Chapter 10 Dormitory Civility Rules (VI)
"My face! My face!"
Guo Guo rolled over on the bed screaming. When Tang Xinjue twisted his shoulders around him, 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 skeleton or a centipede, and my face was really painful, as if 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 comforted 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 value has dropped significantly. The surrounding environment is no longer safe for you. Attacks received 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 his ability to speak: "Since the ghost appeared last night, I have felt cold all over and unable to move, and my phone has been popping up reminders. I know that my health value has been decreasing, but I didn't expect it to decrease so much."
The health line had just dropped to the yellow bottom, and she was already haunted by horrible hallucinations. If it dropped 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 is, the more shaky one's mental defense becomes. In a way, Guo Guo's current state is much 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 turned pale and 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 bags of bread and called 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 and then look for it."
In this test, a day was compressed into one and a half hours. They had only eaten one piece of bread the whole day yesterday, and their bodies could not bear this kind of 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 is going to catch me..."
Tang Xinjue opened the cabinet door, and it was empty inside. This was still Guo Guo's illusion.
Guo Guo panted for a while, gave up searching, and turned around silently to take the bread. After taking a few bites, her shoulders began to shake more and more, and she finally couldn't help crying out: "Why is it always me... Why am I so unlucky!"
Everyone entered the game the same way and was attacked by ghosts, but she took the most damage and her sanity dropped the most? Was it because she was 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 the car accident to the past few years when she was haunted by nightmares.
Why is she the only one who has to experience endless nightmares? Why did she get this inexplicable disease? Why can't she live like a normal person?
Why, it has to be me?
His thoughts drifted to who knows where, blending with the few clues of 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: "Yes, why is it always you?"
Guo Guo: “…hiccup?”
She looked at Tang Xinjue in bewilderment as he stood up and repeatedly looked through his phone and Xiaohong's belongings. As time passed, the girl's expression became more and more 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 the gap in the shelf, the man casually pulled off a bag of puffed food, tore open the bag and chewed it in big mouthfuls. Amid the heavy chewing sound, his fat back gradually walked to the end of the shelf. If you look closely, you will find that the man is clearly walking forward, but his face is looking backwards, with his eyes closed, which is indescribably weird.
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 was not reversed, but that he had two faces at the same time - every fifteen minutes, the man would open the eyes of the other face. This 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 if 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 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 being nearly fainted from hunger since she was born. At this moment, there were all kinds of supermarket snacks in front of her, and she was drooling, but she didn't dare to reach out to take them.
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 became stronger. Zhang You leaned weakly against the wall, and his consciousness began 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 I 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 sinister 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 Xin Jue looked at her and said, "I roughly understand what Xiao Hong 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 little hint information, so little that it doesn't match its difficulty at all."
A ghost that would attack 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 in the previous two days, it was almost certain death.
This is obviously not the level of difficulty a novice field should have.
Guo Guo sniffed blankly: "So, so what?"
"So there must be some hint hidden in the test that we missed."
"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 I think about it, ghosts are bound by rules, and their behavior itself contains certain rules. And the order at that time may be the order we are in now."
Tang Xinjue took out the paper he 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 Wan Qing."
"If we follow this order, then on the second day, my desk should have been chosen as the "Little Red Desk", but it became yours. Why is that?"
"Because I was hurt the most and was the weakest at the time." Guo Guo was dejected. She is a big fan of metaphysics and supernatural stories, and knows that the weaker a person is, the more "yin energy" they have, the more opportunities ghosts and monsters will take advantage of 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 passing the level is to find the correct character item, but we just found nothing. Either it is not in the dormitory at all, or it requires certain specific conditions to be discovered."
Guo Guo seemed to understand something, but couldn't grasp the specific clues. The reduction in her san value made her consciousness a little confused, and she had difficulty following Tang Xinjue's thoughts.
Tang Xin Jue continued. "Similarly, the test gave another hint, which clearly stated: Xiao Hong loves cleanliness, so please don't mess up her desk."
"I like to be neat and tidy 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 shudder. In a moment of clarity, he opened his eyes wide: "...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."
"The testing gave hints from the beginning."
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 what is missing is the last thing: an identity."
Who is Xiaohong?
Just like the sound of a wooden hammer, Guo Guo finally came to his senses, took a deep breath, and his voice trembled.
"Xiao Hong... is it me?"
