After the Evil God Pretends to Be a Player [Infinite] - Chapter 2

Even with umbrellas, everyone was more or less soaked by the time they reached the dormitory.

The one least affected was the Smart-Ass with the punk hair; after all, he had an umbrella all to himself. He looked at the others with a triumphant glint in his eyes, his face practically screaming, “Look how smart I was to seize the initiative.”

The one most drenched was Li Zhu. However, despite the damp traces on his coat hems and hair, he didn’t appear wretched.

He maintained his composed smile, showing no outward signs of abnormality. No one knew that his mind was replaying the scene from a moment ago on a loop:

He had been holding a black umbrella, with Lara and Meng Luo standing beneath it. Rainwater flowed down the edges of the black canopy, splashing onto the ground in a burst of spray.

The surroundings were silent. No one spoke. Everyone was carefully avoiding the puddles on the ground, looking straight ahead. Everything in sight was hazy; one could only see the white and red umbrellas moving forward in the distance, acting like beacons.

Li Zhu had just withdrawn his gaze when he noticed something strange.

Normally, three people sharing one umbrella is crowded, so the other two should stay as close to the umbrella holder as possible to avoid getting wet.

Lara’s posture, however, was completely different. She kept a full thirty-centimeter distance from Li Zhu, and she was even facing away from him—a posture radiating defensiveness and resistance.

This also meant that half of her body was almost entirely exposed to the overwhelming curtain of rain.

Silently, Li Zhu let out a sigh. His upbringing prompted him to shift the umbrella toward Lara, leaving half of his own body exposed to the downpour.

But his searching gaze never left her.

After searching his memory to no avail, a doubt rose in his heart:

Have I ever seen her before?

“Boys live on floors 1, 3, and 5; girls live on floors 2, 4, and 6.”

The first floor of the dormitory was very dim. A long-neglected chandelier emitted a faint yellow light, shining on the face of the Dorm Mother.

Likely due to the rain, the students had all gone back to rest early. Aside from the Dorm Mother, there was no one else on the first floor.

She took out a roster and verified the names of the seven people one by one. The light was dim, making it hard to see her features clearly. However, whenever she looked up, Li Zhu always felt a strange sense of dissonance.

Swoosh,

A beam of light from a flashlight suddenly illuminated the space in front of them.

Before they could see where the light originated, Li Zhu finally understood where the Dorm Mother’s dissonance lay:

From her build, she was no different from a typical Dorm Mother, possessing the fat and bloat common to many middle-aged women. Her arms had the milky-white stretch marks formed by obesity, and her palms were covered in wrinkles from years of labor.

However, if one looked at her face, they would be shocked to find it fair, smooth, and flat, like that of a young girl in her twenties.

The Dorm Mother was just about to flare up when a calm female voice rang out: “I’m afraid of the dark, sorry.”

Lara said she was sorry, but her tone held no hint of an apology.

“You”

The Dorm Mother slammed her pen down in rage. She stopped checking names and assigning rooms, stomping toward Lara.

However, when her gaze swept over Lara’s face, her footsteps stopped.

Under the glare of the flashlight, everyone saw the eerie smile blooming on her face and heard her venomous words:

“You are truly beautiful.”

“I like you very much.”

“‘They’ will like you too.”

Everyone shuddered. Except for Meng Luo and Li Zhu, everyone took a step away from Lara. In a dungeon, earning the “favor” of an eerie NPC was never a good thing.

The punk-haired Smart-Ass even gave her a pitying look, thinking that such a beautiful girl was unfortunately going to be the first cannon fodder.

Lara, the protagonist hated by the NPC, showed no panic. She gave the Dorm Mother a faint glance and then, in the increasingly silent atmosphere, slowly uttered:

“Is that so? I’ll be waiting.”

The Dorm Mother looked like she wanted to explode, but she held back as if constrained by something. After a long while, her eyes darted toward the umbrellas placed on the floor. She smiled maliciously and didn’t argue further.

Although the dormitory at “Pretty Middle School” looked old, the accommodation conditions were unexpectedly good two people to a room.

Meng Luo took the initiative to room with Lara, and Lara did not refuse.

The female streamer was paired with the girlfriend from the couple. The girlfriend seemed to still harbor a grudge over the earlier incident; when assigning rooms, she gave the streamer a hateful glare and whispered “vixen.” It seemed their room would not be peaceful tonight.

Throughout the entire process, the Keeper stood to the side, looking at them with a half-smile. Under his classical beauty mask, the players couldn’t tell if he was actually smiling, but they could all sense his ill intent.

The four girls were assigned rooms.

But there were only three boys.

The male player from the couple hesitated for a second before walking toward Li Zhu.

The punk-haired Smart-Ass saw this and wanted to curse, but then he looked at the different colored umbrellas on the ground and ultimately said nothing.

The Dorm Mother handed the key for room 513 to Li Zhu and the key for the adjacent room 515 to the punk-haired man. The yellow light shining on her discordant beauty-face looked exceptionally sinister. Meng Luo recalled horror novels she had read under her covers and grumbled to herself: This doesn’t feel like room cards being handed out; it feels like receiving “love number plates” from the Grim Reaper.

The next second, the ice-cold keychain fell into Meng Luo’s palm. The Dorm Mother’s fingers were cold, and her skin texture was rough. At the moment of contact, Meng Luo couldn’t help but shrink back.

But when she looked up, she realized the Dorm Mother wasn’t looking at her. Her gaze was venomous and persistent, like the slit pupils of a poisonous snake, firmly locked onto Lara.

Meng Luo gripped the keychain for room 613.

The Dorm Mother handed the 615 key to the streamer. Meanwhile, her vividly painted red lips curled slightly as she said:

“Good luck. Sweet dreams.”

She said “sweet dreams,” but based on the dead-fish eyes she used to glare at them, she clearly hoped to send them to their deaths.

Since the building only went up to the sixth floor, there was no elevator. After the Keeper left, the seven people found the stairwell at the end of the corridor.

The stairwell was similarly long-neglected, filled with an unpleasant smell of dust. When people stepped on the stairs, it made a creaking sound. Combined with the clinking of keys, it gave off an eerie feeling that seeped into the depths of one’s soul.

“Cough, cough” The man from the couple seemed to be choked by the dust particles. Once he finally caught his breath, perhaps to ease the awkwardness, he asked, “What are your character card stats like?”

In ordinary Tabletop Role-Playing Games, character card points are usually randomly assigned. However, in the “Fate” game, to enhance the immersion of a holographic game, the stats assigned are based on a scan of the player’s own condition.

In other words, basic attributes like Appearance, Strength, and Will come from an evaluation of the player themselves. Skills like Listen, Charm, and Medicine also basically depend on whether the player possesses those skills in reality.

His question was practically asking everyone else if they were “useless” in the real world.

No one answered for a moment, except for Li Zhu, who called up his player panel. He looked at it with interest for a long while, then closed it with profound disappointment, letting out a long sigh: “Just as mediocre as in reality.”

The man from the couple couldn’t see his panel, but he wanted to get close to his new roommate, so he comforted him: “It’s fine, brother. In this vast world, who isn’t an ordinary person? We work hard for idiot bosses just to earn a meal. Mediocrity is the keynote of the masses. What do those damn dreams and ambitions have to do with us? It’s good enough just not to starve to death.”

Thinking for a bit, he tested the waters: “In the real world, I’m a coder. What about you, brother?”

The moment he asked, Li Zhu’s expression seemed to turn a bit peculiar, though that abnormality quickly vanished. He said with a smile: “I’m also a coder.”

The male player was so moved he was about to cry. It was clear that if they weren’t in a dangerous dungeon, he would have wanted to become sworn brothers with Li Zhu immediately.

In the time it took to exchange a few words, they reached the fifth floor. The three male players said goodbye to the four female players. Most had little reaction after all, it was hard to say if they would be living people or corpses when they met tomorrow morning but the male player from the couple seemed quite reluctant to part from his girlfriend.

The punk-haired Smart-Ass saw this and complained, “Stop with the lovey-dovey stuff, isn’t it disgusting?” They finally parted ways.

The sixth-floor corridor was equally deserted. All the dormitory doors were tightly shut. The dim yellow light cast long shadows behind the four of them, and the “Emergency Exit” signs emitted an eerie glow.

Meng Luo said strangely, “Does this school turn the lights off this early?”

Lara suddenly asked, “What time is it?”

Meng Luo opened the game panel and took a look. Although her phone had vanished upon entering the game, the game panel showed the time and even allowed communication.

“23:57.”

The streamer exclaimed, “Is it actually that late already?”

Everyone had heard countless horror legends about midnight, so the four of them said no more and hurried back to their respective rooms.

Rooms 613 and 615 were right next to each other. Meng Luo figured that rooms 513 and 515 were likely adjacent as well, and that 513 was very likely directly beneath their room.

Entering 613, Meng Luo turned on the light switch. The moment the lights came on, she gasped, her voice nearly cracking:

“Lara, look, what is this?”

Lara, walking behind, also saw the object in the room and frowned.

In the dormitory stood two beds placed close together. Directly opposite these beds, about a meter away, stood a mannequin.

The mannequin was completely naked, without a stitch of clothing. At first glance, she was no different from common mannequins in clothing stores if one ignored her face.

Compared to her crudely modeled body curves, her facial design seemed overly exquisite: willow-leaf brows, pale lips, and though her eyes were vacant, even her eyelashes seemed clearly visible.

She was practically lifelike.

Cold sweat broke out on Meng Luo’s back.

If someone were lying on the dormitory bed, the direction the mannequin was facing even appearing to look at with a half-smile was exactly where the person on the bed would be!

Meng Luo was terrified. She wanted to huddle together with the seemingly fragile Lara, but she found that Lara’s eyes showed no change in emotions like fear or terror. She was merely looking at the mannequin with a scrutinizing gaze.

She even walked up and reached out to touch the mannequin’s eerie face.

Meng Luo: ???

Having not yet entered university, she had never seen such a grand scene; she started trembling even harder…

Lara finally noticed something was wrong and turned back to ask, “Are you afraid?”

Meng Luo nodded like a chick pecking at grain, the fear in her eyes almost tangible.

Lara thought for a bit and asked, “Are you afraid of it, or do you just not want it looking at you like that?”

Meng Luo: …! Ah, hearing it put that way makes it even scarier staring at me in the middle of the night…

She said with difficulty, “It’s too scary having it look at me at night…” But there’s nothing we can do, so we have to try to overcome it…

Before she could finish her sentence, the words caught in her throat. She saw Lara stretch out her slender, elegant arm, rotate the mannequin 180 degrees, and then turn back: “Are you still afraid now?”