The rain outside never let up.

Du Lai pulled up the hood of his hoodie. Clad in inconspicuous grey, he sprinted forward through the rainy night.

The woman’s mournful singing came and went, full of grief and sorrow — like this cold autumn rain itself, relentless and clinging, with a bone-deep chill woven through its lingering melody.

He followed the sound until he reached the courtyard wall of a household, where he sensed that the singing was close by. He deliberately slowed his pace, moving silently as he searched for the singing woman.

But the night was far too dark.

With the rain falling and not a lantern in sight nearby, the entire village was an inky blackness — even the road surface was barely visible.

He was just hesitating over what to do when that sound suddenly seemed to leap much closer —

As if it had appeared right behind him in an instant!

Terror surged through Du Lai’s chest. He dashed forward several steps and ducked behind a stack of nearby hay!

He had barely crouched down when he heard the creaking, grinding sound of a cart wheel —

An emaciated old woman with a frail, withered figure pushed a flatbed cart, stepping forward one slow step at a time, rounding the corner of a house!

Du Lai’s every nerve went taut. He pressed himself lower, eyes fixed unblinking on the old woman.

In the dim rainy night he couldn’t make out her face clearly — she only seemed very, very old… Her back was hunched, her body thin as dry wood. A few strands of white hair hung in disarray over her shoulders. She moved with a stiff, shuffling gait, nothing like a living person.

The cart itself was rotted and decrepit — soaked through with rain and caked in mud, as though it had been dug straight out of the earth.

On the cart lay a thatched mat, equally waterlogged. Beneath it, barely visible, were the contours of a skeleton.

— *A woman named Li, transporting skeletal remains from the east end of the village to the west, and from the west back to the east, day after day, with no rest to be seen…*

If he reasoned it out alongside what Fu Miaoxue had told them about the opera libretto, then the old woman before him pushing the cart was Li, and the skeleton on the cart was her husband.

Du Lai held his breath and watched the old woman push the cart past him.

As she walked, she sang — her singing voice plaintive, her tone hoarse and ragged. It was hard to imagine how such a sound could carry so far, all the way from the village to the side rooms at the back of the old scholar’s estate.

But in a game, no matter how strange a thing was, it was never really strange.

Du Lai waited where he was until he was certain the sound had moved sufficiently far away, then silently rose to his feet and quickly made his way back to the old scholar’s residence.

……

In the time Du Lai had been away, Fu Miaoxue stayed with Shen Mo and Bai Youwei the entire time. She didn’t mind being the third wheel — being a third wheel was infinitely better than sitting alone in a room.

Bai Youwei asked her curiously, “You’ve technically died once already — how are you still so scared of ghosts?”

“I died once, but I didn’t *become* a ghost,” Fu Miaoxue said with disdain. “I only turned into a doll!”

“Turned into a doll… so you lost a game?” Bai Youwei asked. “Did you enter the game with your boyfriend?”

“No.” Fu Miaoxue shook her head. Her expression was flat as she said, “I entered alone. I wasn’t as lucky as you two — I ended up in a test game.”

“Test games… I know a little about those,” Bai Youwei said slowly. “I’ve heard that no one who enters a test game has come out alive.”

She thought of what the rabbit-headed figure had told them.

It had said that test games contained a massive number of bugs and loopholes, making it next to impossible to clear. Even if a player did manage to clear it, they couldn’t come out alive.

— *It’s like releasing a group of rabbits into an unfinished experimental chamber. Even if a rabbit survives the experiment, does that give it the right to live?*

Thinking about it now — the rabbit-headed figure seemed to have never been stingy about telling them things regarding the game system. Other inspectors either hedged and obscured, or said nothing at all…

Why had it done that? Was it because its clearance level was high enough, or was it… acting with some other purpose in mind?

—