Baizhi

To keep this tottering, dangerous building standing, Ning Zhe had to ensure its foundation remained stable—that is, Feng Yushu's mistaken belief that he was a ghost because of that phone call.

Every advantage he had at the moment rested on a lie. If Feng Yushu learned the truth and her mistaken belief was corrected, everything would collapse, and Ning Zhe would lose everything.

So Ning Zhe knew exactly what he had to do first: "I absolutely can't let Feng Yushu learn the truth. I absolutely can't let her change her mind."

And the easiest way to accomplish that was:

—Kill Feng Yushu.

Only the dead never changed their minds. Once Feng Yushu was dead, her mistaken belief could never be corrected. Ning Zhe would be invincible from then on. Even if he had to face the bizarre and unpredictable rules-bound ghost, he would still have plenty of time and resources to wear it down.

But...

"Auntie, do you want to live?" Ning Zhe asked suddenly as his hurried footsteps carried him through the empty streets.

"Huh? Of course I do. Who wouldn't want to live?" Feng Yushu didn't understand why he'd suddenly asked.

"I mean you," Ning Zhe clarified. "I'll be blunt. I don't think you're a strong person. Your upper-class background and pampered life mean you've had little experience facing setbacks or danger, and you don't know how to handle pressure."

"Compared to Ye Miaozhu, who went through her father's bankruptcy and the breakup of her family, you've hardly experienced any major setbacks in your life. I can tell from the bewilderment in your eyes and the way you shrink back."

"In other words, you're the scantily clad heroine in a horror movie who spends the whole time shrieking, or the pretty character who gets rescued in some cliché hero-saves-beauty story. But we're not acting in a movie. The ghost isn't the director, and it won't give you more screen time just because you're beautiful and have a great figure to boost the ratings."

"Surviving in the narrow gaps between the rules, and watching other people die in bizarre, unpredictable ways—that takes an enormous, enormous, enormous amount of mental fortitude. I don't think you can withstand that kind of pressure for long without breaking down. In other words, you should have died already."

Yet when death drew near, Ye Miaozhu had been easily rattled by Ning Zhe's casual words, and even Zhang Yangxu, meticulous as he was, had made an irrational choice that let the ghost steal his identity... Feng Yushu was far more fragile and timid than either of them, yet somehow she—fragile as she was—had held on until now.

"By rights, you should have been the first to break down, but you've kept forcing yourself to hold on. That means you want to live more than anyone else... Your will to survive is incredibly strong—so strong that you'd do anything to get out of here alive. You even hinted that you'd be willing to sleep with me. I turned you down, but for someone of your background and upbringing, that must have been unthinkable."

As Ning Zhe spoke, Feng Yushu's wrist, held in his hand, began to struggle faintly. He continued, "The will to survive is one of a person's most basic instincts, but yours is so strong that it's pushing you past the normal limits of your body. That's rare."

"So why do you want so badly to live? Do you have a reason?"

Feng Yushu lowered her head and fell silent for a long time.

At last, she spoke. "Because I have a daughter."

"I see." Ning Zhe thought he understood.

Women might be tender by nature, but motherhood made them strong?

Ning Zhe had no interest in prying into someone else's family affairs, but Feng Yushu went on anyway:

"My daughter's name is Baizhi. She's a very well-behaved girl."

"My husband is a workaholic. He's devoted to his career and doesn't care about anything at home. He doesn't care about our daughter's studies or how she grows up, either. I'm not very good at raising children, and Azhi has practically grown up like a child from a single-parent family. She's had such a hard time..."

"...But she was mature from a very young age. She learned to take care of herself, and I've never had to worry about her, whether it was her daily life or her studies. I wanted to show her more affection, but I didn't know where to start. I was her age once, too. I knew how sensitive girls could be during puberty, and I was afraid I'd only make things worse..."

"Azhi really is such a good girl. I want to give her all my love... But she grew up too fast and became independent too early. She shut herself away, and she keeps to herself at school, too. Her clumsy mother doesn't know how to make her voice heard. I watched her grow up day by day, but the distance between us only grew. We became like strangers... Sometimes I can't help wondering if that graceful young woman really came out of my womb."

Feng Yushu prattled on without stopping. She'd always been careful to keep quiet before, but once Ning Zhe brought up her daughter, she seemed to have endless things to say.

Ning Zhe didn't interrupt her rambling. He treated it like an episode of some family drama on Douyin, listening as he hurried her through the deserted streets. His attention remained taut as he watched every flagstone they passed.

"...At the end of last year, Azhi's laptop broke. Her father wasn't home, and I don't know anything about computers, so I took it to a repair shop. After they fixed it, for some reason the startup password was gone. I—I know it was wrong to snoop through my child's personal things, but I wanted so badly to understand her. I really wanted to know what Azhi was thinking."

"I couldn't help opening her computer. I was like a woman possessed, rummaging through everything... I found a lot of really explicit, bizarre comics in her folders, along with some extremely gory and creepy horror games..."

"Then I saw the electronic diary she'd written on a bookmark page called WPS Notes."

Snooping through a diary... a classic Chinese-parent move.

Ning Zhe didn't comment. He'd seen it all before.

What surprised him was that Feng Yushu's daughter kept a diary. This Baizhi girl didn't seem like the respectable sort. Who respectable kept a diary, and an electronic one saved in the cloud at that? Her computer was full of bizarre comics and horror games, too. She was a rich family's sheltered young lady, raised behind closed doors, yet she had such unusual tastes.

Were all rich people this twisted?

At first, Ning Zhe had treated Feng Yushu's rambling as an entertaining little story to take his mind off the oppressive struggle to survive after being driven into a dead end by the ghost. But what Feng Yushu said next sent a chill through his entire body. An icy dread crawled up his spine to the back of his head.