Chapter 137: Dormitory Friendship League
As soon as the blood-red eyeball appeared, Tang Xinjue immediately withdrew all of her scattered mental energy, leaving no room for direct contact.
How to determine who the most hateful candidate in the "Elf House" is? Tang Xinjue's first thought was the number of elves they'd captured.
...And if she was right, 606 had the most elves captured amongst any other dormitories.
And sure enough, the black energy surged forward with such speed that they had no time to react. The glass windows were drenched in a bottomless black. As their vision vanished, a bone-piercing chill washed over them, like plummeting into the depths of an abyssal body of water.
The blood-red eyeball locked onto them and attacked in a split second. The perceptive force of danger declared the monster's power and irresistibility.
Unable to resist, yet unable to escape—was this a dead end?
Thoughts raced at lightning speed, but Tang Xinjue remained calm, gripping the toilet plunger in the darkness.
No… not yet.
The worst hadn't happened yet.
If she hadn't miscalculated.
In the deathly darkness and silence, Tang Xinjue slowly regained her five senses. The outline of the glass window reappeared in her field of vision, and beyond it lay layers of surging black energy. Within the black energy, a blood-red eyeball floated, motionless, and uncertain.
After a long moment, Guo Guo, standing beside her, finally found her voice and hesitantly asked, "Why... isn't it coming in?"
The moment the black energy surged, she had already imagined a desperate fight and her next life. But she had never expected that even after her vision returned, the surroundings would remain silent.
She clearly remembered that the last dormitory she had chosen had been locked in by the black energy for less than three seconds, from the moment it locked onto them to the moment they were wiped out. Yet, looking out from this spot, the balcony window remained intact and solid, blocking her view, showing no sign of cracking.
"...!!!"
Guo Guo belatedly realized the key:
"Our balcony is intact!"
In the previous level, the giant human face, which hadn't attacked the students, was intent on destroying their balcony railings. Unfortunately, it encountered Zhang You, holding a storage bag, in 606.
Every time it gnawed off a piece, Zhang You would repair two more with repair fluid and various tools. As a result, even after they had captured all 13 elves and the capture campaign was over, the human face remained unable to damage the railings.
So, compared to the dilapidated state of the other dormitories, they now had to build an extra layer, or even two, of defense against the attacks of the Blood-Red Eyeball!
"Game reminder: All students, please hide inside your dormitories and use them as a shield to avoid the wrath of the Elf House," Tang Xinjue suddenly said. "We are now in a state of absolute protection."
The Blood-Red Eyeball, firmly blocked outside by the railings, responded: "..."
It was hilarious. There was no way in.
From the balcony's perspective, the terrifying scene that had terrified everyone didn't replay. Instead, it strangely paused, as if its eyeball had been afflicted by some bug.
Even so, the eyeball didn't move away. It stared gloomily at the window of dormitory 606, as if contemplating something.
Tang Xinjue's grip on the toilet plunger remained unchanged. From her expression, Zhang You and the other two could tell that things weren't over yet.
Normally, if a game presented a death trap, candidates who found a way out and successfully avoided it would survive. Ghosts, blocked by the rules of the game, wouldn't continue to haunt them.
But now...
the sense of danger lingered, even intensifying.
Tang Xinjue could sense a subtle shift in the atmosphere outside.
More precisely, the hostility directed at the entire dormitory 606 had subtly coalesced into a hatred directed at a single individual.
—herself .
In a flash, Tang Xinjue discovered the source of the lingering sense of dissonance:
The blood-red eyeball's reference to the "most hated student" had used the word "student," not "dormitory."
What if this statement was truly directed at a particular student?
The so-called dislike could be because a particular student caught the most elves, but it could also be because of... that student themselves.
"So, why?"
Tang Xinjue pressed her finger against the toilet plunger, whispering softly as if to herself.
"Unreasonable punishment, unreasonable challenge, unreasonable monster."
If they had failed to defend the balcony when the mutant face invaded, like all the other students, they would now be annihilated by this dark force, far beyond the students' ability to resist, a near-annihilation mechanism.
But why?
This punishment could fall on any eliminated student, but not her, not 606, not the final winner of the brutal round of selection.
This survival game was deceptive and perverse, but the logic it demonstrated in its various instances was far from the pure and simple anti-human logic of "selecting the strongest students and then killing them."
— When all options were eliminated, the remaining one, no matter how outrageous, was the most likely truth.
Tang Xinjue suddenly raised her eyes.
Here, the problem wasn't her, but the blood-red eyeball.
Its punishment logic shouldn't even exist!
At that very moment, the blood-red eyeball moved.
Amidst the dense black air, the eyeball didn't retreat, but instead pressed further inward.
The red tissue on its surface clung to the railing, transforming into thick blood, which flowed down along the eroded areas of the railing. The deeper it pushed, the larger the area of festering and missing eyeball tissue.
Guo Guo was stunned. "What's it doing?"
Tang Xinjue's face was grim. "It's being punished by the rules."
From the moment the black energy was first blocked from the balcony, they had already completely won. The blood-red eyeball shouldn't have stayed here, much less attempted to use its own body to break through the balcony barrier and force its way in to attack them.
But even under the punishment of the rules, the eyeball showed no sign of giving up. The railing broke and collapsed at a visible speed, and enough rotting eyeballs, enough to cover a window, slammed into the glass, its dim pupils staring at Tang Xinjue inside.
Its purpose was crystal clear.
Rather than punishing the examinees according to the procedure, it wanted to kill Tang Xinjue even more!
606 was no stranger to eyeballs of this size - as early as in the road trip copy, the counselor who suddenly visited in the middle of the night was a red eyeball of about the same size. But if the counselor's "eyeball" brought a sense of majesty and oppression, then this red eyeball at this moment was more dangerous and disgusting.
For Tang Xinjue, 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.
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 coldness and stickiness.
And the thick malice directed at her for no reason.
"So this is your purpose."
Tang Xinjue's fingertips slid across the screen of her phone, a faint glow from the unwavering power supply that shattered the darkness cast by the blood-red eyeballs.
Cracks had appeared on the dormitory window, the shelter of rules crumbling under the monster boss's reckless and frenzied attack. Zhang You, reacting quickly, grasped her arm fiercely. Tang Xinjue smiled, even thinking, somewhat inappropriately, that if time permitted, she might harass customer service again, livestreaming her report of the violation, perhaps even earning a new achievement.
But it was too late.
The glass shattered with a final, resounding bang, and a torrent of boundless malevolence washed over her, completely drowning her.
Cold, suffocating, tearing...
It was like falling back into a nightmare.
It's said that when consciousness descends to the depths of the sea of consciousness, the perceived flow of time slows to a near standstill.
Tang Xinjue felt the familiar resistance again as she returned to the pitch-black, mist-filled, bottle-shaped cave.
However, her mental strength now was far superior to that of her first dive into the sea of consciousness.
This time, she easily dispelled the mist and reached the end, where she spotted four familiar symbols floating in the air:
a glass bottle, a silver ring, a yellow eyeball, and tape.
These four materialized symbols neither grew nor shrank, but seemed to be faintly covered by a thin veil, making them invisible even under close scrutiny. If she hadn't deliberately sensed them, even she would have overlooked their existence.
Tang Xinjue's gaze paused for a moment as the yellow eyeball passed by.
"Honestly, this day has come a little later than I expected."
With no one around to care, her face was expressionless. She simply observed the scene silently, then raised her hand and placed it on the center of her forehead.
On this spot of skin, a mark, or rather a seal, was visible only within her sea of consciousness.
The being who had left this seal claimed to be the in-game counselor, who had given her a switch to control the dark aura.
When the switch was on, the marks left by the ghosts in her sea of consciousness, along with the dark aspects of herself, were obscured. When the switch was off, all obstructions ceased.
Since then, she'd been using this thing for so long she'd become accustomed to it, as if nothing existed.
...But as it turned out, even if she didn't seek the mountain, it would still reach out its claws, trying to drag her down.
With a tap of her fingertips, the barrier surrounding the four markers vanished, and the presence suddenly exploded a hundredfold.
No, that presence wasn't enough.
Tang Xinjue rubbed her brows again, then pressed down hard again!
This time, all her mental energy, along with it, fell silent in exile and suppression.
The blood-red eyeball suddenly stopped moving again.
It should have devoured the human, melting her body into blood with its aura, in a split second... The blood vessels in its eyeball bulged, and it stared motionlessly at the closed-eyed human girl.
But it couldn't move now.
More precisely, it was pinned to its spot by an insurmountable hierarchy, unable to advance an inch.
If the students outside could have seen what was happening in dormitory 606, they would have noticed that it wasn't just the blood-red eyeball that was reacting so violently, but also Tang Xinjue's three roommates.
They retreated almost subconsciously, because just at that moment, a strong sense of strangeness erupted from the person they were most familiar with and trusted the most -
Then the girl opened her eyes, her cloudy and dim pupils slowly moved, cold and indifferent.
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