When the blood-red eyeball just appeared, Tang Xinjue withdrew all the mental power scattered outside without thinking, leaving no room for direct contact with the other party.

How to determine who the most annoying candidate in the "Elf House" is? The first thing Tang Xinjue thought of was the number of elves he had captured.

...And if she guessed correctly, the number of Pokémon captured by 606 should be the highest among all dormitories.

As expected.

The black energy surged towards them so quickly that they barely had time to react. The glass windows were already stained in a bottomless black. As their vision vanished, a bone-chilling chill washed over them, like plummeting into a freezing depth.

It took only a moment for the blood-red eyeball to lock onto them and attack. The sense of danger came with great force, proclaiming the monster's power and irresistibility.

Unable to resist and unavoidable, is this a dead end?

Thoughts raced like lightning, but Tang Xinjue remained calm as he held the toilet plunger in the dark.

No... now is not the time.

The worst hasn't happened yet.

If she calculated correctly.

In the deathly dark silence, Tang Xinjue slowly regained his five senses, and the outline of the glass window appeared in his vision again. Outside the outline were layers of surging black air, and a blood-red eyeball floating in the black air but motionless.

After a long while, Guo Guo beside him finally found his voice and said hesitantly, "Why... doesn't it come in?"

The moment the black air surged up, she had already thought about fighting to the death and the process of reincarnation in the next life, but she never expected that even after her eyesight was restored, the surroundings were still quiet.

She clearly remembered that in the last dormitory that was chosen, it took less than three seconds from the time the black energy locked onto it to the time everyone was wiped out. But when she looked out at this moment, the dormitory balcony window was intact and solid in front of her, with no sign of cracking at all.

“……!!!”

Guo Guo realized the key point belatedly:

“Our balcony is complete!”

In the previous level, the giant human face that did not attack the candidates was focused on eroding their balcony railings, but unfortunately, it met Zhang You holding a storage bag at 606.

If it bit off a piece, Zhang You would use repair fluid and various tools to repair two pieces. As a result, until they caught all 13 Pokémons and even when the catching activity was completely over, the human face was still unable to damage the guardrail.

So compared to the dilapidated state of other dormitories, they now have to put up one or even two more layers of barriers when facing the attack of the blood-red eyeballs!

"Game tips: All candidates, please hide in your dormitories and avoid the wrath of the Elf House under their protection." Tang Xin Jue suddenly spoke:

"We are now in a state of absolute shelter."

The blood-red eyeballs that were firmly blocked outside by the railings: "..."

Dirty joke, can't even get in.

Seen from the balcony, the terrifying scene that frightened everyone did not repeat itself, but instead strangely stayed where it was, as if some kind of bug was stuck in their eyeballs.

But even so, his eyes did not move away. He stared gloomily at the window of dormitory 606, as if thinking about something.

Tang Xinjue didn't loosen her grip on the toilet plunger. From her expression, Zhang You and the other two could tell that the matter wasn't over yet.

Normally, if a death trap appears in the game, candidates can survive if they find a way out in advance and successfully avoid it. The ghosts are blocked by the rules of the game and will not continue to harass them.

But now…

The sense of danger has not dissipated and is even tending to become stronger.

Tang Xinjue could feel that the atmosphere outside had undergone subtle changes.

To be precise, the malice towards the entire 606 dormitory subtly condensed into malice directed against one person.

——Herself.

In a split second, Tang Xin Jue found the source of the lingering sense of disharmony:

When Blood Red Eyeball said “the most annoying students”, he used the word “students” instead of “dormitory”.

What if this sentence is really referring to an individual student?

The so-called dislike can be because a student catches the most Pokémons, or it can be because of... the student himself.

"So, why?"

Tang Xin Jue pressed the toilet plunger with his fingertips and spoke softly as if he was talking to himself.

"Unreasonable punishment, unreasonable challenge, unreasonable monster."

If they had not defended the balcony like all the other candidates when the mutant faces invaded, they would have been killed at this moment, just like the previous dormitory, by this dark force that far exceeded the candidates' ability to resist and was almost like an annihilation mechanism.

But why?

This punishment could fall on any candidate eliminated from the competition, but it should not fall on her, not on 606, not on the final winner after the cruel layers of screening throughout the competition.

This survival game is both tricky and perverted, but what it shows in various copies is definitely not the pure and simple anti-human logic of "selecting the most powerful students and then killing them".

——When all options are eliminated, the remaining one, no matter how outrageous, is the most likely truth.

Tang Xinjue suddenly raised his eyes.

Now here, the problem is not her, but the blood-red eyeball.

Its punishment logic should not appear at all!

At the same moment, the blood-red eyeball also moved.

In the thick black air, the eyeball did not retreat, but instead squeezed further inwards—

The red tissue on the surface of the eyeball stuck to the railing and turned into thick blood, flowing down along the eroded area of ​​the railing. The deeper it squeezed, the larger the area of ​​purulent and missing eyeball tissue.

Guo Guo was stunned: "What is it doing?"

Tang Xinjue's expression was stern: "It is being punished by the rules."

From the moment the black energy was first blocked outside the balcony, they had already completely won. The blood-red eyeball should not have stayed here any longer, let alone tried to use its body to break through the balcony barrier and force its way in to attack them.

But even though it was punished by the rules, the eyeball had no intention of giving up. The guardrail broke and collapsed at a speed visible to the naked eye. The rotten eyeball, which was enough to cover a window, slammed against the glass, and its dim pupils stared at Tang Xinjue in the room.

Its purpose is already extremely clear.

Rather than following the procedure to punish the examinee, it wanted to kill Tang Xinjue more!

606 was no stranger to eyeballs of this size—back in the road trip dungeon, the counselor who suddenly visited in the middle of the night had a red eyeball of similar size. But if the counselor's "eyeball" brought a sense of majesty and oppression, then this red eyeball now conveyed more danger and disgust.

For Tang Xin Jue, she knew about this existence earlier than everyone else - not in endless nightmares, but on the day the game just came out, she saw a giant yellow eyeball outside the glass window that she would never forget in her life.

If she remembered correctly and saw it correctly, the yellow eyeball that flashed by that day and the red eyeball with clear murderous intent now, the two were extremely similar in their coldness and stickiness.

And there was also the thick malice directed at her for no reason.

"So this is your purpose."

Tang Xin Jue's fingertips slid across the phone screen. The never-changing power level made the screen emit a faint glow, breaking the darkness brought by the blood-red eyeballs.

The dormitory window was already cracked, the shelter of rules teetering on the brink of collapse under the monster boss's reckless, frenzied attack. Zhang You, reacting quickly, grabbed her arm. Tang Xinjue smiled, even having a somewhat inappropriate thought: If time permitted, she might harass customer service again, livestreaming a report of a violation, perhaps even earning a new achievement point.

Unfortunately it's too late.

The glass shattered with a final loud bang, and boundless malice poured down, completely drowning her.

Cold, suffocating, torn...

It was like falling into a nightmare all over again.

It is said that when consciousness sinks into the bottom of the sea of ​​​​consciousness, the perceived flow of time will slow to almost no flow.

When Tang Xinjue returned to this dark, misty, bottle-shaped cave, he felt the familiar resistance again.

However, her current mental strength is no longer comparable to the first time she sank into the sea of ​​consciousness.

This time, she easily dispelled the fog and reached the end, where she saw four familiar markers floating in the air.

Glass bottle, silver ring, yellow eyeballs, tape.

These four materialized marks neither grew larger nor shrank, but seemed to be covered with a thin layer of gauze on the outside. They could not be seen clearly when looked at carefully. If she did not deliberately feel them, even she herself would ignore the existence of these things.

When passing by the yellow eyeballs, Tang Xinjue's gaze paused for a moment.

"To be honest, this day came a little later than I thought."

There was no one around her who cared, and there was no expression on her face. She just watched the scene quietly, then raised her hand and covered the center of her forehead.

On this skin, there is a mark, or a seal, that is only visible in the sea of ​​consciousness.

The being who left this seal claimed to be the counselor in the game and gave her the switch that could control the dark aura.

When the switch is on, the marks left by the ghosts in her sea of ​​consciousness, including the dark part of herself, will be obscured. When the switch is off, all obscurations will be ineffective.

Since then, she has been driving this thing for so long that she has become accustomed to it, as if nothing existed.

...But it turned out that even if she didn't go looking for the mountain, the mountain would stretch out its claws from the surface and try to drag her down.

With a tap of his fingertips, the barriers surrounding the four markers disappeared immediately, and their presence instantly increased a hundredfold.

No, this kind of presence is not enough.

Tang Xinjue rubbed his eyebrows again, and then pressed down hard again!

This time, all her mental strength was silenced in exile and suppression.

The blood-red eyeball suddenly stopped moving again.

It should have devoured this human directly and melted her body into blood with its breath, without even taking a second... The blood vessels in its eyeballs bulged, and it stared motionlessly at the human girl with her eyes closed.

But it can't move now.

To be more precise, they were suppressed by the irresistible hierarchy and could not make any progress.

If the candidates outside could see what was happening inside dormitory 606 at this moment, they would find that it was not just the bloodshot eyes that had a huge reaction, but also Tang Xinjue's three roommates.

They almost retreated subconsciously, because just at that moment, a strong sense of strangeness erupted from the person they were most familiar with and trusted.

Then the girl opened her eyes, her cloudy and dim pupils slowly moved, cold and indifferent.