The battle royale that ended before it began

"No! He's lying!" Su Mo shook his head frantically. "That Ghost doesn't leave any traces when it kills!"

"You're not an employee of One-Horn Game, so how did you know his surname was Ma? Why did you call him Manager Ma too?" Xia Yang turned to look at Su Mo.

"The Ghost told me! It knew Manager Ma! The Ghost died suddenly from working overtime! I really didn't do anything!" Su Mo was on the verge of tears. All he wanted was to work hard and make a living, but fate insisted on pushing him in some bizarre direction.

"We should restrain both of them first." Gao Ming looked around, instinctively searching for rope or something similar.

"Believe me! He's really a Ghost! This Delivery Worker was in the elevator with a corpse, and he tried to kill me!" When Manager Ma heard Gao Ming suggest tying him up, he seemed afraid of losing his freedom. He shouted as he ran toward the Emergency Stairwell, "He'll kill all of you! The Ghost is possessing him!"

Manager Ma shoved open the Safety Door and ran downstairs toward the floor that housed Unicorn Game Studio.

"Who do you think is good, and who's bad?" Xia Yang didn't follow him. Instead, he turned to Gao Ming.

"Keep an eye on the Delivery Worker. I'll go explain the situation to everyone." Gao Ming ran back down the corridor to Nightlight Game Studio. The employees hadn't taken the text messages on their phones seriously at all.

"Wei Dayou still isn't back?" Gao Ming looked inside. Several more workstations were empty, and only Wang Momo, an intern, had obediently stayed in the office. "Why did Li Jie and Zhang Wang leave too?"

"I think they went to the bathroom."

"Stay in the office. When they come back, tell them not to go out again, no matter what!" Gao Ming took out his phone and started calling, but he couldn't get through to a single colleague. "The game covers four floors. There are employees from other studios here besides Nightlight Studio. We have to gather everyone together within an hour!"

Gao Ming had no idea how many living people were working overtime on these four floors. Although the game had given the players an hour's grace period, it was still extremely difficult.

Unable to reach his colleagues, Gao Ming ran to the storage room. In the romance game, Xuan Wen was the Psychopathic Serial Killer. She had eyes that could see through people's hearts, along with intelligence and emotional awareness far beyond those of ordinary people.

With her there, Gao Ming would have a tremendous amount of help.

When he pushed open the storage room door, Gao Ming saw a very unusual sight.

Perhaps because Xuan Wen didn't belong in this game, the shadows were violently rejecting her, trying to drag her into the depths of the darkness.

Shadows coiled around Xuan Wen's body. The black veins that had surfaced on her skin had sunk back into her flesh, and she radiated an aura that made people keep their distance.

"If I hadn't absorbed those ten thousand people's emotions, I probably wouldn't have been able to play this game with you either." Xuan Wen looked at Gao Ming with bloodshot eyes. She seemed to have endured the most painful stage and was beginning to get used to the jumble of voices and extreme emotions in her head.

"You woke up at just the right time. Another game has been triggered." Gao Ming helped Xuan Wen up. Her skin felt strange against his palms because it had no warmth at all, like a corpse's. "Why do I feel like you've become a little different from your usual self since entering the game?"

"Don't you like it?" Large amounts of shadow still gathered around Xuan Wen. "Didn't you say it tasted better at room temperature, without ice?"

"I was talking about milk tea."

Gao Ming tried to pull Xuan Wen out of the shadows, but the instant he reached toward them, they lunged at him like sharks scenting blood!

At that critical moment, the chain containing Zhao Xi's memories and Obsession quietly appeared, sparing Gao Ming from the shadows' attack.

"Wearing someone else's bracelet, and even sharing a blood connection with him." Xuan Wen tilted her head and stared at Gao Ming's arm. He couldn't tell what she was thinking.

After leaving the rooftop-jumping game, Gao Ming had taken on Zhao Xi's pain and memories. The chain itself wasn't really a weapon; it was more of a shackle.

"So the blood vessels formed from Zhao Xi's memories can be used like this too?"

Working together, Gao Ming and Xuan Wen spent a long time dispersing the shadows covering her body, temporarily restoring her freedom.

"Why do these things keep targeting you?"

"I strayed from the path of fate that world designed for me. These shadows are correcting the error. That was probably why I couldn't enter Zhao Xi's game last time." Xuan Wen seemed to have figured a few things out. "I want to become a person like you, but apparently the Shadow World won't allow it. It wants to drag this entire city into the shadows."

"Let's leave that aside for now." Gao Ming took out his phone. "Did you receive this text?"

Xuan Wen opened her own phone. Her inbox was empty. She wasn't included among the game's players.

"You're not a living player. Were you assigned the role of the Ghost?" The possibility Gao Ming feared most was that Xuan Wen was the murderous Ghost—and that she happened to have lost control.

"Why are you so prejudiced against a character you designed yourself?" Xuan Wen slowly approached him. "You always assume the worst of me. Do I represent your dark side? Did you leave it to me to do the things you've always wanted to do but never dared? Is that why you created the Psychopathic Serial Killer?"

"I asked you one question. How many did you throw back at me?" Gao Ming opened the storage room door. "If it's not you, let's hurry up and find the real Ghost. We only have an hour."

Gao Ming had spent far too long helping Xuan Wen escape. "The supernatural entities in these games seem to have been given abilities by that unknown world. Zhao Xi, for instance, can survive jumping off a building and is immune to physical damage. What's your ability?"

"It's something to do with people's hearts. I can see and hear..." Xuan Wen stopped halfway through. She lowered her head in disbelief, then slowly lay down on the floor.

"What's wrong?"

"Someone's screaming." The smile on Xuan Wen's face suddenly turned strange. "It seems that sometimes people... are no different from Ghosts."

Realizing something bad had happened, Gao Ming immediately ran to Nightlight's office. The intern Wang Momo was still the only person inside.

"Where is everyone else?"

"I don't know!"

With Xuan Wen in tow, Gao Ming returned to the elevators. Su Mo was curled up alone in a corner, his face pale.

"Why are you the only one here?" Gao Ming grabbed Su Mo by his clothes. "Did anyone come by just now?"

"Someone was screaming in the stairwell. The guy watching me went downstairs to look for them." Su Mo no longer thought Gao Ming was a pervert. He clutched Gao Ming's arms with both hands. "Bro, I really am not a ghost! But I really did run into one today! It wants to toy with us until we're dead. Its mind is completely twisted!"

"Stay here." Gao Ming and Xuan Wen pushed open the Safety Door, and a heavy smell of blood hit them in the face.

The hour wasn't even up yet. The Ghost hadn't awakened, but someone had already been killed!

His heart pounding, Gao Ming pushed open the door to the twelfth floor. The corridor was deathly silent.

Then they reached the eleventh floor, where bloodstains and signs of desperate struggles began to appear on the floor.

"Someone is using this opportunity to hunt down the other employees!"

The Ghost's game had become a human's game, and its bloodshed and terror were even worse than if the Ghost had awakened.

There wasn't a single living person around. Only blood.

They pushed open the Safety Door to the tenth floor. Blood had splattered across the walls. Following the bloody shoeprints on the floor, Gao Ming made his way to the prop room at Unicorn Game Studio.

"The blood trail leads here."

Gao Ming took hold of the prop room's door handle. Just as he was about to open it, the shadows shrouding the floor actually began to recede!

The blood and stench faded along with the shadows, as though another world were swallowing them all.

"The game's over? Someone killed the person possessed by the Ghost?" Gao Ming looked at his phone. Only thirty-six minutes had passed since the game began. He hadn't even done much of anything yet.

"How cruel and insane!" Xuan Wen reached into the shadows. "Obviously, someone decided to kill everyone except himself to escape the game. He murdered the employees one after another and only stopped once he'd killed the unlucky person possessed by the Ghost."

Gao Ming remained silent. He had been wary of the supernatural entities in the games all along, but the cruelty people displayed was actually far more terrifying.

"We can establish four things. First, the killer must have experienced other games before. That's why he acted immediately after receiving the text and seeing the familiar shadows. Second, the killer is among the survivors. Third, he seems to have gained a little of a supernatural entity's power. Otherwise, he couldn't have killed so many people in such a short time." Xuan Wen walked up to Gao Ming. "Fourth, the killer wasn't me. We were together when it happened."

"I know it wasn't you." Gao Ming shoved open the prop room door. Dolls and figures tumbled onto the floor, but the blood and bodies were fading away with the shadows.

He searched the room and finally found only a Black-and-White Posthumous Photo. It was a group picture of Unicorn Game Studio's First Work Group. They were exceptionally skilled at their jobs and were also the studio's most fiercely competitive work group.

"There are seven people in this photo... seven living, breathing people."

Gao Ming's hand trembled slightly as he held the photo. Xuan Wen caught his wrist. "Are you feeling guilty? But what does any of this have to do with you? You're just a victim too. Even if you died to atone for it, other horrors would still appear."

"If I died, would the games I designed disappear?"

"No." Xuan Wen shook her head. "They would all spiral out of control, and this city would lose its only savior."

"You're pretty good at comforting people."

(End of chapter)