My Strange Tale Love Strategy Simulator

Zhang Ying suddenly looked over in the direction Zhou Ping was looking.

Outside the window, a cloud of black mist was suspended in mid-air. Enveloped in the mist was a deathly pale face, so pale it didn't look like the skin of a living person, but rather like a layer of skin peeled off a corpse and then reshaped into a human face.

The features of that face were Xu Miaofeng's—eyebrows, nose, lips—exactly the same, but the smile it wore was one that Xu Miaofeng had never shown before.

His mouth stretched wide to an arc that a normal person's muscles could not possibly reach, and his eyes were fixed motionless in the center of their sockets, staring straight at the people in the room.

At the same time, a line of information popped up in the Ghost Eye's field of vision:

[The Screaming Ghost]

【? ? ? 】

Zhang Ying froze on the spot. It felt as if an invisible hand had gripped his scalp tightly from the back of his head, sending a shiver down his spine.

The second one is a ghost! And this one is of a higher level than the one in the stairwell!

If the call to Zhou Ping was made by this ghostly caller.

Its capabilities extend far beyond this one building; it traversed dozens of kilometers, precisely located Zhou Ping's number, and summoned her here.

In the black mist outside the window, a pale face began to move its lips. Zhang Ying couldn't hear what it was saying, but the lips were moving so fast, it was as if it was repeating the same sentence over and over, or as if it was calling someone's name.

He instantly realized what was about to happen, turned around abruptly, and shouted loudly at Zhou Ping.

"Teacher Zhou—don't answer it!"

Zhou Ping's body swayed slightly.

Her consciousness was pulled from her body; her eyes remained open, but her pupils were no longer focused. Her lips moved slightly, uttering a muffled syllable in response to the face outside the window.

The next second, her body went limp. She collapsed to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, her back against the wall, her legs twisted to one side, her eyes still open, but her pupils unmoving, staring fixedly at the empty space in front of her.

She was still alive and breathing, but her consciousness was no longer in this room.

Xu Miaofeng rushed over, grabbed Zhou Ping's shoulders and shook her desperately, calling her name and slapping her face.

Zhou Ping didn't react. Her lips were moving slightly, as if she were talking to someone in another unseen world.

Zhang Ying gritted his teeth, thinking about how to get Zhou Ping back from the ghostly summoner.

Just then, a line of black text appeared before his eyes.

【escape!】

Zhang Ying's pupils contracted.

"I can't abandon them and run away alone!" he blurted out.

The moment he finished speaking, a chill ran up his spine.

The cold didn't seep in from the outside of the skin; it seeped out from between the bones, climbing up the spine vertebra by vertebra, as if something was counting his vertebrae one by one with its fingertips, from the lumbar vertebrae to the thoracic vertebrae, and from the thoracic vertebrae to the cervical vertebrae.

Something was stuck to the back of his neck, like a piece of cloth just pulled out of cold water.

But that's not cloth; cloth doesn't breathe.

Zhang Ying froze.

A deathly pale human face slowly emerged from above his right shoulder. It tilted its head, its eyes fixed intently on Zhang Ying's profile. Its lips parted, revealing two rows of fine, inhuman teeth.

"You responded to what I said, right?"

The voice was different from what the face outside the window had said earlier. This time, Zhang Ying heard it clearly.

Each word felt like someone was pressing against his earlobe, carving each word onto his eardrum with their fingernail.

Zhang Ying's eyes slowly shifted to the lower right, looking at the pale, smiling face perched on his shoulder. His mind was terrifyingly clear at that moment; the black text he'd just seen wasn't Xiao Hei's at all.

His subconscious response, "I can't abandon them," was already a response to the caller's strange words.

He responded to it himself.

Zhang Ying's eyes gradually became vacant.

Zhou Ping's slumped figure, Xu Miaofeng's panicked face, and the flickering candlelight on the guest table were stripped away layer by layer, leaving only blankness.

Then came darkness, a pure blackness that swallowed up all sense of direction and time. He couldn't even tell if he was still standing or had fallen; only a throbbing pain deep in the back of his head reminded him that his consciousness hadn't completely disappeared.

A faint, high-pitched laugh came from the depths of the darkness.

The laughter came again and again, each laugh closer and clearer, as if the surrounding things were tightening in circles.

With each laugh, Zhang Ying felt as if something was being drained from him.

He could clearly feel his thoughts loosening, like a knot being untied, each thread slipping away from its original position.

In the strategy simulator's panel, sanity is rapidly decreasing: 12 points, 11 points, 10 points.

When his rationality dropped to 10 points, Zhang Ying could feel that the laughter around him was getting louder and clearer, like a group of things hidden in the darkness approaching and surrounding him.

Followed by.

A pale, smiling face emerged from the darkness. Then came a second, and a third.

Countless pale smiling faces emerged one by one from the void, forming a circle and locking him in the very center.

These faces smiled even wider, their mouths stretching to behind their ears, their eyes all fixed intently on his face.

Zhang Ying covered his head with both hands, feeling as if his skull was about to split open. The laughter was like countless needles piercing his eardrums, drilling into the folds of his brain, and stirring repeatedly in every crevice.

Breathing became increasingly difficult; each inhale felt like drawing a vacuum through a ruptured lung—air couldn't get in, but the pain couldn't escape.

He had 9 points of rationality left, and this bottom line built by rationality was still holding him up, but it wouldn't last much longer.

Just when he was about to give up,

A drop of red fell from directly above.

The warm drop of blood pierced straight through the layers of smiling faces, through the net woven from laughter, and with a soft thud, landed on his wrist.

It landed precisely on the jade bracelet that had been won from Li Danyang.

The laughter around them instantly changed. It went from a sticky, low chuckle to a series of shrill, ear-piercing screams.

All the smiling faces contorted in the same second, their mouths opened to the widest possible angle, but instead of laughter, they emitted heart-wrenching screams.

Zhang Ying lowered his head.

On his wrist, a single black hair began to appear, coiling around the jade bracelet. At first, it was just a faint, indistinct wisp of hair, but it gradually became more and more real.

Blood seeped from his hair, trickling down its strands. It slid from his wrist, falling into the void of darkness beneath his feet. The darkness was stained crimson by the blood, the red spreading with astonishing speed, swirling in concentric circles until it covered the ground below his knees, turning the darkness into a lake of blood, reflecting his blurry image.

The crimson hue of those smiling faces turned ashen and utterly decayed under the red glow of the blood lake. They began to fester from the center, their edges curling up like ashes from burnt paper, peeling away, crumbling, and dissolving layer by layer.

Screams rose and fell, weaving together into a mournful chorus above the lake of blood, before disappearing one after another.