Is it a coincidence?
Xin Meng didn’t believe it. Since there were six, it must be pointing to a clue.
But he had just searched carefully, and there really wasn’t anything special in this room…
Could it be…
He couldn’t help but walk in front of the six thermos bottles, examining them closely again. This time, he finally discovered the problem—none of the bottle caps were there.
He picked one up and looked inside; it was empty. He wasn’t in a hurry and continued to check one by one. When he reached the fourth one, he indeed found a rolled-up newspaper inside.
“Well hidden,” Xin Meng muttered, pulling out the newspaper. Using the light by the window, he skimmed through the other pages without any findings, then immediately began to examine the legal page carefully.
“Recently, an accidental incident occurred at a kindergarten in our city. A five-year-old girl was scalded to death while drawing water in the hot water room. She was sent to the hospital but unfortunately did not survive. The specific case is under investigation.”
Another murder case.
And judging by the previous circumstances, it definitely wasn’t a true “accidental incident,” but rather—murder.
This time, the weapon was… a thermos bottle?
No matter what, he decided to take one first.
Xin Meng grabbed one and handed it to You Yi, while he also put one in his inventory.
The footsteps outside lingered for about ten minutes before gradually fading away.
You Yi gently opened the door a crack, looked outside for a moment, then waved to Xin Meng. In his haste, Xin Meng didn’t pay attention while walking and accidentally tripped over a red plastic bucket on the ground. The bucket rolled a few times, and a metal object fell out.
“What is this… a key?” Xin Meng bent down to pick it up. Spreading it out in his palm, it turned out to be a small silver metal key with a small keyring, tied with a red thread.
“It’s a bit small, doesn’t look like a door key,” You Yi came over to take a look at the small, old key.
“Cupboard? Drawer?” Xin Meng couldn’t recall where this key might be used. Along the way, they had encountered several locked cupboards and drawers; there were at least four or five locked drawers in the kitchen alone, not to mention the locked cupboards in other places—he couldn’t even count them on both hands.
“Should we try them one by one?” Xin Meng twitched his mouth, genuinely reluctant. The whole building had so many locked places that it might take three days and nights to open them all.
“Let’s look for nearby rooms first,” You Yi understood his thoughts and didn’t insist.
The two of them walked out of the room and tried a round in the two adjacent rooms, but couldn’t find anything that would open.
As they came out, Xin Meng suddenly had a flash of inspiration when he saw the wall in the corridor. He said, “How about we check the principal’s office to see if we can unlock the file cabinet there?”
After all, compared to other rooms that didn’t have any obvious special characteristics, the principal’s office was unique. There might be two kitchens, five activity rooms, but there could never be more than one principal’s office.
You Yi nodded, and the two of them carefully avoided the wandering ghost children, climbed to the top floor, and entered the principal’s office.
The principal’s office looked exactly the same as when they left. The skeletal chair stood silently there, and the air was filled with visible dust, very quiet.
Xin Meng held the key and first tried it on the drawer under the desk, but it didn’t open. He then went to the file cabinet, tried the left side, and it didn’t open. He tried the right side, and this time, he heard a soft click as the lock opened!
Inside the file cabinet were only a pile of scattered documents. Xin Meng took them out and was about to examine them closely when You Yi pulled him back.
“Something’s coming, let’s go!”
Without asking how he knew, Xin Meng quickly rolled up the documents, tucked them under his arm, and followed You Yi as they hurried out of the principal’s office. They passed the stairs and quickly slipped into a room on the other side of the corridor.
Just as they closed the door, they heard a cacophony of footsteps outside, as several children rushed in!
They kicked open the principal’s office door and began rummaging through the place. When they couldn’t find what they were looking for, they let out inhuman howls that sent chills down one’s spine!
Seeing this, Xin Meng felt a sense of foreboding and quietly asked You Yi, “Did we trigger some condition?”
You Yi neither nodded nor shook his head, only said, “Or we found some special clue.”
After pondering for a moment, Xin Meng said, “Now most of the kids are outside, and we have a mop stick and a thermos bottle. Should we go out and take a gamble?”
This time, You Yi rejected his suggestion: “Let’s check the documents first.”
Xin Meng took out the documents, counted them, and found about thirty A4 sheets, along with an empty kraft paper bag that had likely been used to hold these documents. The drawstring on it had already broken, and there were signs of tearing at the edges.
He split the papers in half and gave half to You Yi, while he kept the other half for himself.
Since they were hastily compiled in a moment of urgency, some documents were face up, while others were face down.
Coincidentally, the first page he saw was folded over. When he lifted it, it turned out to be a very familiar photo—
In it, the little boy who had been smothered with a pillow and was later “transcended” by them was looking down slightly, staring at the camera with a gloomy gaze. That mix of sinister and strange innocence seemed to leap out from the photo!
Xin Meng was startled. After steadying himself, he had to remind himself that this was just an old photo, and the person in it was a child, not a ferocious beast that preyed on others.
Next to and below the photo was the biography of this little boy.
His name was Ping Ping, clearly a pseudonym. The date of birth was vague, only the age was clearly written: 5 years old.
Further down, there was a long paragraph of handwritten notes, which contained truly astonishing content.
[On June 21, XXXX, Ping Ping was four years old. His father killed him with a kitchen knife due to his mother’s infidelity. Ping Ping was present at the scene. When the police arrived, he had a blank expression. The police thought he was traumatized and were about to comfort him, but they found he was unusually calm, which instead frightened the police into speechlessness. Although later investigations revealed that his father had a long history of domestic violence against his mother, and the child might have been used to it, the police privately called him—Monster.]
[On July 3, XXXX, he had no other guardians. A kind female police officer took him home to care for him, but due to an inappropriate remark, he chased her with a kitchen knife, resembling his father. After the knife was taken away, he picked up a mop stick and severely injured the police officer, leading to his expulsion from the family and becoming a homeless child.]
[On September 30, XXXX, I brought Ping Ping from under the overpass into the kindergarten.]
The handwriting was identical to that of the kindergarten principal he had seen before, indicating it was the principal’s record.
This wasn’t all; at the very bottom, there was a heart-wrenching small note:
[On December 25, XXXX, I tried my best, but the tragedy still happened… I don’t blame Ping Ping; I just didn’t try hard enough.]
“It seems this child is the one who killed his companion with a mop stick,” Xin Meng whispered. “He has a tragic past and a criminal record. The principal of this kindergarten still accepted him, but less than three months later, he killed again, and the principal bore all the responsibility alone.”
Flipping further down, there were personal files of the children, and astonishingly, each child had a similar past. Several were brought back by the principal from the streets, and the youngest child was only three years old.
Of course, many others were sent to the principal to handle, only to disappear without a trace.
The principal was indeed a rare kind-hearted person. She embraced these children, provided them with a home, and never looked at them with discriminatory eyes. She recruited several female volunteers to care for these children’s lives.
However, everything seemed to be cursed by a demon. After a little boy named Ping Ping killed his first person, everything changed. Two volunteers were so frightened that they went insane and immediately resigned from the kindergarten. The heavy burden fell entirely on the remaining staff, making it even harder for the already overloaded managers to pay attention to each child’s situation, ultimately leading to one murder case after another.
This content was seen on one of the sheets, the handwriting was messy and forceful, revealing the writer’s inner turmoil and pain. The disjointed expression seemed less like a record and more like a venting.
It seemed the principal couldn’t bear the pressure and was on the verge of madness.
At the very bottom of the paper were several large, messy words. Xin Meng took a long time to decipher them in the light, finally realizing they read: “Can I still save them? I can’t even save myself!”
After reading this, Xin Meng felt a wave of suffocation in his heart and couldn’t help but complain, “This game is really something. To create horror, it concocted a whole bunch of stories like this. It’s too extreme.”
You Yi flipped through the papers in his hand, which contained similar content, and said calmly, “Not all of it is a story.”
“What?” Xin Meng was taken aback.
“The influence of parents on their children is beyond what ordinary people can imagine. There are no inherently evil children, only severely negligent parents,” You Yi said. “The game simply takes the most typical examples from the entire world and puts them together. It is precisely because they are brought together that it creates such a shocking effect.”
“Parental influence?” Xin Meng pondered for a moment, realizing it might indeed be the case. “But what does that have to do with us clearing the game?”
This time, even You Yi didn’t think of more and didn’t need to. His suggestion was—observe the changes and adapt accordingly.
Xin Meng organized the documents neatly, placed them back in the kraft paper bag, and was hesitating whether to find a more obvious place in the room to leave them for the other teammates to see when he suddenly heard a loud noise from downstairs!
