After taking the first fork in the road and heading down a completely different path, the following roads would only lead farther away from the other forks.
Just like Hua Ru, Zhang Huiran was able to quickly accept reality after the first round in the Dark World, rather than feeling like she was dreaming.
Both of them chose to actively cope with the Dark World, but their differing abilities meant their approaches diverged.
Filled with resentment, Zhang Huiran chose to go it alone in the second game, but that round was a psychological battle.
Her lone-wolf strategy was useless, and instead, several others teamed up to hunt her down. To survive, she endured the stench and the maggots crawling all over her body in a pile of corpses, ultimately relying on luck to live through the second round.
By the third game, she stuck to the same path, having even grown accustomed to the killing. She was the first to take a life in that round and immediately became the target of everyone’s hostility.
She survived only by eating raw human flesh to stave off starvation. But the situation only worsened from there.
As her mental state deteriorated over time, she was ambushed. Surrounded by seven assailants, it was a hopeless fight. She knelt on the ground, crying, begging them for mercy.
She knew she couldn’t be a great person, couldn’t die with high honor like those others. She was just a nobody, only hoping to survive.
After being captured, her limbs were chopped off, and she was reduced to a mere plaything. It was a grim fate, but the fact that they did this meant there was still a chance to live. She used every trick in the book to cater to those men as best as she could, preserving her own life.
Watching those people moving in groups, she suddenly had an awakening.
Is humanity’s strongest weapon really weapons? No — it’s unity! Even if it’s fake unity.
In that third game, she again survived by luck. Out of 30 participants, five could survive.
The team that captured Zhang Huiran had planned to kill her off at the end, treating her as nothing more than a toy, but unexpectedly, the game never reached its final stage.
When they went “hunting” one time, they were wiped out entirely. By then, 25 people had died and the game was over.
She survived once more by chance. Back in the real world, her severed limbs regrew. The body can heal, but the mind and soul do not always. She would never forget that despair, that hopelessness.
So… she arrived at the fourth game — this current killing game.
Her acting skills were terrible, having practiced for only two days.
Her strategy was simple: feign weakness, wait, then explode. Use every possible method to form temporary allies; the power of the group far outweighs that of the individual.
Up to this point, her approach was very similar to Hua Ru’s. But Hua Ru’s stance was lofty; she treated selling her body as a trump card, while Zhang Huiran saw it as just a normal tactic.
Therefore, even though the two were alike in many ways, their different experiences, intelligence, and outlooks led them down two separate paths.
Was she pitiful? Yes, very pitiful. But who in the Dark World wasn’t?
Listening quietly to this story, Hua Ru realized this woman was fishing for sympathy votes, using her story to gain pity.
Counting carefully, Hua Ru recalled that this woman had recently “buffed” with No. 11 Xuanyuan Najiang in the communal bathhouse and had just slept with No. 5 Zhou Yulong.
Both of those people should have verbally promised not to vote for No. 2 Zhang Huiran. If Zhang could get her own sympathy vote plus her own single vote, that meant four fewer threatening votes. But that wasn’t enough—she still needed four more votes.
There were 15 people left, meaning 15 votes. If Zhang Huiran could persuade seven people to vote for No. 10, plus her own vote, No. 10 would be eliminated by 8 votes.
No matter who the remaining seven voted for, it wouldn’t change the outcome of No. 10 Liu Qingzhu’s elimination. If she only convinced others not to vote for herself, eight votes would not be enough.
After finishing her story, the still naked woman had tears streaming down her face like pear blossoms in the rain. Her acting wasn’t very good; she had pinched herself to coax out those tears.
But during the story, her expression seemed quite genuine—perhaps it was real; otherwise, the acting wouldn’t have been so convincing.
If she told this story to No. 5 or No. 6, maybe she could truly gain sympathy votes. But telling Hua Ru? That was a waste.
After all, this woman’s heart was already rotten. She didn’t care about this heartbreaking experience. No… Hua Ru wasn’t indifferent; she was thinking about how to use this story to her advantage, even considering handing over a sympathy vote herself.
A bold plan gradually formed in her mind.
What happened next turned out just as Hua Ru had predicted.
Zhang Huiran was indeed fishing for sympathy votes. She knelt, begging this “young lady” to vote for No. 10, listing a long series of deductions about how Liu Qingzhu was the killer.
Pointing out other people as killers in front of the actual killer and doing it convincingly—if not for someone’s good acting, it would have been like a plot out of Death Note.
“But… I… promised him… sorry.” The girl looked hesitant, as if struggling with a difficult decision.
“I know. You all agreed not to vote for your own team members, right? And to give all your votes to others,” Zhang Huiran exposed the unspoken rules of several teams with one sharp sentence.
Hua Ru looked shocked, as if surprised someone had figured it out. Of course this was acting. Everyone knew about the pact to share votes.
“How did you know?”
“That doesn’t matter. Think about it—if No. 10 wasn’t the killer, why would he do this? We can only eliminate the killer by voting. If the killer controls the votes, they become invincible.
It’s precisely because No. 10 is the killer that he’s tricking you out of your votes! By fooling you not to vote for him, he can do whatever he wants: kill at night and control votes by day.” Zhang Huiran kept persuading her, and from the girl’s expression, it seemed the vote was really within reach.
Seeing she had convinced seven or eight people, Zhang played her last card. Wiping away tears, she said solemnly, “Actually… I’m a police officer.”
Huh? So she really used that trick?
Hua Ru felt a headache coming on. The admission didn’t prove anything—her identity could indeed be a police officer, or it could be a desperate lie to survive, or there was a third possibility: someone was coaching her.
If it was coaching, the people Zhang had contact with seemed limited—such as No. 1, No. 5, No. 11. Those were the obvious ones; Hua Ru hadn’t paid close attention to any secret meetings.
A police officer’s privilege was the ability to “verify” others. But what exactly did this verification entail? Could it detect something about a person, or could it directly confirm someone’s identity?
Assuming the latter, even if the police confirmed someone was the killer, that person still wouldn’t be eliminated immediately. It would still require a vote. So the police had to campaign for votes just like everyone else.
If they openly claimed to be police to get votes, and the killer died, the police would be killed that night too. So the police had to act like mice, unable to appear in the light.
Now, No. 2 was about to die.
Hua Ru thought that if she were the police, this would be the perfect moment to exploit No. 2, letting her pretend to be the officer and then strike at someone.
This would be a desperate counterattack. If she hit the killer, she would die. If she missed, the killer might ignore her. But the civilians wouldn’t know if the victim was the killer.
In this way, the police would have a spokesperson. Anyone wanting to vote against No. 2 would need solid evidence or risk being killed in retaliation.
Of course, the killer wouldn’t remain passive forever. Letting No. 2 live while claiming to be the police was itself impossible—unless she was the killer.
When No. 2 Zhang Huiran pulled this stunt, it meant she was doomed. Either the killer would kill her, or she would be voted out by suspicious civilians sooner or later.