Gu Jiu yawned, changed into her pajamas, and called to her boyfriend by the bed, “Ah Ji, come up quickly.”
Lu Ji responded with a soft “mm” and glanced at her.
The neckline of her pajamas was loose, and with a slight movement, it slipped off her shoulder, exposing a large part of her smooth, rounded skin. Her delicate collarbone was fully revealed, and her pale, luminous skin was almost dazzling, making the fine red dots on her skin stand out starkly against the flawless white.
As she prepared to burrow under the blanket, Lu Ji stopped her. “Ah Jiu, don’t sleep yet.” He pulled out a tube of white ointment. “Let me apply the medicine first.”
Medicine?
Gu Jiu quickly realized what he meant and tilted her head to glance at the dozen or so tiny red dots left on her shoulder.
These were the marks left when the ghost’s hair pierced her skin in the grand hall. The strands were so thin that, while the process had been painful and numbing, it hadn’t even drawn blood. If not for the remaining red dots on her skin, the minor injuries might have been entirely forgotten.
After a few hours, Gu Jiu barely felt anything and naturally didn’t care about such trivial wounds.
But Lu Ji clearly cared a lot.
So, she sat up again, smiling at him with a playful tone. “Then you’ll have to apply it for me. Make sure you don’t miss a single spot.”
Hmm, every single spot!
Lu Ji: “….”
Gu Jiu calmly removed her pajamas, crossing her legs as she sat there. Her water-like eyes were brimming with laughter as she gazed at the man beside the bed, whose face was now as red as a tomato.
After the medicine was applied, she slowly put her clothes back on. Then, with her soft, boneless body, she leaned into him, wrapping her arms around his neck.
“Ah Ji, do you have any injuries?” she asked.
“No…”
“I don’t believe you. Let me see!”
“…”
In the end, Lu Ji hesitated before shakily unbuttoning his shirt to let her check.
Unlike Gu Jiu’s flawless, radiant skin, Lu Ji’s complexion was unnaturally pale—almost sickly, like that of a vampire who had never seen sunlight.
As the shirt came off, the “delicate girl” before her transformed into a slender boy—clean, pure, and utterly adorable.
“It’s fine; really, no injuries,” Gu Jiu said with a gentle smile, her gaze wandering downward.
Hmm, so it wasn’t her imagination. Even if her boyfriend appeared to be a slim “girl” now, the monster lurking beneath the skirt was very much real.
Lu Ji clutched his shirt, his entire body seemingly about to burst into flames. After getting her approval, he hastily put it back on.
But just as he finished dressing, Gu Jiu pushed him onto the bed.
She pulled him into her embrace, resting her chin against his collarbone and planting a kiss on his lips. With great affection, she trapped the thin boy in her arms, offering the warmth of her big-sisterly embrace.
“Ah Ji, sleep now,” she murmured.
Lu Ji replied in a low voice, and as her breathing grew steady, he gently kissed her lips again before closing his eyes, a contented smile on his face.
—
Sunlight passed through the window.
Gu Jiu woke up to find herself lying face-down on a desk in a classroom.
The classroom was filled with students attending a lesson, and the clock above the blackboard showed 2:45 PM.
Shortly after she regained consciousness, other players in the classroom also woke up one after another. They glanced around the room, then at the clock, and couldn’t help but frown.
A new day had begun.
At 6:00 AM every morning, Shengying High returned to normal human order.
Players, regardless of what they were doing or where they were, would suddenly lose consciousness at 6:00 AM. Their awareness would only return at 2:45 PM, and they would find themselves back in the spot where they had entered the game world.
This meant that players had no idea what happened between 6:00 AM and 2:45 PM because their memories were completely blank for that period.
However, they didn’t feel any discomfort from the blackout. It was as if time had been fast-forwarded. The players understood that this was likely a rule of the game world or some mechanism to block their perception. Since there wasn’t much value in exploring it further, most players didn’t dwell on it.
Gu Jiu didn’t stay in the classroom for long. She got up and left.
Her first stop was the restroom to wash her face.
While she was washing up, a few truancy-prone girls with outrageous hairstyles barged into the restroom. They shut the door behind them and approached her with malicious intent, reaching out to grab her hair.
Gu Jiu calmly finished washing her hands, then turned and beat the girls up without hesitation.
After dealing with them, she didn’t even spare them a glance before leaving the restroom.
Not long after she left the school building, Gu Jiu ran into Chai Yingying. The two of them walked together toward the dormitory building.
Chai Yingying rubbed her neck and complained, “It’s always like this! I’m lying peacefully in bed in the dorm, and when I wake up, I’m slumped over a stone table in the pavilion. It’s ridiculous! I don’t even know when I ended up there, but judging by how much my neck hurts, I must’ve been there for over six hours!”
Gu Jiu consoled her, “I was slumped over too. Feel better now?”
“You were in the classroom. How can that compare to me being out in the pavilion, exposed to the wind and sun?”
…
As they chatted, they encountered members of the student council on patrol.
The student council at Shengying High held absolute authority. All student-related matters were handled by the council. During class hours, council members patrolled the campus. If you were lucky, you wouldn’t run into them, but if you did, you’d likely get written up.
Looking at these youthful boys and girls—and recalling the headmaster who, by night, had three-meter-long limbs and could tear players apart with his bare hands—all the players couldn’t help but think these student council members were adorable in comparison.
So, when dealing with them, Gu Jiu and Chai Yingying exercised extra patience, smiling generously to the point of overwhelming the shy young council members. Blushing and flustered, the council members ended up retreating on their own.
“If only the patrols at night were made up of these kids,” Chai Yingying sighed wistfully.
“Let’s not go there,” Gu Jiu replied. “If the student council gets too much power, what if they turn into monsters like the headmaster?”
Chai Yingying shuddered, then groaned, “You’re right. I shouldn’t hope for too much.”
The two arrived at the dormitory building and ran into the Dorm Supervisor.
The matron regarded them with a mix of resentment and fear. She didn’t dare block their way as she usually did, instead retreating into her room and watching them leave from a safe distance.
When Chai Yingying deliberately turned her head and smiled at the Dorm Supervisor, the woman quickly shrank behind the curtains, not daring to even breathe.
Chai Yingying couldn’t help but laugh out loud.
Even after walking a considerable distance, they could still feel the Dorm Supervisor’s complex and fearful gaze following them. Clearly, last night’s beating at Chai Yingying’s hands had left a lasting impression.
Upon reaching the dormitory on the fifth floor, Lu Ji was already waiting for them.
Sensing the mood, Chai Yingying tactfully slipped into the neighboring room, calling out to them, “I’m going to rest. You two, do whatever you want.”
Gu Jiu and Lu Ji sat in the room, doing nothing particularly inappropriate.
Gu Jiu retrieved the music box she had taken from the music classroom the previous night and placed it on the desk.
In the daylight, the red music box looked entirely ordinary—just a plain, unremarkable item devoid of any supernatural aura. However, when Gu Jiu tried to destroy it, she found it was indestructible.
So, even during the daytime, when the world reverted to normalcy, did these objects that appeared at night still retain some kind of supernatural protection?
To test her theory, Gu Jiu went next door and banged on the door until she woke up Chai Yingying, who had just fallen asleep.
Chai Yingying, with her hair disheveled and a face full of frustration, begrudgingly handed her the mini birdcage hanging from her waist before slamming the door shut to resume her beauty sleep.
The birdcage contained an eye that seemed lifeless, covered in a dull gray haze, lying quietly inside.
Gu Jiu opened the birdcage and took the eye out.
Holding it felt as though she were grasping a slimy, gelatinous ball. The sensation made her frown in discomfort. She then summoned the two eerie dolls resting in the dormitory’s shadowy corner.
The corner housed a miniature dollhouse that served as the two eerie dolls’ living space. When Gu Jiu rested, they stayed there as well.
“Lisa, can you eat this?” Gu Jiu asked.
Lisa, rubbing her drowsy eyes, glanced at the eye and nodded. It seemed like a delicious treat to her. Although the eye appeared disgusting and horrifying to the players, it was a delicacy to the eerie dolls.
Gu Jiu chuckled. “Alright, once this thing’s no longer useful, you can have it.”
The mermaid doll, who had been napping next to Lisa, immediately perked up, waving its arms and puffing up its cheeks as if to question why Gu Jiu hadn’t asked if he could eat it too.
The impartial guardian replied, “If Lisa wants to share with you, you can eat it. If Lisa doesn’t want to, then you can’t.”
Infuriated, the mermaid doll lunged at Lisa, wrapping his fish tail around her and strangling her in protest. If Lisa didn’t share, he’d just snatch the food later.
Lisa gave him a light shove, but when she realized she couldn’t push him off, she nonchalantly returned to her little dollhouse to sleep.
—
At 6:00 PM, the players and other campus inhabitants gathered in the cafeteria.
Three more players had died the previous night, leaving only 23 of them remaining.
Though they had grown accustomed to the sight of players dying, the memory of the dean tearing those three players in half still left them breathless with dread, adding a new layer of fear to this game world.
Gu Jiu and her group queued up for food.
Surprisingly, dinner tonight was not only abundant but also perfectly normal—living up to the standards expected of a prestigious school’s culinary team.
The cafeteria staff served food with ingratiating smiles, careful not to let even a speck of dirt touch their dishes. Their obsequious behavior was a stark contrast to their arrogance the day before.
It wasn’t just the players who noticed the change; even the usually indifferent students couldn’t ignore it.
They stared in surprise at Gu Jiu and her group, realizing that whatever had caused the cafeteria staff’s change was likely their doing.
Not long after they sat down, the dean appeared, her high heels clicking ominously against the floor.
The students, who had briefly seemed to relax because of the cafeteria’s unusual calm, immediately returned to their usual numb state. They ate their dinner silently, not daring to let their gazes wander even slightly.
The dean held absolute authority.
The players who had witnessed her monstrous transformation the night before were equally unnerved. Any thoughts they’d had of testing her, as Gu Jiu had, evaporated. Survival came first.
No one tattled that evening, and dinner passed peacefully.
Afterward, the students filed out of the cafeteria in a steady stream.
Gu Jiu and her group headed to the lake behind the cafeteria, standing by the water’s edge to wait for the water ghost to appear.
As it had the previous night, the water ghost slowly emerged from the depths, its pale, ghastly face glaring at them from beneath the dark surface of the water. Long black hair spread out around it, floating eerily.
Recalling the grotesque scene of the three eerie creatures devouring its hair the previous night, Chai Yingying tossed out the Glutton Ball.
As the water ghost’s hair reached toward them, the Glutton Ball opened its mouth and chomped down on the strands.
The water ghost glared resentfully at them, its expression darkening. It tried to drag them into the lake to take their place as substitutes, but the three were too strong, making its efforts futile. Its frustration grew.
Glug, glug!
Small bubbles rose to the surface, as if something else was emerging from the water.
The water ghost, which had been focused on its struggle with the group, suddenly froze. A look of terror appeared on its face before it abruptly vanished beneath the water. The hair that had reached the shore was quickly withdrawn, but the voracious ball, in the middle of its feast, rolled determinedly toward the lake and dove in after it.
The three of them kept their eyes fixed on the lake’s surface.
The bubbling grew louder and more frequent. Finally, a corpse slowly floated to the surface.
The face of the corpse was unmistakably that of the water ghost.
It was the water ghost’s own body.
A swarm of paper fish and turtles carried the corpse toward the shore.
As it neared the edge, the water ghost reappeared, its countless strands of hair flying toward the corpse, desperate to reclaim it. Its gaze, both shocked and furious, shifted toward the three on the shore, as if it couldn’t fathom that their target was its body.
Gu Jiu smiled warmly at the water ghost, but her words were anything but kind. “Ah Ji, pull it ashore.”
The Infernal Blood Whip shot out like a living snake, curling around the corpse with a sharp crack before dragging it to land.