She watched jelly-like blood well up from inside her body, the wounds numb and powerless, no pain reaching her…

“Yu Yaqing!” Shen Mo arrived and caught her as she fell.

His shout reached her ears muffled and indistinct, as if her hearing had turned to cotton.

Shen Mo brought out the mud to treat her wounds — but the mud had only 3 uses left, and Yu Yaqing had more than ten lacerations across her body. Heal one wound, and the others kept bleeding their vivid red jelly.

“Don’t… don’t waste your items…”

Yu Yaqing gripped Shen Mo’s arm and forced sound up from her throat:

“…How… how many minutes?”

A dull ache ran through Shen Mo’s chest. He looked toward the Crystal Tower and said: “Ten minutes. Yu Yaqing — we’re about to win.”

“Shen Mo… you… you tell Bai Youwei…”

Her voice grew fainter and fainter.

Shen Mo bent low, bringing his ear close to her lips, and heard her rasp:

“Tell Bai Youwei… she has to… win — keep winning… to the very end.”

Shen Mo clenched his jaw and answered: “All right. I’ll tell her.”

……

The Crystal Tower —

The spiraling staircase came to an end. There was no more road.

The top of the Crystal Tower was different from the rest of the structure. The seventh and final floor had been designed to resemble an enormous crystal gemstone from the outside, meaning the entire seventh level was constructed entirely of glass — not only were all four walls glass, even the floor was glass — so visitors standing on the seventh floor could look directly down into the sixth.

But now, the glass floor of the seventh level was gone.

Along with all the staircase steps that had been built on top of it — all destroyed.

Here on the sixth floor where Bai Youwei stood, the floor was covered in shards of glass of every size. Despite her best efforts at caution, she could not avoid cutting herself as she moved.

She lifted her head and looked up at the rag doll perched at the top of the tower.

It was sitting on the Mysterious Crystal Stone at the center of the seventh floor.

The Mysterious Crystal Stone was, of course, not mysterious in the least — merely a man-made sculpture installed here to give children who made it to the top a sense of accomplishment and delight. They could take photos with it, buy souvenirs, or make wishes upon it.

The small rag doll sat atop it: golden yarn hair, a pink cotton dress, its flat little face bearing a pair of dark glass bead eyes, a curved embroidered smile, and two round patches of rosy color on its cheeks.

The rag doll looked through the glass at the distant fire blazing at the Jungle Adventure, and drawled lazily:

“Oh come on, all that burning and it only took out some trees. I was convinced the fire would spread over here — I was watching it so nervously.”

Its voice was adorable, like a little child’s — but its tone dripped with thick mockery.

Bai Youwei called up to it: “Are you Mali?”

It looked down at her. “Oh my, how surprising — aren’t you the one with the bad legs? You actually made it all the way up here. That really does catch me off guard! But so what if you climbed up here? What good does it do you?”

It laughed, going tee-hee-hee.

“What good does it do you? All that work to get here, only to find there’s no way forward — can you imagine how that feels? Oh my~ just thinking about it makes me want to laugh so much, ha ha ha ha~”

The laughter stopped abruptly. Her mood seemed to swing without warning, and she suddenly began to curse with venom:

“Did you think that if you had them hold my dolls and my cat off, you could kill me? You villains! You wicked villains! The ones who deserve to die are all of you! Tonight’s hide-and-seek — I’m going to make sure not a single one of you survives! Not one!!!”

Bai Youwei took out the rabbit.

Mali started laughing again —

“Ha ha ha ha ha!!! Have you snapped from the stress, or gone completely stupid?! How are you going to shock me? Don’t you know glass is an insulator?! Your item has distance restrictions too, doesn’t it? Two meters? Three meters?

Are you going to throw it up here? Can you even throw that high?

Why don’t you just jump up here yourself? Oh wait… I forgot, you’re a cripple — you can’t jump at all, ha ha ha ha ha!!!”

—