The short-haired woman was speechless. She hadn’t expected to have her cover blown so easily, and she refused to give up, asking: “But just using that one point to conclude that I’m not the X-guest is a bit of a stretch, isn’t it? Maybe I was deliberately putting on an act!”

“Your expression at the time was completely natural—it didn’t look like acting.” Bai Youwei said lightly. “Of course, there’s always a chance I could be wrong about anything. If my judgment is off, then I lose, and I’ll lose with no complaints.”

In a game like this, was there ever a hundred-percent guarantee of victory? Every step forward was a constant process of probing, accompanied by fortune and probability.

And what Bai Youwei had done was simply raise the odds of winning in her own favor.

“There’s one more thing.” Bai Youwei continued. “You took the initiative to recruit the blue-eyed person into your own team, which tells me you’re someone who acts impulsively and recklessly. The red eyes already had a numerical advantage from the very start, yet you still weren’t satisfied—you wanted to widen that advantage even further, to determine the winner and loser as quickly as possible. For an X-guest, that kind of behavior is completely unnecessary, because regardless of whether the players’ eye colors end up uniform at the end, as long as the X-guest survives to the fifth round, they win.”

The short-haired woman asked: “Then what about the doctor? Didn’t he also recruit you into the yellow-eye team? Why did you still suspect him?”

Bai Youwei smiled slightly. “That’s different—I wasn’t recruited by him. I walked over to him on my own.”

Short-haired woman: “……”

Bai Youwei’s words left her completely tongue-tied.

“By the way.” Bai Youwei spoke up again and asked: “In the last round, how did your group vote? The numbers don’t add up.”

“Last round, we gave 2 votes to Number 2, 3 votes to Number 12, and 4 votes to Number 16.” The short-haired woman explained. “We guessed yellow and blue would join forces, and 5+5+5 would at minimum cut our numbers down by three. But our 10 votes, whether split as 5+5 or 4+3+3, could only take up two of the top-five vote spots—so we chose the latter and tried our luck. We just didn’t expect them not to go with the 5+5+5 approach.”

Bai Youwei turned this over in her mind. “So Number 22 really was voted out by them after all…”

The short-haired woman asked: “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” Bai Youwei explained. “Number 22 is a yellow-eye number—we’d already crossed it off. The fact that the blue side did this feels almost like they were deliberately maintaining a numerical balance.”

This time, the targets that yellow and blue jointly agreed on were Numbers 4, 5, and 17—all red eyes.

If the red-eye side then voted out one person each from yellow and blue, the count would become:

Red eyes: 8 people, lose 3, down to 5 (including one blue eye).

Yellow eyes: 6 people, lose 1, down to 5 (including one red eye).

Blue eyes: 6 people, lose 1, down to 5.

All three teams would be at the exact same count.

It was also possible it would shift to: Red 5, Yellow 6, Blue 4—or Red 5, Yellow 4, Blue 6.

That would depend on what numbers the red-eye team ultimately voted for.

“Are we certain about voting for 28 and 29?” the short-haired woman asked Bai Youwei.

Bai Youwei knitted her brow and thought it over for a moment.

If it worked, the X-guest would be eliminated, and the remaining 15 players would win the game.

If it failed…

If it failed, the full count would be: yellow eyes 4, red eyes 5, blue eyes 6.

At that point, the blue side would dominate, and they would certainly make the red eyes their next target for elimination. Even if red and yellow teamed up, it would be difficult to avoid losing at least one person—and the moment they lost even one person, dropping the red eyes down to 4, the red eyes would lose their qualification to win, just like the yellow eyes!

And there were even worse scenarios!

Specifically: once the voting ended, not a single team might have 5 remaining players whose eye colors were all the same!

Either way, if she didn’t win the next round of voting, then in the round after that, she would certainly lose.

Every reward had to come with risk. There was no avoiding it.

Bai Youwei closed her eyes in frustration and said: “I’ll let you know tomorrow. Barring anything unexpected, we’ll vote for 28 and 29.”

—