Some Victim

With no lights, it took Li Sanli a great deal of effort to open the door again. Then he stood in the doorway and said to Zhou You,

"I haven't touched anything inside. That haunted table is in the bedroom, but I don't recommend going in to look. That thing is just too weird..."

Li Sanli was still rambling on, but Zhou You had already stepped toward the room.

"Hey, hey, hey! I'm not finished. Wait a second..."

Before Li Sanli could finish,

the iron door behind them suddenly slammed shut with a bang.

"...Was that you?"

The gaunt fat man slowly turned his gaze toward Zhou You, desperately hoping to hear a yes.

But the other man only shrugged, looking completely innocent.

"..."

Li Sanli rolled his eyes and promptly fainted.

Zhou You went over to him and gently pinched his philtrum. After confirming he was fine, he raised his hand and looked once more at the Brass Bell around his wrist.

Even now, the bell was still ringing. The problem was...

The sound was extremely faint. If you weren't paying attention, you could easily miss it.

Zhou You had never encountered anything like this.

In the previous Night Watchman scenario, even when he encountered the weakest entity, the Corridor Face, the bell had never rung this softly.

Before Zhou You could make sense of it, the curtains in the distance suddenly fell.

Then the entire room sank into darkness.

An ordinary person would probably have started screaming at the sight. But Zhou You...

After everything he'd been through, his heart was now rock-solid. He could probably watch Sadako crawl out of a television, calmly walk over, and ask her, "Yaranaika?" And this measly curtain was supposed to scare him?

Give me a break.

But the other party clearly knew this was only an appetizer. Whispers drifted through the room, seeming to come from right beside his ear and yet from somewhere far away. Just as he tried to listen closely, suddenly—

Smack!

A bright red bloody handprint appeared on the wall.

Then more and more red marks appeared, quickly spreading across the entire wall. The whole room seemed to turn scarlet, and the whispers became wails that rang right in his ears!

The problem was, the bell was still just as faint.

In fact, Zhou You couldn't sense any chill or murderous aura at all.

So he simply ignored the strange happenings around him, walked straight to the bedroom door, and slowly pushed it open.

There wasn't much furniture inside: just a bed, a wardrobe, and a rear-projection television.

But there were far more other things than he'd expected.

Skulls, tarot cards, strange-looking folk decorations, divination tools commonly used by Romani people...

He hadn't seen anything as disgusting as a Kuman Thong, but collecting so many items related to the occult was beyond what an ordinary person could manage.

"How big must Li Sanli and his girlfriend's nerves be, to sleep in a place like this..."

Zhou You carefully moved a Ultraman Buddha to one side, then looked toward the middle of the room.

A table stood there.

Compared to the outrageous objects around it, the table seemed rather ordinary. It looked like one of those mass-produced pieces from IKEA that cost two or three hundred yuan. The only thing that set it apart was the pile of yellow talismans plastered around it.

Zhou You took the yellow paper from his pocket and compared it. It was identical.

So he took two steps forward.

But the next moment, everything in the bedroom began to tremble. A shadow faintly appeared on the table, gathering like smoke until it revealed a woman's face.

She looked about eleven or twelve, an age when she should still have been in middle school. Yet her face held nothing but deep fear and madness.

Then came a shriek.

"Get out!"

The piercing scream swept through everything. Zhou You frowned, but still took another step forward.

"Don't come near me!!!!"

The ghost's face twisted more and more. Then the whole room began to scream. The deafening sound rang in his ears, so intense it nearly drove him mad.

But at that moment, a voice rang out, clear as day.

"Om."

In an instant, the entire scene shattered.

The ghost's eyes widened, but all color had vanished from them. It quickly came back to its senses and tried to scream again, but Zhou You had already forced himself through the exhaustion brought on by the True Word and closed in on it.

A sharp blade flashed through the air, gleaming with a bleak, cold light—the edge of the bloodstained blade. But just as Zhou You pinned down the spirit and was about to stab it, he suddenly frowned.

—An ill-timed talent had activated.

Under the influence of the Eye of Insight, countless images flashed before his eyes.

He saw an ordinary, warm daily life. He saw laughter shared with friends at school. But he also saw the tears and pleas for mercy when she was kidnapped, and the despair and screams as she was dismembered.

At last, all the images settled on one scene.

The ghost's body, shattered into pieces, and a strangely shaped ritual altar.

The next moment, everything vanished.

When Zhou You picked up the knife again, he saw something completely unexpected—

The ghost hadn't used the opening to attack. Instead, it had curled into a ball, cowering in the corner and sobbing as if terrified.

...Seriously, how was he supposed to bring himself to do it now?

If the other party had attacked him to kill the moment they met, or had already caused any deaths or injuries, then no matter how many reasons they had, he would have killed them without hesitation.

Just like Liu Shang and the security team captain in the Night Watcher. Good and evil would each be rewarded accordingly. It was the simplest, most down-to-earth moral principle his grandfather had taught him from childhood.

But this ghost hadn't killed anyone. It had only instinctively treated the room as its own territory and driven out everyone and everything that didn't belong there. And now it had lost its hostility. Of course, the main reason was...

Zhou You gently prodded it with the handle of his knife.

—Its sobbing immediately grew louder.

"Come on, don't do that. You're making it look like I'm bullying a kid..."

Zhou You let his shoulders sag helplessly.

—Now he really couldn't bring himself to do it. But he couldn't leave this thing here, either. Li Sanli and his girlfriend definitely wouldn't be able to handle it...

"So what am I supposed to do...? I can't exactly sell this thing to someone else so it can hurt them..."

Zhou You scratched his chin, then suddenly had an idea.

"Wait. I have to keep staying in that Weird Game lately anyway. My place will be empty, and the neighborhood isn't very safe. I'm worried about burglars, too. How about..."

"I just take the table to my place?"