Giving Interstellar Players a Horror Ghost Game Shock - Chapter 101
It wasn’t just An Zhi’s team that was getting dizzy from all the backstabbing NPCs—other players were clearly losing it, too.
Elsewhere in the game, some contestants were already breaking down from the contradictory plotlines.
Previously, it was mentioned that aside from the few who blindly followed Liu Mang, most of the students from the First Military Academy were actually quite rational. They had downloaded the trial version of the game for research and even studied Miss Ye’s previous two works.
To be honest, those games were scary, yes—but military cadets had exceptional mental strength. Besides, in Miss Ye’s earlier games, aside from the well-crafted creepy atmosphere, most of the actual scares came from jump scares. Once you’d been hit by a few of those, the braver players essentially became immune.
—Due to information and timing gaps, the students from the First Military Academy hadn’t known that there was a hard-mode trial version available earlier. They had assumed that “Campus Horror Night 2” would be about the same difficulty as the previous titles.
When they requested an increased difficulty setting, they never imagined it would truly be a challenge for them. In fact, they thought it would hinder the players from the Central Military Academy and give them an opportunity to show off their school’s strength.
What they definitely didn’t expect… was that when Miss Ye decided to stop holding back—this game could actually be this terrifying.
In one of the First Military Academy’s livestreams, a female player with the ID “Azi” was now sitting rigidly in the same Room 414 of the girls’ dormitory.
Her two teammates had already died on the Yin-Yang Road, their cause of death: splitting from the main group and getting themselves killed doing something stupid.
So, Azi had learned her lesson—deeply—from her teammates’ fatal mistakes. Since then, she had clung tightly to Ah Yuan’s team, refusing to stray even a single step. She had also independently come to understand the principle Sheng Qingye had once told Ji Yu:
Don’t overthink. Don’t overlisten. Don’t overobserve.
Force yourself to ignore everything frightening to preserve your SAN value. This way, the ghosts are less likely to target you first.
Using that mantra, she had managed to survive up to this point.
But the next segment of the game was not something you could simply “survive.”
In fact, if you spent too long hiding and never actively engaged, there was a very high chance you would miss crucial clues—leading straight into a series of inevitable death endings in Phase Two.
And that was precisely the outcome Ye Yuxi had meticulously designed:
You can hide for a while, but not forever.
Take Azi’s current dilemma, for instance—
An NPC named Liu Tian, moments before his death, had called to tell them:
“Trust Brother Feng. The guy with the baseball cap is the ghost. Whatever you do, don’t believe him!”
But now that the baseball cap guy had already died and become a ghost… he, in turn, was saying that Brother Feng couldn’t be trusted.
And more disturbingly—he hadn’t harmed anyone since becoming a ghost.
This kind of mutually contradictory, seemingly reasonable branching narrative completely broke Azi’s already fragile, fear-paralyzed brain. It turned her thoughts into mush.
What the hell is going on?
Wasn’t this supposed to be a linear horror game? As long as you followed the path laid out by the game, weren’t you guaranteed a win?
She had followed every instruction step by step—so how did things spiral into this mess?!
The NPCs were splitting sides now.
Zhang Wen insisted on trusting Brother Feng and wanted to split up, saying they should all hide separately.
Ah Yuan was still in denial, thinking maybe Brother Feng had deliberately scared them as part of some plan.
Another girl said Brother Feng was probably not to be trusted, and that Pen Fairy would never lie…
The three girls arguing was giving Azi a splitting headache.
Her internal frustration surged in tandem with their escalating quarrel, and all the conflicting thoughts in her mind sank into a mental pit of despair.
She felt a string in her mind—snap.
“Shut up, all of you!!”
The previously silent Azi suddenly roared.
Her eyes were now bloodshot, and the ferocious aura she radiated made it seem like she was ready to swallow the NPCs whole. The other three girls were stunned into silence and stared at her in shock.
Azi panted heavily, her mind a tangled mess of the game’s conflicting clues, completely unaware that her SAN value—displayed in the top-right corner of her perspective—was plummeting.
She had already been knocked down to 30 SAN after several scares. Now, she was rapidly approaching the red line, and a bl00d-colored haze was starting to cloud her vision.
Then she turned her head slightly and spotted a silver fruit knife lying on another table.
It might’ve looked like some ancient civilian’s crude blade, but… it would probably do the job.
“Az—Azi, what are you doing?!”
Zhang Wen was the first to realize something was wrong. She cried out in horror, watching Azi—her expression dark and twisted—suddenly lunge forward and raise the fruit knife!
After grabbing the knife, Azi began walking slowly toward the three NPCs, a deranged smile twisting across her face.
Her thinking was simple: there was now a serious trust crisis between her and the NPCs, and she couldn’t come up with any way to determine who—if anyone—could actually be trusted in time.
So, if none of the NPCs could be trusted… then she’d just kill them all.
That way, she wouldn’t have to keep her guard up or worry about getting stabbed in the back. Problem solved.
Kill them all, and she’d never have to wrestle with this “who’s the real enemy” dilemma again.
“Hehehe…”
Azi had no idea how twisted her expression looked at that moment. She didn’t think her logic was wrong, either.
She had practically forgotten this was a game tournament, and had long since lost sight of her initial goal to clear the game. All she wanted now was to slaughter the annoying, noisy NPCs right in front of her!
“Azi, calm down—calm d—ahh!”
“AAAAAAHHH!”
Amid piercing screams, Zhang Wen collapsed beside the table leg, her eyes wide open in death, her throat nearly slit through.
Ah Yuan, on the other hand, died even more horrifically.
She had fought back fiercely to the bitter end, which resulted in her tendons being severed, her arms and legs slashed full of bloody wounds. She had been stabbed more than ten times before Azi finally pierced a vital spot. Even then, she writhed on the floor for over ten seconds before drawing her final breath.
Only after watching Ah Yuan die in agony did Azi confirm she was truly dead. Then she casually grabbed a nearby cloth and wiped the bl00d off her fruit knife.
Her eyes—now completely bl00d-red—locked firmly onto the last remaining girl, the one with double braids.
“You’re last…”
To her surprise, the double braided girl didn’t show fear or fury. Instead, her lips curled into an unsettling smile, her once gentle face slowly warping.
“That’s right. You’re the last one now… It really is your turn.”
The girl’s voice grew rough and hoarse, like something no human could produce. Her pitch-black eyes began leaking black bl00d, her skin turning deathly pale as livid corpse marks crept over every exposed part of her body.
It was only then—when she saw something inhuman unfolding before her—that Azi, who had been lost in a frenzy of bloodlust, finally regained a sliver of sanity. She stumbled backward in horror.
Only now did she realize why she’d always felt so uncomfortable whenever she looked into double braids’ eyes—
Because there were no eyeballs in those sockets at all!
“Aaaaaaah!!”
Realizing that the girl she’d treated like a normal NPC all along was actually a ghost, Azi let out a bl00d-curdling scream—just like the NPCs she’d slaughtered moments ago—then turned and bolted in terror.
But the very next second—
She tripped over Ah Yuan’s corpse.
Still shrieking, she kicked at the body in a panic. Just as she tried to step over it—
Ah Yuan’s supposedly lifeless form twitched. Her lips curled into a grotesque smile.
She slowly… began to rise.
The scene was so terrifying that Azi couldn’t even scream anymore.
She stared, frozen in terror, as this dead NPC crawled back to life—
And she could feel a horrifying malice radiating from her reanimated body.
She collapsed onto the floor in a daze, pushing herself backward with trembling arms.
Only to feel… another cold hand against her own.
She turned—and saw Zhang Wen, previously “dead with eyes wide open,” now rolling her eyes toward her.
When their gazes met, Zhang Wen even smiled.
But this smile wasn’t friendly.
And that cold, vice-like hand… was about to crush her bones.
In that moment of overwhelming terror—before the ghosts could even kill her—Azi’s SAN value dropped to zero.
But she didn’t trigger the common bad end of “died halfway through trying to do something stupid.”
No—she triggered a different one:
“Congratulations, player has unlocked Bad Ending #9: Self-Destructive Path. This ending has been archived. Would you like to start a new game?”
「Yes / No」
Ding—Player detected in special mode. Save file has been locked. New game cannot be started. Player has been forcibly logged out.
(Author’s Note: SAN value refers to mental stability, not just fear. Persistent anxiety, frustration, and mental breakdowns can also cause it to drop rapidly.)