Chapter 10 - Hide and Seek

Translated by: Jayre & Fleur

The two did not go very far. Behind them, there were footsteps coming closer and closer. Yu Su turned around to see Wang San walking over quickly.

She was slightly surprised, and Lin Xiao An also asked in surprise: “Police Officer Feng, what’s the matter?”

He nodded and looked at Yu Su. “I heard that you were the one who stood nearest to the deceased just now, I‘ll have to  ask for your help to understand the situation.”

“......” Yu Su secretly thought that there could have been a worse excuse.

It was very obvious that this person definitely had other motives.

Yu Su hmmed and asked Lin Xiao An to wait for her for a while, before following him to a place with a lesser crowd.

There was a bench where the shoppers could rest and the two walked over to sit on it. Wang San then said: “My name is Feng Ting.”

Yu Su nodded and said nothing.

Feng Ting raised an eyebrow. “At this point, shouldn’t you offer your name?”

Yu Su smiled. “I didn’t ask you for your name, you were the one who said it.”

“ This face of yours changes really fast,” Feng Ting lowly chuckled.

Yu Su tilted her head. “Relax, the next time we meet in the task, I’ll change it back.”

She did not feel that there was a possibility of encountering each other. According to the “Exchange” section, the players met by the newcomers will be those who are not far away in real life.

But the players who enter a task are completely randomized and the level of difficulty is not assigned according to tasks that were already completed. Therefore, even if it is the same task, the rest time given for each player will be different after they completed the task.

As the number of tasks increased, the places where the encountered players were from would slowly grow from the whole city to the whole province and then to the whole country.

At the end, the players in a task would be from all over the country. Unless one formed a team before entering, it would be hard to meet the players one encountered before.

And now, the newcomer Yu Su bumping into Feng Ting, her partner in the mission, was not something to be shocked about.

This could actually be considered one of the clever points of the game. Whether it was a veteran killing a newcomer, or a newcomer causing the death of a veteran, it would be easy for them to find each other in real life to exact revenge.

The most important point is, if the veteran stuck with a newcomer was concerned over this point, then they would not dare to act carelessly towards the newcomer.

After all, no one knows whether the inexperienced player in the task is actually a powerful boss in reality.

Now Yu Su really wanted to know if the male who jumped off the floor and died met Xue Mei in this 24 hours.

“You should have recognized the deceased just now?”Feng Ting asked.

Coincidentally having the same line of thoughts, Yu Su asked, “Is he also someone living near here?”

“No,”Feng Ting shook his head, “He was from ChengHua district, as for the reason behind his death here, it is still under investigation.”

Yu Su was a little curious. “This type of case, will the police close the case as suicide?”

Feng Ting shrugged, “To the ordinary people, this is suicide.”

Seeing Lin Xiao An who seemed a little impatient, Yu Su directly asked, “Big Brother, what you are looking for from me, just say it.”

“Have you seen today’s Weibo?”Feng Ting really went straight to the point.

“What?” Yu Su did react. Why is he suddenly bringing up Weibo?

Feng Ting stood up, and said in a low voice, “Look at it when you have time. Also, because the players come from different places, there are some who formed organizations, remember not to carelessly join.”

Seeing Feng Ting standing up, Lin Xiao An hurried over and heard the last sentence. “Join what?”

Yu Su shook her head hurriedly. “Nothing, he’s talking about the WeChat group, can’t just add casually.”

Lin Xiao An’s eyes darted from one figure to the other, a strange glint in them. “You added each other on WeChat?”

She then whispered to Yu Su, “You go, sister!”

“......”Yu Su felt she was too dramatic, and shook her head. “No, how is that possible? We don’t know each other. “

“Oh,”Feng Ting sneered and looked at Yu Su. “When you need someone you call them XiaoTianTian, when you don’t need them you say you don’t know them?”

(T/N: 小甜甜)

Yu Su: “......”

She hurriedly dragged Lin Xiao An away.

In the remaining time, she explained to her good girlfriend more than a dozen times before Lin Xian An finally believed that she really did not call anyone XiaoTianTian.

It wasn’t until she returned home that Yu Su finally remembered what Feng Ting said and opened Weibo.

Once opened, she swiped through a few posts of the same content.

And this Weibo’s content shocked her.

“Today at 8.15 in the morning, Jiang Tian’s murderer Wang Mou died a bizarre death in prison. At the same time, Xing You died in his bedroom. Their deaths were the same as Jiang Tian.

But according to Xing Mu, no one had been to the house and the windows had railing guards installed. This murder case is really peculiar……”

There are photos filled with mosaic censorship attached to the post, but this censorship allowed the people to imagine just how bloody the murder scene was.

Unlike a general homicide case, aside from the advertisement comments, the tens of thousands of comments under the post were all celebrating the death.

This was not strange. Yu Su read about Jiang Tian’s case last time. Jiang Tian and his girlfriend Xing You rented a house together. Xing You and Wang Mou had a conflict and Wang Mou killed the innocent Jiang Tian just outside a room.

At that time Xing You was in the room just right across, yet she did not open the door. After the incident, she even repeatedly abused Jiang Tian’s mother.

Although this case is very different from Yu Su’s previous task, there were still some similarities.

This was something that Feng Tian had specifically mentioned to her and so there should be some relation between the task and this case.

Or… is it that after a player completed a task, it will affect the development of a case in reality?

Yu Su thought, is this considered being forced to do good deeds?

After resting for two days, her vacation was coming to an end. After careful consideration Yu Su decided to resign first.

To those who were not players, the time between entering the game and leaving it was only as long as a blink of an eye, but she had to survive for a long period of time in the game and also meet with life-threatening danger.

She really did not want to leave early in the morning and come back late at night for work daily after coming out of the game.

If one died in the mission, one died in reality. But if one lived on, one game could bring a five-figure income. To go or not to go to work did not matter.

The ten days passed very quickly. Aside from meeting Lin Xiao An occasionally, the rest of the time was spent cooped up in the room to read the different tasks experienced by the other players.

The chats in the “Exchange” section were mostly just filled with bragging. There were posts like“I just got off the plan in the United States and hid”, “Should the me with an annual salary of 80 million hire someone to help me pass the task”. Those who asked were not serious, and those who replied were even less so.

In the blink of an eye, the countdown came to an end.

Yu Su clutched her phone and quietly waited. Soon, a task interface appeared on the screen.

At the very top is the three bolded words 【Hide and Seek】 and right below it was an “Invite” option. After clicking on it, three empty columns will appear. Just fill in the codes of the other players and wait for the other party to confirm and then they will be able to enter the same mission.

Right in the middle was a three minute countdown, it was apparently to allow players to have enough time to invite the other players and prepare their belongings.

Yu Su had already changed into comfortable sportswear in the morning and also hid the dagger wrapped in cloth beside her calf.

She also prepared some food and water, as well as pain killers, medicine for cold, hemostatic disinfection and the likes. As for weapons, there was no preparation.

Several posts under the “Experience” section had said that any weapons outside cannot be brought into the game. Even if they were packed in a bag, they would disappear after entering the game.

The three minute countdown soon ended, and as Yu Su stared at “Hide and Seek” these three words, she entered the game in a blink of an eye.

Suddenly switching from a bright environment to a dark place, Yu Su’s eyes could not see anything for a moment.

She blinked hard and her vision cleared.

It was an old room that looked like a rural house in the nineties, with an incandescent lamp that was not so brightly glowing hung above. The wire attached to the lamp was swaying, causing the shadows in the room to move as it swayed.

Yu Su was currently sitting in front of an eight people table and there were people sitting on both her sides.

There were eight people including her, and  judging by expression, there were only two newcomers.

One of them was a male sitting blankly on the left and he looked to be a high school student. The other was sitting directly opposite and was a middle-aged lady in a dress who looked like she was from a rich family.

Yu Su looked at the players one by one, and the one she was most concerned about was the child sitting right beside her.

It really was a little boy, and he looked to be twelve years old at the very oldest. But his expression was very calm, and even though he was very young, Yu Su was sure that he was not a newcomer.

At this moment, the phones rang one after another.

Yu Su took out her phone from her bag and looked at the prompt on her screen.

【There is a murderer hiding amongst you, make sure to find him* before your death.

The hide-and-seek game starts at 21:00 every night and lasts for 20 minutes, with the voting to find the murderer starting at 07:00 the next day. If the murderer is found, the game ends. Otherwise, the one who lost the hide-and-seek game at night will die.

Note: If there are more than one who lost the hide-and-seek game, one person will die randomly.】

*(T/N: It was written as ‘ta’ in the original text so that the players will not know if it is a male, female or an object. I wrote ‘him’ since ‘them’ sounds weird.)

Yu Su glanced at the text and carefully read it twice before finally waiting for someone to speak.

The first one to speak was the seemingly rich middle-aged lady.

She looked around with disgust and scorn. “I’m not dreaming? What the hell is this place? It’s dirty and run down, how can I be here? And also, this says that the person beside me-”

She looked towards the young man sitting next to her. “It’s you, it says you are my son?”

The young man’s mouth twitched, he was clearly dissatisfied with this setting.

Yu Su thought, she did not receive any information about her relationship with anyone. It seemed that the two newcomers were assigned partners, while the rest were playing the game independently.

This is good, even though she was also a new player, she did not wish to be partnered up with a newcomer. It was not that she looked down on them, but she just felt that it was too bothersome and she was also a novice whose inexperience could make it easier to hurt others.

The author has something to say: This world has a lot of characters. My way of naming uses the characters homophones, which should make it easier to remember.