Shen Mo made a sound of acknowledgment. A moment later he asked, “Do you regret it?”

Bai Youwei’s forehead rested on his shoulder, and she shook her head lightly.

She didn’t regret it. But…

“I’m scared.” Her eyes were closed as she murmured.

Shen Mo’s jigsaw piece had been used up in the third round of “A Friend’s Gathering.” Now her jigsaw piece had been used up in “The Final Bride.”

This meant that whenever they encountered a hopeless situation in future games, they would have no means of preserving their lives—only certain death.

To be sure, Bai Youwei still had a good many items on her.

But she had seen through it all now! Almost every item was designed to be used against other players—by eliminating other players, you gained advantages for yourself. If you truly found yourself in a must-die situation inside a game, items were useless.

Take the snowman summoned by the snowflake.

Bai Youwei believed that, used correctly, the snowman could be extraordinarily powerful. Yet in “The Final Bride,” the rule was that the Duke must kill one bride each night! No matter how powerful the snowman might be, it could not change that rule. At best it could let the one who used it escape temporarily—while the other players became the Duke’s targets.

That was also why Su Man had chosen not to use the snowflake at the time.

Bai Youwei was afraid.

She was afraid of facing a situation like this again—afraid of watching the people around her die one by one while she stood helplessly by.

The most terrifying thing is never death itself.

It is when you have, with great difficulty, built bonds with this world—and then you must witness those bonds being severed, shredded, and destroyed, one by one.

And in the end… you become alone again.

……

Bai Youwei took a deep breath, wrapped both arms tightly around Shen Mo’s arm, and said, “Let’s go to a labyrinth.”

“Go to a labyrinth?” Shen Mo was briefly taken aback.

—The Shanghai labyrinth had disappeared after being cleared three consecutive times, and there were no other labyrinths nearby.

“Before I get another jigsaw piece, I don’t want to enter any games for a while.” Her voice was low and despondent. “…I’m scared.”

This was the second time she had used the word “scared” since coming out of the game.

Shen Mo was silent.

Was he not afraid, after all?

When he had waited in the darkness, watching the dolls of Zhao Lanfen and Cheng Qian appear one after another, while Bai Youwei sent no news—had he not been sick with worry the entire time?

Thinking of her legs that could not walk, thinking of her personality that was prone to making enemies—no matter what, he couldn’t stop worrying… This time they had managed to escape safely, but what about next time? And the time after that?

In the ever-shifting rules of the game world, wanting to keep her safe was nothing but empty words.

Without a jigsaw piece, there was no way to protect the people you wanted to protect.

Shen Mo thought over all of this, then said slowly, “If we’re going to find a labyrinth… we can head south or north. But given the rumor that the north is safer, I think people will probably start concentrating there.”

“Labyrinths appear where populations are dense.” Bai Youwei understood what he meant. “We’ll go north.”

She paused, then couldn’t help but ask, “The north is safer—how did that rumor start?”

“It’s actually somewhat connected to Professor Song’s SCO organization,” Shen Mo explained. “Back before the widespread power outages, there was an interview report about the SCO on the internet. The researcher who accepted the interview offered a hypothesis: the anomaly in Earth’s magnetic field was most likely caused by a higher-dimensional force using the sun as a medium to radiate and deconstruct the Earth.”

“Using the sun… as a medium?” Bai Youwei seemed to grasp something. “That’s actually a rather interesting hypothesis.”

Although a higher-dimensional space appears more advanced than a lower-dimensional one, beings from a higher-dimensional space cannot enter a lower-dimensional one—just as humans cannot jump into a cartoon. But if both worlds have a sun, perhaps that could serve as a medium.