Self-Deception

The investors of Bishuiwan Manor have quite a perverted hobby; the mirror wall in the female employees' changing room is actually a one-way mirror that allows people to observe the inside from the outside, which leaves Ning Zhe feeling deeply puzzled.

To build such a luxurious project in a place like Bishuiwan, one needs both immense financial resources and extensive connections. For a man who meets these two conditions, sleeping with a movie star wouldn't be difficult, so why resort to such dangerous, petty antics just to peek at his own female employees changing clothes?

Ning Zhe cannot understand the twisted fetishes of the manor's investors, but there is no denying that some people simply have such predilections.

And there are quite a few such people.

Leaving the changing room, Ning Zhe walks quickly to the second floor, enters the room of Baizhi, and meets Feng Yushu and her daughter.

Just after entering, Ning Zhe takes off his suit, his short, messy hair transforms into long hair pinned behind his head, and his shirt and long pants shift into a form-fitting waiter uniform, his two long legs wrapped in flesh-colored stockings.

"Ning Zhe?" Feng Yushu, sitting on the bed, looks curiously at him as he enters the room in a woman's identity: "How did you..."

"Don't ask too many questions. Just do whatever I say later." Liu Yunzhi's high-pitched voice emanates from Ning Zhe's throat: "Where is Baizhi?"

"She... is asleep." Feng Yushu shakes her head, turning her head to look at her daughter, who is curled up on the bed like a caterpillar, and sighs softly.

Baizhi truly treats this place as if it were a dream, unable to distinguish reality from illusion, and the whole person has become very strange.

"I feel like she is acting very strangely. Whether it's her manners or her speech, she doesn't seem like the person I usually know; it's as if she's someone else entirely." Feng Yushu says softly: "Azhi is a very quiet child. Although she doesn't have many friends, she is gentle to everyone, even if only on the surface, but today..."

"Perhaps what you usually know isn't the real her?" Ning Zhe says nonchalantly: "Get ready and come out. We are about to begin."

"Okay." Feng Yushu stands up from the bed, follows Ning Zhe out of the room, and arrives in the hallway.

The corpse of the electrician that had been possessed by a ghost earlier still lies by the balcony, unmoved.

"Listen, what you need to do is very simple." Ning Zhe takes a flashlight from his pocket and places it in her hand:

"When I count to three, you turn on the flashlight and shine it on my shadow. The ghost will be attracted over very quickly."

"If nothing goes wrong, the ghost will possess that corpse to kill me. I need you to stare at it fixedly; watch the entire process of the ghost killing me without blinking an eye."

"I will be killed by the ghost in the identity of Liu Yunzhi. After I die, you must turn off the light immediately. There can be no delay, do you understand?"

"I understand." Feng Yushu grips the flashlight tightly and nods solemnly.

She understands what Ning Zhe is doing now. He has advanced to the final step; he is preparing to use a close-range death to test the specific trigger conditions for the ghost's killing.

"Before we start, I have one question." Feng Yushu suddenly asks again: "Why Liu Yunzhi? Why not that Li Ge?"

Ning Zhe has already stolen the identity of "the Li Ge that Xie Ya'an knows." Although Old Li is currently on the verge of death, he is still alive. Why didn't Ning Zhe use his identity to conduct the experiment instead of going through all the trouble to re-steal the identity of Liu Yunzhi?

"Because Old Li's identity is not complete enough." Ning Zhe says flatly.

"Not complete enough? What does that mean?" Feng Yushu is even more confused.

"Exactly what it sounds like. Alright, time waits for no one. Let's begin."

"Mm."

Feng Yushu nods and flicks the switch on the flashlight. A colorless white light shines out, dispelling the darkness in front of them and projecting the silhouette of a woman in a dress onto the wall. The corpse belonging to the electrician lies not far from Ning Zhe.

Ning Zhe waits quietly for the arrival of the ghost, his heart completely calm.

He does not explain to Feng Yushu the reason for choosing Liu Yunzhi, because that reason involves the underlying logic of the Taiyi rules. The rules are the lifeblood of the ghost, and also the lifeblood of Ning Zhe himself. The more people who know the detailed intelligence, the more dangerous he becomes.

Reviewing the rules of Taiyi once more:

[When someone mistakes Taiyi for someone they know, using the erroneous cognition as a medium, Taiyi can steal the corresponding person's identity and related memories.]

Simply put—whoever you think he is, that is who he is.

A person is the sum of all their social relationships. An individual's image appears differently in the eyes of different people. A person's identity can be subdivided into the son known by a mother, the brother known by a friend, the student known by a teacher... and so on.

The same identity is dissected into slices of identity from different angles in the different perspectives of different people. Only when all the slices overlap does a complete person exist.

When Taiyi disguises itself as Person A, the more people who know A that it successfully deceives, the more identity slices Taiyi acquires, and the more complete the theft of A's identity becomes.

Complete to a certain degree, it can even deceive the rules—even the rules of the Snake God Zhaoyou.

When Ning Zhe violated a Death Taboo in He Family Village, enough villagers mistook him for the Snake God. The Snake God identity he possessed was complete enough to deceive the rules, shifting the Death Taboo punishment he was supposed to suffer onto the Snake God.

But the "Old Li" identity Ning Zhe currently possesses is not complete enough.

He only possesses the single slice of "the Old Li that Xie Ya'an knows," at most plus that of Liu Yunzhi.

If these two were Old Li's parents or siblings, or other very close people who understood Old Li deeply enough, Ning Zhe might have been able to steal a sufficiently complete identity through their cognition, but that is not the case.

They are merely ordinary colleagues. Their understanding of Old Li is one-sided and incomplete. Such a clumsy performance cannot deceive the rules.

So, what is the fastest way to steal the most complete identity, allowing Ning Zhe to obtain a life for trial and error as soon as possible?

Or to ask it another way: In this world, if you had to find the person who knows you best, who would that person be?

The answer is yourself.

No one knows you better than yourself, not even a psychologist who can see through your inner thoughts.

Through the one-way mirror wall in the changing room, Ning Zhe successfully deceived Liu Yunzhi, making her believe that the reflection in the mirror was herself, thereby stealing the most complete identity to date.

There is no deception harder to see through than deceiving oneself, and there is no one who knows Liu Yunzhi better than Liu Yunzhi.

The flashlight beam spills onto Ning Zhe's dress, making the flesh-colored stockings on his legs look like white silk. The silent time passes quietly. Suddenly, a sound comes from the hallway; the corpse stands up.

The ghost has arrived.