Chapter 83 Old School Days "Now you're the protagonist, you wouldn't dare."...
The girl froze, waving her hands in a panic: "No, big brother, you've confused me! Don't scare me! What, what about my room...?"
Xue Chao looked at her quietly without saying anything. The girl had experienced the "self-inflicted embarrassment" of a female ghost, and her full emotions quickly deflated. She said dejectedly, "It really is my room... You should have noticed how 'a gathering of heroes' this dormitory building is, all for self-preservation... And you have to admit, you look scary!"
Xue Chao then chuckled: "You thought I was a ghost?"
Seeing that he was softening, the girl breathed a sigh of relief, thinking she had gotten away with it: "What else could it be? He's not a ghost, but he doesn't seem like a good person either... What happened to you? This sounds like a story, did you encounter some kind of monster..."
“Everyone else has anomalies, but I have such a ‘normal’ head. Don’t you think there’s anything wrong with that?” Xue Chao casually interrupted her attempt to change the subject. “Or have you seen the female ghost on the first floor, or the one under your table?”
"That one under the table too...!" the girl exclaimed in confusion. "Wait, what do you mean? What happened to your head? Aren't there a lot of heads here?"
Xue Chao pointed around: "The bedroom appeared after the first meow, and you hadn't been in there before, so you're worried about clues about you."
The first time, she didn't forget; she deliberately didn't remind him to look for the books before leaving. The second time, unable to avoid it, she took advantage of hiding in a corner near the bookshelf and intercepted the task of checking the books, since he had seen her handwriting before... Perhaps the first time she huddled in the corner, she was already somewhat prepared for the worst.
But that's not the point. Xue Chao said, "You translated it very carefully."
The girl was about to argue that "the bedroom must appear after the cat meows," but when she heard his inexplicable emphasis, she didn't know what he meant, but she subconsciously retorted with his words: "You just said that I haven't been in the bedroom before either."
Xue Chao's phoenix eyes curved into a smile, his fierce aura veiled by a hazy, moonlit surface, making even danger alluring: "So when I first asked, did you need to search your room to find out which parts I could see and which parts I couldn't?"
The girl understood the subtext and froze completely.
Indeed, there is a loophole in her behavior—if she is the owner of this bedroom, why is she searching through it so thoroughly, as if she knows nothing about her own room?
"I've never been in here before" is a linguistic trap he deliberately set. The bedroom suddenly appearing in the dormitory building is against common sense, so it's normal that she hasn't been in the bedroom before in the dormitory building. But she is the owner of the bedroom. Once she enters, how can she act as if it's the first time she's entered?
There is a seemingly absurd possibility.
"You admit this is your bedroom, yet you're not familiar with it." Xue Chao scoffed, not at her, but at another person who wasn't present. "You were almost fooled by him... You're the fifth protagonist."
"【Xue Chao (Proxy Player)】ah???"
"【Xue Chao (Proxy Player)】ah???"
...
"【Xue Chao (agent player)】Aba aba, although it was automatically translated into my native language, I still can't understand it (drooling)."
"【Xue Chao (Agent Player)】...Holy crap, this girl isn't an NPC, she's a player??"
"【Xue Chao (Agent Player)】Super, so Jiang Ming is lying, she's the fifth player!"
"【Xue Chao (the substitute player)】wasn't lying, didn't you forget? He never said he was the fifth player, he only said he was afraid of getting too close to the 'plot kill' later on, so we naturally guessed that he was the fifth one to replace the first one..."
"【Xue Chao (Agent Player)】Wait a minute, doesn't that mean the player count has exceeded the limit?"
"【Xue Chao (Agent Player)】So the old man with sunflower roots in his cavity isn't a player, but a root planted by Jiang Ming to mislead people? Damn, this plot point was planted way too early!"
"【Xue Chao (Agent Player)】That makes sense. In the first unit, at the beginning of the dungeon, the number of players is displayed. If the system didn't make a mistake at all, only one player entered at that time."
"【Xue Chao (Agent Player)】If that's the case, then the old man might actually be a player. This dungeon has no waiting time, and according to the first unit, players aren't in the same batch; they can enter one or several at a time. If there is indeed a mistake, this girl might be trying to fill the empty space left by the deceased."
"【Xue Chao (Proxy Player)】Why should Xue Chao come up with any solutions? Why not just match him directly?"
"【Xue Chao (the proxy player)】is just trying to screw over the host, lol. Does anyone really think this game is a safe haven for the host? It's obviously setting a trap! Who cares about the NPCs' lives? If she dies like the person in bed number 2 on the first floor, then there really won't be a protagonist in the fifth unit. Xue Chao is just a 'proxy' after all. Do you think he'll be able to clear the game?"
"【Xue Chao (Agent Player)】...If I don't find out, I'll die. As the agent protagonist, I'll most likely be unable to complete the game. My failure will definitely generate buzz. If I do find out, that's even better, a huge climax...Wow, my popularity has indeed skyrocketed (clasped fists)."
"【Xue Chao (a proxy player)】Jiang Ming just wanted to kill me, but you want to livestream from my grave and have everyone send virtual gifts (thumbs up)."
"【Xue Chao (a player on behalf of the gamer)】 Hahaha, players always criticize the host as a red-eyed fly that comes to the smell and flies wherever it smells bad. He would do anything for the sake of popularity, like pushing a millstone and coaxing pigs and manipulating people. In fact, your game is the real master (dog head with rose in hand)."
"You..." The girl barely managed to recover her composure. She wanted to deny it at first, but when she met Xue Chao's deep blue eyes, she realized that pretending any longer would only be humiliating. She lay dejectedly on the bed like a pancake. "...I've run into a pro. I am indeed a player. When did you find out?"
Xue Chao was convinced that she was probably sincere, and his heart stirred slightly. She really had only just been matched into the instance in this unit, and the information was too different.
He then briefly explained the special features of this instance, leaving the girl stunned. Although she had no face, she was probably speechless: "So... after I was scared by the cat's meow, my mentality collapsed, and the dormitory building began to mutate. The most obvious feature was that the dormitory rooms would all turn into my bedroom. That's when you started to have doubts. When you found that I was not familiar with my room, you were completely certain that I was not an NPC at all, but a player?"
Xue Chao: "Even earlier."
The girl was shocked: "Even earlier??"
Xue Chao: "I mean the alienation happened earlier; you were already in a mess when you summoned the spirit of the Ouija board."
That's why the senior student who committed suicide in the dormitory became "her" mother. At that time, the entire building had transformed from a ghost story in the campus dormitory into "her" fear, a "reality" rotting out from "beautiful memories".
The fact that her senior year of high school can still be considered a "good memory" is probably because she was able to escape her family by staying at the dormitory.
But Xue Chao did have one thing he couldn't understand. The girl's situation should be similar to Deng Dayun's, with experiences that resonated with the character. It was probably a real-world family of origin, an abusive father, a mother who was used as a punching bag, and a cat. How many nights would such terrifying sounds come from outside her door, and she could only shrink in the corner, listening helplessly, hating the people outside the door and cursing them, while hating herself, hysterically praying in her heart that she would just disappear, but on her face she dared not move, afraid of making any noise, to get through the long night.
So the cat's meow as a trigger is easy to understand, but it happened much earlier. His expression shifted slightly, and the girl, at that moment, displayed remarkable insight, pointing out what he was thinking: "I had my back to you at the time, and I was terrified by their screams before I even saw you... You should have noticed that the man's appearance caused a lot of noise, while the noise we made in the bedroom became quieter. Didn't you say this was a 'memoir'? This is my... her inner world, where every slightly loud sound represents danger and violence, requiring one to cautiously curl up in a ball and quietly wait until the other person loses interest and 'takes pity'."
Xue Chao looked at the girl's head with the earpiece and understood why she had such an unusual head shape. He said softly, "I'm sorry."
Whether they saw him or not, the other girls screamed because of his sudden appearance.
"...Ah, anyway, there are ghosts in the house, they'll scream sooner or later, so this way we know the clues in advance, right?" The girl paused for a moment, then chuckled twice. "If you want to make amends, please, God, take me away from this horrible place! Don't think I don't know you were planning to abandon me before!"
"What?"
"You refused when you said there were monsters that could disguise themselves as humans and I asked if we should devise a code!" the girl accused menacingly. "You had already planned to get rid of me, so you never even considered the step of 'recognizing' me!"
“Indeed.” He even smiled, his eyes crinkling. “Now that you’re the main character, you wouldn’t dare.”
Xue Chao pushed open the door. In the eerily red corridor, there were still clumps of black everywhere, but they weren't black cats. Instead, they were tangled piles of hair, which were like mold, invading everywhere and throbbing menacingly. The ends of the hair were like tentacles, crawling haphazardly. There were also bloodstains everywhere.
He beckoned and whispered a few words into the girl's earpiece: "...Got it?"
The girl snapped out of her shock and patted her chest confidently: "I'll remember it! Let's go downstairs now!"
"Why go downstairs?" He glanced at him. "He kills cats on the sixth floor, kills his wife on the fifth. He's a bully only within his own household. Who do you think he could kill on the fourth floor?"
"...Me." The girl's thought process was rather peculiar. "Then let's go to the rooftop?"
Upon hearing the keyword, Xue Chao asked in surprise, "Why the rooftop?"
Girl: "If we can't go down, let's do the opposite and go up?"
Xue Chao: "The door to the rooftop is locked." He checked when he came up.
This time it was the girl's turn to be surprised: "No, before I summoned the spirit, I went to the bathroom and looked out. It was slightly ajar, with a crack in the door."
Xue Chao: "Didn't you go up to check?"
Girl: "I actually mustered up my courage and peeked out the door a little... It was pitch black and there was wind, so I was scared away immediately."
Xue Chao: "Is there a wire mesh fence around the rooftop?"
Girl: How did you know?
Xue Chao: "..."
However, from the outside, the rooftop of the dormitory building has no railings.
—She is the girl who fell off the rooftop.
"Get away from there, your character fell to his death from the rooftop." Ignoring the girl's fear, Xue Chao walked towards the laundry room. "I'm a little concerned about the head in the washing machine, let's go check it out first."
But the closer he got to the laundry room, the more agitated his mushroom-like hair became, as if it didn't want him to go in. Seeing that he was about to go in without caring, the girl grabbed him: "That hair is just about to jump up and slap you in the face!"
Xue Chao blinked, as if asking, "What can we do then?"
The girl pulled him aside and tentatively took a step closer, but his hair didn't react... She didn't know if this was a good thing or a bad thing. She swallowed hard and said, "I'll go... You watch me at the door."
Xue Chao shrugged: "Don't get too close, and don't bother lifting the lid. Just look through the top of the lid from a distance. If you can't see clearly, then forget it."
The lid is made of dark blue transparent plastic, so you can see it a little.
He watched the girl approach slowly, when suddenly he felt something entangle his ankle. He looked down and met eyes in the thick hair. It was still a wedding photo, but it had been slashed by a knife, and blood and sand were seeping out.
A girl's short, soft cry came from the laundry room. Xue Chao immediately looked up, but the girl was already out of sight. He kicked away the tangled hair, took a few steps to the door, and saw the girl fall inside. The drainpipe, which seemed to be the culprit, was spreading bloody water, staining her school uniform red.
The girl scrambled to her feet and ran outside, clutching her knees, still shaken. "It's like a hair stuck out of the drain and tripped me! That's so incredibly unsportsmanlike..."
She talked for a long time without hearing Xue Chao respond. When she looked up, she saw Xue Chao leaning against the door, looking at her coldly from a distance.
She asked anxiously in a low voice, "What's wrong?"
Xue Chao examined it for a while longer before speaking: "A long time ago, I vaguely conceived of inventing a machine—" [1]
The girl then realized what was happening and immediately replied, "Traveling through time!" [2]
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