Chapter 16
The bullet comments instantly filled with horrified reactions. Everyone was so shocked by this guess that they couldn’t speak.
“Impossible... There’s no way! How could a player eat a monstrosity? No way!”
“Right! We must’ve missed it, but he secretly found an item in his room that could destroy monstrosities, then quietly killed it. Yeah, that has to be it.”
“Exactly, exactly. It has to be that. Newbies are usually pretty lucky, and none of us paid him much attention, so it must’ve been an item.”
“That newbie’s so lucky. I never found an item that could kill a monstrosity outright.”
“I’ve been here so long, and I haven’t even seen a single item, haha.”
“Who hasn’t, haha.”
The bullet comments burst into laughter, trying to use jokes and banter to dispel the fear rising in their hearts.
But another comment floated by at an inopportune moment: “Come to think of it, doesn’t that mean the monstrosity in Yin Xiu’s living room is gone? Yin Xiu didn’t see what just happened, so he has no idea the first monstrosity he encountered was fake?”
That comment all but confirmed their earlier guess, bringing everyone even greater unease.
It had imitated the rules monstrosity’s actions and taken its place. After killing the monstrosity that had been roaming the living room, it could completely take over its identity. If Yin Xiu didn’t discuss it with anyone, there was no way he’d notice.
Could it be... that the player everyone was seeing on their screens right now—Yin Xiu’s new roommate—was pulling the same trick?
In the darkness, the cold, handsome man smiled as he wiped the blood from his body with a towel. He cleaned himself up with the elegance of someone wiping his mouth after a meal, making it impossible to connect him with the eerie chewing sounds that had just echoed through the darkness.
But considering how he’d sat motionless in the darkness and kept smiling the whole time, everyone was now certain beyond doubt that this man was the thing that had impersonated the instance’s monstrosity!
And right now, only Yin Xiu was being kept in the dark.
“Fuck, that’s terrifying!! I don’t want a monstrosity staring at me all night while I’m trying to sleep!”
“I hope Yin Xiu realizes something’s wrong with this guy soon! He needs to watch out for him!”
“It’s easy for us to figure out from an omniscient perspective, but Yin Xiu might not notice. Besides, this guy’s deliberately hiding it from him.”
“This is kind of scary. Mainly because we don’t know what he’s after. He killed the other players earlier, but didn’t kill Yin Xiu.”
“He’s definitely going to torture him until the end of the instance before killing him! That’s what perverts do! This monstrosity’s a pervert too!”
“Mom, there’s a perverted monstrosity here!!”
Amid their wails, the bullet comments watched Li Mo sit in the room all night.
Not long after daybreak, Yin Xiu woke up.
He hadn’t planned to sleep—at least, he’d meant to stay on guard for a long time. But for some reason, under Li Mo’s gaze, drowsiness washed over him before long. Unable to fight it off, he fell asleep.
“Good morning.” Li Mo smiled as he greeted him in the room’s faint light.
He was still sitting in that chair, exactly as he had the night before. It seemed he really had sat there all night.
“Morning...” Yin Xiu replied coolly and immediately got up.
“We should go make breakfast,” Li Mo reminded him.
“Are you hungry?” Yin Xiu hadn’t expected him to be so eager to hurry him along.
“I ate last night, so I’m not hungry.” Li Mo’s curved eyes held an ambiguous smile. “But the girl next door is. She started knocking and calling for you as soon as it got light. I ignored her.”
“The little girl? Why didn’t you wake me?” Yin Xiu hurriedly opened the door and went out. Li Mo also got up and followed him.
“She was too noisy. I didn’t want her to disturb your sleep.”
Once Yin Xiu was standing in the clean, tidy living room, with not a thing out of place, he cast Li Mo a cool glance. “Next time, just wake me.”
Li Mo tilted his head slightly. “But I don’t want anyone disturbing your sleep. You look so good when you’re asleep, like a cold corpse, completely motionless.”
Yin Xiu ignored him and went straight back to the little girl’s room.
The bullet comments asked nervously, “Does Yin Xiu really not react at all to the weird things he says?”
“Why doesn’t Yin Xiu ask him what he ate last night?!”
“He said he likes Yin Xiu looking like a corpse when he sleeps! Why doesn’t Yin Xiu think that’s weird?!”
“Yin Xiu’s too calm. He makes me feel like I’m the weird one!”
“The guy above is the weird one. Yin Xiu really does look like a corpse when he sleeps. He’s pale, quiet, and limp, lying there all night without moving an inch—and he’s a very good-looking corpse, too.”
“Bro, stop replying to me. I can’t keep up with your train of thought.”
“Maybe it’s because he’s always been kind of corpse-like? Yin Xiu’s expression is so blank, he barely reacts to anything, and he’s so pale. He really does look like a walking corpse.”
“Damn it, can you guys focus on the important part?! That guy said he likes Yin Xiu looking like a corpse! Could he kill Yin Xiu just so he can see him actually turn into one?!”
“We can only hope Yin Xiu gets lucky... There’s still hope as long as he realizes the other guy isn’t human.”
Under everyone’s tense gaze, Yin Xiu left Li Mo behind in the living room and went into the little girl’s room.
The cozy little room that had been perfectly intact yesterday was now a complete mess. The bed was overturned, books were scattered everywhere, the carpet had been torn to shreds by something, and even the door was covered in terrifying scratch marks. It seemed some monster had rampaged through the entire room last night.
The moment he entered, the little girl rushed into Yin Xiu’s arms, sniffling and crying. “Big Brother, I’m scared!”
Yin Xiu silently looked around the room, then lowered his eyes to look at the little girl.
There were signs that some monster had rampaged through the room, but the little girl was completely unharmed. To keep her from coming out, he’d locked the door from the outside last night, so there were only scratch marks on the door, and all the damage was confined to the room.
“Hold out your hand.” Yin Xiu crouched down and held out his palm to the little girl.
The little girl wiped her tears as she placed her small hand in his.
Her hand was perfectly unharmed, but there were wood chips under her fingernails. Comparing them with the scratches on the door, it was hard not to guess what had wrecked the room.
Since he’d known from the start that the little girl could turn into a monster and kill people, this wasn’t surprising.
Mom’s note, Rule Five: At night, you must stay in your own room and sleep. No matter what the room looks like when you wake up, that’s normal.
Clearly, this wasn’t the first time the little girl had done this. A repeat offender, huh.
“Big Brother, I’m so scared...” The little girl threw herself into Yin Xiu’s arms, tears in her eyes. “It’s so scary here...”
Yin Xiu guessed that she knew she could turn into a monster, but that her nighttime transformation was unconscious, so she must have been startled when she woke up and saw what was around her.
“It’s okay.” Yin Xiu patted the little girl’s back. “I’ll clean everything up for you in a bit.”
The little girl trembled slightly in Yin Xiu’s arms. Perhaps because of her fear, her appearance began to change too. Black liquid seeped from her eyes, like tears or something else, and slid down her cheeks. Wherever it touched, her skin twisted and changed.
She reached up to touch her face, trembling. “Big Brother, I’m so scary... Am I about to turn into a monster?”
Seeing her mind begin to waver, and wanting to keep her from saying she wanted a mirror to see what she looked like, Yin Xiu spoke first. “Aren’t you a cute little girl? What part of you looks like a monster?”
“I don’t?” The little girl rubbed her face. She felt the parts that had warped and the black liquid spilling from her eye sockets, and her voice shook. “I don’t look like a monster? Am I cute? Am I really still cute? I’m about to turn into the monster Mom’s afraid of. Mom won’t come back.”
The more her emotions wavered, the more distorted she became. Even her entire head was becoming less and less human.
Facing the grotesque little girl whose head defied description, Yin Xiu didn’t even blink. He nodded calmly. “You’re cute. You don’t look like a monster at all.”
The little girl’s body trembled. Black liquid streamed from her pupils as she repeatedly asked, “Am I really cute?”
“Cute.”
“I don’t look like a monster?”
“No.”
With each calm reassurance from Yin Xiu, the little girl’s appearance gradually recovered, slowly turning back into that of an ordinary girl. Even her tears became clear and clean again.
“Big Brother is so nice.” The little girl threw herself into Yin Xiu’s arms, sobbing, and it seemed everything was back to normal.
The viewers silently shifted their gaze to the rooms of the other players who had triggered this event. On-screen, the little girl was curled up alone in her room, trembling in fear. She kept twisting and warping in her terror until she turned into a horrific monster, then smashed through the door with a crash and rushed out to attack the player inside. Her distorted form was so terrifying it was impossible to tell she had once been a little girl.
And Yin Xiu really could look at a face twisted like that and call it cute.