"My face! My face!"

Guo Guo screamed and rolled around on the bed. When Tang Xinjue twisted his shoulders, his hair was tangled like a bird's nest and his face was covered with tears. Apart from that, his face was clean and spotless.

"What's wrong with your face?" Tang Xinjue asked.

"Ouch...something just hit my face...hiccup, it looked like a skull or a centipede, and my face hurt like it was burning..."

Guo Guo gradually calmed down and realized that what she said was a bit irrelevant. She touched her face again, and the fleeting pain was gone.

Tang Xin Jue understood and soothed him, "This is an illusion, don't believe it."

Looking at Guo Guo's [Physical Information] interface again, the health value has dropped to the yellow base layer, coated with a layer of almost dark red color.

[Sanity Collapse (Mild): Your sanity has dropped significantly. Your surroundings are no longer safe. Attacks received may be distorted irregularly.]

[Note: During this process, your health value will continue to decrease]

Looking at the phone interface, Guo Guo took a few deep breaths before regaining his ability to speak. "Ever since that ghost appeared last night, I've felt cold all over and unable to move. My phone keeps popping up reminders. I knew my health had been decreasing, but I didn't expect it to drop so much."

The health line had just dropped to the yellow bottom when she was already haunted by terrifying hallucinations. If it fell to the red line, or even to zero... Guo Guo trembled and said:

"Xin Jue, if my health value reaches zero, will I die?"

"Don't think about things that won't happen. You need to rest now." Tang Xinjue pushed her back.

The more pessimistic and nervous one becomes, the more precarious one's mental defenses become. In some ways, Guo Guo's current state is even more dangerous than Zheng Wanqing's.

Guo Guo shook his head vigorously and struggled to get off the bed. "We must find what we need for the mission. Today is the deadline. If we can't hand it in, we will all die here!"

Perhaps it was because desperate situations could unleash a person's potential, Guo Guo's movements were even faster than yesterday. She didn't want to die the next day!

Tang Xinjue didn't say anything else. After confirming Zheng Wanqing's safety, he also started searching.

The second time he searched the same place, he was much more familiar with it than the first day. In addition, Tang Xinjue had a special sense for ghosts and monsters, so he searched the entire dormitory in less than fifteen minutes, but did not find any new items.

The two found nothing.

"How is that possible?"

Guo Guo's face turned pale, and he rushed to his seat to search again in disbelief.

Tang Xinjue looked through Xiaohong's phone and notebook for a while, then went to get two fully packaged bags of bread and called to his roommate, "Eat something first and take a rest."

"I'm not hungry. I'll eat after I finish looking for it."

Guo Guo's voice was muffled and full of moisture.

Tang Xin Jue said firmly, "Eat first, then look for something else."

In this test, a day was compressed into one and a half hours. It was equivalent to them only eating one piece of bread the whole day yesterday. Their bodies could not bear such hunger and consumption.

Guo Guo remained silent. Suddenly, she shuddered as if she had seen something extremely terrifying. She screamed and collapsed to the ground, "There's a ghost in here!"

She pointed to the vertical cabinet under the table: "It's in here. It's watching me from inside and wants to take me in..."

Tang Xinjue opened the cabinet door, and it was empty inside. This was still Guo Guo's illusion.

Guo Guo panted for a moment, gave up searching, and silently turned to take the bread. After taking a few bites, her shoulders began to shake more and more violently, and she finally burst into tears: "Why is it always me... Why am I so unlucky!"

Everyone entered the game the same way and was attacked by the same ghosts, but she took the most damage and her sanity dropped the most? Is it because she's timid?

Listening to his roommate's sobbing, Tang Xinjue was speechless for a moment.

She had asked herself this question many times, from the day she had a car accident to the past few years when she was plagued by nightmares.

Why was she the only one who had to endure endless nightmares? Why did she get this inexplicable disease? Why couldn't she live a normal life?

Why, it has to be me?

His thoughts drifted to who knows where, blending with the few clues he had found in the past two days, Tang Xinjue frowned unconsciously and muttered to himself, "Why is it always you..."

Something in her mind was suddenly hit, her eyes sharpened, she suddenly raised her eyes and stared at her roommate: "Yeah, why is it always you?"

Guo Guo: "...hiccup?"

She watched in bewilderment as Tang Xinjue stood up and repeatedly looked through his phone and Xiaohong's belongings. As time passed, the girl's expression grew increasingly serious, as if she had discovered something.

A few minutes later, Tang Xinjue let out a long breath, "I think I understand."

In the shelf, Zhang You held his breath and dared not make the slightest sound.

Half a foot away, across the simple wooden shelves filled with food, a fat and bloated body walked slowly past, each step leaving a heavy sound.

Boom, boom, boom.

Through a gap in the shelf, a man casually pulled down a bag of puffed food, ripped it open, and began to chew it with big mouthfuls. Amidst the heavy chewing sounds, his portly figure gradually walked towards the end of the shelf. But if you looked closely, you would see that although the man was clearly walking forward, his face was facing backwards, his eyes closed, an unspeakably bizarre and eerie scene.

Only when the figure completely disappeared from his sight did Zhang You dare to breathe a sigh of relief.

She knew that the supermarket owner's face wasn't reversed, but rather that he had two faces at once—every fifteen minutes passed, and the man would open the eyes of the other face. That was how she was almost caught last time.

Fortunately, the supermarket owner could not leave the supermarket, so she could hide in the vast white fog outside and hide back when she encountered other monsters. However, she could not go to the phone booth again.

Although she completed Xiaohong's task last night and met "Xiaobai" who looked like an ordinary young man, when he left, the other party looked as if he was looking at a dead person... Zhang You didn't dare to think about it anymore.

Her health is now declining, and her body is so weak and hungry that she feels like she hasn't eaten for two days. She is not sure if she can survive the supermarket owner's next inspection.

Hungry, extremely hungry.

Zhang You had never experienced such a feeling of near-fainting hunger since she was born. Now, in front of her were all kinds of supermarket snacks, and her saliva kept flowing, but she didn't dare to reach out for anything.

There are no humans in this area, and the supermarket owner is not a human either. How could she dare to eat things sold in such a supermarket?

But I'm really hungry... I really want to go back to the dormitory...

With every passing second, the feeling of hunger grew stronger. Zhang You leaned weakly against the wall, his consciousness beginning to fade.

According to the time in this test, it is already seven o'clock in the afternoon, and in another hour, night will come again.

I wonder if Tang Xinjue and the others are in danger and whether they can complete the mission?

As his mind became increasingly blurred, Zhang You finally reached out his hand unconsciously and touched a bag of potato chips on the shelf.

"Finally found you, my little classmate, my little guest..."

A cold breath ran along his arm to his back. Zhang You woke up with a start and heard the supermarket owner's sticky and gloomy voice coming from outside the shelf.

"Heart Sutra, what do you understand?"

In the dormitory, Guo Guo couldn't help but ask, his eyes full of confusion.

Tang Xinjue looked at her, "I think I understand what Xiaohong wants."

Guo Guo was delighted, but then he saw that there was no smile in Tang Xinjue's eyes. The corners of his mouth froze, and a bad premonition came over him: "Yes, what is it?"

Tang Xin Jue sighed silently and pulled out a chair for her to sit down. "From the beginning, I've been thinking that this game provides too few hints, so few that it doesn't even match its difficulty."

A ghost that would strike on the first night, with only one chance to try and fail, and an almost completely unknown quest item... For them, who were just ordinary female college students just two days ago, it was almost certain death.

This is obviously not the difficulty a novice field should have.

Guo Guo sniffed blankly: "So, so?"

"So there must be some hint hidden in the test that wasn't on the surface, and we missed it."

"Do you remember the order in which Xiaohong woke us up when she showed up in the dormitory on the first night?"

"I didn't notice this at first, but now that I think about it, ghosts are bound by rules, and their actions themselves contain certain rules. The order at that time might be the same as the order we are in now."

Tang Xinjue took out the paper he had used to draw the relationship diagram on the first day, and wrote the names of the four people in order behind "Xiaohong - Dormitory".

"First it was me, then you, then Zhang You, and then Wan Qing."

"If we follow this order, then on the second day, my desk should have been chosen to be the [Little Red Desk], but it was yours. Why is that?"

"Because I was hurt the most, I was the weakest at the time," Guo Guo said dejectedly. A devotee of metaphysics and ghost stories, she knew that the weaker a person is, the more "yin energy" they possess, the more opportunities ghosts and spirits have to exploit them.

"So starting from the first day, our ranking has changed." Tang Xinjue moved Guo Guo's name to the top.

"The only condition for completing the level is to find the correct character and item, but we just found nothing. Either it's not in the dormitory at all, or it requires certain specific conditions to be discovered."

Guo Guo seemed to understand something, but she couldn't grasp the specific clues. The decrease in her san value made her consciousness a little confused, and she had difficulty following Tang Xinjue's thoughts.

Tang Xinjue continued. "Similarly, the test gave another clear tip: Xiaohong loves tidiness, so please don't mess up her desk."

"I love tidiness and don't like my desk to be messy. Does this personality trait sound familiar to you?"

This sentence was like an electric current, causing Guo Guo's fuzzy thoughts to tremble. In a moment of clarity, he opened his eyes wide and said, "...It's very familiar."

"Because there happen to be two people in our dormitory who have this characteristic." Tang Xinjue pointed at himself and then at the other person.

"You and I."

"From the very beginning, the testing gave us hints."

Tang Xin Jue said word by word, "Xiao Hong is indeed a member of our dormitory. Here is her desk, her belongings (cell phone), her memories and personality traits (diary). Now all that's missing is one last thing: an identity."

Who is Xiaohong?

Just like the sound of a wooden hammer, Guo Guo finally woke up completely, took a deep breath, and his voice trembled.

"Xiaohong...it's me?"