Each time the game character died, Lin Jiu would announce Fang Tian's death count the moment the screen drowned in red. From her tone it wasn't hard to tell she wasn't angry about her own "deaths" — if anything, she was watching this game of cat-and-mouse with relish.
By the fifth death prompt, Fang Tian had worked out some of the game's rules.
The monster moved extremely fast; once it spotted you, it would seize you within two seconds. And unlike the usual chase-horror formula, there were no cabinets or under-the-bed nooks here to hide in.
The game also had one serious, vicious bug: the instant he left the café cubicle, the monster would come hunting at once, whether or not it had seen him.
Beyond the cubicle was a corridor. At the monster's speed, he had no chance of crossing it; his best run had covered less than a third of the distance.
If this were an ordinary game, Fang Tian would absolutely have left a one-star review and filed for a refund. But going by Lin Jiu's reactions, this was no simple game. He suspected it was very likely what Lin Jiu had gone through on the day she vanished — which meant there had to be a reason the monster could spot him the instant he crept out of the cubicle.
Once he'd thought this through, Fang Tian began his sixth attempt.
This time, instead of bolting the moment he left the cubicle, he turned the camera and looked toward the left, which he'd been ignoring. On his third try he'd already noticed the left was a dead end, so the last two times he'd focused on how to cross the corridor on the right.
The left corridor was empty — but when he looked up, he found a surveillance camera mounted directly facing the cubicle door.
The screech of gears came up behind him, and the screen, predictably, dyed red.
Only this time Lin Jiu didn't mockingly announce his death count. Instead another line of text appeared: "Why did you stop running?"
"The first time you left the cubicle, the monster spotted you almost right away. It cut you off and dragged you back inside."
Fang Tian thought back to seeing Lin Jiu's true face in his dream. Senior Hao had mentioned that most ghosts kept the appearance they'd had at the moment of death — and Lin Jiu's eyes were all but gone, her body badly wounded. It wasn't hard to deduce that, before she could cry out for help, she'd been attacked by this puppet monster.
"......Yes."
"But you don't know how it was able to find you."
Unlike him, with his six attempts, Lin Jiu back then had only one chance. She'd had no time to study the many details inside and outside the cubicle. In fact, that she'd dodged the monster's line of sight and slipped out of the cubicle even once was already remarkable.
And everything he was experiencing now could be read as a question Lin Jiu was, in her own way, putting to him.
Perhaps even Lin Jiu herself didn't know where the puppet monster had come from, or how she'd been spotted the moment she fled the cubicle.
"You know?"
"The first time you fled the cubicle, was there anyone else in the corridor?"
Fang Tian typed the question in-game. He felt what was before him now was the very scene Lin Jiu had glimpsed in her panic.
As for the camera in the left corridor, that was more likely something she'd noticed on her way to the cubicle.
"No."
Lin Jiu's answer was firm and certain.
"Why did you go to the café alone that day? And who told you to come to this cubicle?"
"A friend I game with. I went to the cubicle because the main hall was full."
"What did your friend look like?"
"Never met them. Didn't get the chance."
Lin Jiu's answers largely confirmed Fang Tian's thinking. So he started a seventh match right in front of her — only this time he didn't try to flee the cubicle right away. Listening to the puppet's patrolling footsteps, he circled the desk with it several times, then, courting death, hopped back and forth across the cubicle doorway. Yet as long as he didn't enter the camera's range, that sharp, grating screech of gears never came.
The very instant half his body entered the camera's range, the puppet monster charged and finished him in under two seconds.
This time, before Lin Jiu could speak, Fang Tian typed first: "The reason the monster found you was that the camera saw you."
In this game Lin Jiu had laid before him, the puppet wasn't the only thing hunting him. Of course, he couldn't rule out that Lin Jiu's memory had drifted, or that in her haste to flee she hadn't noticed a handler controlling the puppet from the shadows. But at the very least, whoever was on the other end of the surveillance feed hadn't warned Lin Jiu the monster was coming — and had never mentioned it to the Qingkong police afterward.
By that logic, the attendant on duty at "Cat Whisper Internet Café" that night was a prime suspect.
Even so, many things about the case still didn't add up for Fang Tian.
For instance, Lin Jiu said the main hall was already full when she arrived, meaning business was booming that night. In that case, why had no one mentioned the puppet monster to the police? If even one person had, the matter wouldn't have been so simply filed as a disappearance, and Officer Feng might well have begun a targeted investigation three years ago.
"Thank you."
Lin Jiu's reply cut into Fang Tian's thoughts. No eighth match came; an option to exit the game appeared on the screen automatically.
It seemed Lin Jiu had never expected him to escape the puppet's pursuit in the first place.
"Hold on."
Fang Tian hurriedly stopped her. He hadn't yet completed the task Officer Feng had given him, and he had plenty of unanswered questions of his own — after all, three years ago Lin Jiu had been classed as missing, not dead, which meant the police had never found her body at Cat Whisper Café.
And the only one who could answer that now was Lin Jiu herself.
"What happened after that?"
"I got away."
"You got away?"
Fang Tian was stunned for a good while. For the life of him he couldn't work out how Lin Jiu had escaped a death-trap like that. "How did you do it?"
The exit option vanished, and the game countdown reset to its starting value.
The eighth match.
This time Fang Tian did nothing, yet the character on screen began to move on its own.
The first forty seconds were the familiar wait — but Lin Jiu didn't crouch behind the desk to play ring-around-the-pillar with the monster. She stood in the most conspicuous spot in the cubicle, and almost the instant the monster appeared, that tooth-grinding screech of gears came.
Lin Jiu's view shifted, unhurried, to the one lit computer screen.
The next moment, the picture wrenched around.
The café cubicle and the monster vanished; the map returned to the familiar hostage room of the warehouse.
At the same time, another prompt sounded.
『Appreciator, please note: the Calming Tea Leaves' effect has worn off. The other party's emotions may grow unstable. Please proceed with caution.』
The words had barely faded when the computer went straight to a blue screen, and within three seconds of that, the power was cut entirely.
Then a crack lanced across the laptop screen, splitting it in two. Arcs and sparks flared, glaringly bright in the dead of night in the dorm.