Where's the cute girl we were promised? She's completely wiped out S-rank dungeons!

"Honey~ I brought you a cake~"

Where are you?

Xu Tai'an felt his blood run cold.

Her vision began to blur, her breathing quickened, and her face turned pale. She saw cold sweat dripping from her eyelashes, then onto the note, landing next to the sentence, "I can't wait to put you in the shop window~".

A year of sweet life, intimate and passionate, suddenly took a turn for the worse at this moment:

She was sleeping next to a deranged serial killer who thought every day about how to humiliate and torture her like he would his other victims, eventually turning her into a lifeless doll.

This is her boyfriend, the lover she plans to spend her life with.

Xu Tai'an's eyes were bloodshot. He suddenly pulled open a drawer and frantically searched through it.

"Honey—that's strange, are you playing hide-and-seek with me?"

Duan Fengye, carrying a cake in the living room, assumed Xu Tai'an was asleep and prepared to go upstairs to check on him.

As he passed the shelf and noticed the hidden door beneath the cabinet, the composed smile on his face vanished for the first time.

The cake box crashed to the ground with a "thud," splattering cream everywhere. He strode towards the entrance, but before he could even get a good look at the scene in his prized "paradise," "Bang!"

His chest jerked backward from the force of the impact. Duan Fengye slowly lowered his head, looking at the bloody hole in his chest, then at Xu Tai'an, who was holding a gun, his face streaked with tears, seemingly in a thousand times more pain than him:

"...Ah, I never thought this day would come for me."

He sighed to himself, then slowly collapsed.

Later, Xu Tai'an called the police. The shocking serial killer who had horrified the nation was finally apprehended, and this monster turned out to be a talented and handsome young man!

Later, the police investigated the villa where he lived while studying abroad. The villa also had a basement. This man not only killed his own people but also foreigners. Life was as insignificant to him; killing was simply a unique form of entertainment.

During that period, the news headline "Serial Killer Arrested" dominated the trending searches for several days. Xu Tai'an, like a withered orchid, locked herself in her house. She wouldn't eat, sleep, or communicate with anyone. Her parents were very worried and arranged for Xu Tai'an to take a six-month leave of absence from school. They sent her messages every day to comfort her, hoping she would cheer up soon.

Xu Tai'an is not a fragile person. Although she was hurt, love is not her whole life, and she will never be completely defeated by this.

As she rallied and stepped out of her room to greet her parents, the execution date arrived for her boyfriend—or rather, her ex-boyfriend. The night before his execution, Xu Tai'an, her heart broken, turned on her phone—she wanted to see the news, to witness firsthand the final fate of the man who had committed such a heinous crime, to tell herself that it was all over, that the man who had once given her endless sweetness, but who had secretly scrutinized her with cruel, cold eyes, was gone.

As a result, all the data about the criminal "Duan Fengye" disappeared overnight.

Xu Tai'an's mind went blank. She stared at the screen with eyes wide open, frantically switching pages and searching for information and cases about the "serial killer." Not only Duan Fengye, but also information about the victims who had been persecuted by him had all disappeared.

"What happens next is actually quite simple."

At this point, Xu Tai'an lowered his eyes and sighed:

"Later, a new series of murders emerged. Before, he would kill one person a month, or one every two weeks. But later, almost every two or three days, a new victim would appear. The strangest thing was that the news of their murders would only appear for two days each time, and then disappear without a trace. I took screenshots, recorded audio, and saved evidence, but it was all useless. It was as if they were deliberately shown to me."

My parents and the police all thought I had suddenly gone mad; the whole world had forgotten him, except for me.

She tapped her throat:

"I stopped eating, sleeping, and communicating with people. After a long time, I realized I couldn't speak normally anymore. The hospital said it was aphasia."

My parents have been trying to find a cure for me and have consulted doctors, but nothing has worked.

One day, my father was reading alone in the living room when he was suddenly attacked. When my mother found him, he was lying on the ground with a broken forehead from a hammer blow, and he almost didn't survive.

I know who did it; the night my father was admitted to the hospital, I received a handwritten letter from him.

Two days later, the letter miraculously disappeared. Xu Tai'an still remembers its contents clearly. In the letter, Duan Fengye spoke the cruelest words in a gentle tone. He said he still loved her and asked Xu Tai'an why she shot him, why she called the police, and why she left him.

Xu Tai'an's father's injury was clearly his revenge.

After reading the letter, Xu Tai'an rushed to the hospital and, communicating with his parents through pen and paper, tearfully begged them to go abroad to hide away. He promised to live a quiet life there under an assumed name and never come out again.

But she herself stayed in China.

She had made up her mind. If Duan Fengye really wanted someone to die, then her death would be enough. She didn't want her parents and friends to suffer.

It was only at this moment that she truly understood the suffering of those victims. Before, she was an outsider and didn't know what it felt like to have one's life played with and one's family's safety threatened.

So this is how painful it is.

That night, Xu Tai'an stayed in her "home" where she was all alone. She stood on the verge of collapse, staring blankly at the ceiling, her chapped lips moving slowly.

"If I could go back to that day... I would never miss."

I'll do anything to find him and stop what he's doing.

Right after those words were spoken:

"Then I entered the game."

Xu Tai'an gave Song Yuan a wry smile, but once the smile faded, her delicate face appeared exceptionally resolute under the lamplight in the lounge.

"Later I learned that the reason he was able to erase his crimes was because he fulfilled his wish through the game and escaped punishment."

Back then, I was a new player, and I couldn't beat him in terms of skill. But I swore that one day I would personally send him to hell.

It wasn't just for myself, but also for over a hundred innocent people who died at his hands. My family and friends are still alive and well, but they are truly gone, and they will never come back.

No matter how much time, how many instances, or how much damage I take, as long as I'm not dead... no, even if I die, I won't let him go.

From that moment on, their fates became intertwined like a nightmare.

Forever and ever, until death do us part.

After listening, Song Yuan gave a simple comment:

"He Li would probably like you a lot."

"Who is that?" Xu Tai'an tilted his head in confusion and asked cautiously, "Is it your friend?"

"My attending physician likes people who are righteous and pure."

Actually, Song Yuan wasn't listening to Xu Tai'an talk about these things for gossip's sake; she just wanted to understand what Xu Tai'an's goals and desires were in this game.

"Would you like to join our guild? Although there are only three of us right now, and our weapons and resources are still not quite complete."

Song Yuan subconsciously used the same sales pitch that Qiao Ran had used to recruit her:

"If you join us, I can assure you that I will do everything in my power to help you achieve your goals."