Qi Si descended the stairs in darkness. His eyes gradually adjusted to the dim surroundings, allowing him to make out blurry shapes.
He stopped on the first floor and looked toward the office, where a halo of light spilled from the crack beneath the door. He could also hear a few muffled voices, seemingly discussing the details of the instance.
A few players had beaten him to it; they were already exploring the office.
The light from within the office flickered, not like a lamp, but like the dancing flames of a campfire. It was clear some players had found a loophole in the "no lights" rule and had started a fire for illumination.
He wondered if Ms. Medina would fly into a rage tomorrow when she caught the lingering scent of smoke.
Qi Si moved silently, slipping past the office and heading straight for the archives next door.
In a team-based game, an advantage wasn't just determined by the amount of information you had, but by its rarity. And it seemed that items in this instance could be placed in one’s pack and stored in the inventory.
With all the other players diving headfirst into the office, he had already lost his first-mover advantage. It was better to take a different path, to find and hide some key clues for himself.
Qi Si drew a thin wire from his bracelet and picked the lock to the archive room in a few deft movements before pushing the door open.
Rows of metal bookshelves stood packed together, leaving narrow aisles that only one person could pass through at a time.
The shelves were crammed with all kinds of books. Some had frayed edges, their spines pocked with decaying sores; others looked new, their colorful covers giving no hint as to their contents.
Now Qi Si understood what the other players had meant when they said there were "too many files to read."
Such a bewildering collection of books would make even an avid reader shrink back, unsure where to begin. It was even more daunting for the other players, who were already worn thin from the pressures of the instance and simply lacked the patience to search for answers from scratch.
No, to be more precise, these books were probably not meant to be
Qi Si roughly estimated there were several thousand books in the archive room. Even if all the players gathered here and worked together, each person would still have to get through at least a hundred volumes.
Even if one spent only two seconds per page just to see if any text prompts appeared on the system interface, the time required would be immense.
The instance would never provide players with that much safe time for reading.
And trying to find the truly useful books among this pile was a fool's errand.
Not only was it too dark to see anything clearly now, but even in broad daylight, faced with a collection of books with no discernible pattern to their appearance, one couldn't possibly judge their value by their titles.
As for just picking a book at random...
In a game that emphasized "fairness," Qi Si didn't believe the instance would allow luck to play such a significant role.
So, either the answer wasn't in the books, or there was another, simpler way for players to extract the information they held.
Since he was already here, Qi Si decided to slip between the shelves and feel his way along, inch by inch, checking for any hidden compartments.
Suddenly, his fingers brushed against a sheet of paper. Its texture was rough, feeling jarringly out of place in the narrow gap between two shelves.
Qi Si pinched the paper between two fingers and pulled it out, holding it up to his eyes.
After he stared at it for two seconds, the writing on the page materialized on his system interface.
Qi Si narrowed his eyes.
...
Yamakawa Nobuhiro held up a lighter, its tiny flame casting just enough light for him to make his way slowly down the first-floor corridor.
He hadn't wanted to go exploring at night, but his dorm mates had all left without a word, leaving him alone to have a staring contest with the ghosts in the room.
He knew that as long as he didn't break any rules, the spirits couldn't harm him. But being watched by so many faces that plunged deep into the uncanny valley still made his hair stand on end and left him unable to sit still.
Sleep was impossible, and staying in the dorm was unbearable. After much deliberation, Yamakawa Nobuhiro had finally, reluctantly, stepped out.
After all, with his roommates gone, probability suggested that staying put was the more dangerous option.
Yamakawa crept cautiously toward the office, his anxiety mounting with every step.
An eerie firelight danced in the crack beneath the office door, reminding him of a will-o'-the-wisp in a dark forest. The muffled conversation from within sounded like the whispers of a ghostly procession.
In the real world, Yamakawa was an ordinary university student. He’d been born with a weak constitution and was perpetually sickly, the type to be knocked over by a strong gust of wind.
Even before entering the Weird Game, he had believed in ghosts and had often encountered strange phenomena, like getting lost in familiar places or feeling as though he'd been spirited away.
Walking through the darkness, he couldn't stop his mind from conjuring all sorts of ghoulish tales—the slit-mouthed woman, the blue-lantern specter... As time passed, his fear grew thread by thread, threatening to consume him entirely.
He forced himself forward, his limbs stiff with dread. He passed the office and came to a stop at the door to the archive room.
Leaning his back against the cold iron door, he gasped for breath, trying to tell himself not to overthink things and to calm his racing heart.
A faint creak, like a bone cracking, sounded by his ear. The support behind him vanished, and Yamakawa stumbled backward.
He was about to scream, but an icy hand clamped firmly over his mouth.
Before he could react and struggle, a crisp, clear male voice spoke in a rapid whisper. "I'm a player."
A player, thank goodness...
Yamakawa let out a sigh of relief. The terror receded slightly, and his tense muscles went slack, his entire body aching as if he'd just finished a grueling workout.
He gave a small shake of his head, then a nod, indicating that he wouldn't make a sound.
Only then did the person holding him release their hand and step back, putting some distance between them.
He turned to see a young man with black hair looking at him sternly, a single finger pressed to his lips in a universal gesture for silence.
Yamakawa didn't know what was happening, but the young man's grave, deliberate demeanor was infectious, and he found himself growing tense again.
In a daze, he was pulled into the archive room. The young man then took the lighter from his hand, and only then did it belatedly dawn on him that something was wrong. *Who is this guy? Why am I just letting him lead me around?*
Yamakawa was about to ask, but when he looked up, the young man shot him a conspiratorial glance. Then he grabbed a book from a shelf, lit it on fire, and casually tossed it back.
The burning book landed at the bottom of the bookshelf, and the moment it touched the flammable material, it blossomed into orange-red flames.
Graceful tongues of fire licked their way up the stacked books. The pages curled instantly in the heat before disintegrating, scattering into the air like a flurry of charred, black fragments.
The towering flames leaped wildly, golden flickers reaching the ceiling and scorching a small patch black. The intense heat made the iron shelves glow red-hot, emitting a strange, grating crackle that set one's teeth on edge.
In a matter of seconds, an entire shelf of books had been incinerated.
Yamakawa stared dumbly at the bonfire of books, his mouth hanging open. It took him a long moment to utter a single sound. "...Huh?"
No one offered an explanation.
The culprit who had just torched a shelf of "the ladders of human progress" seemed to be in a good mood, standing to one side and coolly observing the inferno.
Paper was an excellent fuel, especially in such abundance. The flames illuminated the entire room, making it, for a moment, even brighter than it was during the day.
Soon, not a single sheet of paper with writing remained in the iron cabinet, only residual embers writhing reluctantly in the ash, sending up long, silken threads of white smoke.
Qi Si glanced over from a distance, confirmed that no useful clues had emerged from the fire, and promptly walked to the next bookshelf with the lighter. He grabbed a random book and was about to extend his destructive hand once more.
"What... what in the world are you trying to do?" Yamakawa finally snapped out of his stupor, his tongue twisting around the words. "And... who are you?"
"A brief introduction," Qi Si said with a straight face. "My name is Qi Wen. I'm a freelance player, and I've cleared ten instances. In this one, my number is 50." As he spoke, he lit the book in his hand and repeated the process, tossing it back onto the shelf.
Flames once again shot toward the ceiling, bathing the entire archive room in light as bright as day.
Qi Si turned his side to the fire, his gaze on Yamakawa so calm it was almost cold. "The information in this room is too cluttered and trivial. Burning some of it now is an effective way to reduce our workload, isn't it?"
"Huh?" Yamakawa stared at Qi Si, utterly speechless. There were so many things wrong with that logic he didn't know where to begin.
These were all potential clues, and he was burning them just for the sake of convenience?
Then he heard Qi Si continue in the same unchanging tone, "The most crucial, core clues can't be destroyed. Even if the instance has to trigger its minimum death count, it still needs a logical path to completion. Therefore, anything that *can* be destroyed must not be important."
"It's impossible to read all these books in a short amount of time, and the instance wouldn't base its puzzles on such repetitive, inefficient labor. I'm inclined to believe that the very presence of these books is a smokescreen. Only by eliminating the chaotic surface can we see the truth at the core."
Qi Si's gaze was sharp and cold, casting him in the light of a high-IQ genius.
For a few seconds, Yamakawa's mind filled with the image of an eccentric, brilliant detective, and the more he thought about it, the more Qi Si's reasoning seemed to make sense.
But just as he let out a sigh of relief, he heard Qi Si add, "I let you in here because I wanted to borrow your lighter. When I'm finished burning these books, if you have any objections to my methods, you can leave, turn left, and go join those idiots in the office to fish in troubled waters. At least they won't be making any decisions that are beyond your comprehension."
As he spoke, Qi Si never stopped moving, deftly pulling out one lucky book after another to serve as kindling, systematically setting fire to every bookshelf in the room.
In the flickering firelight, his words were as cold as ice, his tone unyielding and absolute.
Yamakawa froze. At first, he thought it was an order to leave, but after mulling it over for a couple of seconds, he realized that wasn't quite right.
If you have an opinion, you can leave. By extension, if you don't raise any objections, you can stay.
Yamakawa thought for a moment and decided it was better to stay.
This room had been confirmed to be safe, and it was now occupied by a powerhouse who clearly knew what he was doing. The office next door, on the other hand, looked terrifying, and who knew if it was filled with ghosts. Only a fool wouldn't know which to choose.
With that, he bowed to Qi Si. "I am Yamakawa Nobuhiro. I'm in your care!"
Having secured his new tool, Qi Si turned to see that the last bookshelf had been burned clean.
He raised his hand and glanced at his Fate Pocket Watch. From the moment he'd lit the first bookshelf to now, only fifty-six seconds had passed.
He casually tossed the lighter back into Yamakawa's arms and sauntered toward the door.
Yamakawa caught the lighter and looked quizzically at Qi Si, who was already standing by the exit.
The next second, a searing pain erupted at the back of his head, as if an axe had been brought down on him, splitting his skull wide open.
His eyes widened, a mixture of bewilderment and terror swirling within them.
Bright red blood streamed down his cheeks, streaking his face like the garish paint of an opera mask. He knew he was dying, but he was powerless to do anything. His body pitched forward, hitting the floor in a spray of dust, brain matter, and blood.
A thick, paint-like substance congealed around the wound. Even in his final moment, he still couldn't understand how this had become his end.
Qi Si quietly studied the corpse, now missing half its head. He looked into the wide, unseeing eyes that refused to close in death and broke into a genuine smile.
He bent down and lifted a piece of cloth on the corpse's chest. Just as he expected, beneath the maple-leaf-shaped school crest was the number "36."
He raised an eyebrow slightly, but his movements didn't falter. He took out the piece of paper he had found between the shelves earlier and held it to the embers glowing in the ash.
Only when the paper had completely blended in with the charred fragments, its writing no longer visible, did he retrieve a handkerchief from his pack and satisfactorily wipe his fingertips.
On that burned sheet of paper, the words had been stark and clear:
[April 7, 1869. The archive room on the first floor of the school was set on fire. Textbooks and many other books were destroyed. An investigation revealed that the indigenous children, dissatisfied with the curriculum, had entered the archives at night and committed arson.]
[Despite separate interrogations, the identity of the arsonist could not be determined. However, a used box of matches was discovered not far from the scene. The investigation showed that this box belonged to number 36.]
[Number 36 insisted he knew nothing about the arson. He claimed his matches had been stolen three days prior and were likely used by a classmate to frame him. The teachers unanimously believed he was telling the truth and advocated to continue searching for the real culprit, or to let the matter drop if no one could be found.]
[But Mr. Thorson felt the unruly natives had to pay a price. Since the arsonist was unknown, executing the owner of the arson tool would serve the same purpose. The truth was unimportant. It was enough to instill fear in those natives.]
Amidst the room full of ashes, a single silver-white iron box stood out, pristine.
Qi Si walked over to it, picked the lock with his thin wire, and opened it to find files stacked neatly inside.
The most prominent line read—
"They all have insomnia."