Chapter 3 : The “Bear’s” Story

The scarlet words hung before their eyes, seizing the minds of every player present.

Compared with the other words, only these two characters had become more ferocious, more blurred, as though they had been treated with something like “italics” or “bold”

They were also like words written in blood on a window, smeared by someone before they had fully congealed.

After Ming Po read the rules clearly, he narrowed his eyes slightly and raised his head to look at the stone pillars hanging from the ceiling.

“This is…”

He deliberately acted startled, murmuring in a suppressed voice.

Seeing him like this, the others also raised their heads after him.

After seeing those precariously hanging giant stone swords, suspended like the Sword of Damocles, people quickly realized… just how this game’s “execution” would be carried out.

It was like staring with one’s own eyes at the tip of a needle gradually approaching, or sitting inside a dangerous house whose ceiling creaked overhead and rained dust;

Or perhaps like walking along a narrow mountain path and seeing the massive boulder above one’s head loosen slightly and slowly slide downward…

Even Lawyer Chen, composed as he was, could not stop himself from trembling.

He subconsciously straightened his back, tense as though he was about to be called on by name.

His pupils quivered, his breathing grew rapid, cold sweat seeped uncontrollably from his palms, and the back of his head went numb with waves of icy chill.

He even felt… as if the giant swords hanging in the sky had begun swaying slightly.

As if they might fall at any moment!

He did not know whether it was an illusion caused by staring for too long, or whether they truly had loosened and started to sway.

Finally, someone let out an extremely terrified scream.

“I… I’m not playing anymore!”

It was the player at Seat 1, a silent youth wearing a “cat” mask.

He suddenly leapt down from his chair like he had gone mad, startling Lin Ya beside him.

The moment his feet landed, his legs gave out. He dropped to his knees with a thud, and his knees made a dull sound that set people’s teeth on edge.

“Ah… aah…”

Broken, meaningless sounds mixed with sobs were squeezed from his throat. Fear had made him unable to stand up again at once. Instead, he remained on his knees, crawling forward along the ground.

He stretched out his hand, seemingly wanting to support himself on someone else’s chair, or grab someone’s hand to make it easier to rise. But Lin Ya really had been frightened and quickly shrank backward, avoiding the youth’s hand.

The youth did not pay her any attention either… he did not even try to grab Lin Ya again. He only stared fixedly at that door and, using both hands and feet, half-crawled, half-scrambled, stumbling as he tried to flee outside the room.

But at that moment—

The stone sword that had originally hung above his head came loose.

Amid the brief screams of the crowd, the glowing giant sword drew an extremely strange arc through the air, chased after him, and smashed him into a pulp!

Lin Ya had been the closest to the youth to begin with.

The instant she felt a gust of forceful wind rush toward her, she instinctively shut her eyes and curled tightly into herself.

But right then, a smear of warmth mixed with impact suddenly splattered onto Lin Ya’s rabbit mask.

The feeling was like having a teacher throw a piece of chalk at her during class like a flying knife.

A lingering foreign sensation made her subconsciously wipe at it, but all she felt was something sticky and wet.

…This… is?

Realizing what had bounced onto her body, Lin Ya’s pupils contracted sharply.

Her body began trembling uncontrollably.

Because it was a severed finger.

It had not bounced away. Instead, after striking her mask, it had fallen straight into the collar of her nightgown.

She could not stop herself from screaming!

As though it was not a finger, but a lit firecracker, she shook all over and fumbled in a panic to fish it out, flinging it far away.

All the knowledge she had studied in the past seemed to turn into meaningless scraps of paper in an instant, offering not the slightest help against her helplessness, fear, and hysteria at this moment.

And yet, they were not completely meaningless either…

Under extreme terror, a flash of inspiration suddenly crossed her mind.

She looked in shock toward “Mr. Ai” beside her.

Ming Po had also turned back with her just now, looking toward Number Two, who had tried to flee from behind them. Because of that, several streaks of blood had also stained his face.

Yet he looked so calm, as if the youth’s death had long been within his expectations.

Even the clear, transparent eyes beneath the mask seemed to have grown brighter!

Noticing Lin Ya’s terrified and astonished gaze, Ming Po tilted his head slightly. Beneath the mask, a smile she could not see surfaced.

Although this girl didn’t look too clever, her intuition was actually quite sharp.

But having intuition that was too sharp was not necessarily a good thing.

Lin Ya stammered in a trembling whisper, “You, you couldn’t have…”

“Since you’ve already put on the mask.”

Before Lin Ya could finish, a deep, magnetic voice sounded faintly once more from the center of the round table. “Don’t even think about running away halfway.”

That was the host’s voice.

The “mouth” hanging on the cat’s back was not acting crazy anymore at this moment.

It had become incomparably serious, abnormally cold.

It even gave Lin Ya a faint illusion.

It was like a teacher arriving early to the classroom, laughing and chatting with the students, vividly recounting some amusing thing he had experienced recently; yet the instant the class bell rang, the teacher’s expression abruptly turned cold as he solemnly announced, “Students, class begins now”

The right hand hanging from the cat’s neck was currently stroking the black cat’s head slowly and methodically, rubbing its ears.

The slender and soft black cat, dark as a black hole, purred comfortably and rubbed its head against the host’s palm.

Meanwhile, the host’s eye looked toward Ming Po with great interest.

This guy isn’t simple.

The host was extremely certain… Ming Po had already noticed the Sword of Damocles above their heads earlier, but at the time, he had not said a single word. Only after the game officially began did he put on an act of having just discovered those things

So that was it. He was testing the rules.

Whether leaving one’s seat would result in immediate execution, whether trying to escape would bring early punishment… These were indeed pieces of information that needed to be confirmed in advance in order to seize the initiative.

But if he directly asked, that would be equivalent to openly revealing the information to everyone.

On top of that, he had also used death to pressure the others, making everyone take the game seriously… because the more seriously people treated things, the more controllable their behavior became instead.

Interesting, the host thought.

If he could win, then the host would mark him as a “seeded player.”

The host completely ignored Number Two, who had been crushed beneath the stone pillar, leaving only a pool of blood behind.

The right hand hanging from the cat’s neck pointed straight toward the old man at the twelve o’clock position.

“Starting from ‘zero o’clock.’ Bear, you are first.”

“Ah…”

Having been suddenly called on, the old man looked somewhat at a loss.

But when he saw the corpse, he was unexpectedly not particularly frightened, and the giant sword above his head did not seem to scare him either.

Among the twelve people at the table, this dark-skinned, unremarkable old man was actually one of the few who could be considered relatively calm.

“What should I talk about…”

“Bear” hesitated slightly, his voice becoming somewhat muffled through the mask. “Then… I’ll tell a story. A story about… a bear.”

As he said this, his voice became much deeper and calmer.

“Back in our village, there used to be a saying. They said, see, there was a bear spirit living in the mountains! Black fur, red eyes, scary as anything, and it ate people at night. Loved eating tender young lads and girls!

The folks in the village were all scared. They all took the long way around. They even warned the kids at home, telling them not to go out at night. I wasn’t scared. I never believed in that evil stuff!

So I picked a winter night on purpose and went into the mountains to chop firewood. Hey, guess what happened?”

At this point, Old Bear’s eyes suddenly lit up.

A strange sense of unease and chill made Lin Ya suddenly shudder.

“Ha! I really ran into that beast!”

As he spoke up to this point, Old Bear’s voice became extremely loud.

He slammed the table hard, and his emotions grew agitated. “When it ran into me, it didn’t think of eating me… looked like it was full and didn’t want to move, but I wasn’t letting it off!

My whole life, see, I never left behind any descendants. Then, near the end, I even got a terminal illness. If I could take an evil bear with me before I left, I’d have done right by my ancestors!

So I swung my axe and chopped at that bear’s skull! But… I couldn’t do it anymore. I was old. My eyes were blurry, and my hands had no strength. One swing went crooked and chopped into the beast’s shoulder.

That beast let out an ‘ouch,’ then turned around and was going to kill me. Scary! But I wasn’t afraid of death. I charged up to it and swung another axe, chopping straight into that bear’s forehead! Then it was three chops, five chops, and I hacked that bear spirit’s big face into a rotten mess! Finally, I chopped its head off and threw it into a ditch. If you don’t deal with it like that, you can’t kill the thing.”

At this point, Old Bear smiled, seeming somewhat relieved, yet also somewhat lost.

He tilted his neck and looked toward the others at the table, then asked, “Do you think I did the right thing?”

“The narration phase of the first round has ended. Entering the discussion phase.”

After “Bear” finished his story, the host said faintly, “The discussion phase will end when all players have voted or when time runs out.”

Ming Po saw two color blocks silently appear on the left and right armrests of his chair.

The one on the left was blue, with “Correct” written on it; the one on the right was red, with “Incorrect” written on it.

He first pressed “Correct” with great interest and saw the blue light up abruptly. Immediately afterward, without leaving a trace, he applied force with the middle finger of his right hand and secretly touched the right armrest… unlike the first action, this degree of pressure, under such dim lighting, would be completely impossible for the others to notice.

The blue on the left went out, and the red on the right lit up.

Then Ming Po used the same method to press the button on the left once more, watching the red go out and the blue light up.

At the same time, he discovered that he could not see the light beside anyone else’s chair at all; the others also could not determine which button he had pressed.

…A secret vote, huh.

Thus, Ming Po had roughly understood the situation.

He smiled, then calmly withdrew both hands. Folding his arms across his chest, he no longer touched either side of the seat.

At this moment, Lin Ya felt somewhat confused.

She had roughly figured out the rules of this game—the so-called “Death of the Minority” rule should be that one must not allow oneself to become the minority.

In other words, it meant guessing the thoughts of others.

Predict what the majority wanted to vote for, then vote along with them… If one guessed wrong, they would be executed.

Without a doubt, this was a game that tested one’s ability to read expressions and assess people.

It was precisely Lin Ya’s area of expertise.

But

This made absolutely no sense!

Because the “narrator” had to trigger disagreement and opposition among the others in order to survive!

If everyone chose the same answer, then the narrator themselves would be eliminated. From this perspective, the narrator was the side with the greatest advantage… because perhaps people could not determine whether they were in the majority or minority, but raising a topic that was certain to be controversial was much simpler.

But “Bear’s” story, wasn’t it completely one-sided?

“…Putting aside whether a ‘bear spirit’ exists or not, shouldn’t that kind of man-eating evil bear be shot dead?”

The girl wearing a raccoon mask at the ten o’clock position spoke timidly.

“Or,” Yang Shuang, who sat at the five o’clock position wearing a sparrow mask, asked, “is the controversial point animal protection? I remember Asiatic black bears are protected animals.”

“That’s true, killing a bear is illegal!”

The “dog” at the eleven o’clock position shouted loudly, “It should be punishable by law. Otherwise, why would bear paws be so hard to buy?”

The “raccoon” girl argued, “When someone’s about to die, who still has the time to care whether it’s a protected animal or not!”

“Sir, what you mean,” Lawyer Chen, wearing the “fox” mask, asked cautiously at this moment, “by whether it was ‘right or wrong’… is whether this act was legal or illegal?”

If that was the case, then this was purely a legal issue.

“Bear” did not answer. Instead, he looked toward the host. “Do I have to answer?”

“No.”

The host said calmly, “Even if you answer, you do not necessarily have to tell the truth. This game has [no additional rules], so what is being enforced is the literal wording of the rules.”

…No, something is still wrong.

Lin Ya shook her head, feeling somewhat confused.

She kept feeling that something was off somewhere, yet she could not say what it was.

“Winter…”

Suddenly, the “red panda” at the seven o’clock position asked, “Aren’t bears supposed to hibernate?”

The moment he said this, the table became slightly quieter.

“Fox” suddenly realized something and widened his eyes.

But right then…

Ming Po suddenly spoke, saying leisurely, “Old sir

—The ‘bear spirit’ you killed, was it human?”

(End of Chapter)