Xu Dengming sprawled out on the sofa, limbs extended like a dismantled scarecrow, motionless.
After completing the first round of [Houseplay], Xu Dengming returned directly to her living room.
Influenced by the game, the living room looked entirely different from before.
The sensation of being submerged in water became more pronounced, the space seemed to shrink inward, and the distant walls and cabinets were swallowed by a blurry darkness.
All Xu Dengming could see now was the sofa and a small area around it.
The wall directly in front of the sofa was still there, and the wooden door that had appeared on it was clearly visible.
However, the twisted red characters scrawled on it had changed from “3” to “2.”
The red number on the wooden door obviously represented the remaining attempts Xu Dengming had for the test.
She wasn’t too keen on finding out what would happen when the number reached zero.
[Houseplay] didn’t force players to re-enter the game immediately after a failure, but as time passed, the wooden door inexplicably became incredibly alluring.
Xu Dengming found it almost impossible to resist the urge to keep her gaze fixed on it.
This was clearly the system’s silent way of urging her on.
Xu Dengming opened the system panel and noticed that her mental value, which had fully recovered when she left the hospital, had changed again.
[Mental Value: 111/120 (Mild Insanity, Continuously Declining)]
Xu Dengming suddenly felt a pang of guilt toward her attending physician.
If the game continued to torment her like this, she suspected she’d have to get an annual membership at the Seventh Hospital-assuming the hospital was still willing to waive her fees, of course.
[Houseplay] hadn’t forcibly stripped Xu Dengming of her ability to think, but as long as she couldn’t clear the game, endless madness awaited her.
Xu Dengming took a deep breath, pushed herself up with her legs, and walked forward to push open the wooden door for the second time.
Behind the door was still that empty room.
Xu Dengming walked up to the graffiti on the wall, then turned around.
A cold sensation immediately pressed against her body.
The little girl wearing a plastic bag as a coat stood behind Xu Dengming, standing on a table to make herself appear as tall as an adult.
If Xu Dengming had taken a slightly larger step, her head would have collided directly with the little girl’s.
This time, the little girl didn’t play house.
Her black eyes stared straight at Xu Dengming, like two smooth mirrors embedded in her face.
Xu Dengming: “Hello.”
The little girl didn’t respond.
She just stood there quietly, lips pressed together, her expression cold and even slightly resistant.
The two of them stared at each other like this.
Xu Dengming tried to speak, but the little girl gave no reaction.
She was merely watching, as if the game’s design had never included an interaction option for her.
Xu Dengming felt a bit helpless.
She had always thought of herself as socially awkward, but compared to the little girl in front of her, she felt almost outgoing and lively.
Time passed minute by minute.
Xu Dengming’s eyes grew dry from staring for so long, and she rubbed them.
The moment she did, her surroundings darkened, and a familiar whisper echoed in her ear:
“Save my family.”
“Save Guo Jiajia.”
The faint whispers had barely faded from her ears when Xu Dengming returned to the children’s room.
Everything before her eyes remained consistent with the previous cycle-the calendar, the desk, the window.
Xu Dengming carefully examined each item, confirming that nothing had been added or removed from the current refresh point.
-The game content doesn’t change with the number of test runs, which is somewhat a good thing.
It allowed Xu Dengming to mentally raise her evaluation of the dungeon from zero to one star.
Kitchen.
After the chaotic exploration that had just taken place across the living room floor, Xu Dengming had formed a few hypotheses, though each lacked sufficient evidence for validation.
She now understood why The Unhatched Flame gave players three attempts.
Xu Dengming summarized the events she had experienced in the first cycle.
So far, all the fatal dangers had occurred in the living room and after leaving the children’s room.
The elderly woman in the living room had quickly shown signs of abnormality, followed by herself, and then the woman and the man.
A thought naturally occurred to her.
If she could prevent the relevant individuals from entering the event-triggering locations in advance, could she alter their fates of death?
With only one exploration under her belt, the information was still insufficient.
Xu Dengming needed more clues to verify her conclusions.
The second cycle would be her test run.
Xu Dengming quickly formulated a plan of action in her mind.
She jumped off the bed, glanced at the clock on the wall, and her pupils suddenly contracted.
The clock showed 7:30 in the morning.
Her login point had been delayed by nearly forty-five minutes.
If the players’ free action time was limited, then Xu Dengming was already teetering on the edge of failure.
The living room was completely silent now.
The man and the woman had clearly left the house, and the entire home suddenly felt empty and quiet.
The time she had left for exploration was dwindling, and the situation was becoming increasingly unfavorable for the tester.
Xu Dengming wasted no time.
She rushed to the desk, opened the drawer, and purposefully took out the small, unlabeled medicine bottle.
Considering that her limbs might become unresponsive during an episode, she placed a pill under her tongue in advance to ensure she wouldn’t miss the chance to take it.
The unknown pill emitted a bitter taste that was hard to ignore, though it wasn’t too noticeable yet due to the barrier of her tongue.
Next, Xu Dengming retrieved the diary from the drawer again and quickly flipped through it.
-In some games, the details of items within a dungeon could change with each cycle.
She wasn’t sure if Houseplay had a similar mechanic.
Her second read-through was much faster than the first.
In less than ten minutes, Xu Dengming confirmed that the contents of the diary in the desk remained consistent with the previous cycle.
She then checked the books on the shelf again, this time briefly skimming through a few that she hadn’t had time to read in the last cycle.
All the books on the shelf showed signs of frequent use, with annotations on the pages.
The notes varied in age, with the most heavily annotated being Crafting Skills Start with Children.
Upon closer inspection, although the annotator had tried to keep their handwriting neat, it still appeared too immature, clearly the work of a child.
Unfortunately, most of the annotations were just explanations of rare words, and those explanations were quite standard, as if directly copied from a dictionary.
Taken directly from the dictionary, there were no personal opinions mixed in.
Judging from the vocabulary used, the writer seemed more like a child.
This body could fall ill at any moment.
Xu Dengming remembered that in the previous cycle, the woman had returned home just after ten o’clock.
And now it was almost nine.
Xu Dengming thought that perhaps she could make a mark at the entrance first, so that the two adults returning home would notice something was wrong before entering, and thus take appropriate action.
Xu Dengming rummaged through the shelf and found a red marker, then walked out of the children’s room.
She moved quickly but made no sound at all.
The old man she had encountered in the previous cycle was still lying on the wooden chair, motionless, with his eyes closed, but Xu Dengming inexplicably felt that his attention was focused on her.
An inexplicable chill spread from her spine to her limbs.
Xu Dengming shook off the various unfounded thoughts in her mind and walked directly to the entrance, carefully opening the door.
Just as the door opened, a familiar sense of weakness spread from deep within her body, and Xu Dengming immediately swallowed the pill in her mouth.
The weakness was alleviated, and Xu Dengming successfully stabilized her condition.
Xu Dengming placed another new pill under her tongue, then slowly pushed the door open wider.
A strange shiver instantly surged through her heart.
Xu Dengming didn’t consider herself a particularly timid person, but for a second or two, she was completely frozen in fear, unable to move at all.
The bungalow she had seen through the window earlier was clearly distinct, but outside the door, everything was shrouded in a gray haze.
All the scenery appeared chaotic and blurred.
Xu Dengming couldn’t see the distant view at all.
The harder she tried to observe, the more suffocated and astonished she felt, and the sensation of her hair standing on end grew even stronger.
The child’s hand trembled slightly, and Xu Dengming’s entire body resisted going outside.
Her intuition was desperately trying to stop her from leaving the house.
Xu Dengming thought that all game dungeons have boundaries, and perhaps this “home” was the boundary of the character she was playing.
She used almost all her strength to finally step over the threshold, then immediately turned around and used the marker to leave three crooked but distinct red characters on the door—
“Run away!”
As Xu Dengming finished writing the message, she felt a distant scream echo in her ears.
Cold sweat soaked through the sackcloth clothes Xu Dengming was wearing.
The act of leaving the message once again caused her to feel weak, and the second pill was thus consumed.
She only had one last chance to heal herself.
[Playing House] was clearly controlling the player’s mobility by reducing their health and mana.
After writing the message, Xu Dengming walked back into the house with unsteady steps and glanced at the clock on the wall.
The clock showed it was half past nine.
-In this cycle, Xu Dengming had not yet died, but the flow of time had still become distorted.
There were about forty minutes left before the woman would return home, leaving Xu Dengming with only a little time to explore.
In the previous cycle, Xu Dengming had not had time to search the entire room before meeting her demise.
Currently, there were still clues in the bathroom, master bedroom, and storage room that she had yet to collect.
Xu Dengming went to the bathroom first.
Just like the living room and kitchen, the bathroom was also spotlessly clean.
Xu Dengming noticed something else the cleaning cloths and buckets in the bathroom were relatively new.
On the middle shelf next to the sink, there was a stack of brand-new, unopened cleaning cloths.
On top of the cloths were two blue toothbrush holders, each containing a slightly worn toothbrush that matched the size of an adult’s mouth.
Xu Dengming’s gaze froze.
She stared silently at the scene before her.
There was no blood, no monsters, and the image wasn’t distorted in any abnormal way.
Yet, the hidden strangeness in the mundane details seeped into Xu Dengming’s consciousness like icy water.
There were only two toothbrush holders in the bathroom, but clearly, four people lived in this house, and the children’s room showed obvious signs of habitation.
If the elderly person who could drink beverages through their chest cavity indeed had no need for a toothbrush, then where was Guo Jiajia’s child-sized toothbrush?