner of Ning Buwen's body. Her feelings were twisted by the mysterious force. Then, under the pretext that they were childhood friends, she invited the original owner out and killed him.

Then Ning Buwen arrived.

Because Ning Buwen had taken over this body and it had not disappeared, Chen Ying had not forgotten what she had done.

She was uneasy, terrified, and still clung to a thread of hope.

At last, she made another move.

"This body was already dead. So when I entered the game and was told to survive for ten days, perhaps it meant that this body would collapse within ten days." Ning Buwen pieced together the beginning and end of the matter, feeling that too many key details were missing.

In supernatural games, clues were often too numerous and scattered. The best approach was for everyone entering the game together to divide the work and pool their clues, reducing the danger and ensuring their safety.

That was why Ning Buwen had sought cooperation from the beginning.

But trouble had come: the people who entered the game with him were either there to commit suicide in the game or useless dead weight hoping to get lucky. Several of them had died on the first day.

He would have been better off without teammates that useless.

Ning Buwen could only investigate while doing his best to preserve himself, so his progress was exceptionally slow.

There were still many things in the chain of cause and effect he had deduced that he could not explain. Why had Chen Ying suddenly wanted to kill him? If the classmates had forgotten it, why were they still wary of him? What role exactly did School Doctor Cheng play in this game? Was it the dead teacher's ghost killing people on this campus, or something else? Where had that spirit-summoning ritual come from? Chen Ying should have died long ago, so why could she still retain enough awareness to kill him?

There was far too much to investigate, but neither his time nor his energy allowed him to look into all of it.

Before entering the Pandora Game, the manual issued by the superior legion had included one rule: "You must not investigate every question in the game."

Because that was simply courting death.

What most distinguished supernatural instances from other types of game instances was that they defied science. They were distorted, mysterious, and impossible to fathom with a normal person's thinking or psychology.

Otherwise, once you fell into a blind spot in your thinking, you might drag your teammates to their deaths with you.

"I really am unlucky. If I'd drawn even one life-saving skill or item from the Newcomer Starter Pack, I'd dare to get creative with courting death." The more Ning Buwen spoke, the more regretful he sounded. But for his first instance, he should clear it honestly first. It would be better to unlock some life-saving skills afterward.

"If those people hadn't committed suicide earlier, they probably would have quickly realized that it wasn't only the students in this school who were a problem. Sigh, it was too much of a blind spot." Ning Buwen muttered to himself.

Because the game took place at a school, and Ning Buwen and the others who had entered it were students themselves, plus a name as recklessly ominous as "spirit summoning," they had naturally assumed the root of the problem lay with the students. But a school had always consisted of both students and teachers.

Ning Buwen immediately thought of School Doctor Cheng.

He counted as one of the school's teachers too.

Normally, if a beautiful female teacher were troubled by rumors, another person at school in a similar position—School Doctor Cheng, a doctor—would be quite likely to become someone she turned to for help.

So he had to make a trip to the infirmary no matter what.

"Xiaoxin really is lucky." Ning Buwen recalled having Xiaoxin follow the school doctor earlier. Wasn't that a ready-made reason to go find School Doctor Cheng?

To call it a coincidence... no. There were no coincidences that perfect in this world.

Xiaoxin was close to no other NPCs, yet he had run into School Doctor Cheng...

Maybe this dumb little dog was actually a clue-finding expert in this game.

"Woof."

It seemed Xiaoxin had known from far away that his owner was coming. Wiggling as he went, he ran toward Ning Buwen with his tail wagging.

Just before that, he had been standing in an empty spot amid a patch of bloodstains, and even when he ran over, he chose bare ground.

Ning Buwen looked ahead, raised his eyebrows in surprise, and understood why the dumb dog had stood still: the ground outside the infirmary was almost entirely covered in blood. Never mind a small dog—there might not even be space for a sparrow to stand.

Well, a sparrow could fly.

Since entering this school, Ning Buwen had avoided walking on those bloodstains. In a supernatural instance like this, something so dark might well be some strange debuff. The best course was not to touch it.

But the problem now was that if he wanted to find the school doctor, he had to figure out a way across that enormous pool of blood.

Troublesome. How was he supposed to get over there?

As Ning Buwen considered the possibilities, he suddenly heard footsteps in the distance.

High heels, probably. Click, click, click.

Anyone wearing high heels at a school had to be a female teacher.

Ning Buwen's instinct was to hide.

His thoughts raced. He immediately scooped up the dumb dog beside him and rammed his way through the nearest door.

"Woof—" Before Xiaoxin could make another sound, Ning Buwen covered his mouth. "Quiet, dumb dog."

Xiaoxin's tail drooped dejectedly.

But Ning Buwen had no mood to attend to a dog's feelings. He pressed his ear to the wall to see whether he could make out anything.

Schools were usually not that well soundproofed. When he hid in here, he had noticed that this room was next to the infirmary, so he should not be unable to hear anything at all.

Soon, he heard a door open.

Good. He could hear a little from here.

The voices were too quiet at first for Ning Buwen to make them out. Then an argument suddenly broke out, and words like "older sister" and "like" came up repeatedly.

Older sister?

A possibility sprang to Ning Buwen's mind. Could the female teacher who had come be related to the one who had died? At last, the course of events had begun to leave a clear trail.

Then came the loud slam of a door.

Strange. Why didn't he hear the high heels walking away?

Ning Buwen's heartbeat quickened. After thinking for a moment, he slowly lowered himself to the floor, intending to peer through the gap beneath the door.

But the instant Ning Buwen put his eye to the floor, he discovered that on the other side of the gap, an eye was looking back at him!

— Author's note —

Hahahaha, the Shiba Inu isn't the top in the pairing~~ He's just an ordinary dog with good luck.