Docked a point of Sanity by Lin Jiu, Fang Tian, ironically, grew a good deal more rational. For one, he quickly realized that ghosts kept to a nocturnal schedule, and that Lin Jiu was no morning person — so he decided to change tactics on the spot, adopting the strategy of "when the enemy sleeps, I sleep; when the enemy wakes, I wake."
Put simply: when Lin Jiu slept, he'd sleep too, keeping their body clocks in close sync, so that when they both woke in the dead of night they might even strike up a friendship.
But before sleeping, the daily quest still had to be done. Fang Tian stopped bothering Lin Jiu, opened the little horror game he'd downloaded yesterday, turned the volume to its lowest, and played two hours of horror games before bed, then slept clear through to the small hours.
Two hours later, hearing the system's chime, Fang Tian immediately saved and quit, the motion smooth and without the least reluctance. Then he took off his outer clothes, rolled into bed, pulled up the covers, shut his eyes — refusing to carry any fatigue into the middle of the night.
Compared with last night, this sleep was far more settled; at least Lin Jiu didn't show up in his dreams to give him grief.
When he opened his eyes again, the sky outside the dorm was draped in nightfall. As that familiar chill welled up in his chest, Fang Tian knew it was probably midnight. By his third night at Qingkong, he'd worked out some common sense about ghosts — for instance, that when a ghost was about, it usually brought a wave of cold. He suspected this was the origin of the saying that one's heart "runs cold."
The screen, which he'd switched off, had powered itself back on, again showing the familiar CS 1.6 loading screen — only now, above the loading screen, was an extra dialogue box:
"Lin Jiu invites you to play a match."
The dialogue box offered the options "Yes" and "Yes."
Fang Tian steadied himself and looked around, startled to find his roommate had mysteriously vanished again. Whether this had anything to do with Lin Jiu he didn't know, and he had no mind to dig into it for now — because Lin Jiu seemed an impatient sort. Seeing him slow to accept the invitation, she set the computer ringing with the warning chime over and over; the snow on the screen grew thicker, the cooling fans inside roared louder. This computer he'd bought new for university looked ready to crash at any second.
"Easy, easy. Let me grab a bite first."
For his computer's sake, Fang Tian switched to the desktop and typed quickly.
The first thing he did was boil water and brew Lin Jiu a cup of the Calming Tea Leaves the system had given him; he trusted it would help with the conversation ahead.
For himself, he made a cup of instant noodles. As a former veteran shut-in, instant noodles could fairly be called a comrade-in-arms who'd fought at his side.
As he ate, Fang Tian glanced now and then at the tea he'd brewed for Lin Jiu. Her figure never appeared, yet the tea in the disposable cup kept dropping bit by bit, until by the time he was halfway through his noodles the cup was empty.
The Calming Tea Leaves were remarkably effective. One cup down, the computer's warning chime stopped, and the screen no longer snowed. Lin Jiu waited patiently for him to finish his noodles, even granting him about a minute to digest before sending the match invitation.
Fang Tian chose "Yes." After a brief load, the screen was suddenly cut off by a sheet of darkness.
He thought at first it was a bug, but after groping around in the dark a good while, he realized it seemed to be a map that was simply very dim. Fang Tian wandered the small room a long time before it dawned on him that this wasn't a souped-up office map: judging by the identical equipment on the desks, this was an internet café.
A café cubicle?
Every college student knew these five-seat cubicles well.
A name surfaced at once in his mind — "Cat Whisper Internet Café."
The instant it occurred to him this might be tied to the café where Lin Jiu vanished, Fang Tian snapped to full alertness. His character had no starting weapon, currently empty-handed. He tried every key and found this map had no attack function.
When the dim game timer at the bottom of the screen passed thirty seconds, footsteps suddenly rose from beyond the cubicle door, drawing nearer and nearer.
Out of habit, Fang Tian crouched behind one of the computers — but with a first-person view he had to expose half his body to scout the doorway. If only this map had given him a knife, by now he'd usually be readying himself to go knife someone.
At forty seconds in, the footsteps stopped at the cubicle door.
Then he watched the door swing slowly open from the outside — but what emerged from the depths of the dark was no member of the T side. It was a monster nearly twice the height of his character, its body cobbled together from discarded parts, its pair of blood-red eyes especially vivid in the dark.
Clearly, while Fang Tian was studying the monster from behind the desk, the monster had noticed him too.
A grating screech of turning gears came through the screen. The next moment, the puppet dashed up to Fang Tian as if it had a cheat enabled, and before he could react at all, the screen was replaced by blood-red.
Caught off guard, Fang Tian nearly flung his mouse clean across the room.
No one had ever told him this was a horror game, so he had no mental preparation whatsoever.
"Congratulations."
After the blood-red, a line of white text surfaced on the screen. "You successfully got me killed once."
Fang Tian was slightly taken aback. This line was typed by Lin Jiu — which perhaps meant that what he was playing wasn't an ordinary game at all. This pitch-black, can't-see-your-own-fingers cubicle seemed to be the Cat Whisper Café of three years ago, and Lin Jiu had, for some reason, been trapped in this very cubicle.
In that case, had the puppet that appeared so suddenly once truly existed as well?
Lin Jiu didn't leave him long to think. After a brief load, he was back in the familiar little dark room.
The monster's footsteps came at thirty seconds; it began blocking the door at forty. This time Fang Tian dashed for the door at once, only to find the cubicle door shut fast — there was no getting out.
His sneak-out failed, he shrank back behind the desk, this time not exposing even half his body. From what he'd just seen, the puppet reacted fast, and wasn't blind the way the chasing NPCs in many horror games were — and this game, in fact, only truly began once the puppet appeared.
With one failure behind him, Fang Tian was far more careful this round. He judged the puppet's patrol route by its footsteps and circled the cubicle with it, the desk as their center point.
But the instant he stepped out the cubicle door, that grating screech of gears rose again. Before he'd run more than a few steps, the screen filled with blood-red once more.
"Try, try again," Lin Jiu remarked. "That's twice you've gotten me killed."