Baizhi

To keep this crumbling, dilapidated building standing, Ning Zhe must ensure the stability of its foundation—namely, the false perception Feng Yushu holds, where she mistook him for a Ghost due to that phone call.

Every advantage he currently possesses is built upon a lie. Once the truth is revealed to Feng Yushu and her misconception is corrected, total collapse and a complete loss of the game await Ning Zhe.

Therefore, Ning Zhe knows clearly what the top priority is right now: "I must never let Feng Yushu know the truth; I must never let her perception change."

And to achieve this goal, the most convenient method is:

--Kill Feng Yushu.

Only the thoughts of the dead will never change. Once Feng Yushu is dead, her erroneous perception can never be corrected, and Ning Zhe will remain in an invincible position from then on. Even if he has to face the unpredictable and bizarre Ghost of the Rules, he still has plenty of time and resources to wear it down.

But...

"Aunt, do you want to live?" Rapid footsteps echoed through the empty street as Ning Zhe suddenly asked this.

"Eh? Of course I do. No one wouldn't want to live, right?" Feng Yushu didn't quite understand why he would suddenly ask such a thing.

"I'm asking you." Ning Zhe corrected her: "I'll be blunt. I don't think you are a strong person. Whether it's your status as a member of the upper class or your pampered life, both dictate that you, Aunt, lack experience in facing setbacks and danger, and lack the ability to handle pressure."

"Compared to Ye Miaozhu, who has experienced her father's bankruptcy and family restructuring, your life has hardly faced any major blows. I can see this from your confused eyes and cowardly behavior."

"In other words, Aunt, you are the eye-candy heroine in a horror movie who is responsible for screaming, the damsel in distress in a hero-saves-the-beauty trope. But we aren't acting in a play right now. The Ghost is not a director, and it won't give you more screen time to boost ratings just because you are pretty and have a good figure."

"Surviving in the cracks of the rules and witnessing the bizarre and unpredictable deaths of others requires enduring immense, immense, immense psychological pressure, and I don't think you have the resilience to withstand this pressure for long without breaking down. In other words, you should have died long ago."

But the reality is that when the threat of death approached, Ye Miaozhu was easily broken by Ning Zhe's understated words, and even someone as meticulous as Zhang Yangxu made irrational decisions, leading to his identity being usurped by the Ghost... Feng Yushu is far more fragile and cowardly than those two, yet it is she, the fragile one, who has held on until now.

"Logically, you, who should have broken down the most, have instead held on until now. This shows that you, Aunt, want to live more than anyone else... Your desire to survive is extremely strong, so strong that you would pay anything to leave this place alive. You even hinted that you could offer yourself to me, although I didn't pay you any mind, but for your status and upbringing, that is clearly unimaginable."

As Ning Zhe spoke, Feng Yushu's wrist, held in his palm, struggled slightly. He continued: "The desire to survive is a person's most basic instinct, but your desire to survive is so strong that it has affected your normal physiological limits. This is truly rare."

"--So, why do you want to live so much? Is there any reason?"

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

After a long while, she finally spoke: "Because I have a daughter."

"I see." Ning Zhe roughly understood.

Women are weak, but mothers are strong?

Ning Zhe had no interest in continuing to pry into other people's family affairs, but Feng Yushu continued on her own:

"My daughter's name is Baizhi, and she is a very well-behaved girl."

"My husband is a workaholic, completely devoted to his career. He doesn't care about family matters at all, and he doesn't care about our daughter's studies or growth. I'm not very good at raising children. Since she was little, Azhi has been no different from a child from a single-parent family. It's so pitiful, so pitiful..."

"...But she is very precocious. From a young age, she knew how to take care of herself. I never had to worry about her life or her studies. I really wanted to care for her more, but I didn't know where to start. I went through that age too, and I know how sensitive the minds of teenage girls are. I was afraid of doing more harm than good..."

"Azhi is truly a very, very good child. I want to give her all my love... but she matured too quickly and became independent too early. She closed off her heart early on and kept to herself at school, leaving her clumsy mother not knowing how to convey her voice to her. I watched her grow up day by day, but the relationship between mother and daughter grew more and more distant, like strangers... Sometimes I can't help but wonder, is this beautiful young woman really born from my womb?"

Feng Yushu rambled on without any intention of stopping. In the past, she had always been cautious and kept silent, but once Ning Zhe brought up the topic of her daughter, she seemed to have endless things to say.

Ning Zhe did not interrupt Feng Yushu's rambling, treating it as listening to a soap opera. While listening, he led her quickly through the deserted streets, his attention highly focused, keeping an eye on every Stone Slab he had stepped on.

"...At the end of last year, Azhi's laptop broke. Her father wasn't home, and I don't know anything about computers. After I took it to the repair shop and got it fixed, the login password for some reason disappeared. I, I know it's wrong to snoop through a child's private belongings, but I really wanted to understand her. I really wanted to know what Azhi was thinking."

"I couldn't help but open her computer, and like I was possessed, I flipped through it randomly... I saw many bizarre, hardcore comics in the folders, as well as some very bloody and eerie horror games..."

"Then, I also saw an electronic diary Azhi wrote on a bookmark page called WPS notes."

Snooping through a diary... the traditional skill of Chinese parents.

Ning Zhe did not comment on this; he was used to it.

However, what surprised him was that Feng Yushu's daughter actually kept a diary. This girl named Baizhi didn't look like a normal person at all. Who keeps a diary, let alone an electronic version stored in the cloud, and keeps a bunch of bizarre comics and horror games on their computer? She was clearly a young lady from a wealthy family, yet a girl raised in a boudoir like this had such unique tastes.

Are all rich people this twisted?

Originally, Ning Zhe had just treated Feng Yushu's rambling as a lighthearted story to relieve the pressure of being forced into a Dead End by the Ghost. However, the next words Feng Yushu spoke made his whole body turn cold, and a bone-chilling sensation crawled up his spine to the Back of the Head.