Xu Dengming was poring over the contents he had seen in the diary, realizing that Guo Jiajia’s records concealed a subtle trap.
Although the little girl had written an entry for September 6th, the events of the game might have taken place before that date.
Xu Dengming believed that Guo Jiajia had a habit of writing future diary entries in advance.
Like many children who were too lazy to record their daily lives but had to jot down a few words, Guo Jiajia would write a series of identical entries in her diary in chronological order, stating, “Nothing worth recording happened.”
If she encountered something she wanted to elaborate on, she would simply add a few lines at the end.
According to Xu Dengming’s speculation, on September 4th, the man had torn apart the doll, which led to a significant conflict with Guo Jiajia and caused her physical functions to fail.
Believing that the little girl was nearly broken beyond repair, the man temporarily placed her body in the basement.
Given that there were multiple households in the area and even staff members who came to collect utility bills, the man, harboring a secret he did not want others to see, did not want the disappearance of the child to attract attention.
To this end, he made certain disguises.
He removed Guo Jiajia’s belongings from the common areas of the house and hid her suitcase.
If anyone inquired, he could claim that the child had gone out temporarily, likely to participate in a badminton competition.
This explained why Guo Jiajia’s toothbrush was missing from the bathroom and why her suitcase was found hidden in the farthest cabinet.
Xu Dengming then thought about the cleaning tools in the bathroom.
The cabinet was filled with many brand-new rags, and every area of the house, except for the utility room, was exceptionally clean and tidy.
Living alone in an apartment, Xu Dengming was well aware of the effort required to maintain such cleanliness.
Therefore, either the “mother” and “father” mentioned in the diary had a penchant for cleanliness, or a major cleanup had been done not long ago.
Considering the water stains on the walls and the long-untouched utility room, Xu Dengming was inclined to believe the latter.
Moreover, the absence of old cleaning tools in the bathroom suggested that the family had discarded all used rags after the major cleanup.
Taking into account the conflict on September 4th, Xu Dengming couldn’t help but consider the possibility of evidence destruction.
This also explained why the woman and the man had no intention of visiting the child’s room in any of the test rounds, because in their eyes, Guo Jiajia’s bedroom was empty.
This conclusion had been verified in the second round—when the woman wanted to leave the house, she made up an excuse about not having her keys.
If there really was someone in the house—excluding the immobile old woman—then the woman should have tried calling out when she realized she didn’t have her keys.
But she didn’t do that.
Because what was moving around in the child’s room at that moment was a doll that should not have existed in the current timeline.
The doll possessed a very special ability.
As Guo Jiajia’s creation, it could not only see the future but also interfere with it to a certain extent.
However, there was a fatal limitation to its foresight—during the entire process of predicting the future, it could not be detected by anyone, otherwise it would revert to its torn state, which was how Xu Dengming had ended up evenly spread on the floor at the end of the previous two rounds.
The woman ignored the doll’s “flesh and blood” because to her, those were just scattered cotton balls, and the greatest impact they could cause was a sneeze.
Although the doll could not be seen, if it was almost discovered, as long as contact was promptly blocked, its state could still be restored.
Xu Dengming remembered that her first illness in the first round occurred when she approached the door, causing her to temporarily lose her ability to move.
The game was warning Xu Dengming that if her existence was discovered by others, she would suffer a devastating injury.
It was also for this reason that the restoration of certain items’ movements in the child’s room was not due to some special mechanism or bug in the game, but because the woman and the man might realize that someone was in the child’s room due to the obvious changes in the items.
As for the less noticeable changes, such as the slightly pulled-out copy of “The Origin of Life,” since they would not be noticed, they would not be affected by restoration.
The old woman in the living room, having lost his sight and with unclear thinking, could not realize the true identity of the person moving around him, making him a target that the doll could briefly come into contact with.
After making these assumptions, Xu Dengming began to ponder the reason for her second illness.
Since her illness was caused by being seen, who was the person who saw her at that time?
Xu Dengming remembered that during her argument with the old woman, she accidentally broke the kettle and made a loud noise.
The sound of the broken object caught the attention of someone in the room, and she received enough attention to be shattered into pieces.
It was a person whom Xu Dengming could not see but who truly existed in that space and time.
The doll’s foresight was conditional.
Since it had not seen that person, their image would not appear in its predictions, just as it could not see the specifics outside the house or beyond the master bedroom.
For the doll, the view outside the familiar child’s room window was clear and bright, the rarely visited master bedroom was blurry, and the scenery outside the never-before-trodden front door was chaotic.
It could only make predictions based on what it already knew, and the deeper its understanding, the more accurate its judgments would be.
As for the identity of the person who caused Xu Dengming’s second illness in the first round, it was most likely an enemy of the family.
From the woman’s unhesitating speed of fleeing in the second round, it was evident that their lives had always been threatened by some force.
However, what they did not know was that, without their notice, the threat had already infiltrated the house and even found the basement, temporarily hiding inside.
Since the basement only contained the immobile little girl, Guo Jiajia, the “threat’s” hiding did not arouse any suspicion.
Xu Dengming temporarily referred to the hider in her mind as John Doe A.
John Doe A did not immediately take action to eliminate the couple but patiently gathered information for a while.
By the day of the incident, John Doe A had basically figured out the daily routines of the woman and the man.
If “unexplained illness” and “being seen by John Doe A” were indeed equivalent, as Xu Dengming had speculated, then based on her experience, John Doe A would not leave his hiding place until the woman returned home, unless there was a loud noise from the outside that drew attention.
Therefore, as long as she avoided making too much noise, Xu Dengming actually had ample time to act.
Her sudden death in the first round had a clear element of accident.
After being attracted by the loud noise, John Doe A left the basement and, apart from the teapot shards on the ground, did not initially notice any other abnormalities.
However, this hider still became suspicious and decided to immediately eliminate the couple.
After the woman returned home, John Doe A took advantage of her cooking in the kitchen to launch a surprise attack, chopping off her head.
He then cleaned up the kitchen and moved the body to the bedroom—this was why Xu Dengming saw the woman’s head roll into the master bedroom and all the blood in the kitchen disappear.
Subsequently, John Doe A hid again and, after the man came home from work, delivered a fatal blow to him from behind.
Thus, the first round ended completely, and the entire house fell under the control of John Doe A, including Guo Jiajia, who was hidden in the basement.
Guo Jiajia did not survive, and Xu Dengming’s consciousness exited the game due to the failure to pass the level.
After collecting some basic information, Xu Dengming used the second round as her trial-and-error round.
She first put forward a relatively normal hypothesis, intending to achieve the goal of rescue by preventing the couple from entering the house, only to find that even if the woman and the man left the house and survived for a while, it would not count as her passing the level, and they would still die.
The game she tested seemed to have become an unsolvable puzzle.
After the failure of the second round, Xu Dengming became more inclined to another hypothesis—that the target she needed to rescue was not the suspicious “couple.”
And this was the second copy she had experienced from the system, theoretically, the difficulty should not be too high.
Xu Dengming thought that Guo Jiajia considered the woman to be her mother and the man to be her father, but for the doll she was playing, there was only one family member, and that was Guo Jiajia, who created her.
With only one chance left, she had to gamble on who her true target was.
Xu Dengming clearly remembered the two sentences she had heard before she started playing, “Save my family, save Guo Jiajia.”
Would Guo Jiajia refer to herself by her own name?
These two sentences provided some clues, making Xu Dengming think that the speaker was likely not Guo Jiajia, but a family member of Guo Jiajia.
When she put herself in the role of the doll, the meaning of these two sentences became even clearer.
The second sentence was essentially an emphasis on the first one.
The doll was hinting to the tester that its family consisted of only Guo Jiajia.
So in the first round, the woman’s death did not directly end the game, but rather, it was only after the man also lost his life and no one was left to awaken the little girl in the basement that the system gave the evaluation of [Total Annihilation].
A bold hypothesis was followed by an even bolder verification.
Xu Dengming set the goal of the third round to “find and awaken the little girl in the basement.”
In her hypothesis, besides the little girl, there was also John Doe A in the basement.
She needed to use the fact that “John Doe A would be attracted by loud noises,” which she had learned in the first round, to lure him to another area and create space for her rescue.
Thus, Xu Dengming arranged a trap in the master bedroom to temporarily hold John Doe A and then went to the basement to find the person.
Xu Dengming had anticipated that the Guo Jiajia she would find would be an immobile little girl.
Fortunately, there were two items in the copy that showed the ability to heal those who had lost their physical functions: one was the pills in the child’s room, and the other was something like cured meat in the refrigerator.
Before exploring the basement, she took all the healing items with her.
As a doll, Xu Dengming did everything she could.
She awakened Guo Jiajia and, in this ending, gave the little girl a chance to escape.
The little girl woke up and left with the doll.
Just as the system was about to give the evaluation of [A Glimmer of Hope], Xu Dengming promptly used the [Chest of Destiny].
Success.
The game had once told Xu Dengming, “Conditions not met, backpack use failed.”
Later, when she tried to use her abilities again, she also failed.
Xu Dengming interpreted this in the opposite direction, thinking that the system meant that as long as the conditions were met, it would be possible to use the abilities.
Time was limited, and information was limited.
In fact, just three rounds were far from enough to fully understand the copy involving special powers.
Fortunately, the final test results were not too bad.
After passing the level, Xu Dengming reviewed her own thinking process and felt that at least sixty percent of her original guesses were correct.
After briefly organizing her thoughts on how she passed the level in her mind, Xu Dengming opened the backpack interface.
Unlike the previous three times, this time Xu Dengming could roughly guess what kind of reward she would receive.
What still appeared on the backpack interface was a chest with no new design.
After Xu Dengming opened it, the chest puffed out one hundred and fifty colorless crystals.
Xu Dengming raised her eyebrows.
If the number of colorless crystals obtained was related to the difficulty of the copy, then in the system’s judgment, the difficulty of [Playing House] was apparently higher than that of [Nestle Park Internship Incident].
“Unhatched Fire” finally showed its superiority over the wild copies outside.