Chapter 10: Dormitory Civilization Code
"My face! My face!"
Guo Guo screamed and rolled on the bed. When Tang Xinjue grabbed her shoulders, her hair was already rubbed like a bird's nest, and tears were stuck on her face. It was clean and there was nothing.
"What happened to your face?" Tang Xinjue asked.
"Ugh... something hit my face just now... Hiccup, like a skeleton and like a centipede, I still feel a pain in my face, as if it's burning..."
Guo Guo gradually calmed down and realized that what she said was a bit wrong*. She touched her face again, and the fleeting pain was gone.
*) the original text was "点驴唇不对马嘴"=pointing donkey's lip is not a horse's mouth, analogy that means the answer doesn't suit the question, a bit out of tune. Something like "how old are you?" answered by "I just ate". Google Translate directly translated it as 'a little bit wrong', but hey, more knowledge for you to know.
Tang Xinjue understood, soothed: "That is an illusion, don't believe it."
Looking at Guo Guo's [Body Information] interface, the health value has dropped to the bottom of the yellow area, and it was plated with a layer of almost dark red.
[Sanity Collapse (mild): Your san value has dropped significantly, the surrounding environment is no longer safe for you, and attack may be irregularly distorted]
[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 her ability to speak: "Ever since the ghost appeared last night, I felt cold all over and couldn't move, and the notifications kept popping up. I know that my health value has been declining, but I didn't think it has dropped so much."
The health bar dropped to the bottom of the yellow area, and the terrifying hallucinations had already entangled her. If it fell to the red line, or even reset to zero... Guo Guo shivered and said: "Xinjue, you say, if my health goes to zero, will I die?"
"Don't think about what won't happen, you need to rest now." Tang Xinjue pressed her back.
The more pessimistic and tense, the more shaky the mental defense became. To some extent, Guo Guo's current state was much more dangerous than Zheng Wanqing's.
However, Guo Guo shook her head vigorously and struggled to get out of bed, "We must find what the mission requires. Today is the deadline. If we don't make it, we will all die here!" Guo Guo's movement speed was even faster than yesterday. She didn't want to die tomorrow!
Tang Xinjue didn't say anything. After confirming Zheng Wanqing's safety, she also searched.
The second time she searched the same location, she was much more familiar with it than on the first day. Coupled with Tang Xinjue's special sensitivity to ghosts and monsters, she rummaged through the entire dormitory in less than fifteen minutes, but she did not find any new items.
The two found nothing.
"How is that possible?"
Guo Guo's face was pale, and she rushed to her desk in disbelief and started rummaging again.
Tang Xinjue flipped through Xiaohong's cell phone and notebook for a while, went to get two bags of fully packaged bread, and called out to her roommate, "Eat something first and take a rest."
"I'm not hungry, I'll eat after I find it."
Guo Guo's voice was muffled, with a thick water vapor.
Tang Xinjue's voice was firm: "Eat first, then look for it."
In this test, a day was compressed into one and a half hour. Yesterday, they only ate a piece of bread for the whole day, and their bodies could not bear this kind of hunger and fatigue.
Guo Guo was silent, and suddenly, she trembled all over, as if she saw something extremely terrifying, she shrank to the ground after screaming, "There's a ghost in here!"
She pointed to the vertical cabinet under the tabletop: "It's here, it's looking at me inside, and want to take me in..."
Tang Xinjue opened the cabinet door, and the inside was empty. It was still Guo Guo's hallucination.
Guo Guo gasped for a while, gave up searching, and silently turned around to take the bread. After taking a few bites, her shoulders dropped more and more, and she finally couldn't help crying out: "Why is it always me...Why am I so unlucky!"
Obviously everyone entered the game the same and suffered the same ghost attack. Why was it then when she was attacked, the damage was the greatest, and the san value was also decreased the most? Was it because she was timid?
Listening to the sobbing of her roommate, Tang Xinjue couldn't speak for a while.
This question she had asked herself many times from the day she suffered a car accident to the years when she was haunted by nightmares.
Why was she the only one who had to experience endless nightmares? Why did she get this inexplicable disease? Why couldn't she live like a normal person?
Why was it me?
She didn't know where the thoughts drifted, but when it was combined with the rare clues in the past two days, Tang Xinjue unconsciously frowned and muttered to herself, "Why is it always you..."
Suddenly a point in her mind was poked, and she suddenly raised her sharp eyes and stared at her roommate: "Yes, why is it always you?"
Guo Guo: "...Hiccup?"
She watched Tang Xinjue got up with a bewildered face, and repeatedly flipped through the phone and Xiaohong's belongings. As time passed, the girl's expression became more and more solemn, as if she had discovered something.
A few minutes later, Tang Xinjue exhaled heavily, "I think, I seem to understand."
*
On the shelf, Zhang You held her breath, not daring to make a single sound.
A half-foot away, across a simple wooden shelf full of food, a fat and bloated body walked slowly, with heavy footsteps falling with every step.
Boom, boom, boom.
Through the gap in the shelf, the man ripped off a puffed bag of food, tore open the bag and a big mouth chewed it in. Between the thick chewing sound, the fat back gradually walked towards the end of the shelf. If you looked closely, you would find that the man was obviously walking forward, but his face was long behind, his eyes were closed, and it was grotesque and strange.
It was not until the figure completely disappeared from sight that Zhang You dared to breathe a sigh of relief.
She knew that the boss of the supermarket did not have a reversed face, but had two faces at the same time—every fifteen minutes passed, the man would open the eyes of the other face. That was how she nearly got caught last time.
Fortunately, the supermarket owner couldn't leave the supermarket. She could hide in the vast white fog outside, and then hide back in when she encountered other monsters, but she couldn't go to the phone booth anymore.
Last night, although she completed Xiaohong's mission and saw "Xiaobai" who looked like an ordinary young man, when she was leaving, the other party's eyes seemed to be looking at a dead person... Zhang You didn't dare to think about it.
Her health was dropping continuously now, and her body seemed to be hungry and weak as if she hadn't eaten for two whole days. It was uncertain whether she could survive the next inspection by the supermarket owner.
Hungry, extremely hungry.
From birth to the present, Zhang You had never experienced such a feeling of being so hungry that she almost fainted. At this moment, there were all kinds of supermarket snacks in front of her, and her saliva kept secreting, but she didn't dare to reach for it.
There are no humans in this area, and the supermarket owner was not human. How dare she eat the things sold in such a supermarket?
But she was really hungry... She really wanted to go back to the dorm...
Every second, the hunger became stronger. Zhang You leaned against the wall weakly, and her consciousness began to sag.
According to the time in this test, it was now seven o'clock in the afternoon, and there was still an hour before darkness will come again.
She wondered if Tang Xinjue and the others were in danger and could they complete the mission?
As her mind became more and more blurred, Zhang You finally reached out her hand unconsciously and touched a package of potato chips on the shelf.
"Finally found you, little classmate, little guest..." The cold breath ran along her arm to her back. Zhang You was startled, and she heard the thick and dark voice of the supermarket owner from outside the shelf.
*
"Xinjue, what do you understand?" In the dorm, Guo Guo couldn't help but ask, her eyes filled with doubts.
Tang Xinjue looked at her, "I probably understand what Xiaohong wants."
Guo Guo was overjoyed, but then she saw that there was no smile in Tang Xinjue's eyes, and the corners of her mouth froze. A not-so-good premonition came up: "Yes, what is it?"
Tang Xinjue sighed silently, pulled out a chair and let her sit down: "From the very beginning, I was thinking that this game gives too little hints, too little to match its difficulty. It doesn't match at all."
The ghosts who would attack on the first night, only allowed one chance for trial and error, almost completely unknown quest items... Putting them, who were completely ordinary female college students two days ago, in an almost certain death situation.
This was obviously not the difficulty that a novice level should have.
Guo Guo sniffed: "So, so what?"
"So, there must be some hints hidden in the test, not on the bright side, and we missed it. Do you remember the sequence of waking us up when Xiaohong appeared in the dorm on the first night? I didn't notice this at first, but now that I think back, the ghost is restricted by rules, and its behavior itself contains some kind of rule. And the order at that time may be some kind of order we are in."
Tang Xinjue took out the paper used to draw the relationship diagram on the first day. After "Xiaohong - dormitory", she wrote the name of four people in turn.
"First is me, then you, then Zhang You, Wanqing. If you follow this order, then on the second day, it should be my desk that is chosen to be [Xiaohong's Desk], but it became you, why is that?"
"Because I suffered the most damage and was the weakest at the time." Guo Guo was downcast. She was a serious fan of metaphysics and supernatural stories. She knew that the weaker a person was, the stronger the so-called "yin qi", and the more opportunities for ghosts to take advantage of.
"So from the first day, our ranking has changed." Tang Xinjue moved Guo Guo's name to the top.
"The only condition to clear the level is to find the correct character's item, but we just found nothing. Either it is not in the dormitory at all, or it needs certain conditions to be discovered."
Guo Guo seemed to understand something, but she couldn't grasp the specific clues. The decrease in san value made her consciousness become a little chaotic, and she struggled to follow Tang Xinjue's ideas.
Tang Xinjue continued to speak. "And also, another prompt given by the test clearly reads: Xiaohong loves neatness, please don't mess up her desk.
"Love neatness, and don't like the desk being messed up. Is this character characteristic familiar?"
This sentence was like an electric current, which made Guo Guo's fuzzy thinking stunned, and widened her eyes in a moment of sobriety: "...It's very familiar."
"Because in our dormitory, there are exactly two people with this characteristic." Tang Xinjue pointed to herself and then to the other party. "Me and you."
"The test has given hints from the very beginning."
Tang Xinjue said, "Xiaohong is indeed a member of our dormitory, here is her desk and her belongings (mobile phone), there are memories and personality traits (diary) that belong to her, and now the only thing missing is the last one: an identity."
Who was Xiaohong?
As if there was a sound of final knock on wood, Guo Guo finally woke up completely, took a breath of cold air, and her voice trembled.
"Xiaohong... is that me?"
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