Chapter 32 ~ Fourth Game Pt.3 ~
Brother Zhang and the male player, who were both holding the pen, could feel the arrival of the spirit earlier than the others.
Their hands moved without command, as if being controlled by the pen, and they drew a crooked circle on the paper.
The spirit came.
The other three female players squeezed together, pushing against each other. They stared at the paper and didn’t dare to make a sound.
The flashlight also stopped playing tricks at this time.
The light source was on the paper.
Brother Zhang and the male player exchanged glances.
Brother Zhang asked, “Spirit Pen, Spirit Pen, do you know my age?”
Once these words fell, Brother Zhang and the male player’s hands moved abruptly and the pen slid them to the word “No” on the paper.
It seemed that this spirit was not an omniscient spirit, but just a ghost.
Brother Zhang gave a significant look to the male player.
This time it was the male player’s turn to ask a question.
The male player’s lips trembled and his gaze inadvertently flew around at random, happening to land behind the female players.
A pale-faced woman stood there, her eyes distantly looking at him.
It was a ghost!
The male player immediately wanted to let go, get up, and run.
Brother Zhang roared, “It’s fake! Quick, ask something!”
In his desperation, his voice was high and loud, shaking the entire space and echoing.
The male player’s hand was grasped tightly by Brother Zhang.
Both of their hands were barely holding the pen together, but only just barely and in the end they didn’t let go.
The male player didn’t dare to glance over at the female players again.
The female players knew there must have been something suspicious behind them. They looked at Brother Zhang for help.
Brother Zhang, a veteran player, was the backbone of the entire group.
He glanced behind the female players.
A woman was standing there.
When he looked closer, where was she standing!? She didn’t have legs at all! She was floating!
The female ghost smiled eerily at Brother Zhang, revealing a mouth full of blood-colored fangs.
Brother Zhang’s hand shook once and then he turned his head back calmly. He had seen more terrifying things and this female ghost’s methods of scaring people weren’t enough.
The male player asked with trepidation, “Brother Zhang, is this hard to deal with? Your hand is shaking…”
“Shut up.”
Brother Zhang interrupted the male player’s words and said, “Everyone calm down, don’t turn your head. You, ask something quickly.”
The female players knew those words about not turning the head were towards them.
One by one, they got closer to the person next to them.
The male player only wanted to end the Spirit Pen now. If he asked quickly, then it would end sooner.
“Spirit Pen, Spirit Pen, why are you following us?”
After Brother Zhang heard this, he looked at the male player like he was looking at an idiot.
First, putting aside whether or not this question itself would enrage the spirit, right now they only gave a paper with “Yes” or “No” for the spirit to answer with.
How was the spirit to answer this?
But since the male player already asked a question, this matter was already done for.
Brother Zhang and the other female players could only stare at the pen.
The pen made no movements at all, but the male player’s head suddenly dropped.
His voice became erratic and bizarre.
“Only you all can help me.”
Brother Zhang immediately released the pen.
Meanwhile, the expression of the female player closest on one side of the male player changed greatly and she instantly stood up, taking a step back.
In quick succession, the other two female players also reacted and they also quickly stood up and moved sideways towards Brother Zhang.
During their move, they still didn’t dare to look behind themselves, just in case the ghost behind them wasn’t the ghost currently possessing the male player. They could be in danger if they looked back.
The three female players stood behind Brother Zhang, looking neither right nor left.
Brother Zhang looked calm and didn’t superfluously move his line of sight outwards at all. Instead, he stared directly at the male player who was already possessed by the ghost.
He asked, “Spirit Pen, what can we do for you? Whatever it is we can do, we’ll try to do it for you.”
When the male player heard this, his voice became shrill like a girl complaining to others.
“I’m so pitiable. I was killed by someone. Do you know who killed me? It was my roommate who I always treated as a good friend! Gu Yian!”
It was Little Gu’s name.
Brother Zhang immediately matched the name Gu Yian to the Little Gu in his memories.
With this match, Brother Zhang instantly doubted the credibility of this ghost’s words.
He saw perfectly clearly what sort of person Little Gu was in their game.
She was a principled good person.
Brother Zhang didn’t express his doubts and, instead, remained calm still.
However, the three female players looked into the eyes of the male player, or to be precise, looked into the eyes of the female ghost who was possessing the male player and had some sympathy.
Killed by a trusted person. This sort of matter made the protagonist of the story sound pitiful.
The female ghost, possessing the male player, told how she was blindly tricked by her roommate, Gu Yian, to play Spirit Pen and caused their other roommates and the classmates in the dorm next door to all die tragic deaths.
As the three female players listened, one after another, they felt an extreme disgust towards Gu Yian.
Of course they still remembered who Gu Yian was.
She was the person who was still alive when all her roommates died, even all the people in the dorm next door.
“I didn’t expect her to look pretty, but have a heart as malicious as a snake,” one female player whispered.
She was heard by the female ghost.
The ghost said, “Isn’t that the case? She pretends to be an innocent rich beauty, but she actually doesn’t have any money at all. Her generosity is just a pretence because she’s being raised by an old man, so that’s how she can be so extravagant. I thought about it for a long time after I died and she must have realized I overheard her talking to that old man over the phone, so she wanted to harm us like this. It wasn’t enough to just harm me, but she even harmed Fei Fei and the others.”
The female ghost suddenly raised her head. Her face was bursting with blue veins, showing her anger.
She was speaking through being attached to the male player’s body.
The male player’s appearance was average and so making this expression was not only scary, but also extremely ugly.
The female players unconsciously drew closer to Brother Zhang.
Brother Zhang’s heart was tense and the movement behind him nearly made him jump.
He steadied himself and asked the female ghost, “May I ask what you want us to do for you?”
The ghost gave two ghastly laughs and then said, word by word, through gritted teeth, “Help me kill her! Kill her!”
The resentment and coldness in this voice nearly made goosebumps rise on the female players who heard this sentence.
They didn’t know how to reply to the female ghost’s words at all.
This was murder!
The ghost was making them kill someone!
Brother Zhang had a calm expression and he wasn’t afraid to face the female ghost either.
He heard this and made things difficult on her. “Murder is illegal. We can’t do this.”
The female ghost controlled the male player’s body and said, with eyes full of rage, “Then, despite killing us, she gets to get away with it? Kill her! Or else, I’ll kill you all!”
The ghost glared at the players.
Brother Zhang’s expression was still calm.
He said, “Alright, you need to give us time. We need to spend time setting up an ambush. Spirit Pen, I’ll also have to ask you to leave my companion. He’ll be a useful helper.”
The female ghost’s gaze swept over the players present and her eyes revealed a hint of greed.
“Tomorrow night, if she’s not dead, you’re all dead.”
The male player’s upper body suddenly softened.
Boom!
He fell to the side onto the ground, unconscious.
It looked like the female ghost left from his body.
Brother Zhang motioned for the three female players to shake the male player awake, and then asked them to sit down.
The pen lying on the ground also gave Brother Zhang an extremely dangerous feeling.
He picked up that pen and put it in his hand, so as to avoid this pen causing another accident.
Brother Zhang said, “What we just summoned should be the spirit that was originally possessing this pen.”
After the three female players sat down, hugging their knees, they looked at Brother Zhang with some panic and their voices trembled, “Brother Zhang, we don’t have that thing behind us, right?”
He glanced behind the three of them and, indeed, that ghost wasn’t there anymore.
His thoughts flickered but his mouth said, “That was probably the spirit. There’s only one ghost here and it’s just, at that time, it came out of the pen. It’s now back in the pen. Let’s go to the bleachers first and sleep for a night. Some things can be talked about tomorrow morning.”
The female players also didn’t want to talk about the female ghost at night.
The ghost had returned to the pen, but the fear she brought to them was still in their hearts. The female players wanted to have a good rest.
Brother Zhang opened a smartphone with a cracked screen that he swiped from the shop where he sold their previous phone and checked the time.
“It’s 1:16 in the morning. We’ll take turns staying up through the night, sleep until 5:00, and then set off to the library to wait for Gu Yian.”
~~~
At 6:20 in the morning.
Gu Yian woke up.
She stared at her ceiling at first and then gradually became clearheaded, remembering her schedule for today.
She had a class at eight this morning.
The notebook, her phone, her card and the other items quietly lay beside her pillow.
Forty minutes later, Gu Yian tidied herself up and placed the textbooks she was going to use today in her backpack before finally grabbing her phone and the notebook.
Out of Gu Yian’s expectation, the notebook suddenly opened by itself.
A line of black words automatically emerged on the horizontal line of the paper.
“There’s something I think I should tell you.”
Gu Yian had a bad feeling.
She calmly said, “Speak.”
A single line of black letters appeared.
“In fact, I can feel the outside world, including when you hug me.”
When did she hug the notebook?
Gu Yian was stunned.
Then she reacted.
Whenever she went out, her hand would hook around the notebook and she would place it at her elbow, pressing it against her abdomen. Many people would sandwich folders like this when they were holding them.
That meant, through her clothes, the notebook could feel…
Gu Yian locked the door to her rented apartment without saying a word.
Goodbye, you can wait here alone as a notebook!
Gu Yian looked calm, but her pace this time was a little faster than usual.
However, when she arrived at her classroom, she wasn’t a few minutes early because she reached the school cafeteria at rush hour for students to eat, so she still spent some time.
Gu Yian randomly found a place to sit down in the empty seats at the front of the classroom.
She was used to staying away from others, lest they be frightened.
This was the first time, in the past eleven days, that Gu Yian didn’t bring the notebook.
She quickly adapted to her current situation and flipped her textbook to the spot the professor last spoke on.
Several minutes passed.
It was 7:58 AM.
Several men wearing suits, with some weight on their body and looking like middle-aged men in management, leading an old monk in robes that were somewhat greying appeared at the door to the classroom.
The students in the class were astonished and even the students in the back row stopped playing on their phones. Everyone stretched out their neck to see if a Buddhist monk really came to their classroom.
Someone asked kindly, “Did you find the wrong classroom?”
Those people ignored these voices.
The middle-aged man at the head swept his eyes through the class, and then stepped back to say something into the ear of the old monk.
Gu Yian, who was looking at her textbook with a lowered head, suddenly felt a lot of vigilant eyes on her body.
Those eyes, without an exception, came from the people in front of the classroom!
Gu Yian raised her head slightly and looked forward.
She saw an old monk standing in front of the blackboard in the middle of the classroom. He bowed to her with his palms together and gave a small smile.
Gu Yian glanced at the people on both sides of the Buddhist monk who seemed like school management before she also smiled a little at this monk, treating it as a greeting.
After the old monk saw Gu Yian’s response, he shook his head slightly to signal to the person beside him and then turned and walked towards the door of the classroom.
The other people in suits withdrew the initial vigilance in their gazes when they looked at Gu Yian.
One of them said, “We are holding a religious conference and went to the wrong classroom. Everyone, attend your class without concern.”
It would have been better for that person not to explain. Once he explained, everyone in the class looked at these people with strange eyes.
When they had called this to attention earlier, they were ignored. Now, these people were saying they walked to the wrong classroom.
These people came inexplicably and left just as inexpicably.
Only Gu Yian felt that these people came to see her.
After the monk discovered there was no problem with her, they left.
Ding dong!
The class bell rang.
The professor who taught Gu Yian this professional class stepped into the classroom on the bell. He walked to the multimedia podium and set down his bag.
He glanced at the people below him.
“There are fewer and fewer people. I sure hope they’re skipping class.”
After the professor spoke, he also realized he said something he shouldn’t have said. “Anyway, everyone wake up, we’re starting class.”
When Gu Yian heard these words, she turned her head and looked at the people behind her.
The people in the classroom were scattered in their seating, most of them concentrated in the last few rows.
She usually sat in the front rows of the classroom and never paid much attention to the back.
Looking at it like this, compared to the number of students in Gu Yian’s memory, it certainly was much less.
Many university students skipped classes and it was a common problem for a lot of schools.
Generally, students were most present when school started and also when there were main points in class.
In today’s class, the professor would occasionally touch on this and so, logically speaking, there should be a lot of students.
Gu Yian detected something strange.
She didn’t believe that many people died and instead wondered if something happened that made those students not dare to come to class.
Gu Yian took out her phone, placed it on the desk, and logged into the school forums to check the information.
As a general rule, the school forums would be the source of firsthand news.
Of course, whether the news was true or false, it all depended on everyone’s discernment.
The moment Gu Yian entered she saw a post floating on the first page. The content of the title was that they discovered the body of an unnamed male at school.
She had just clicked in when the page disappeared.
It looked like the forum administrators weren’t permitting this discussion.
The first class ended.
As soon as Gu Yian picked up her phone she saw an incoming call.
It was her counselor’s phone number.
Gu Yian walked out of the classroom and accepted the call.
“Professor Huang, may I ask if something’s wrong?”
The counselor at the other end of the phone said, “Actually, it’s not really anything. Yian, if you feel your surroundings aren’t safe then you should be more careful. There’s a gang of thieves on campus and, yesterday, they stole someone’s phone right in front of them. You have to take more care. The moment you feel any danger, run away quickly! A person’s sense of danger will never trick them.”
She repeatedly emphasized that if Gu Yian sensed any danger then Gu Yian had to run away quick.
This was her counselor’s good intentions, so Gu Yian promised. “Okay, thank you for the reminder, Professor. I’ll do that.”
After she hung up the call, Gu Yian thought to herself that her counselor was this worried about her because the she felt it was very likely Gu Yian would be harmed.
Normally, Gu Yian didn’t offend people either.
The only time, in this late period, was the slight estrangement of her roommates because of the Spirit Pen matter, but then they all rushed into the underworld because they played Spirit Pen as a group.
Yesterday, the counselor called her over to inquire about her roommates’ personalities and their circumstances, saying the school management wanted this information.
Before class today, several men brought an old monk to see her in the classroom.
There were so many students who didn’t come to the classroom in her class.
Her brother, Gu Tianjing, deliberately called to tell her that someone at her school played Spirit Pen again and died.
That day she also learned from someone else that a person had summoned the spirit and the spirit said Gu Yian killed it.
The clues linked together and made Gu Yian have a guess.
Her former roommates became new Spirit Pens and, not only this, they may have lost control and killed many people, including the people who went against them before.
Only this sort of situation could explain the counselor’s concern for her, students fearing to attend class with her, and the school management attaching importance to specially finding and bringing a monk over.
The school management, as well as others, probably regarded her as an existence more evil than a ghost.
Because Gu Yian didn’t interact with people much and she lived off campus, news was inaccessible to her and she also didn’t know whether or not all the people who fought with her former roommates had something happen to them.
On this point, she was still only guessing and so she planned to investigate this by herself.
Meanwhile, returning back to the side of the five players.
Brother Zhang and the others sat dejectedly in a small alcove in the school garden.
He apologized to the other players who were biting buns.
“Yesterday, I just saw a post in the forums that said she liked to go to the library. I didn’t expect that today we would crash into the day she attended classes. Ugh, we didn’t see her at all after waiting for several hours.”
The players moved out at five o’clock in the morning and waited until eight o’clock in the morning before they couldn’t endure it anymore.
On the surface, Brother Zhang sighed but, inwardly, he was glad he didn’t remember Gu Yian’s school timetable wrong.
If he really let these players go over, he was afraid they would seriously want to kill Gu Yian.
Then his deception game would lose even the targets of his deception.
Of who could live between these players and Gu Yian, Brother Zhang had no doubts that it would be Gu Yian who would live.
The players listened to Brother Zhang’s words and one of the female players comforted him, “Brother Zhang, it’s alright. If I really had to go up and kill someone, I wouldn’t have been mentally prepared either.”
When Brother Zhang heard this, his eyes flashed and he looked at the pen he was holding in his hand before looking at the other players again and shaking his head at the four of them.
The male player saw and consciously understood. “Brother Zhang, do you mean we can’t kill her?”
Brother Zhang glared at him.
Could he say that in front of the Spirit Pen? In front of the spirit, they had to say they must kill her!
This male player was the one who slept the best among the five players. Although he lost some spirit and energy due to being possessed by the female ghost, he made it all up with sleep.
At that time, Brother Zhang and the other three female players had to stare at the pen with the spirit in their hands, and also had to take turns keeping watch in the night to prevent themselves and the others from being discovered for living secretly in the gymnasium.
The female players were attentive and, under observation, they saw in succession that Brother Zhang was afraid of the spirit in his hand.
They wanted to understand why, but it was difficult to speak in front of the spirit.
Right then, Brother Zhang suddenly felt the spirit in his hand lose its air of danger.
This air disappeared without reason.
Brother Zhang quickly reacted. For the spirit to leave, could it be there was someone it feared around them?
He immediately looked around their surroundings and quickly locked onto a target.
“Is that a monk?” Brother Zhang had sharp eyes and he saw, on a path not too far away, a group of people following behind a monk.
He loosened his hand and looked into the distance, as if he completely didn’t notice the pen slipping from his hand.
“Come on, let’s go over and take a look.”
The male player looked at the pen on the ground and reminded him, “Brother Zhang, the pen—”
“Let’s see who walks the fastest!”
Brother Zhang forcibly blocked the male player’s words and ran out.
He didn’t walk, he ran.
When the female players saw Brother Zhang run, they instantly followed.
The male player gaped at them, “Wait for me.”
He also ran and didn’t care about the pen on the ground at all.
Brother Zhang brought the four players to mix into the group, pretending to be someone watching the excitement, and followed behind the monk.
This time, that pen didn’t appear.
They weren’t in the spirit’s sphere of supervision anymore.
It was at this time that Brother Zhang spoke, “Does everyone believe that female ghost’s words?”
A female player hesitated when she heard this. “Why can’t we believe it? It seemed to tell the truth.”
Brother Zhang replied, “Only seemed!”
He continued, “If it was really as simple as killing someone, then would God give us the mission of surviving for seven days?”
Everyone was doubtful.
The mission to survive for seven days was said by this veteran player, Brother Zhang, and at this time everyone could only trust in this veteran player.
Another female player said, “Brother Zhang, it’s probably real. Don’t we have the hint, ‘malice’?”
She analyzed, “That Gu Yian deliberately tricked people into playing Spirit Pen and killed so many people, all because her roommate overheard her calling her sugar daddy. This maliciousness is too obvious.”
Brother Zhang shook his head.
“You guys can’t understand maliciousness like that. In the information we asked around for, were there people who said Gu Yian was a bad person? They only said she had an ominous air. What this means is that, in their eyes, there’s no problem with her character.”
“Have you all considered this question? What if the ghost was lying?”
The players listened to Brother Zhang’s speech.
The male player called him into question, “Brother Zhang, why are you speaking for that Gu girl? She only looks pretty and it doesn’t mean she’s kindhearted. You can’t be that shallow and judge people solely by their appearance.”
Brother Zhang sneered inwardly.
If he really judged people by their appearances, then he would have already thrown off this basic male player who dragged him down, leaving himself with three young and beautiful female players!
On account of his stupidity, Brother Zhang had kept him.
Brother Zhang ignored him and looked at the others.
“What do you all think?”
The female players thought for a while. Actually, they wanted to say that, in the information they heard, there were people who guessed that Gu Yian might have killed her roommate, but Brother Zhang’s thoughts at this time were clearly biased towards Gu Yian.
One female player represented them and said, “We might need more clues.”
They were tactfully saying they didn’t fully believe Brother Zhang’s words.
Brother Zhang heard this and said, “Look, you don’t believe what I’m saying.”
The female players were a little embarrassed by Brother Zhang’s words.
Brother Zhang continued, “You all know not to completely believe a person’s words. Ghosts are turned from people, so you’re actually going to believe a ghost’s words?”
His words shook the thoughts of the players present.
Indeed, even living people couldn’t be trusted, so dead ghosts couldn’t be trusted even more.
The male player asked, “Brother Zhang, where are we going to search for clues? We already looked on the internet. You said those new people who were killed by the spirit were just victims who got involved, and that searching for clues on them is no use at all.”
Brother Zhang answered in a deep voice, “We’re going to find someone. We’re going to find Gu Yian. We’ve heard what the ghost said, now we’ll listen to the person.”
Through the meeting with the spirit last night, he already discovered that it was hard to deal with.
The difficulty of this game was much harder than what he guessed before.
He had to meet Gu Yian today and understand the actual situation of the spirit from her.
He wanted to know, more than anyone else, how Gu Yian escaped the spirit’s pursuit so that the spirit could only find players to kill her.
~~~
Ding dong! Ding dong!
The bell rang after class.
After her enlarged class, Gu Yian collected her textbooks. She opened her backpack and was about to put her books inside when she saw a familiar notebook quietly lying there.
Her action of putting the books inside paused.
The people in the class gave the place where Gu Yian was a wide berth, one after another, before they left the classroom.
Gu Yian hesitated and then took out the notebook.
She opened to a page at random, picked up a pen, and wrote a sentence on it.
“When did you come here?”
Gu Yian didn’t bring it out at all today.
Under the line of words that Gu Yian just wrote, Lu Zize’s answer appeared in an instant.
“Just now.”
Gu Yian didn’t believe him.
For Lu Zize’s words, it was enough to listen to them, but she must never believe them.
Trusting him would make her be miserably deceived.
At any rate, Gu Yian didn’t believe him.
Lu Zize, who was a notebook nowadays, could still guess Gu Yian’s thoughts as always.
His words emerged on the paper, one by one.
“If I say I’ve been here all this time, will you believe me?”
Of course Gu Yian didn’t believe this either.
She suspected he deliberately angered her today, making her not carry him with her this morning, likely to escape the monk coming to the classroom before class to examine her.
The notebook felt wronged and new words immediately appeared.
“You don’t believe anything I say. Do you want me to dig out my heart to show you?”
Gu Yian instantly wrote below these words, “No need.”
With Lu Zize’s mental state, she was really afraid she would see a bloody heart in the next second.
Speaking of which, Gu Yian suddenly recalled how she seemed to have seen one at the end of her first game.
She commanded herself not to remember this incident.
Gu Yian looked at the notebook and saw that under her two words, “No need”, there was a single line that drew the outline of a large heart.
Inside the heart, single strokes gradually became clearer and formed six letters, Gu Yian.
A horizontal arrow beside this pointed to the center of the heart.
One remark slowly appeared next to this arrow, just like how that person spoke leisurely.
“My heart.”
Gu Yian’s hand turned and she snapped the notebook shut.
That was fake at a glance.
Chapter 32 ~ Fourth Game Pt.3 ~
Brother Zhang and the male player, who were both holding the pen, could feel the arrival of the spirit earlier than the others.
Their hands moved without command, as if being controlled by the pen, and they drew a crooked circle on the paper.
The spirit came.
The other three female players squeezed together, pushing against each other. They stared at the paper and didn’t dare to make a sound.
The flashlight also stopped playing tricks at this time.
The light source was on the paper.
Brother Zhang and the male player exchanged glances.
Brother Zhang asked, “Spirit Pen, Spirit Pen, do you know my age?”
Once these words fell, Brother Zhang and the male player’s hands moved abruptly and the pen slid them to the word “No” on the paper.
It seemed that this spirit was not an omniscient spirit, but just a ghost.
Brother Zhang gave a significant look to the male player.
This time it was the male player’s turn to ask a question.
The male player’s lips trembled and his gaze inadvertently flew around at random, happening to land behind the female players.
A pale-faced woman stood there, her eyes distantly looking at him.
It was a ghost!
The male player immediately wanted to let go, get up, and run.
Brother Zhang roared, “It’s fake! Quick, ask something!”
In his desperation, his voice was high and loud, shaking the entire space and echoing.
The male player’s hand was grasped tightly by Brother Zhang.
Both of their hands were barely holding the pen together, but only just barely and in the end they didn’t let go.
The male player didn’t dare to glance over at the female players again.
The female players knew there must have been something suspicious behind them. They looked at Brother Zhang for help.
Brother Zhang, a veteran player, was the backbone of the entire group.
He glanced behind the female players.
A woman was standing there.
When he looked closer, where was she standing!? She didn’t have legs at all! She was floating!
The female ghost smiled eerily at Brother Zhang, revealing a mouth full of blood-colored fangs.
Brother Zhang’s hand shook once and then he turned his head back calmly. He had seen more terrifying things and this female ghost’s methods of scaring people weren’t enough.
The male player asked with trepidation, “Brother Zhang, is this hard to deal with? Your hand is shaking…”
“Shut up.”
Brother Zhang interrupted the male player’s words and said, “Everyone calm down, don’t turn your head. You, ask something quickly.”
The female players knew those words about not turning the head were towards them.
One by one, they got closer to the person next to them.
The male player only wanted to end the Spirit Pen now. If he asked quickly, then it would end sooner.
“Spirit Pen, Spirit Pen, why are you following us?”
After Brother Zhang heard this, he looked at the male player like he was looking at an idiot.
First, putting aside whether or not this question itself would enrage the spirit, right now they only gave a paper with “Yes” or “No” for the spirit to answer with.
How was the spirit to answer this?
But since the male player already asked a question, this matter was already done for.
Brother Zhang and the other female players could only stare at the pen.
The pen made no movements at all, but the male player’s head suddenly dropped.
His voice became erratic and bizarre.
“Only you all can help me.”
Brother Zhang immediately released the pen.
Meanwhile, the expression of the female player closest on one side of the male player changed greatly and she instantly stood up, taking a step back.
In quick succession, the other two female players also reacted and they also quickly stood up and moved sideways towards Brother Zhang.
During their move, they still didn’t dare to look behind themselves, just in case the ghost behind them wasn’t the ghost currently possessing the male player. They could be in danger if they looked back.
The three female players stood behind Brother Zhang, looking neither right nor left.
Brother Zhang looked calm and didn’t superfluously move his line of sight outwards at all. Instead, he stared directly at the male player who was already possessed by the ghost.
He asked, “Spirit Pen, what can we do for you? Whatever it is we can do, we’ll try to do it for you.”
When the male player heard this, his voice became shrill like a girl complaining to others.
“I’m so pitiable. I was killed by someone. Do you know who killed me? It was my roommate who I always treated as a good friend! Gu Yian!”
It was Little Gu’s name.
Brother Zhang immediately matched the name Gu Yian to the Little Gu in his memories.
With this match, Brother Zhang instantly doubted the credibility of this ghost’s words.
He saw perfectly clearly what sort of person Little Gu was in their game.
She was a principled good person.
Brother Zhang didn’t express his doubts and, instead, remained calm still.
However, the three female players looked into the eyes of the male player, or to be precise, looked into the eyes of the female ghost who was possessing the male player and had some sympathy.
Killed by a trusted person. This sort of matter made the protagonist of the story sound pitiful.
The female ghost, possessing the male player, told how she was blindly tricked by her roommate, Gu Yian, to play Spirit Pen and caused their other roommates and the classmates in the dorm next door to all die tragic deaths.
As the three female players listened, one after another, they felt an extreme disgust towards Gu Yian.
Of course they still remembered who Gu Yian was.
She was the person who was still alive when all her roommates died, even all the people in the dorm next door.
“I didn’t expect her to look pretty, but have a heart as malicious as a snake,” one female player whispered.
She was heard by the female ghost.
The ghost said, “Isn’t that the case? She pretends to be an innocent rich beauty, but she actually doesn’t have any money at all. Her generosity is just a pretence because she’s being raised by an old man, so that’s how she can be so extravagant. I thought about it for a long time after I died and she must have realized I overheard her talking to that old man over the phone, so she wanted to harm us like this. It wasn’t enough to just harm me, but she even harmed Fei Fei and the others.”
The female ghost suddenly raised her head. Her face was bursting with blue veins, showing her anger.
She was speaking through being attached to the male player’s body.
The male player’s appearance was average and so making this expression was not only scary, but also extremely ugly.
The female players unconsciously drew closer to Brother Zhang.
Brother Zhang’s heart was tense and the movement behind him nearly made him jump.
He steadied himself and asked the female ghost, “May I ask what you want us to do for you?”
The ghost gave two ghastly laughs and then said, word by word, through gritted teeth, “Help me kill her! Kill her!”
The resentment and coldness in this voice nearly made goosebumps rise on the female players who heard this sentence.
They didn’t know how to reply to the female ghost’s words at all.
This was murder!
The ghost was making them kill someone!
Brother Zhang had a calm expression and he wasn’t afraid to face the female ghost either.
He heard this and made things difficult on her. “Murder is illegal. We can’t do this.”
The female ghost controlled the male player’s body and said, with eyes full of rage, “Then, despite killing us, she gets to get away with it? Kill her! Or else, I’ll kill you all!”
The ghost glared at the players.
Brother Zhang’s expression was still calm.
He said, “Alright, you need to give us time. We need to spend time setting up an ambush. Spirit Pen, I’ll also have to ask you to leave my companion. He’ll be a useful helper.”
The female ghost’s gaze swept over the players present and her eyes revealed a hint of greed.
“Tomorrow night, if she’s not dead, you’re all dead.”
The male player’s upper body suddenly softened.
Boom!
He fell to the side onto the ground, unconscious.
It looked like the female ghost left from his body.
Brother Zhang motioned for the three female players to shake the male player awake, and then asked them to sit down.
The pen lying on the ground also gave Brother Zhang an extremely dangerous feeling.
He picked up that pen and put it in his hand, so as to avoid this pen causing another accident.
Brother Zhang said, “What we just summoned should be the spirit that was originally possessing this pen.”
After the three female players sat down, hugging their knees, they looked at Brother Zhang with some panic and their voices trembled, “Brother Zhang, we don’t have that thing behind us, right?”
He glanced behind the three of them and, indeed, that ghost wasn’t there anymore.
His thoughts flickered but his mouth said, “That was probably the spirit. There’s only one ghost here and it’s just, at that time, it came out of the pen. It’s now back in the pen. Let’s go to the bleachers first and sleep for a night. Some things can be talked about tomorrow morning.”
The female players also didn’t want to talk about the female ghost at night.
The ghost had returned to the pen, but the fear she brought to them was still in their hearts. The female players wanted to have a good rest.
Brother Zhang opened a smartphone with a cracked screen that he swiped from the shop where he sold their previous phone and checked the time.
“It’s 1:16 in the morning. We’ll take turns staying up through the night, sleep until 5:00, and then set off to the library to wait for Gu Yian.”
~~~
At 6:20 in the morning.
Gu Yian woke up.
She stared at her ceiling at first and then gradually became clearheaded, remembering her schedule for today.
She had a class at eight this morning.
The notebook, her phone, her card and the other items quietly lay beside her pillow.
Forty minutes later, Gu Yian tidied herself up and placed the textbooks she was going to use today in her backpack before finally grabbing her phone and the notebook.
Out of Gu Yian’s expectation, the notebook suddenly opened by itself.
A line of black words automatically emerged on the horizontal line of the paper.
“There’s something I think I should tell you.”
Gu Yian had a bad feeling.
She calmly said, “Speak.”
A single line of black letters appeared.
“In fact, I can feel the outside world, including when you hug me.”
When did she hug the notebook?
Gu Yian was stunned.
Then she reacted.
Whenever she went out, her hand would hook around the notebook and she would place it at her elbow, pressing it against her abdomen. Many people would sandwich folders like this when they were holding them.
That meant, through her clothes, the notebook could feel…
Gu Yian locked the door to her rented apartment without saying a word.
Goodbye, you can wait here alone as a notebook!
Gu Yian looked calm, but her pace this time was a little faster than usual.
However, when she arrived at her classroom, she wasn’t a few minutes early because she reached the school cafeteria at rush hour for students to eat, so she still spent some time.
Gu Yian randomly found a place to sit down in the empty seats at the front of the classroom.
She was used to staying away from others, lest they be frightened.
This was the first time, in the past eleven days, that Gu Yian didn’t bring the notebook.
She quickly adapted to her current situation and flipped her textbook to the spot the professor last spoke on.
Several minutes passed.
It was 7:58 AM.
Several men wearing suits, with some weight on their body and looking like middle-aged men in management, leading an old monk in robes that were somewhat greying appeared at the door to the classroom.
The students in the class were astonished and even the students in the back row stopped playing on their phones. Everyone stretched out their neck to see if a Buddhist monk really came to their classroom.
Someone asked kindly, “Did you find the wrong classroom?”
Those people ignored these voices.
The middle-aged man at the head swept his eyes through the class, and then stepped back to say something into the ear of the old monk.
Gu Yian, who was looking at her textbook with a lowered head, suddenly felt a lot of vigilant eyes on her body.
Those eyes, without an exception, came from the people in front of the classroom!
Gu Yian raised her head slightly and looked forward.
She saw an old monk standing in front of the blackboard in the middle of the classroom. He bowed to her with his palms together and gave a small smile.
Gu Yian glanced at the people on both sides of the Buddhist monk who seemed like school management before she also smiled a little at this monk, treating it as a greeting.
After the old monk saw Gu Yian’s response, he shook his head slightly to signal to the person beside him and then turned and walked towards the door of the classroom.
The other people in suits withdrew the initial vigilance in their gazes when they looked at Gu Yian.
One of them said, “We are holding a religious conference and went to the wrong classroom. Everyone, attend your class without concern.”
It would have been better for that person not to explain. Once he explained, everyone in the class looked at these people with strange eyes.
When they had called this to attention earlier, they were ignored. Now, these people were saying they walked to the wrong classroom.
These people came inexplicably and left just as inexpicably.
Only Gu Yian felt that these people came to see her.
After the monk discovered there was no problem with her, they left.
Ding dong!
The class bell rang.
The professor who taught Gu Yian this professional class stepped into the classroom on the bell. He walked to the multimedia podium and set down his bag.
He glanced at the people below him.
“There are fewer and fewer people. I sure hope they’re skipping class.”
After the professor spoke, he also realized he said something he shouldn’t have said. “Anyway, everyone wake up, we’re starting class.”
When Gu Yian heard these words, she turned her head and looked at the people behind her.
The people in the classroom were scattered in their seating, most of them concentrated in the last few rows.
She usually sat in the front rows of the classroom and never paid much attention to the back.
Looking at it like this, compared to the number of students in Gu Yian’s memory, it certainly was much less.
Many university students skipped classes and it was a common problem for a lot of schools.
Generally, students were most present when school started and also when there were main points in class.
In today’s class, the professor would occasionally touch on this and so, logically speaking, there should be a lot of students.
Gu Yian detected something strange.
She didn’t believe that many people died and instead wondered if something happened that made those students not dare to come to class.
Gu Yian took out her phone, placed it on the desk, and logged into the school forums to check the information.
As a general rule, the school forums would be the source of firsthand news.
Of course, whether the news was true or false, it all depended on everyone’s discernment.
The moment Gu Yian entered she saw a post floating on the first page. The content of the title was that they discovered the body of an unnamed male at school.
She had just clicked in when the page disappeared.
It looked like the forum administrators weren’t permitting this discussion.
The first class ended.
As soon as Gu Yian picked up her phone she saw an incoming call.
It was her counselor’s phone number.
Gu Yian walked out of the classroom and accepted the call.
“Professor Huang, may I ask if something’s wrong?”
The counselor at the other end of the phone said, “Actually, it’s not really anything. Yian, if you feel your surroundings aren’t safe then you should be more careful. There’s a gang of thieves on campus and, yesterday, they stole someone’s phone right in front of them. You have to take more care. The moment you feel any danger, run away quickly! A person’s sense of danger will never trick them.”
She repeatedly emphasized that if Gu Yian sensed any danger then Gu Yian had to run away quick.
This was her counselor’s good intentions, so Gu Yian promised. “Okay, thank you for the reminder, Professor. I’ll do that.”
After she hung up the call, Gu Yian thought to herself that her counselor was this worried about her because the she felt it was very likely Gu Yian would be harmed.
Normally, Gu Yian didn’t offend people either.
The only time, in this late period, was the slight estrangement of her roommates because of the Spirit Pen matter, but then they all rushed into the underworld because they played Spirit Pen as a group.
Yesterday, the counselor called her over to inquire about her roommates’ personalities and their circumstances, saying the school management wanted this information.
Before class today, several men brought an old monk to see her in the classroom.
There were so many students who didn’t come to the classroom in her class.
Her brother, Gu Tianjing, deliberately called to tell her that someone at her school played Spirit Pen again and died.
That day she also learned from someone else that a person had summoned the spirit and the spirit said Gu Yian killed it.
The clues linked together and made Gu Yian have a guess.
Her former roommates became new Spirit Pens and, not only this, they may have lost control and killed many people, including the people who went against them before.
Only this sort of situation could explain the counselor’s concern for her, students fearing to attend class with her, and the school management attaching importance to specially finding and bringing a monk over.
The school management, as well as others, probably regarded her as an existence more evil than a ghost.
Because Gu Yian didn’t interact with people much and she lived off campus, news was inaccessible to her and she also didn’t know whether or not all the people who fought with her former roommates had something happen to them.
On this point, she was still only guessing and so she planned to investigate this by herself.
Meanwhile, returning back to the side of the five players.
Brother Zhang and the others sat dejectedly in a small alcove in the school garden.
He apologized to the other players who were biting buns.
“Yesterday, I just saw a post in the forums that said she liked to go to the library. I didn’t expect that today we would crash into the day she attended classes. Ugh, we didn’t see her at all after waiting for several hours.”
The players moved out at five o’clock in the morning and waited until eight o’clock in the morning before they couldn’t endure it anymore.
On the surface, Brother Zhang sighed but, inwardly, he was glad he didn’t remember Gu Yian’s school timetable wrong.
If he really let these players go over, he was afraid they would seriously want to kill Gu Yian.
Then his deception game would lose even the targets of his deception.
Of who could live between these players and Gu Yian, Brother Zhang had no doubts that it would be Gu Yian who would live.
The players listened to Brother Zhang’s words and one of the female players comforted him, “Brother Zhang, it’s alright. If I really had to go up and kill someone, I wouldn’t have been mentally prepared either.”
When Brother Zhang heard this, his eyes flashed and he looked at the pen he was holding in his hand before looking at the other players again and shaking his head at the four of them.
The male player saw and consciously understood. “Brother Zhang, do you mean we can’t kill her?”
Brother Zhang glared at him.
Could he say that in front of the Spirit Pen? In front of the spirit, they had to say they must kill her!
This male player was the one who slept the best among the five players. Although he lost some spirit and energy due to being possessed by the female ghost, he made it all up with sleep.
At that time, Brother Zhang and the other three female players had to stare at the pen with the spirit in their hands, and also had to take turns keeping watch in the night to prevent themselves and the others from being discovered for living secretly in the gymnasium.
The female players were attentive and, under observation, they saw in succession that Brother Zhang was afraid of the spirit in his hand.
They wanted to understand why, but it was difficult to speak in front of the spirit.
Right then, Brother Zhang suddenly felt the spirit in his hand lose its air of danger.
This air disappeared without reason.
Brother Zhang quickly reacted. For the spirit to leave, could it be there was someone it feared around them?
He immediately looked around their surroundings and quickly locked onto a target.
“Is that a monk?” Brother Zhang had sharp eyes and he saw, on a path not too far away, a group of people following behind a monk.
He loosened his hand and looked into the distance, as if he completely didn’t notice the pen slipping from his hand.
“Come on, let’s go over and take a look.”
The male player looked at the pen on the ground and reminded him, “Brother Zhang, the pen—”
“Let’s see who walks the fastest!”
Brother Zhang forcibly blocked the male player’s words and ran out.
He didn’t walk, he ran.
When the female players saw Brother Zhang run, they instantly followed.
The male player gaped at them, “Wait for me.”
He also ran and didn’t care about the pen on the ground at all.
Brother Zhang brought the four players to mix into the group, pretending to be someone watching the excitement, and followed behind the monk.
This time, that pen didn’t appear.
They weren’t in the spirit’s sphere of supervision anymore.
It was at this time that Brother Zhang spoke, “Does everyone believe that female ghost’s words?”
A female player hesitated when she heard this. “Why can’t we believe it? It seemed to tell the truth.”
Brother Zhang replied, “Only seemed!”
He continued, “If it was really as simple as killing someone, then would God give us the mission of surviving for seven days?”
Everyone was doubtful.
The mission to survive for seven days was said by this veteran player, Brother Zhang, and at this time everyone could only trust in this veteran player.
Another female player said, “Brother Zhang, it’s probably real. Don’t we have the hint, ‘malice’?”
She analyzed, “That Gu Yian deliberately tricked people into playing Spirit Pen and killed so many people, all because her roommate overheard her calling her sugar daddy. This maliciousness is too obvious.”
Brother Zhang shook his head.
“You guys can’t understand maliciousness like that. In the information we asked around for, were there people who said Gu Yian was a bad person? They only said she had an ominous air. What this means is that, in their eyes, there’s no problem with her character.”
“Have you all considered this question? What if the ghost was lying?”
The players listened to Brother Zhang’s speech.
The male player called him into question, “Brother Zhang, why are you speaking for that Gu girl? She only looks pretty and it doesn’t mean she’s kindhearted. You can’t be that shallow and judge people solely by their appearance.”
Brother Zhang sneered inwardly.
If he really judged people by their appearances, then he would have already thrown off this basic male player who dragged him down, leaving himself with three young and beautiful female players!
On account of his stupidity, Brother Zhang had kept him.
Brother Zhang ignored him and looked at the others.
“What do you all think?”
The female players thought for a while. Actually, they wanted to say that, in the information they heard, there were people who guessed that Gu Yian might have killed her roommate, but Brother Zhang’s thoughts at this time were clearly biased towards Gu Yian.
One female player represented them and said, “We might need more clues.”
They were tactfully saying they didn’t fully believe Brother Zhang’s words.
Brother Zhang heard this and said, “Look, you don’t believe what I’m saying.”
The female players were a little embarrassed by Brother Zhang’s words.
Brother Zhang continued, “You all know not to completely believe a person’s words. Ghosts are turned from people, so you’re actually going to believe a ghost’s words?”
His words shook the thoughts of the players present.
Indeed, even living people couldn’t be trusted, so dead ghosts couldn’t be trusted even more.
The male player asked, “Brother Zhang, where are we going to search for clues? We already looked on the internet. You said those new people who were killed by the spirit were just victims who got involved, and that searching for clues on them is no use at all.”
Brother Zhang answered in a deep voice, “We’re going to find someone. We’re going to find Gu Yian. We’ve heard what the ghost said, now we’ll listen to the person.”
Through the meeting with the spirit last night, he already discovered that it was hard to deal with.
The difficulty of this game was much harder than what he guessed before.
He had to meet Gu Yian today and understand the actual situation of the spirit from her.
He wanted to know, more than anyone else, how Gu Yian escaped the spirit’s pursuit so that the spirit could only find players to kill her.
~~~
Ding dong! Ding dong!
The bell rang after class.
After her enlarged class, Gu Yian collected her textbooks. She opened her backpack and was about to put her books inside when she saw a familiar notebook quietly lying there.
Her action of putting the books inside paused.
The people in the class gave the place where Gu Yian was a wide berth, one after another, before they left the classroom.
Gu Yian hesitated and then took out the notebook.
She opened to a page at random, picked up a pen, and wrote a sentence on it.
“When did you come here?”
Gu Yian didn’t bring it out at all today.
Under the line of words that Gu Yian just wrote, Lu Zize’s answer appeared in an instant.
“Just now.”
Gu Yian didn’t believe him.
For Lu Zize’s words, it was enough to listen to them, but she must never believe them.
Trusting him would make her be miserably deceived.
At any rate, Gu Yian didn’t believe him.
Lu Zize, who was a notebook nowadays, could still guess Gu Yian’s thoughts as always.
His words emerged on the paper, one by one.
“If I say I’ve been here all this time, will you believe me?”
Of course Gu Yian didn’t believe this either.
She suspected he deliberately angered her today, making her not carry him with her this morning, likely to escape the monk coming to the classroom before class to examine her.
The notebook felt wronged and new words immediately appeared.
“You don’t believe anything I say. Do you want me to dig out my heart to show you?”
Gu Yian instantly wrote below these words, “No need.”
With Lu Zize’s mental state, she was really afraid she would see a bloody heart in the next second.
Speaking of which, Gu Yian suddenly recalled how she seemed to have seen one at the end of her first game.
She commanded herself not to remember this incident.
Gu Yian looked at the notebook and saw that under her two words, “No need”, there was a single line that drew the outline of a large heart.
Inside the heart, single strokes gradually became clearer and formed six letters, Gu Yian.
A horizontal arrow beside this pointed to the center of the heart.
One remark slowly appeared next to this arrow, just like how that person spoke leisurely.
“My heart.”
Gu Yian’s hand turned and she snapped the notebook shut.
That was fake at a glance.
