Free Web NovelWatching Bai Six’s silhouette run off and vanish into the morning light, Xiao Mu Ke’s heart seemed to stop for several seconds.
He thought of Liu Jiayi’s strange smile and suddenly wanted to grab Bai Six’s hand and tell him not to enter that classroom.
But Bai Six was too fast. In the blink of an eye, he had already reached the door of the other classroom, calmly turned the lock, and slipped inside.
Xiao Mu Ke’s breathing grew rapid.
Only then did he suddenly realize—
He hadn’t heard a single sound from that classroom for almost an hour.
“Bai Six! Come back!” Xiao Mu Ke rushed out on instinct, wanting to call Bai Six back. He hammered anxiously against the classroom door. “Something’s wrong with this classroom! Get out of there! Let’s forget about Liu Jiayi, okay? Bai Six, let’s just run! Just the few of us!”
But no matter how desperately Xiao Mu Ke cried out, no matter how he stomped and shouted until his voice nearly broke, the empty corridor only echoed with the sound of his own ragged breathing.
That sound could no longer reach the other handicrafts classroom, which had already been sealed by the effect of the item [Silent Soundless].
Soon, Xiao Mu Ke exhausted himself from pounding on the door in such emotional frenzy. He clutched his chest and crouched in front of the classroom Bai Six had entered, panting hard. His lips had turned a bruised shade of purple.
From the end of the corridor came the sound of approaching footsteps. fгeewebnovёl.com
A teacher had been drawn over by the commotion.
Xiao Miao Gaojiang followed him out. He looked at Xiao Mu Ke, who was gripping the handle of the other classroom door with a deathly hold, with a complicated expression. Then he pried Xiao Mu Ke’s fingers away one by one.
He dragged the exhausted Xiao Mu Ke back into their classroom and whispered, “Stop shouting. You’ll bring the teachers here, and Bai Six will suffer for it too. Just wait ten minutes like Bai Six told us. He’s much more capable than we are. You have to believe him.”
Xiao Mu Ke’s chest rose and fell violently.
He glanced at Xiao Miao Gaojiang and opened his mouth as if to say something, but his breathing was too fast. In the end, he said nothing.
He only turned his head away and stared at the quartz clock in the classroom, biting his lip as he silently counted down those ten minutes.
—
The other handicrafts classroom.
The moment Bai Six entered, he smelled an overwhelming stench of blood.
He saw Liu Jiayi curled up in a corner, clutching her shoulders as she trembled and sobbed without pause. Her body was covered in blood, along with wounds and marks that looked as though someone had bitten her brutally.
Those bite marks did indeed resemble the kind a child Xiao Miao Feichi’s age would leave.
Bai Six frowned.
The scale of suspicion in his heart slowly tilted toward the possibility that Xiao Miao Feichi really had eaten someone.
Even so, Bai Six did not approach rashly. Instead, he kept a cautious distance and asked in a low voice, “Liu Jiayi, where is Xiao Miao Feichi? Did he attack you?”
Curled beside her cloth box in the corner, Liu Jiayi nodded as she sobbed quietly.
“Yes.”
Then she lifted a trembling hand and pointed toward another corner swallowed by deep shadow.
Bai Six turned his head in that direction.
There was indeed a tall silhouette standing there.
Among the children, Xiao Miao Feichi’s height was second only to Bai Six’s. At that moment, the figure stood hidden behind a messy pile of discarded handicrafts, seemingly holding something in his hand, as though waiting for an opportunity to launch a sneak attack.
It seemed Xiao Miao Feichi had hidden himself the moment Bai Six entered.
“Miao Feichi?” Bai Six tightened his grip on the candlestick. He checked the soul currency belonging to Xiao Miao Feichi and advanced one step at a time, probing the situation carefully.
With the soul currency in his hand, Bai Six was not worried about Xiao Miao Feichi attacking him.
He pushed aside the scattered handicrafts covered in cobwebs and dust.
At last, he saw Xiao Miao Feichi’s terrified eyes behind them.
Even after everything he had already seen, the sight before him still made Bai Six’s breath stop for several seconds.
Xiao Miao Feichi’s limbs had been bound with IV tubes like a marionette, suspending him from the ceiling.
His face, the backs of his hands, and his neck were densely covered in needles. Every visible vein in his body had been pierced, and blood continuously flowed from him into infusion bags.
Those blood-sucking bags had drained him until his lips were cracked and dry, his skin withered like paper. His hands and feet trembled uncontrollably.
Even his tongue had been pierced with needles, leaving him able only to breathe faintly through the immense pain, unable to make a single sound.
Suspended by his limbs, Xiao Miao Feichi’s eyes had gone unfocused.
The instant he saw Bai Six, tears slid down his face. A few faint gasps escaped him, and even his eyes revealed a trace of suicidal despair.
Clutched in his hand was a cloth doll whose entire head had been pierced through with countless needles.
The doll wore clothes identical to Xiao Miao Feichi’s.
Liu Jiayi’s sobs gradually turned into eerie laughter.
With her hands behind her back, she slowly stood up.
She turned around with a radiant smile, tilting her head as she “looked” at Bai Six, who stood in front of Xiao Miao Feichi. Then she very cutely and playfully stuck out her tongue.
“Fooled you.”
“A big idiot like Xiao Miao Feichi could never hurt me.”
“I forced him to bite these wounds onto me. Mm, I might have given him a rather bad first impression of eating human flesh. He was crying so loudly and begging me to let him go while he bit me.”
Liu Jiayi giggled, casually pointing at the bite marks on her body.
“But if I didn’t do this, I wouldn’t have been able to trick you into coming in, clever, cold-blooded Bai Six-gege, who doesn’t look like a normal, obedient child at all.”
Bai Six glanced sideways at the whimpering Xiao Miao Feichi behind him.
He lifted the candlestick horizontally, taking on a posture ready to attack.
“On that point, I don’t think you have any right to criticize me. You deliberately kept Xiao Miao Feichi alive because you were afraid I would notice something was wrong and refuse to enter this classroom, weren’t you?”
If Bai Six had seen from the soul currency in his hand that Xiao Miao Feichi was already dead, he absolutely would not have come inside.
“Your skill...” Liu Jiayi walked toward Bai Six with leisurely, tiptoeing steps. “It lets you see the survival status of the people you control, doesn’t it?”
Bai Six gripped the candlestick and remained vigilant, keeping distance between them.
But Liu Jiayi did # Nоvеlight # not seem to care. A very sweet smile still hung on her face.
“Your investor—or rather, the future you—once talked to me about that skill. It truly is a perfect skill. It allows an exchange of souls, though it requires the other party’s consent, right? A rule-based skill with a small restriction. For a newcomer like Bai Liu, it’s already impressive enough.”
“It’s as if you’ve become another system, one that can decide the life and death of the people you control.”
The smile on Liu Jiayi’s face faded slightly.
Her clouded pupils shifted, revealing a high-and-mighty look of utter loathing and disgust.
“The desire for control hidden inside the purchase of souls... It really is a filthy personal skill born from the unique malice of adult men.”
[System Notification: Content regarding (Soul Trading) and related topics in player Liu Jiayi’s speech has been censored by the system.]
Liu Jiayi approached Bai Six step by step, her pace growing faster and faster.
Bai Six retreated quickly.
Liu Jiayi skipped and hopped through the cluttered handicrafts, still wearing that obedient smile, as though it had been painted onto her face. Like a wind-up doll, she leaped over box after box, her tone light and cheerful.
“Bai Six, so at this age, you’ve already started becoming obsessed with the pleasure of controlling others?”
“In that sense, you’re really quite similar to the man who fathered me.”
“No wonder you did those things to my gege in the last game. So it turns out there were already deep roots for it.”
Bai Six retreated cautiously, using various objects as cover while his mind spun rapidly.
“You want to save your gege, Liu Huai, right? But you’ve already taken Xiao Miao Feichi’s blood. Combined with your own, there’s a high chance that will already be enough to save Liu Huai. There’s no need for you to attack me.”
“Liu Huai and the future me are still in a cooperative relationship.”
“Cooperation?”
Liu Jiayi’s ethereal laughter seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, closing in on Bai Six from every direction in the classroom.
“You mean the kind of cooperation where he uses all sorts of conditions to restrict my gege, then uses words to guide and coerce him into choosing between himself and me?”
“What filthy, bottomless cooperation.”
Bai Six stood in the center of the classroom, looking around and observing every place Liu Jiayi might emerge from.
His tone remained calm.
“But you didn’t stop it, did you?”
“You clearly could have called your gege and told him you didn’t need him to save you. That way, he wouldn’t have been coerced into cooperating by the other me.”
“But you watched coldly as Liu Huai was forced to choose between you and himself, suffering so much that he could barely endure it.”
“Or perhaps...”
Bai Six’s eyes were quiet.
“You were also waiting for the answer. Waiting to see whether he would choose your life over his own.”
“If you call this filthy cooperation, then you were also a participant and a facilitator of that cooperation, Liu Jiayi.”
“You wanted to see Liu Huai give up his life for you and fulfill that cooperation more than any of us.”
“You wanted to see your gege suffer until he wished for death, all for the sake of saving and protecting you.”
“If you hadn’t waited until the very last moment, until you were certain Liu Huai would die for you, you wouldn’t have revealed yourself at all, would you, Liu Jiayi?”
“When it comes to being filthy to the core, we are far behind you.”
Liu Jiayi’s laughter stopped abruptly.
The dim corridor light flickered once.
When it lit up again, Bai Six saw Liu Jiayi standing very close to him, holding a doll whose head and limbs had been torn so badly they were nearly falling off.
Her face was expressionless.
She looked up at Bai Six without blinking, her breathing light and quiet.
The doll in Liu Jiayi’s arms wore a white shirt and suit trousers. Around its neck hung a strange coin with a hole broken through the middle.
Its head had been twisted almost one hundred and eighty degrees, and its face bore an eerie, frozen smile as it looked up at Bai Six together with Liu Jiayi.
Although Bai Six had never seen the future Bai Liu, based on the descriptions Bai Liu had given him of himself, he recognized at once that the crudely made doll in Liu Jiayi’s arms was his future self.
Bai Six’s gaze settled on the doll.
His breath hitched slightly.
His Adam’s apple bobbed because of his racing heartbeat.
So this was what it felt like when the fear of death stood so close.
For a split second, he even thought, distractedly, that it was not as terrifying as he had imagined.
Liu Jiayi’s voice was very soft and very low.
She lowered her eyes and stroked the doll in her arms, as though speaking to herself.
“Do you know why witches in the Middle Ages made voodoo dolls?”
“When they began to curse someone, or when they began to love someone, they would make a doll of that person. They hoped the doll could contain that person’s soul.”
“The person they hated would die in the way they hated most.”
“The person they loved would remain by their side in the way they liked best.”
Bai Six had already retreated until his back pressed against the wall.
His expression remained steady.
“Is there any difference between what you’re doing and what Bai Liu does?”
Liu Jiayi was silent for a long time.
Then she suddenly tilted her head and let out a very pleasant laugh, blinking her eyes.
“Essentially, there’s no difference.”
“That’s why I’m also a filthy existence.”
“It’s my own fault for not being treated well by my gege.”
“But Liu Huai gave everything for you.” Bai Six breathed lightly. His heels touched the wall, and his eyes met Liu Jiayi’s, now only inches away from his face. “You got exactly what you wanted.”
“You already obtained what you wanted.”
“What are you still dissatisfied with?”
Liu Jiayi finally raised her head.
Her expression was faint and indifferent.
Those misty, grey-clouded pupils were embedded in her young, emotionless face, creating a strange, eerie, heartbreaking dissonance.
She curved the corners of her lips and eyes like an obedient child who understood nothing.
But the words she spoke drifted out like heavy fog.
“Because I never dared to truly believe in my gege.”
“Because I refused to believe it, I never truly received it.”
Bai Six’s reflection appeared in Liu Jiayi’s eyes, blurred and hazy, as if his soul had been dragged out and imprinted into her gaze.
“My gege is a very cowardly person.”
“He wouldn’t...”
“He wouldn’t dare give everything for me.”
“Betrayal is his bad habit.”
“He is a habitual coward.”
Looking at Liu Jiayi, Bai Six remembered what Bai Liu had told him about Liu Huai.
That person, Liu Huai, did indeed seem to have a habit of betrayal.
From Mu Shicheng to Zhang Kui...
If betrayal and cowardice were bad habits, then the one most deeply hurt by those habits would inevitably be the person who spent day and night beside him.
Xiao Bai Six suddenly understood something.
He looked at Liu Jiayi.
“What did Liu Huai betray you over?”
The smile on Liu Jiayi’s face finally disappeared.
She stared straight at Bai Six.
“What did he betray me over?” she whispered, then laughed. “You should be asking when he ever stopped betraying me.”
Everyone spoke to her in that filthy, hesitant tone.
[Born from incest, huh? Her intelligence must be lacking, right?]
[She really is blind. And a girl too. Why didn’t you abort her?]
[...My mom says a child born from incest like you can’t even get household registration. You can’t even go to school. And your gege said he’d cure your eyes and send you to school so you could get into a good university? Haha, hilarious!]
That man would beat and kick her whenever he got drunk, slapping her again and again.
He would force her, still only a few years old, to go down into the irrigation pond to catch fish. He would snarl that if she failed to catch a certain weight, she was not allowed to come back up.
The water in the irrigation pond was so cold.
For a little girl only a few years old, stepping into it meant the water seemed to rise all the way to her throat.
It was all mud and water, and the fish inside were as slippery as the limbs of a dead person, swimming around her, impossible to catch.
She was like her dead mother, fallen into an irrigation pond she was never allowed to climb out of.
Liu Jiayi could never catch enough fish to satisfy that man.
She understood.
He simply wanted to drown her—this useless little brat who only wasted food—in that pond.
Just as he had drowned her jiejie and her mother.
When Liu Huai wasn’t there, when he was at school, Liu Jiayi would hide in the chicken coop or the pigsty and stay with the animals.
Or she would hide in the closet, or beneath the bed, trying to keep that man from finding her and beating her whenever something displeased him.
Most of the time, if she hid well enough, she would be fine.
But she had to remain alert at all times.
Otherwise, she would be grabbed by the hair, slammed onto the ground, whipped with bamboo strips soaked in water, or dragged to the irrigation pond to catch fish.
From the time Liu Jiayi first had memories, she had hidden in every lightless corner of that house, quietly hugging her knees and counting the passing time as she waited for Liu Huai to come home from school.
She felt the chill of the rural night seep through her skin and sink deep into her heart.
Sometimes she could not control herself and would cry loudly, or scream sharply, like the “mentally disabled,” “lunatic,” and “psycho” everyone called her.
She would hit the animals locked up with her, as if doing so could vent the resentment and pain in her heart that had nowhere else to go.
She never dared let Liu Huai see this side of her.
In front of Liu Huai, Liu Jiayi was always obedient, sweet, innocent—the little sister who understood nothing, who would lift her face toward him the moment he came home from school and call him “Gege” with a bright smile.
Even if she had just crawled half-dead from the mud-filled irrigation pond after struggling there for an entire afternoon.
Even if, ten minutes earlier, she had been screaming hysterically while nearly strangling a goose to death.
Bad children were not loved.
Liu Jiayi had understood that since childhood.
She had always known that all the affection Liu Huai gave her existed only because of the mask she wore. So no matter when, she remained as tense and vigilant as she had been while hiding beneath beds or inside dark closets, terrified that Liu Huai would drag out her true self with the same rough methods that man used—
Only to whip her and ask in disappointment:
How could you become such a terrible child?!
Perhaps he wouldn’t even do that.
Even if she revealed her true self to Liu Huai, he would probably only shrink back and turn away, not daring to look at her.
Because her gege was a coward who feared facing the truth.
Her memories and consciousness sank together into that endless black mire.
Standing before Bai Six, looking into those dark, questioning eyes of his, Liu Jiayi suddenly felt as though she had returned to that crumbling little house in the countryside.
Back then, she would hide beneath beds or inside closets whenever that man got drunk and wanted to beat her. She only dared crawl out after Liu Huai came home or after the man finally passed out snoring.
One day, that man had encountered something that enraged him more than usual.
He overturned the house searching for her for half the day and still failed to find her. Even after Liu Huai came home, he continued searching obsessively.
The sound of bowls and chopsticks shattering across the floor crackled through the room.
Liu Jiayi covered her mouth tightly with both hands, not even daring to breathe too loudly as she listened to the man curse her viciously.
“Damn brat... getting better and better at hiding... Can’t even find anything to vent on...”
“Liu Huai! Liu Huai, get your ass over here!”
Then came the sharp sound of a slap.
A young boy’s frightened, suppressed crying followed.
The man cursed under his breath while gulping down mouthful after mouthful of alcohol. The sound of him drinking seemed to pour directly into Liu Jiayi’s ears. Her breathing grew rapid, and bitterness rose in her throat, making her dizzy.
Then came the familiar, heavy thuds of the drunken middle-aged man striking Liu Huai across the back with his fists and feet.
The sounds of violence continued for a while before gradually fading beneath Liu Huai’s trembling sobs.
“Fuck...” the man cursed drunkenly. “You’re the only seed left of the Liu family. I don’t wanna hit you... but my hands itch after drinking, and that little bitch isn’t here. That brat hides too damn well. She only comes out when you’re around.”
“I even tried imitating your voice... hic... but she still wouldn’t come out.”
“Go.”
The man kicked Liu Huai viciously.
“Lure that little bitch out, and I won’t hit you anymore.”
Liu Jiayi waited for a very, very long time.
So long she thought dawn must have arrived.
Then she heard Liu Huai’s voice, trembling with tears:
“Jiayi... Gege’s back. Could you... could you come out for a moment?”
“Come out for a bit, okay? Father’s already gone... no one’s going to hit you anymore...”
“Come out... really, it’s only Gege here now... Gege wants to see you...”
Liu Jiayi remained silent for a very long time.
Those sounds blurred into meaningless ringing inside her overly sensitive ears clogged with dirt and grime.
At last, trembling, she crawled out from beneath Liu Huai’s bed, where she had hidden the entire day.
The man instantly grabbed her by the hair and smashed her onto the ground.
Alcohol-soaked slaps rained down on her alongside his satisfied laughter.
A bamboo strip as thick as a finger whipped across Liu Jiayi’s curled-up body over and over again. Heavy kicks slammed into her soft stomach.
Every time another blow landed, Liu Huai—standing nearby—would shut his eyes tightly and tremble.
But he never dared step forward.
He only leaned weakly against the wall in the corner, silently waiting for the torture to end.
Afterward, Liu Huai held the half-dead Liu Jiayi in his arms and cried loudly, promising again and again:
“Gege will definitely take you away from here...”
“Gege will definitely get into a good university and leave this place...”
“Just endure it a few more times for Gege...”
“Soon... it’ll happen very soon...”
But Liu Jiayi merely stared blankly ahead with those sightless eyes.
Listening to Liu Huai’s voice—slowly becoming more and more similar to that man’s—her fingers twitched slightly before slowly falling limp again.
“Okay,” she whispered weakly and obediently.
“Jiayi will help Gege endure it.”
She knew Liu Huai needed this shell of a “good little sister” to soothe the guilt gnawing at his heart.
Liu Huai—her gege—had always been like this.
Cowardly.
Betraying her while coaxing her gently because he lacked the courage to resist that man.
He had stood in that dim main room, the room where she crawled out for him only to be beaten, shutting his eyes and refusing to look at any of it.
Her gege was a coward to the bone.
A cowardly assassin whose blade could not even wound another person.
And yet—
The best thing Liu Jiayi had ever received in her entire life was still this one cowardly gege.
Betrayal and suspicion.
They were siblings born from the same mold.
