Chapter 30: After the Shipwreck (1)

Glug.

Glug.

Twelve silhouettes sank beneath the deep blue sea. White bubbles rose in clusters, like the fizz in a glass of soda.

Chi Wei felt the ocean’s pressure against her chest, her eyelids, her skin. The sensation of drowning crept inch by inch over her body, seeping into her nerves.

Damn it!

She didn’t know how long it would take for the ship to finish sinking, but there was hardly any oxygen left in her body.

The line between her and death seemed to draw closer with every moment. Choking and suffocation pushed her toward it.

Her body fell like a leaf torn from its branch, sinking and sinking.

But scenes from before the ship went down kept flashing through her mind—

Six that evening, just two hours earlier.

Everyone on Team Three had come out of the Lottery Room looking gloomy and uneasy.

Everyone except Silver-Masked Woman, whose expression no one could ever read.

[Remaining Game Time: 2 hours]

The message was now exposed for every player to see.

Judging by what was happening, everyone knew what it meant.

Hearts Girl leaned against the corridor wall, lighting one cigarette after another. The floor was covered in cigarette butts, and her hand trembled slightly as she held the cigarette between her lips. Every so often, she let out a scoffing laugh.

In the end, she hadn’t lost to Silver-Masked Woman or Chi Wei. She’d been undone by some trick no one had ever noticed.

What a joke this game was.

Hearts Girl had already accepted that she was about to fail the game. But no one had expected that after Team Three left the Lottery Room, messages would appear on the closed door:

[Team Three players have won a total of 9.5 million yuan in lottery prizes.]

[Round Three has ended!]

[“Feast Aboard the Cruise Ship” has ended. Settlement countdown: 2 hours.]

The tiny figures in the lower-right corner refreshed:

[Team One’s prize money: 5.75 million yuan]

[Team Two’s prize money: 0 yuan]

[Team Three’s prize money: 17.75 million yuan]

[Total prize money: 23.5 million yuan]

[Remaining Game Time: 2 hours]

This time, Team Three had won the entire 9.5 million yuan by themselves!

That meant the choice Team Three had just made in the Lottery Room had been “Betray.”

Were they insane?

The Team Two players, who’d been hanging their heads in despair, suddenly stared at the messages on the Lottery Room door. They were so shocked they couldn’t speak.

And yet a glimmer of hope seemed to appear in their eyes.

Hearts Girl dropped her cigarette butt and frowned. She glanced at Team Three’s captain, Master Appraiser, then stared at Silver-Masked Woman.

They’d chosen “Betray”? Why?

The important thing wasn’t that Team Three had taken all 9.5 million yuan for themselves. It was that without the final choice to “Cooperate,” the total prize money hadn’t reached 24 million yuan.

They hadn’t even met Victory Condition 1. Everyone had failed!

The white-haired man from Team One suddenly lunged forward like a madman, grabbed Master Appraiser by the front of his clothes, and roared, “What are you doing? Have you lost your minds?!”

They could’ve won together! Team One and Team Three could’ve left with their money and their lives!

The white-haired man felt as though someone had shoved him into an abyss from behind.

Master Appraiser tried several times to push him away, but he didn’t want to say much. “Enough. Our choice has nothing to do with you.”

“How can you say that?” The white-haired man was furious. “I don’t want to die with you! Why did you do this to me?!”

The Blonde Woman came over and pulled the white-haired man away.

“Collective failure means the ship sinks. It doesn’t mean we die. Calm down.”

That was right. The rules had spelled it out clearly. If the total prize money for all three teams failed to reach 24 million yuan—the condition for Victory Condition 1—then every player would be shipwrecked.

But if Victory Condition 1 was met and a team failed to meet Victory Condition 2, which required at least four million yuan in prize money, only that team would be declared to have suffered “Game Failure.”

“Game Failure” meant death, but “shipwreck” and “Game Failure” weren’t necessarily the same thing!

After Silver-Masked Woman pointed out the difference between the two conditions in the Lottery Room, the Blonde Woman had decided to take a gamble and trust her.

Should she send all four players on Team Two to their deaths—or take a risk and look for a chance that everyone could survive? The Blonde Woman had chosen the latter.

Master Appraiser had nothing to explain to anyone. He’d simply followed Deathweed’s wishes.

There was no particular reason. Something in Deathweed’s force of character had made him feel that her choice was worth following.

He’d lived a long life. He didn’t want to fall for Silver-Masked Woman’s taunt: “Every victory you’ve won has left you looking like a fool, outmaneuvered by someone else. She’s watching from the shadows and laughing at you, because everything you did played right into her hands.”

Silver-Masked Woman had said, “You’re the captain, one of the three strongest people in this game. So what if the ship sinks? As long as there’s still a chance, in a pack of wolves, you’re the one who ought to survive. You should bite that hyena’s neck and show her what happens when she uses you.”

Yes. Everything the woman in the green dress had done was meant to kill everyone, herself included.

Even if she failed, at least one team’s players would die because of her trick. She’d hidden information from everyone, and their distrust of one another had taken root.

They’d all deserved it!

Retribution!

The mad laughter of the woman in the green dress seemed to slip into Chi Wei’s ears through the seawater.

Chi Wei hadn’t expected that because life had gone badly for her, and because the prize money she’d won in the “Lucky Game” hadn’t been enough to save her daughter in the ICU, the woman in the green dress would come to hate the game so thoroughly.

“Our kidney transplant! We were first in line! When we’d finally scraped together the money, the hospital should’ve given the kidney to us! Why did someone else get to cut in line? My daughter had to wait longer! That three-day delay killed Little Huan!”

“You greedy people, always wanting money and power! Give it to you and you turn rotten. You abuse your power and kill other people’s children. Little Huan is gone. What kind of ‘Lucky Game’ is this? My daughter and I have been unlucky from the very beginning!”

“Now you’re all going to die. I never wanted you to make it out of here alive! Hahahahahaha… I have Team Three to thank for this. The ship is sinking. We can all die together!”

She’d been the first player to find the Lottery Room on the first day.

But she’d hidden the truth from everyone, including the fact that she was a skilled painter.

The woman in the green dress had stayed quietly among the crowd, unnoticed, waiting for this moment.

Even as the ship sank, she never wondered why Team Three had chosen “Betray.”

Everything had gone exactly as she wanted. She was too caught up in the pleasure of destruction to care about the reason.

This was the outcome she’d wanted most!

Let them all die! Every greedy bastard deserves to be buried with Little Huan. This isn’t a “Lucky Game.” It’s where our bad luck began! It should be where everyone’s life ends!

At the bottom of the deep sea, the woman in the green dress’s laughter drifted faintly through the water, grating on the ears.

As she began to lose consciousness, scenes from the time she’d almost died as a child flashed before Chi Wei’s eyes.

Her life might not have been precious, but it certainly wasn’t something to waste.

If I die here—at the hands of two antisocial lunatics—I won’t accept it!

A fierce desire to survive drove her to force one last breath from her lungs in that sea.

I can’t die yet.

The thought circled Chi Wei’s ears like a spell.

My life… was saved by someone precious to me…

Glug, glug, glug.

She didn’t know how long she’d been sinking. Then, all at once, she felt as if the clouds had parted and the moon had appeared.

She reached the deepest part of the sea, but suddenly the water’s buoyancy vanished. Gravity returned to her legs, and twelve soaked people tumbled onto a blue floor one after another.

They dropped through the water with a rush of splashing. Chi Wei landed on her knees on the dreamlike blue surface, both hands braced against the floor, water running off her as she gulped down air.

She didn’t care how she looked. Air flooded her lungs, and only then did she truly feel that she was alive—that she’d escaped the suffocating grip of death.

The others were no better off. Inside the air wall beneath the surface, several people were pressing on their stomachs to throw up seawater.

Chi Wei came back to herself, wiped the water from her eyelids, and opened her eyes to this new world beneath the sea.

Yes, “shipwreck” didn’t mean “Game Failure” or instant death. She could begin to understand why Team Three had acted as they had.

This place was the Host’s new game world.

An enormous Heka God’s head stood on the seabed in front of the twelve players, like a short underwater tunnel. Its eerie green eyes watched them in silence.

A blue game screen sat inside its mouth.

“Holy crap, I’m alive!”

“I’m still alive…? What is this place?”

Two or three players cried out. They shakily pushed themselves up from the floor.

Once they realized they were in an underwater world, separated from the sea by air, their disbelief gave way to relief.

The Blonde Woman sat on the floor and smiled in relief. So shipwreck didn’t mean death. They could still be saved. There was hope for all of them…

“Ah!”

A fierce scream suddenly ripped through the air beneath the sea, piercing everyone’s ears.

The white-haired man turned into a rabid wolf and pounced on the woman in the green dress.

He’d treated her like a teammate for so many days, only to discover that she’d been plotting to kill him the whole time. The betrayal, the brush with death, the fury—it all surged into his head at once.

He’d managed to survive. Now he was going to kill the person who’d nearly killed him.

The white-haired man’s adrenaline made him forget where he was. He wrestled the woman in the green dress to the ground, pinned her beneath him, and clamped his hands around her throat, ready to take revenge.

Then alarms suddenly blared throughout the underwater world.

The Heka God’s green eyes turned bloodred. Red beams scattered through the air, filling it with a scarlet glow.

A warning rang out again and again. The Heka God’s bloodred gaze fixed on the white-haired man.

“Stop!” Chi Wei shouted.

[This game prohibits violence!]

[Warning: 2!]

The warning number on the screen inside the Heka God’s mouth jumped from 1 to 2. The red light in its eyes deepened.

A chill ran down the white-haired man’s back. He jolted, realized what he’d done, and hurriedly let go. He rolled away from the woman in the green dress.

He fell onto the floor, stared at the Heka God, and tucked his hands against his chest to prove his innocence.

He hadn’t hurt her! He hadn’t really done anything!

In a game that prohibited violence, breaking the rule could get a player executed on the spot by the Heka God. The Host’s authority couldn’t be challenged.

At last, the underwater world fell quiet. The Heka God’s eyes returned to their normal color.

The warning vanished from the blue screen, which returned to its previous message:

[Welcome to the “Survival Game.”]