Chapter 61: Solving the Puzzle

A golden full moon climbed into the sky, and the night deepened.

Bai Zhi woke up on the sofa, her head throbbing as if from a hangover. She propped herself up and looked down—she was wearing an orange-and-black one-piece work uniform, likely belonging to some employee of the gas station.

“Awake?” Ning Zhe walked in from the doorway, holding a skewer of charred meat—shrimp and beef, among other things.

Ning Zhe sat on the sofa opposite Bai Zhi, tore off a chunk of meat with his iron skewer, and chewed it loudly. These skewers were grilled by the gas station owner and staff for themselves—the meat portions were far more generous than those at any barbecue restaurant.

“You’d better give me an explanation,” Ning Zhe asked while eating. “At that level of acute poisoning, a normal person would be dead already. Even if they barely survived thanks to some Daoist priest’s emergency treatment, their body would suffer permanent damage. But you’re strange.”

“You received no proper or timely medical care—just slept on this sofa—and all your poisoning symptoms vanished, not even a trace left behind.”

Sensing the presence of a ghost, intuitively knowing vague rules… and this thing that looks like immortality.

The strange aspects of Bai Zhi are multiplying.

“If I could, I’d shoot you right between the eyes and see if you come back to life,” Ning Zhe said, placing the empty skewer on the table. “Speak up—what exactly are you?”

Don’t give me another line about how you think you’re a Ghost Tale player. You’re not fooling anyone.

“I… I don’t know,” Bai Zhi said, pressing her hands against her knees and shaking her head nervously.

Ning Zhe frowned: “That look, that tone… damn, she’s hiding again.”

“What are you talking about?” Bai Zhi looked at him, confused.

“Nothing. I just didn’t find the person I was looking for,” Ning Zhe said, placing a skewer on the table and standing up. “Come with me. I’ll show you something.”

Bai Zhi followed him out of the gas station without understanding why. Several corpses still lay on the platform in front of the entrance, untouched. Ning Zhe led her through the greenery, around to the back of the station, where a small open courtyard held a homemade barbecue grill puffing thick white smoke.

On two trees beside the courtyard, two people were tied up.

One’s limbs hung unnaturally, joints apparently broken, his clothes soaked in blood.

The other showed no signs of struggle—only a faint bruise beneath one eye—and was also bound to the tree by Ning Zhe.

Ning Zhe pulled Bai Zhi up to the gas station employee whose limbs had been broken, and pressed her wrist against the man’s bloody face.

“What are you doing?” Bai Zhi asked, too afraid to resist.

“Look for yourself,” Ning Zhe said. Instantly, the man’s limp head snapped up, his mouth wide open, lunging to bite Bai Zhi’s wrist. Ning Zhe yanked her hand back before he could make contact.

The broken-limbed employee lifted his head, gasping for breath, his voice pleading: “Brother, I beg you… let me go. Let me kill this girl—I have to kill her, I must, I absolutely must…”

“He wants to kill you.”

Ning Zhe said calmly:

“He doesn’t even know why—but he wants to kill you. Desperately. Like hunger demands food, thirst demands water—it’s an instinct. He’s utterly convinced he must kill you, no matter what.”

“How could this be…” Bai Zhi’s face was filled with disbelief.

Ning Zhe then pulled her to the other tree and repeated the same move, bringing her wrist close to the face of the cleaner-looking employee.

But this employee didn’t try to bite her wrist or drain her blood. He lifted his head and stared at Ning Zhe: “Are you insane? Murder’s illegal! You’ve killed the boss and Old Liu and the others… This is a law-abiding society—you won’t get away with this… Boy, if you’ve got guts, kill me. You won’t escape…”

“See? Both are gas station employees—but he doesn’t want to kill you.” Ning Zhe released Bai Zhi’s wrist. “Do you know what’s different between them?”

Bai Zhi shook her head. “I don’t know.”

She simply couldn’t understand why someone would want to kill her for no reason—especially with that kind of unyielding, fatal conviction. It was unthinkable.

“Because he stayed inside the gas station the whole time,” Ning Zhe said.

Ning Zhe brought Bai Zhi back inside and explained briefly what had happened last night.

—The Yangguang Gas Station had eight people total: the owner and seven employees.

As evening approached, two of them manned the front entrance to keep the station operating.

Of the remaining six, five—including the owner—were grilling outdoors in the courtyard, and one was inside cutting meat.

“The only one who didn’t want to kill you was the one cutting meat inside,” Ning Zhe concluded. “At sunset, ‘something’ happened.”

“Everyone exposed outdoors became utterly convinced they had to kill you—like an instinct. But I, and the employee cutting meat inside, were unaffected. We didn’t want to kill you.”

Summarizing the current information, Ning Zhe reached this preliminary conclusion:

Every evening at sunset, the ghost influenced all those exposed outdoors, compelling them to believe, deep in their hearts and by pure instinct, that they must kill Bai Zhi—by any means necessary.

This belief didn’t interfere with normal thought. Everyone could still communicate normally. Everything about them was ordinary—except for one thing: they were utterly, irrevocably convinced they had to kill Bai Zhi.

The ghost is everywhere—but not inside buildings.

“What is it about you that makes the ghost so desperate to kill you? Even to the point of ignoring me entirely?”

Ning Zhe wondered, for a moment, why Bai Zhi and not himself? Aside from being a Ghost Tale player, what made him different from her? Alright, let’s trace it back…

1. This ghost, which influences those exposed outdoors every evening at sunset, seems to be artificially controlled—like how I command the rules of Taiyi, or like Lei Te, who was previously released into the estate.

2. The one who released Lei Te likely intended to summon Zhao You—but he could only vaguely sense Zhao You’s location, not pinpoint exactly who carried it. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have slaughtered everyone in the estate indiscriminately.

Finally, assuming the one controlling the “omnipresent, unseeable” ghost hunting Bai Zhi is the same person who released Lei Te, then his motive becomes clear.

Bai Zhi and Feng Yu, mother and daughter, were both survivors of the Bishuiwan Estate incident. Ning Zhe was not.

At least… not on the surface.

Who knows what identity Feng Yu used to drive him home that day.

“Now Bai Zhi’s words from yesterday make sense. This ghost isn’t hunting her alone—it’s killing all survivors of the Bishuiwan Estate incident.”

Since it couldn’t determine who carried Zhao You, it simply eliminated everyone who might be the target.

Ning Zhe didn’t believe this conclusion was the absolute truth—but it was likely very close.

[54] (End of Chapter)