The voice faded, leaving the screening hall quiet and dim. The flashlight from the unknown phone that had been illuminating earlier was now off, and only the faint glow from the phone’s screen cast a weak light on the frightened faces amidst the dark.
In the pitch-black hall, the visible faces looked terrified and stiff.
“Ha, it can’t be that scary, right? They said we just have to watch and understand the story of the movie?” said a girl with twin ponytails, illuminated by the phone screen’s light.
“Do you really believe that?” the burly man replied.
“It seems… it seems real. That voice was in my head; there’s no explaining that,” a middle-aged woman in the front timidly said.
“Ah well, if we keep this up, we’re all done for. I guess it’s up to me to step forward,” a young man casually hopped onto the back of a seat, surprisingly maintaining his balance on the narrow edge, “What was said in that video is true; we’ve been dragged into a strange game. I’m someone who’s been in the games before, an experienced player.”
Everyone’s gaze shifted to him.
“But, that phone wasn’t mine.” He scanned the room, “There must be at least one more experienced player here, maybe even a very powerful one.”
“Since that person won’t come forward, let’s listen to me for now. You’ve seen the horrors of the game in the video; cooperating is our only chance to survive. By the way, my name is Guo Yang.”
The ponytailed girl immediately asked, “How do we get out of the game?”
Guo Yang: “Clear the game, and you can leave.”
The muscular man asked, “How do we clear the game?”
Guo Yang: “Ah, stop asking; the movie’s about to start. Just follow my lead for now.”
“Explain it first!” the muscular man stepped forward, attempting to drag him down, “How do we know you won’t trick us?”
The man, in his thirties and muscular, gripped the young man’s arm with a strong hand.
The young man glanced at the hand, his eyes obscured by long lashes. He reached out a hand—a shade paler than the man’s—and grasped the man’s wrist. With a slight twist, the man was thrown into the aisle.
The screening hall fell silent with the muscular man’s grunt of pain.
Guo Yang’s smile vanished. “I’ll say it again: listen to what I have to say.”
“Ah! There! Look at the screen!”
Another scream interrupted him, drawing everyone’s attention. Xia Bai turned to see blood oozing out from the screen.
In that moment, no one doubted the reality of the game anymore. The screening hall was filled only with the sound of heavy breathing.
“There’s no time to waste!” Guo Yang spoke loudly: “Everyone, get seated in your assigned seats and stop moving about. We’ll start counting off to confirm the number of people. A dark space like this makes it easy for non-humans to appear. Let’s confirm the total number of people and make sure we recognize the people around us!”
Now, no one opposed him; in their panic, he had become the leader.
Starting from the front row, Guo Yang shone his phone’s flashlight on each person as they counted off, circling the light over their faces before moving on. This was to allow those around them to see and to confirm their humanity.
The beam of light from the phone moved through the dark screening hall, passing over silent, empty red seats, stopping at the fourth row.
The first three rows were empty.
The first people, seated in the middle of the fourth row, were a middle-aged man and woman who had earlier attempted to call for staff at the door.
Noticing the light on them, the couple immediately turned to look back.
They appeared to be around fifty, their faces uniformly marked with the lines of hardship, panic spreading across their features along those wrinkles. The woman had a disposable paper cup on her lap, half-filled with popcorn. The man was holding a white plastic bag, also containing popcorn.
“O-one.”
“Two.”
The fifth row had three people: a girl with her hair up in a ponytail sitting on the left and Guo Yang to the right, though they were still seated close enough to the center for their seats to be considered as part of the middle area. The muscular man, who had just gotten up from the floor, was catching his breath leaning on the nearest seat.
“Three.”
“Four.”
“Five.”
The sixth row had two men. They weren’t sitting in the middle, but together at the far right, next to the wall. The wall wasn’t fully enclosed, with a corridor on the other side leading to the entrance.
They didn’t turn back, so Xia Bai couldn’t see their faces, only noting that one of them was a little fat.
“Six.”
“Seven.”
There was only one man in the seventh row, sitting in front of Xia Bai to the right. When the light fell on him, he was idly playing with his fingers, head bowed, not looking up.
“Eight.”
Xia Bai, seated in row eight, seat seven, was in the last filled row. He thought he was alone in his row. Just as he was about to speak out after the previous row finished counting, a tiny voice said, “Nine.”
Following the voice, Guo Yang’s flashlight illuminated the area, revealing a child sitting to Xia Bai’s left, hunched over in the seat.
“Why is there a child here?”
It wasn’t just Xia Bai; everyone had failed to notice the child until now.
The muscular man, who had been awkwardly leaning against a nearby seat after being tossed aside and had found little to say besides his number during the count-off, finally found something to comment on upon seeing the child. Frowning, he blurted out, “Who brought a kid here? Make sure the kid doesn’t hold us back!”
No one responded to him.
Taking advantage of the light from Guo Yang’s phone, Xia Bai glanced to his left. The child seemed very tense, curled up in the seat, rigid, clutching the edge of their clothing, head down, with a very pale face and a somewhat familiar profile.
Xia Bai couldn’t place where he had seen this face before.
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
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Did his parent not come in, or did he come to the cinema without any in the first place? How did he get in without an adult?
The light from the phone briefly illuminated them before moving away, and Guo Yang’s attention was drawn elsewhere when the ponytailed girl exclaimed, “Look! The movie is starting!”
The blood that seemed to spill from the screen never hit the ground, making them realize it wasn’t blood flowing outward but a disturbingly realistic scene from the movie. The blood on the screen dispersed, black hair writhing, eventually forming the words: Island Escape.
The movie officially began.
Guo Yang looked back at Xia Bai, who cooperated by announcing “ten”. Guo Yang then turned and loudly instructed, “Make sure to watch carefully, try to remember as much information as possible, and don’t overlook any details!”
They didn’t need his reminder to watch intently; they all heard the voice instructing them to unravel the movie’s story logic.
This was probably the most attentive and tense movie viewing of their lives. Even blinking felt wasteful. Some even recorded the screen with their phones.
The movie’s subtitles were all formed by black hair, starting like any ordinary film.
Producer: Li Dongfeng, Wang Yuhai, Yu Kebao
Director: Huang Weiping
Executive Producer: Liu San
The first scene of the movie was a sinister, deserted island.
An exploration team arrived on the island for an adventure, featuring several female college students in ultra-short shorts and deep V-neck tank tops. Some were even in swimsuits, showcasing long legs and fair skin.
“…”
Including this visit, Xia Bai had been to the cinema a total of three times in his life. However, this didn’t mean he didn’t enjoy movies. He liked watching films on the library computer, with zombie flicks and horror supernatural films being his favorites.
Xia Bai remembered how a certain type of clichéd horror movie had been popular a few years ago, characterized by a blend of horror and mild eroticism, where a group of attractive young people venture into an area and do reckless things.
His strong, negative impression of these movies wasn’t just because they were misleading in their marketing.
Once, while watching a specific scene from such a film, he was caught by a librarian.
Xia Bai had to write a 5,000-word reflection, which his classmates marveled at for a full week, as if it was the ninth wonder of the world.
To this day, he despised these kinds of movies.
He loathed them and didn’t want to watch them.
Watching them made him feel as if he was being watched.
Turning his head slightly after the movie began, the light from the screen made the hall brighter, and he could clearly see the child to his left covering his eyes with his hands.
It seemed like the child had given up on this game.
A civilized little guy, Xia Bai thought, feeling a bit of fondness for him.
Just as he was about to turn back and focus on the movie, his hands came into contact with the genealogy book in his pocket and he blinked.
A child.
Xia Bai resisted the urge to look again, forcing himself to concentrate on the movie.
The film was incredibly realistic and well-crafted, with a strong sense of immersion, clearly a high-budget production.
However, as Xia Bai expected, it followed a very vulgar and illogical formula.
A group of young college students, led by a wealthy classmate, excitedly travel to the deserted island on a yacht. They encounter indigenous islanders living a primitive life, staring at them with eerie and greedy eyes, but decide not to leave and stay overnight.
They find an abandoned house among the indigenous people’s dwellings to prepare for their night’s stay, all while casting flirtatious glances and touches, eliciting an exasperated sigh from the ponytailed girl.
Her reaction wasn’t surprising; the movie quickly turned sleazy, likely causing her physical discomfort.
So far, nothing particularly strange had appeared in the movie, just the typical, clichéd plot and scenes.
Because of this, several people in the hall gradually relaxed, no longer as tense as before.
Initially, their fear of the game was extreme, so much so that they expected the game to show them something profound or complex.
They didn’t anticipate a low-quality, predictable film, the kind where you could guess the ending from the start.
The clichéd scenario continued as the students divided rooms, with several male students jokingly saying they wanted to share a room with the campus beauty. The aloof beauty scolded them coldly and chose a room on the first floor to the far right for herself.
In the dead of night, two islanders snuck into the beauty’s room and dragged her to a cave. Two male students witnessed this and followed, only to watch from the cave entrance, their breathing growing heavy until they couldn’t resist entering themselves.
The campus belle died.
Her eyes were open, filled with endless rage and despair.
Her face dominated the screen, her hair matted with wet mud from the cave, black mud and other fluids covering her face. The swollen eyes, infiltrated by dirt, occupied a large part of the screen, glaring back at them with boundless fury.
Her body was also covered in dirt and muddy water. Her once fair hands were now darkened, swollen, and rough, hanging limply towards the ground, her fingers naturally pointing in their direction.
Xia Bai felt a chill.
He initially thought the chill stemmed from witnessing such a deathly scene, but soon realized it wasn’t so. The coldness didn’t emanate from the movie, but from beneath the seat.
Amidst a strange background music that sounded like a mix of crying and laughter, the scene on the screen gradually dimmed, symbolizing the departure of the campus belle.
Underneath the seat, darkness enveloped everything. Xia Bai couldn’t discern what was causing the increasingly palpable chill. All he knew was that something was slowly inching closer to his ankle.
While watching the movie, Xia Bai reached into his pocket.
The icy presence neared his ankles, causing goosebumps to break out on his exposed skin.
In the movie, unsurprisingly, those who violated the campus beauty died the next day, each death more gruesome than the last.
The camera showed each of the men in turn.
The bone-chilling coldness crept closer to his ankles. Xia Bai didn’t move but glanced down.
A mass of black hair spread like water from under the seat. It was visible in the darkness because the hair was soaked in glaringly red blood, which also spread like water.
His gaze shifted backward to a gap between the seats, locking onto a blood-soaked, withered eye. The eyeball was shriveled and wrinkled, yet it still exuded a cold hatred and madness.
Xia Bai’s expression was blank.
He was seriously considering whether it was a ghost, a corpse, or a living person.
If it was an intangible ghost, his corpse-suppressing talismans would be useless.
Not wanting to waste his precious talismans priced at 100,000 each, he first reached out gently to touch.
The texture was soft and sticky, with a slight corrosiveness, and probing deeper into the eye did not reach the skull.
It was indeed not human, but it seemed not to be an intangible ghost either.
Xia Bai bent over, searching in his pocket to stick a corpse-suppressing talisman on it.
The deathly cold aura overflowed, as if something was silently screaming.
As Xia Bai was about to look up, he noticed the child’s previously fidgeting legs had suddenly become still.
Pretending not to notice, he stood up and continued to watch the movie.
The camera moved past two dead men, and when it focused on the third man, the screening hall fell terrifyingly silent.
The third dead man in the movie was the same muscular man from seat number five who had watched the movie with them, who had counted off as number five.
In the movie, his eyes were wide open, staring back at them from the giant screen with unnerving accuracy, seemingly pleading for help.
The atmosphere in the screening hall was oppressively tense, the light from the screen illuminating faces with varying expressions.
Some people kept their gaze fixed on the screen, too afraid to look towards the muscular man’s seat, while others timidly glanced over, and some turned their heads directly to look.
That seat was empty, as if it had always been unoccupied.
The person who had been sitting among them, watching the movie together, had died in the movie without anyone noticing.
When did it happen? What did he experience? Why was there no sound at all?
“Th-the screen, blood, so much blood…” the ponytailed girl murmured in terror.
Blood appeared on the big screen again, but unlike the blood that had seemed to flow outward at the start of the movie, this time it seeped through the screen, dripping down.
In the gaps between the movie’s sounds, the dripping sound was clearly audible in the dim screening hall.
A fresh scent of blood spread in the confined hall, intertwining with the sweet smell of popcorn, making each inhale smell both sweet and metallic.
This blood was real; it wasn’t just special effects.
It was flowing from the muscular man from seat number five who was now in the movie.
The people in the screening hall were too shocked by this eerie scene to react.
“Is this a breach in the dimensional barrier? Was the world in the movie connected to our outside world?” The ponytailed girl tried to maintain composure as she moved closer to Guo Yang, but her spilled cola betrayed her panic. “C-Can we pull him out then?”
As expected of someone who had paid money to watch a horror flick on the big screen, the girl had seen many horror films and was rich in theoretical knowledge and unique ideas.
“Keep watching the movie attentively; I’ll go check it out,” Guo Yang’s voice was slightly strained.
This was his first encounter with such a situation too. The game had barely just started, but someone had already died silently.
He was the closest to seat number five and had not noticed anything amiss. The man’s death was sudden and without reason, offering no clues to what deadly rules he had triggered, nor any hint of how it happened.
This was the most terrifying aspect.
Cautiously stepping around the seat of the muscular man, Guo Yang carefully extended his foot, slowly advancing, fearing that stepping on something might drag him into the movie to meet a similar fate.
Xia Bai watched his actions, understanding his concerns.
Something had appeared beneath his seat earlier, a presence that Xia Bai couldn’t quite discern as either a ghost or a corpse. Could it, or one of its kind, have dragged the man in seat number five into the movie?
No, that wasn’t it.
It had appeared gradually, and when it did, Xia Bai felt a distinct chill, stimulating his ankles. The muscular man would have surely noticed something. Given his earlier loud and boisterous behavior, he wouldn’t have remained silent or died so quietly in the movie.
Even if he hadn’t felt it, Guo Yang, an experienced player sitting just two seats away, was nearby.
If it wasn’t the creature under his seat that dragged the muscular man into the movie, then how did he die there?
What were the actual rules of death?
In the movie, the rest of the exploration team discovered the dead beauty and their classmates and started to investigate what had happened.
The film used a flashback technique, revealing the corpses at dawn and then showing how they died the previous night.
In the screening hall, Guo Yang reached the screen but then hesitated and withdrew his hand.
Others divided their attention between the movie and Guo Yang’s actions.
They understood his reluctance to reach out towards the screen or behind it, uncertain of what they might encounter. With someone just having died in the movie, there could be a ghostly hand waiting to pull in another victim, or perhaps the muscular man’s corpse.
After retracting his hand, Guo Yang swiftly produced a pure black, slender knife blade as if out of thin air.
The blade was thin, inserted into a barely noticeable gap behind the screen. After checking the screen with it, he withdrew the blade, shaking his head in negation.
The movie reached a crucial moment—the scene of the muscular man’s death.
The sudden death of the man in seat number five in the movie was horrifying because they did not know the cause. An inexplicable death was more terrifying than anything. If the muscular man was the first, who could guarantee they wouldn’t be next?
If there was any basic logic to the movie and game, they hoped to deduce some rules from the process of the muscular man’s death.
All eyes were glued to the screen, hoping for some revelation, but their hopes were dashed.
The plot of the movie was straightforward, devoid of any suspense. The deaths were all caused by the ghost of the campus beauty.
The first to be killed was the muscular man.
He scrambled out of the cave in a panic, his face etched with terror, “Help! Help! Guo Yang, save me, save me! Someone save me!”
His image filled the entire screen, as if he was trying to crawl out of the movie, pleading for their help. He seemed aware they were watching the movie, and he could even see them sitting right in front of him.
Xia Bai remembered his grandfather’s advice: in times of danger, when seeking help, don’t just shout for help from anyone around; specify who you’re asking for help, and point out their clothing or hairstyle.
The muscular man not only called out for help but also specifically mentioned Guo Yang’s name. However, they were powerless to assist him, and even if they had a way, it would be futile; he was already dead, and this was a replay of his final moments.
The muscular man’s struggle was excruciating. He was missing two fingers on one hand, and as he reached out to them for help, blood ran down his arm, seeping through the screen and dripping in front of their seats.
He was bleeding profusely. From the moment his death scene had started, blood began to spill out from the screen, and now it resumed again.
The blood soaked through the screen, staining it red.
Xia Bai watched the blood-soaked area, realizing the image was becoming unclear. He understood that if two more people were dragged into the movie and killed, most of the screen would be obscured by blood, and they would have to rely solely on the audio to understand the movie’s story logic.
The muscular man only managed to cry out before a dripping ghost appeared on his back.
The female ghost was covered in muddy water and fresh blood, her once smooth hair matted into indissoluble clumps by the mud. Her face was unrecognizable, bloodied, and her nose askew from a hit.
She sniffed at the muscular man’s neck, then crawled down his back, her grayish-purple ghostly hand grabbing his ankle.
Screaming in terror, the muscular man left only a few fingernails in the crevices of the rocks as the ghostly campus beauty dragged him bit by bit into the deep cave.
The camera did not follow into the cave, focusing instead on the dark entrance. The shrill screams, the dull sounds of dragging, sharp impacts, and even the slicing noises were all clearly audible to them.
Unable to see, their imaginations filled in even more horrifying and vivid details, making the atmosphere in Hall 5 even more oppressive. The hall echoed with faint sobbing sounds.
Just a short while into the game, and they were already experiencing all its terror.
The horror of dying without any knowledge was too frightful. They didn’t even know how to prevent it or what to do, except to watch the screen intently.
Next, the ghost of the campus belle began her ruthless and brutal revenge on the others involved from the previous night.
The four men deserved their fate, and no one felt sympathy for them. Besides, this was just a movie plot, and seeing the beauty’s ghost enact her revenge was satisfying.
As the movie progressed, its ability to create an immersive atmosphere became increasingly apparent. The initial scenes of the beauty being victimized evoked disgust and frustration, but watching her ghostly vengeance unfold was oddly gratifying.
One, two, three…
Xia Bai’s gaze briefly left the screen to rub his temples, then he looked around the screening hall.
Almost everyone was absorbed in the movie, lost in its world, except for one exception: the little neighbor to his left.
Initially, the child had covered his eyes with his hands, but at some point, he had crouched down on the floor, turning his back and curling into a small ball, his hands now covering his ears.
“…”
He had well and truly given up. He probably didn’t even know the basic plot of the movie.
If the sky fell, there would be a taller person to hold it up, huh?
Xia Bai only paused for a few seconds before returning his attention to the screen, where the scene had shifted.
The exploration team’s discovery of the dead bodies led to the reveal of the island’s indigenous people preparing meals. It was shown that these islanders, isolated from the modern world and uneducated in modern civilization, harbored primitive savagery and worshiped obscure, malevolent deities. Violent, bloodthirsty, and carnivorous, they consumed not only the flesh of other island creatures but also human flesh.
A significant portion of the movie focused on them processing food and consuming meat with gusto under the blazing sun. They tore meat from bones with their shiny, tanned arms, their strong jaws and prominent Adam’s apples moving visibly as they swallowed, indulging in their meal with primitive enthusiasm.
Only after the meal did they discover two of their own were dead. They wouldn’t kill each other. The only ones who could harm their kind were those outsiders, and these barbaric and violent individuals naturally did not spare them.
Two more students from the exploration team were killed.
The camera lingered on the dead.
“AHH!—”
A terrified scream suddenly pierced the silence of the screening hall.
Xia Bai turned towards the source of the sound, just in time to see the middle-aged man in the front row throwing something outward, resembling a hand.
But that wasn’t the main focus. The middle-aged woman sitting next to him had disappeared.
Xia Bai looked up just as the movie showed the corpse of the middle-aged woman.
She, too, had died in the movie.
Thank you for the chapter! ❤
Thanks for the update
Thanks for the chapter!!
Thinking about the child after touching the genealogy book… is Xia Bai thinking about adopting a (dead) little brother?
A child would probably be the easiest to trick into agreeing to give him their body after death, if it was a real child??
Thanks for the chapter
Nah, he said he has seen the boy face somewhere. So I’m guessing it might even be the corpse he lost? That or it’s the ghost charmer guy.
Oh good point!
I wonder what will happen with the child?
Thank you for the chapter💚💚💚💚
I’m so confused 😰 The rules of death haven’t been found out, much less speculated! I wonder how the child will survive in this game 😭😭
Thank you for the update. Can’t wait to figure the rule of death and also potential new corpse family.
!!!There are multiple spoilers!!!
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Ngl I feel bad for the dude, he and his girlfriend suffered so much, and only when they were about to get married, go to retirement, and build a home together in the countryside they suddenly get caught up in this entanglement and sadly the woman didn’t survive, at least the man was saved and joined Lao Yang in rescuing suicidal people 🥲
bruh how long do you want me to make it until you say “more” to continue 💀