While Fu Changxun and the others were busy with their monster (scratch that, family reunion) drama, things were finally progressing on Dong Zi’s side.
At the start of the seventh loop, he immediately stopped Lulu, who was about to rush upstairs.
“Our main objective is the five horror tales,” he analyzed. “That girl on the roof must be one of them. But unless we figure her out, we’ll be stuck in the loop forever.”
Lulu sighed.
Girls like Li Menghan, hopeless romantics to the core… they were the kind who wouldn’t quit unless they hit rock bottom. Or worse—maybe even then, they’d just cover their eyes and pretend they hadn’t seen the coffin at all.
So how to save her?
“Find that upperclassman jerk. Let’s send the scumbag to hell first!”
Lulu, putting herself in Li Menghan’s shoes, instantly voted for bloody revenge.
Dong Zi agreed. “I’ll go check with the class rep again, see if I can get a lead on this ‘senpai.’ You head up to the roof and check if she’s there. We’ll regroup soon.”
The two split up. Lulu quickly climbed the stairs and pushed open the rooftop door.
Sure enough, the girl was still there, sitting quietly.
This time, Lulu stayed calm. She walked over and asked casually, “Why are you still up here, skipping class to feel the breeze? I saw you from downstairs and thought I’d come have a chat.”
Li Menghan kept a cautious two- to three-meter distance and didn’t respond.
Lulu had no idea how to crack this and decided to crowdsource a solution. She opened the livestream.
[Finally! A new stream’s up!]
[Not many players streaming lately. Did the instance difficulty spike or something?]
[Whatever. Let’s just see what this one’s about.]
“You can talk to me about anything,” Lulu said, cheerful as ever. “I mean, I’m no therapist or motivational speaker, but if you need a tree hole, I’m perfect for the job. I’ve been that way since I was a kid—”
No response.
Still, Lulu didn’t get discouraged. She kept chattering away on her own.
She talked nonstop for over ten minutes. Li Menghan must’ve finally reached her limit, because she snapped, “Don’t you know my story already? Everyone in school’s talking about it. Or are you just here to mock me? The senior got seduced by those other girls, and now all of you are just here to kick me while I’m down!”
Lulu blinked. “…Girl, you’re overthinking it. I just transferred here. I don’t know a thing about all your school drama. How about you start from the top and tell me?”
Li Menghan froze. That… was not the response she’d expected. She looked visibly awkward.
She rubbed her stiff jaw and gave a bitter laugh. “I got plastic surgery for him. Changed everything about myself. When I came back, we’d just gotten back together!” She hissed through gritted teeth, “If it weren’t for them exposing my identity, I’d still be with him right now. I’d still be his girlfriend!”
Lulu barely stopped herself from rolling her eyes.
This was obviously a scumbag’s fault. It was simple—deal with the scumbag and everything else would fall into place.
But clearly, Li here had been deep-gaslit. Lulu lowered her head and glanced at the livestream chat.
Maybe someone there had a better idea.
[Girl, wake up! You’ve been KTV’d!]
[This NPC’s been hardcore CPU’d. Can we drag that scumbag here and make him confess?]
[She got KFC’d!]
[Alright, enough with the meme spam. Y’all are about to EXO. (The “E” is silent.)]
[Jokes aside, focus on the dude. She still thinks he loves her, right? Then make him say the opposite, straight to her face.]
[Agreed. Unless her brain’s fried, being dumped that hard should snap her out of it.]
While chat brainstormed, Dong Zi had already tracked down the so-called “senior” and dragged the NPC over—literally—to the rooftop, tossing him near the edge.
“Alright,” he said, “you two talk this out. No more one-sided drama. Let’s hear both sides properly. He says you broke up ages ago and that you tricked him afterward. He claims he’s the victim.”
Li Menghan froze. Her eyes brimmed with desperate hope as she looked at the senior, praying he’d say what she wanted to hear.
What she got was: “We were just messing around, alright? Who knew you’d take it seriously? We broke up a long time ago. You just couldn’t let go. You got plastic surgery and lied to me—how is that my fault?”
“But we promised to get married…”
“People say stuff when they’re dating. You girls are so naïve. Who actually takes that crap seriously?”
His tone was totally indifferent, like none of it mattered.
The light in Li Menghan’s eyes went dark—then twisted into venom.
“You said you wanted to be with me. You said you’d make me happy every single day…” Her voice trembled with fury. “So it was all lies? Just bullshit?”
The senior shrugged. “I never said that—”
“Shut up!” she screamed.
The realization that she’d been deceived hit her hard. But she still didn’t want to face it.
The senior looked totally unrepentant. “So what now? I’ve already said all this. She’s the one clinging to—”
His words turned into a shriek as Li Menghan lunged at him, dragging him to the edge of the rooftop—half his body hanging in the air.
“Wait—hold up—” Lulu reached out instinctively to stop her, but Li Menghan looked ready to take them both down.
Lulu quickly waved her hands. “Hey hey, I’m not stopping you from getting revenge on the jerk. I’m just saying… didn’t he pull the same crap on a bunch of other girls? Maybe call them over first?”
Li Menghan turned to glare at her, eyes full of hostility—but she was visibly hesitating.
Dong Zi chimed in, “Yeah! Make him infamous over the school broadcast. Let everyone know what a garbage person he is. Let him feel what it’s like to be humiliated, to be hated. Why drag yourself down when you can drag him down alone?”
Li Menghan’s eyes slowly lit up. For the first time, it made sense.
Dong Zi snatched the shivering NPC from her hands, disgusted. “Let’s go. Time to rally the troops.”
They marched straight into the broadcasting room—didn’t matter if class was in session—and forced the guy to list the names of all his exes. Then they started paging the victims over the school PA.
Within an hour, more than a dozen girls had shown up, crowding the broadcast room.
One by one, they took the mic:
“Attention: Class 2-3 student Qiao Qi has been caught two-timing and emotionally manipulating his classmates. We’re here to expose him and stop other girls from falling for his lies…”
“We must all stand against this kind of behavior. Take this as a warning.”
“Qiao Qi still refuses to admit fault. Stay vigilant, everyone…”
At exactly 12:12, Li Menghan was still in the broadcast room.
She didn’t jump.
The clock ticked forward.
The loop had finally broken.
It might’ve sounded simple—just bring the scumbag to the rooftop—but every step after that, every piece of dialogue, had required constant guidance and careful timing.
Lulu let out a huge breath and turned to Dong Zi. “So that’s one strange tale down? Honestly, not bad at all. Since time’s flowing again, we should hurry and go check on Doctor Fu’s team. We need to make sure they aren’t stuck in a loop.”
Dong Zi was already walking briskly toward the classroom building. He’d been stuck handling Li Menghan for nearly seven or eight loops—he hadn’t had time to look for the others.
[That was beautiful.]
[Perfect. Scumbags like that deserve public shame. Bet he won’t dare mess with girls again.]
[That was so satisfying. Just got out of a soul-crushing instance—this one’s giving me life.]
[Hahaha, this instance is progressing pretty well… Eh? Eh?? Why does this instance look exactly like the one from that player’s stream? That high school dungeon.]
“Wait a sec!” Lulu suddenly stopped in her tracks. “Someone in the chat just said a player had been in this same instance before!”
She anxiously turned to her viewers. “Is that true? Could it be one of the other four who are livestreaming?”
As she pointed it out, the stream briefly cut to footage showing three half-newbie slackers and one lone-wolf player. The audience took a closer look, carefully scrutinizing the figures, then collectively shook their heads.
[It’s this place! No doubt about it!]
[Yeah yeah, the rectangular teaching building, the broadcasting room on the fifth floor, and a playground right next to the first floor…]
Lulu looked utterly bewildered, glancing at Dong Zi in confusion.
He mimicked Fu Changxun’s thoughtful expression for a moment before speaking: “Ask the chat to describe how the scene looked for that other player. What exactly did they see at the same location?”
[It was at the playground. One player was doing warmups when they saw an NPC get killed by the game’s rules right before their eyes.]
[Yeah, that’s the one—but the player on that stream definitely wasn’t one of your six. It was a guy with glasses. There was also a kid in his party, I think. Not sure if it was a player or an NPC. Had two ugly little pigtails.]
Lulu repeated that for clarity, and Dong Zi’s expression sharpened.
Both of them immediately thought of Xiao Xiao.
They’d all entered the game together, dropped into the same instance—and yet they couldn’t see each other at all.
Dong Zi speculated from a scientific angle: “Could this instance have two parallel spaces?”
“Maybe.” Lulu crouched down and gestured on the ground. “It’s possible that right where I’m standing, there’s another player occupying the same space. I can’t see them, and they can’t see me.”
Dong Zi nodded. “Instances are full of traps—this isn’t outside the realm of possibility. But first, we need to confirm it.”
If their guess was right—
“Then we’re in two completely overlapping, yet mutually isolated, spaces. The flow of time might differ slightly, but the items and layout within the instance should be identical.”
Lulu went to the chalk tray at the front of the blackboard and picked up a piece of chalk.
She gently rolled it across the surface of the desk.
Would the chalk in the other space show signs of movement?
“I wonder how Ah Xun’s side is doing… Have they figured out we’re in separate spaces?”
Dong Zi couldn’t hide the unease in his heart.
This instance was pulling clever tricks—placing the two strongest combatants in a low-risk environment that demanded brains and psychological insight, while dumping the three “weaklings” into a danger zone crawling with monsters. It had deliberately inverted the strengths of both teams—an extremely targeted move.
Dong Zi looked up toward the sky of the instance, as if trying to see through it to whatever lay beyond.
The higher-dimensional beings… were watching them.
