After the Evil God Pretends to Be a Player [Infinite] - Chapter 18

Before re-entering the dormitory building, Li Zhu stood outside for a long time, observing, before finally stepping inside.

Lale, seeing him standing at the entrance for so long, asked, “What are you looking at?”

Li Zhu let out a scoff. “Checking to see if things have returned to normal. Sigh, I feel like we’re two dishes on a dinner table, being eyed hungrily by the monsters and ghosts inside.”

A rare glint of amusement appeared in Lale’s eyes. She said, “You are a dish; I am not.”

Li Zhu said meaningfully, “You once said that the term ‘ant’ is relative. Well, for me, ‘dishes’ are relative too. In my eyes, you aren’t just a dish, you are a plate of… how should I put it… No, if I say it, you’ll definitely kill me…”

He watched Lale and laughed to himself for a while, refusing to say another word.

Lale sensed he wasn’t thinking of anything good and shot him a glare before taking the lead and walking inside.

The dormitory building had returned to its original state. On the first floor, the dim yellow light still glowed from the supervisor’s office.

This time, they arrived at the dormitory where Yingzi resided.

In Yingzi’s room, only three people lived year-round, leaving one bed vacant. Of her two roommates, one was extremely close to Yingzi, while the other had found her eyesore from the very first day.

Lale gently pushed open the dormitory door. The two people talking in the bathroom didn’t notice the door had been quietly opened.

As Li Zhu entered, his tall stature caused his head to accidentally brush against the wind chimes hanging on the door.

Ding-ling-ling…

Ding-ling-ling…

Yingzi’s two roommates came running out, surprised. “How did the door open by itself? The wind chimes moved too.”

Seeing no one there, they attributed it to the wind in the corridor blowing the door open and returned to the bathroom to continue their conversation.

Lale walked around the room and frowned; Yingzi was not in the dormitory.

The dormitory door wasn’t very soundproof, and fragmented voices drifted out from the bathroom:

“…If I were her, I’d rather just bash my head against a wall and be done with it. It would be peaceful…”

“But she hasn’t really done anything wrong…”

“Stop pretending! I saw that diary under your bedboard. What happened to her you’re the one who did it, right!”

This time, the bathroom fell into a long, heavy silence.

Eventually, a female voice whispered, “You saw it all?”

“Hey, I won’t tell anyone. You said in your diary that you were jealous of her beauty. Who isn’t? I actually think you did a good thing! When God opens a door for someone, He must close a window. Since God won’t act, we’ll close that window for her ourselves!”

“Actually…” The roommate who was supposed to be close to Yingzi started to say something, but she hesitated and ultimately said nothing more.

The voices in the bathroom gradually died down. Seeing that they weren’t coming out, Lale began to search for the diary mentioned in their conversation without any guilt.

Li Zhu lifted the bedboards of the two girls, but neither revealed the diary.

Drawers, cabinets, bookshelves… they searched almost every place a girl could hide something, but they still couldn’t find the crucial diary.

Lale frowned. Stepping forward, she flipped over the bedding on the bed belonging to Yingzi.

The diary was lying quietly on the bedboard.

Lale and Li Zhu exchanged a glance. The fact that the diary was placed under Yingzi’s own bed carried an implication that went without saying.

Lale whispered, “No wonder. Even back then, she had already realized…”

She recalled the scene where Yingzi was interrogated by the members of the Student Council:

The frail girl had lowered her head and said, slowly but clearly, “My mistake was that I shouldn’t have been born looking like this.”

Lale took a deep breath and opened the diary.

The first half of the diary recorded some daily trivia that occurred before Yingzi had transferred to the school.

Lale quickly flipped to the entries following Yingzi’s transfer.

Initially, the diary owner’s attitude toward Yingzi was positive. she recorded many warm and interesting anecdotes about their time together—eating together, doing homework together, joining clubs together. She also wrote words tinged with envy, such as:

“I really envy Yingzi. Even Senior Meng confessed to her.”

“Yingzi looks beautiful from every single angle.”

However, before long, these expressions of envy increased in frequency, gradually dominating the daily entries and taking on a tone of jealousy and resentment.

“Why does she get to be so beautiful when her family background isn’t even that good?”

“Why is it that every time a boy in class talks to me, it’s just to ask about Yingzi? What am I? Am I her sidekick or her secretary?”

Lale flipped to the final page. A few lines of black ink on the white paper were unmistakably clear:

“She is too beautiful. I had no choice but to do it…” The following few words were blacked out.

“I know every boy who admires her; after all, I’m the one who helps her reject their love letters. I contacted Cheng Lin from the third year. He will agree to it.”

“I had no choice either. After all, she looks like that. I hope she doesn’t blame me.”

Lale closed the diary. The clues in her mind were now connected into a single line, yet it felt as though something remained unresolved…

Once she finished reading the clues and her thoughts stopped racing, she suddenly felt that the surroundings had become far too quiet.

At some unknown point, the voices, the running water, and even the sounds of footsteps or friction from the bathroom had vanished. In the dead silence, the only thing remaining was the shallow breathing of herself and Li Zhu beside her.

From somewhere came a rustling sound faint, as if afraid of disturbing something, yet appearing to be right in front of them.

A strand of a woman’s hair drifted down, hovering before them.

In a flash, Lale and Li Zhu locked eyes and simultaneously looked toward the ceiling.

Next to the ceiling lamp, two ghastly pale faces were suspended. The moment they looked up, those two pale faces simultaneously broke into an eerie smile.

In the next second, both faces moved toward them!

In reality, the faces weren’t merely “suspended.” The bodies connected to the back of the faces were clinging to the ceiling like spiders, creating the illusion of hanging heads.

And those faces—who else could they be but Yingzi’s two roommates?

Li Zhu couldn’t help but let out a “Holy crap!”

“Is this Evil God trying to help us, or does He have a grudge against us? Every time we get a key clue, He pulls this stunt!”

Lale said quickly, “She doesn’t want to accept the fact that her friends were determined to harm her. Stop talking, let’s go!”

However, Li Zhu didn’t run immediately. He pulled open a nearby wardrobe, quickly snatched something from inside, and only then grabbed Lale’s hand to run.

But this time, the two roommates they encountered were much smarter than those in Cheng Lin’s dormitory.

Their arms and legs moved across the ceiling with lightning speed. One of the monsters crawled to the door within seconds and sprawled across it. Its pale face twisted 180 degrees, flashing them a bizarre smile.

Simultaneously, Li Zhu felt a shadow descend before his eyes. Looking up, he saw the long, hanging hair of the other monster.

He was about to heartlessly brush the monster’s “lovely locks” aside so they wouldn’t block his vision when he felt a resistance at his wrist.

It was Lale. Her forward pace had come to a sudden, dead stop.

Li Zhu shook her wrist. “Escaping might be hard, but you can’t just give up now! Come on, pull it together!”

In the next second, he heard Lale say, one word at a time, “Forget it. Since they don’t want us to leave, then no one is leaving.”

Li Zhu almost thought he had misheard her.

But the monster’s hair before his eyes grew longer and longer, and for a moment, he couldn’t see what was happening.

Following that, a series of whispers echoed in his ears, as if trying to burrow into his skull, mingled with the howling of monsters.

The Keeper seemed to be calling for a Sanity Check, but those words were drowned out by howls that grew louder and louder. He wasn’t even sure if he had rolled the dice.

Suddenly, all the howling stopped abruptly.

The hair that had been firmly blocking his vision fell away, severed at the roots.

As for the monster that had jumped onto his head…

Li Zhu turned his head. It was being held by the throat, eyes rolling back, trembling uncontrollably in Lale’s hand.

And the monster on the door…

It was nowhere to be found.

Li Zhu thought about it and wisely decided not to ask where that monster had gone.

Lale asked the monster in her hand, “Is everything you wrote in the diary true?”

Li Zhu suddenly realized: the monster Lale had spared was the instigator who had contacted Cheng Lin. However, when NPCs in a dungeon undergo a monstrous transformation, their appearance changes drastically. He didn’t know how Lale had recognized her.

“I…”

The monster trembled, and the short words it uttered finally formed a broken sentence: “Yes… it was me… I was jealous of her beauty. I did everything by myself.”

Lale let go, and with a thud, the monster fell to the floor.

Lale ignored it, leaving it to lie there shivering, and walked out the door with Li Zhu.

Li Zhu said with a smile, “I thought you were going to kill it directly?”

Lale said flatly, “There was no need.”

“Oh?”

“It is merely a thrall.”

Li Zhu suddenly considered a possibility. He wanted to ask if every mask in the School History Museum and every NPC in Pretty High School was essentially a thrall of that Evil God.

But after staring at Lale’s profile for a long while, he ultimately asked nothing.

He changed the subject. “So, does this mean the events of the past are fully resolved? When will the Evil God let us out?”

Lale, however, said, “She lied.”

“Who?”

Li Zhu initially thought she meant the Evil God, but when she spoke, he realized she meant the monster they had just interrogated.

“If the story ended there, Yingzi had already gained the Senior’s protection. Why was her face ultimately flayed? Her roommate doesn’t look like someone capable of defying the Student Council President.”

“And…” Lale was deeply perplexed. “The date marked next to Yingzi’s mask was February 14th. Is there anything special about that day?”