The Trial Game of Life

The rain started at 11:30 in the morning and stopped at 7:30 in the evening. 

As it rained, the sky turned dark, making people’s hearts gloomy and easy to feel dejected, yet also easy to become irritated.

The girl who was live streaming was killed in her rental apartment, and no one knew who the murderer was.

Tang Cuo looked at the darkened screen and didn’t move for a few seconds. The screen was black but the sound was still on. It turned dim because someone was blocking the camera.

He could clearly hear the girl’s stifled cry for help, the clanging of the chair falling to the ground amidst her struggle and the sound of her being dragged away.

The time was 1:03 in the afternoon.

She was a game live streamer. Did this have anything to do with the student who was chided by his parents for showering the live streamers with expensive gifts? Tang Cuo creased his eyebrows, feeling as though the sound of raindrops was right next to his ears and the temperature around him had suddenly dropped sharply.

He stood up and looked at the entire cemetery. Besides the fact that the formation of cell phone tombstones here was creepy and absurd, outside the cemetery, everything was engulfed in complete darkness, just like the arena he was sent to on the day he died. He couldn’t escape at all.

After a while, his eyes fell on the phone screen again.

Who was the murderer? Who was the victim? He couldn’t find another connection for the time being, so he decisively put this phone down and picked up the takeaway staff’s phone, continuing his investigation. 

His movements seemed to become a tad faster.

Xiao Tong propped his chin and solemnly watched him. He wanted to take a sip of coffee but found that it had gone cold. He suddenly smiled, put the cup down, then once again, he carefully gazed at Tang Cuo to continue passing his judgment.

This little friend is playing the game so seriously, what a delightful sight.

On the monitoring screen, Tang Cuo was thinking while walking around. If the takeaway staff failed to deliver the meal in time because of the incident at Xishan Road, and the person who ordered the meal failed to eat it in time, what chain reaction would happen?

A moment later, after meticulous consideration and elimination, Tang Cuo finally found the tombstone of the one that he suspected to be the orderer.

The phone interface showed his company group, where the leader was lecturing and the employees were sending flowers and applauding emojis. It was a neat row of copy-and-paste.

The orderer didn’t say anything, so the leader @ him and asked him why he didn’t answer.

Manager Wang: “@Chen Jun Have you seen the latest messages? Why didn’t you reply? Do you have any objection to what I just said? Feel free to say it.”

Manager Wang: “We are an inclusive and loving company like a big family, we allow employees to have different opinions.”

Finance department – Sister Li: “@Chen Jun Indeed, Xiao Jun, what Mr. Wang said is all very important. You’re so young, you must take it to heart. This will help you in the future, you know?”

Jian Li: “Sister Li is right [Flowers].”

……

Unsurprisingly, the young man named Chen Jun exploded.

Chen Jun: “What’s my opinion? I have no opinion!”

Chen Jun: “I’m so busy every day that I can’t even eat lunch, and I have to suck up to you in this WeChat group, every day! Every day, you tell me that young people should work hard for the sake of our dreams and our future, but no one cares about how much I could earn! If I’m on the phone, you’ll say I’m not focused, if I’m not on the phone to listen to your preaching, you’ll say that I don’t fit in, that I don’t tag along well with this group!”

So Chen Jun, who was considered to not mix in well with the others, was fired, and thus out of rage, he lamented to the takeaway staff.

Tang Cuo searched and searched as he walked like the wind, a stern expression consistently worn on his face.

Another tombstone blew up behind him. Without turning his head back, Tang Cuo quickly locked his eyes on another phone screen, then he sat down to check. This was a Weibo interface where someone had posted a short video, and the location was Xishan Road.

It was the scene of the takeaway staff squatting down on the ground and sobbing hard. It made today’s rain seem exceptionally ruthless.

The words on Weibo were very intense, full of that sense of justice brimming with such fiery zeal. In the background was a messy crowd that was unanimously looking in a certain direction. Tang Cuo guessed that was the location of the murder.

The heavy rain obscured everything and made people unable to see the tragedy that was happening amidst the falling raindrops. With his sharp eyes, Tang Cuo stared at the corner of the street behind the takeaway staff, where a tall man clad in black clothes and a pair of rain boots flashed by.

He was pushing a small cart, which contained two large white foam boxes covered with a black water-resistant canvas.

Everyone was watching the scene of the incident and not noticing anything behind them at all. Even the takeaway staff who was sitting only ten meters away didn’t notice — these two foam boxes might be hiding a corpse inside.

The man in the rain boots was also blocked, so he stopped and looked at the place where the crowd gathered. His face was shadowed by his cap and couldn’t be seen clearly.

The video was short, with no other content. Looking at the comments below, at first, they were flooded with condemnation and distress. Later, there were comments that believed the takeaway staff might also be in the wrong. Unsurprisingly, the two sides soon got into a heated argument.

Tang Cuo took a brief look. He observed things very quickly and had developed the ability to skim through keywords when he was in school, which made his reading speed at least 50% faster. In order not to miss the key information, he read almost all the comments he could turn to, but he didn’t detect anything useful.

“Ding dong.” One after another, ‘new message’ notifications reverberated through the cemetery.

Tang Cuo checked the phones one by one, and when he came back to the very first phone, he found that the girl named ‘Pao Qi’ had refreshed the Moment once more.

Pao Qi: It’s terrible. There was an incident on Xishan Road. It’s said that the boyfriend and girlfriend broke up, then the boy stabbed the girl [Scare]. Alas, this boy is too impulsive, and so is the girl. Why don’t you communicate well? It’s better to be like me, new-generation women are independent and don’t need boyfriends!

[Selfie.jpg][Selfie.jpg][Selfie.jpg]

It was Xishan Road again.

Tang Cuo suddenly had a bold guess. Was it possible that all the 99 people in this cemetery had been to Xishan Road?

At the same time, in the asylum, Zheng Yingying, who was dragged into the consulting room, was tied to the bed by metal shackles. There were three monster doctors here, one on the left, one on the right and one at the end of the bed, but they didn’t immediately take action. They approached Zheng Yingying leisurely, as if they were checking her, nodding their heads as they evaluated her worth.

A bloody stench attacked Zheng Yingying’s nose. Picking up the revolting smell, she turned to look at the ugly faces of the three monster doctors, but still she didn’t struggle.

Soon, the monster doctor on the right opened the case book in his hands and began to read out Zheng Yingying’s diagnosis report: “Paranoid personality disorder, with a serious tendency to resort to violence. She shouldn’t be in contact with others, and isolated treatment is recommended.”

Hearing this, Zheng Yingying’s expression changed at once, not because they said they wanted to isolate her for treatment, but because of the diagnosis’ content. She had heard it once, but never expected to hear it a second time. What personality disorder, what violent tendency? These people didn’t understand her at all, and they decided to lock her up with just this one sentence.

“I didn’t push him!” She stared at the monster doctor with her single intact eye that overflowed with rage and loathing: “I had cancer and was already dying, why do you have to talk about me like that?!”

“Hold her down. Get ready to inject sedatives!” The intelligence of the monsters here was far above that at Jin Cheng’s gate. Not only could they speak human words, but they also could carry out basic behavioural routines.

Two monsters stepped up on each side to hold down the resisting Zheng Yingying, while the remaining monster pulled out a huge syringe. The sedatives in the syringe were red.

Like blood.

The needle tip gleaming with a cold light kept coming closer, slowly magnifying in Zheng Yingying’s eyes. She struggled fiercely, but her body was very tightly pressed down.

But would it end just like this?

The moment the needle pierced her skin, the monster doctor let out a creepy “hoho” laughter. The tingling sensation made Zheng Yingying’s struggle reach its peak. She gritted her teeth and pulled one hand out of the metal shackles without a care about the pain she was going through — her hand was already incomplete for it missed a pinky finger, and now, as she brushed off more of its skin, her blood became a lubricant that finally set it free.

The moment she got out of the shackles, Zheng Yingying immediately pulled out the dagger and stabbed the nearest monster doctor in the chest. But, her hand was injured and she wasn’t strong enough. The dagger could only pierce two- or three-centimeter deep and was unable to move any further.

However, the [Nameless Dagger] was a weapon so terrifying that with only this little contact, it was enough to make the monster go mad. The monster’s soul seemed to be torn apart and its body was swept by intense pain. Every inch of its skin, every ounce of its flesh and every bone seemed to be suffering, as though it was under the torture of ‘lingering death’.凌迟 [ling chi], roughly translated as ‘lingering death’ or ‘death by a thousand cuts’, refers to a form of torture and execution back in pre-modern China, where a knife is used to methodically remove portions of the body over an extended period of time..

Zheng Yingying summoned all her strength to pull the dagger out, then stabbed another monster doctor with a twist of her wrist. But, this monster had been aggravated by the miserable state of his ally, thus instead of stepping back, he rushed towards Zheng Yingying. The little girl immediately fell back on the hospital bed, resulting in the dagger only able to slash the monster’s arm.

At the same time, the monster doctor at the end of the bed grabbed Zheng Yingying’s ankles again.

“Ah!” Zheng Yingying felt as though the bones at her ankles had broken. As the monster’s claws poked in, the severe pain caused her to tear up for a moment.

Her hands trembled violently, but the pain kept her completely conscious and allowed her to throw the dagger.

The [Nameless Dagger] brushed the monster doctor’s neck, scratched it and fell to the ground with a “clang”.

Distracted by the sound, the monsters turned back to look at the primitive dagger on the ground, their eyes brimming with fear and yearning, but neither of them dared to reach out to pick it up — it was just like an animal’s primal instinct when facing imminent danger.

The three monster doctors were all injured by the dagger, but not deeply enough. Becoming sluggish after being stabbed in the chest, the first monster roared loudly and was about to dash towards the hospital bed. Its eyes had turned completely red, as though it now only wanted to tear Zheng Yingying into pieces.

At this critical moment, Zheng Yingying grabbed her cloak and wrapped it around the hand that had escaped the shackles, then she blocked the monster’s gigantic, bloody mouth. Those fangs clearly wanted to bite deep into her arm, but they weren’t able to pierce through the cloak and even almost broke upon contact.

Zheng Yingying’s eyes gleamed a little. The dagger once again appeared in her palm, and with a flip of her wrist, it landed into the monster’s jaw.

After being stabbed twice, the monster totally went crazy and slumped to the ground in pain, unable to get up at all.

Zheng Yingying used the cloak to protect herself while fighting with the other two monsters, but even though the cloak had high defence capability, it wasn’t a hard armour. Her bones were smashed and her internal injuries continued to accumulate.

The monster doctors finally managed to suppress her, and the huge needle plunged down again, injecting the red liquid into her body. The icy cold sedatives made Zheng Yingying’s body quiver. She regained a tinge of sanity from the pain and, once again, struggled extremely hard.

The more she struggled, the more unstable the needle became, and the injection was interrupted.

Over and over again.

She was taking a gamble.

In fact, the curse’s impact was ongoing. When the two monster doctors fought with her, she had slashed them several times. As long as she lasted long enough, they would fall down first.

What was more, the [Nameless Dagger] had a devouring effect, and their powers would continue to be absorbed into her body. Although their strength wasn’t high enough and couldn’t provide her much, to Zheng Yingying at the present, it was no different from the Elixir of Life.

Eventually, with two loud “thud”, the monster doctors slumped down, and the wounds on their bodies caused by the [Nameless Dagger] turned as black as thick ink. At a glance, the sight could make anyone scared stiff.

On the hospital bed, Zheng Yingying didn’t move. As her red blood spread on the red cloak, it was difficult to tell if it was the colour of blood or the cloak itself.

The huge syringe fell to the ground, with about a quarter of the liquid sedatives still left in it.

A crow standing on a tree outside the window nodded its head with satisfaction, but it didn’t come closer.

Suddenly, the door of the consulting room was pushed open, then an ordinary-looking male player walked in, stopped in front of the hospital bed and looked at Zheng Yingying with a complicated expression.

It was apparent that he had been waiting outside the door for a long time, but when he heard the movements in the room, he never came in.

At this moment, his gaze shifted from Zheng Yingying’s intact eye to the dagger she was clutching. He swallowed hard, looked at her face again with uncertainty and hesitantly stretched out his hand.

His fingertips slowly got closer to the [Nameless Dagger]. The initial hesitation gradually turned into resolution, and the light in his eyes became brighter. But just as he was about to touch the dagger, Zheng Yingying suddenly opened her eyes and sat up, hitting him hard in the shoulder and knocking him to the ground. Recklessly, she rushed off the bed and pressed him down.

Petrified, the man immediately reached down to his waist in an attempt to draw his blade, but Zheng Yingying’s dagger was already on his neck, making him unable to move.

A drop of blood dripped from Zheng Yingying’s chin to his cheek.

“Huanhuan.” Zheng Yingying’s said with a hoarse voice, then the corners of her swollen mouth tugged up into a grin: “Bad boy.”