She Was Sentenced to Life Imprisonment [Unlimited] - Chapter 64

Chapter 64: The Studio (6)

◎Can You Hear It?◎

Jiang Nan was interrupted by the crying and looked at the girl beside her.

The girl was sobbing softly, but she wasn’t crying as hard as before. She carefully tugged on Jiang Nan’s clothes and spoke with a sense of guilt and regret.

“Did she not follow us?”

Jiang Nan didn’t have time to explain. The girl seemed to have remembered something terrifying. Fear filled her eyes, and her crying gradually grew louder again. The crying echoing in the silent academic building was particularly chilling.

She heard something coming up the stairs. A chill went down her spine, and she said.

“Stop crying.”

The moment Jiang Nan spoke, the others were stunned. The girl closest to Jiang Nan was so frightened that she stopped crying. She stared at Jiang Nan, thinking that the displeasure in her eyes was directed at herself. Her body couldn’t help but tremble.

After the girl had calmed down a bit, Jiang Nan finally heard clearly that someone was indeed coming up the stairs. Their footsteps were heavy and dull.

But when Jiang Nan saw the reactions of the others, she frowned again and asked.

“You can’t hear anything?”

“What sound? Isn’t it just this person crying?” Yan Xin said.

For good measure, the others held their breath for a moment, then shook their heads at Jiang Nan.

Upon hearing this, Jiang Nan’s frown deepened. It wasn’t because they said they couldn’t hear it, but because after she asked the question, the person seemed to have noticed and purposely softened their footsteps, making it so she could barely hear them, too.

She raised a hand and rubbed the space between her eyebrows, a little suspicious that she was just hearing things.

Just as she was feeling annoyed, the girl spoke, still sobbing softly and with a great sense of self-blame.

“It’s already night. That killer must be out. It’s all my fault. I should have told you not to leave the classroom. Now… now someone has died because of it…”

Her voice was full of sobs, and her words were a little incoherent. She hung her head in self-reproach.

The others didn’t immediately assume that Thanatos was dead. Lin Jia was deep in thought, and she quietly said.

“That shouldn’t be right. She clearly…”

Her voice grew softer and softer until it was impossible to hear what she was saying in the end.

Jiang Nan glanced at Lin Jia, then said calmly to explain.

“She…”

She seemed to have realized something and paused before calmly correcting herself.

“Luo Ning isn’t dead. She went to climb the building.”

Those two short and concise sentences made them all freeze for a moment.

“Luo Ning?” Yang Yi secretly repeated the name. She exchanged a look with Yan Xin, then subtly covered it up.

They hadn’t seen a player named Luo Ning or any name that sounded like it on the leaderboards. Since Luo Ning was on the top tier of the Stairway to Heaven, she must be a player who hadn’t yet made it into the top ten. But that didn’t mean she was to be underestimated. And the other person seemed to be firmly standing behind Jiang Nan.

The girl looked up at her blankly. When she met Jiang Nan’s eyes, she seemed to have been pricked by something and immediately looked away. To hide her panic, she said in a sobbing voice.

“Climb what?”

Jiang Nan looked out the window. In the depths of her light-colored pupils, it was impossible to tell what she was thinking.

“The building.” Jiang Nan answered again thoughtfully, with a hint of an almost imperceptible worry.

Before they could fully react, the next moment, the sound of breaking glass rang out from within the office. It fell to the floor with a “crashing” sound, which made them freeze again.

Afterward, the sound of footsteps on the broken glass echoed from inside the office. The footsteps grew closer and closer until they reached the door, separated from them by only a single door.

The sudden turn of events and the instance’s malfunction made their nerves tighten once again.

“Who’s in there?”

Yang Yi pulled Yan Xin behind her. Her eyes were vigilant as she looked at the closed door, holding something in her hand.

There was no movement behind the door for a long time, and no response came. It was as if someone was deliberately toying with them.

Jiang Nan was silent for a moment. She walked past them and went to the door. Under everyone’s watchful eyes, she reached out her hand to the doorknob, but she couldn’t open it.

“Don’t. It won’t open,” Yang Yi quickly said, trying to stop her.

But Jiang Nan frowned. As if she remembered the playful, smiling eyes of the person behind the door, she said coldly, her tone carrying a hint of an order that could not be refused.

“Luo Ning, open the door.”

Someone seemed to chuckle softly from behind the door. In an environment like this, it only felt terrifying.

Then, when Jiang Nan pulled the doorknob down again, the lock made a “click” and successfully opened in front of them. The cold, white light from inside shone on them.

“You…” Yang Yi’s voice trailed off. She was a little incredulous.

They had clearly confirmed earlier that this door was locked. How could someone suddenly appear inside to open the door for them?

The lights were already on in the office. The person sitting in the office chair was Thanatos. The broken glass beside her made it very clear who the culprit was. It was only then that they understood why Jiang Nan had said she had gone to climb the building.

But the girl had only said it was on the fifth floor, not the exact location. How had Thanatos found it so precisely?

Thinking of this, their gazes changed, but they didn’t say anything in the end.

Thanatos seemed to not notice the strange silence in the air. She nonchalantly gestured for Jiang Nan to come over and look at the roster on the table.

“Is little Jiang Nan looking for these?”

The moment her words came out, the gazes of the others fell on Jiang Nan.

Jiang Nan looked at her and realized that the other person was illiterate. She could only walk to the other person’s side under everyone’s gaze. Thanatos had even left a large part of the chair open to make it convenient for Jiang Nan to come and sit.

Thanatos lightly patted the spot beside her, gesturing for Jiang Nan to sit next to her.

Jiang Nan took the roster from her hand and met the other person’s gaze. In the end, she refused indifferently.

“I’m not tired. You can sit.”

As soon as she finished speaking, Thanatos fiddled with the drawer of the office desk. She pulled the lock off and then took out a few more stacks of rosters from inside, placing them in front of Jiang Nan.

“I see there are some more here. They should all be for you to look at,” Thanatos said, as if she hadn’t just forced the lock open.

Jiang Nan: …

Jiang Nan didn’t look at the papers in front of her. Instead, she looked at the lock that Thanatos had pulled off. She then looked at the other person’s long and beautiful hands, which looked like they were born to play the piano. She quietly moved a few inches away from the other person.

Seeing the two of them, the others didn’t know what to say. They could only take a few stacks of the rosters and go to another spot.

Later, they would find out that Thanatos had even been so thorough as to use a vase to smash the security camera.

After Jiang Nan had flipped through a few pages, she saw a familiar face on one of the rosters and handed it to the girl.

The girl took it and thanked her happily.

“Thank you, thank you, everyone.”

As the girl took the roster, Jiang Nan asked the most important question.

“Have you thought about who will take your place after you cross your name off?”

This was a question the girl had seemingly never thought of. When Jiang Nan asked her, she held the roster and looked at a loss. She shook her head and said.

“I… I don’t know.”

She didn’t want to die, but no one else wanted to die either. If she were to switch her name with someone else, she would be hurting them.

The girl looked at the roster in her hand. She didn’t know the person whose name was next to hers. In the end, as if she had made a decision, she said.

“How about I… I still go by myself.”

The girl hung her head. Tears flowed down her cheeks and dripped onto the roster.

She couldn’t hurt others just because she was afraid.

Jiang Nan walked up to her, took the roster from her hand, and placed it on the desk. She pointed to a name and confirmed it with her.

“Is this the right one?”

“Huh? Yes…”

After confirming it, Jiang Nan took a pen and decisively blacked out the girl’s name. She then wrote her own name in its place. Before the girl could react, Thanatos, who was beside the other person, had already pasted a picture of Jiang Nan that she had torn off from who knows where.

“Since you’ve come all this way, I don’t want you to have made a trip for nothing. Since you don’t want to go, and I happen to want to, I’ll go for you.”

Jiang Nan’s voice was calm, with no emotional fluctuations, as if she were talking about a normal thing.

“But…”

The girl looked at the obviously altered roster. She was still a little hesitant, but there was no way to restore it after Jiang Nan had changed it.

“It’s fine. Let her go.” Thanatos said with a smile. It was impossible to tell what emotions were in her eyes, which made the girl not dare to look at her directly.

“Okay.” The girl could only agree. Even she didn’t realize that she was breathing a sigh of relief.

“Someone’s actually rushing to their own death,” Yan Xin said with a sneer, her voice low.

The voice wasn’t loud, but everyone here could definitely hear it.

Helpless, Yang Yi could only come out and explain.

“She has a big mouth, but she definitely didn’t mean to insult you.”

Jiang Nan didn’t care and didn’t respond. As they helped look through the rosters and filtered out a few names that sounded like “Fang Yuan,” they handed them to Jiang Nan and Thanatos to confirm.

The girl watched from the side. She might have still felt a little guilty and didn’t dare to ask what they were here to do. She could only ask quietly.

“Can I help?”

Because there were too many student rosters and each person had a separate photo for confirmation, a single sheet of paper couldn’t hold many people. The rosters for the art building were not put together separately either, which made them even harder to find.

Based on the principle that another person meant another pair of hands, Lin Jia handed her a roster and said.

“Look for a name called Fang Yuan. Just find any that are similar and pull them out.”

“Fang Yuan?!”

When the girl heard the name, she suddenly looked up. The hand holding the roster unconsciously tightened.

The players keenly noticed the change in her emotions. Su Yue adjusted her glasses. The coldness in her eyes made it impossible for people to look at her directly.

“You know this person.”

She didn’t give the girl a chance to refute and directly stated it as a fact.

“No… no, I don’t know her!”

The girl’s voice suddenly grew high-pitched and sharp. Her expression was one of extreme fear.

“You don’t have to be nervous…”

Just as Jiang Nan was about to comfort her, the lights above suddenly exploded. The office went dark in an instant. The light from the flashing sparks was not enough for them to see clearly.

A cold wind blew through the broken glass window. The wind suddenly grew stronger, as if on purpose. It left them no time to react, and more than half of the rosters in their hands were blown away.

In an instant, the entire office was filled with flying papers. The scene immediately became chaotic. They quickly started to clean up the scattered papers.

“Where is this wind coming from?!” Yan Xin swore furiously, her hands still not stopping from cleaning up the papers.

“Hurry and get the rosters back! The sparks from the lights might ignite the papers!” Yang Yi said, frowning and speaking urgently. She wanted to close the window but remembered that Thanatos had already broken it when she came in.

In the darkness, Thanatos grabbed Jiang Nan’s wrist, not with a lot of force.

In the pitch-black darkness, Jiang Nan could still feel the other person’s powerful aura of oppression.

“It’s gone.”

When she finished speaking, the strong wind stopped at that moment. The cold wind that had been blowing seemed to have been frozen. She also let go of Jiang Nan’s hand.

As if sensing something, Jiang Nan looked out the window at the crescent moon, which was gradually being covered by dark clouds.

A heavy sound of footsteps echoed from the hallway again. Jiang Nan saw that the others were still cleaning up the messy rosters, as if they hadn’t heard anything just like last time.

Jiang Nan looked at Thanatos beside her and asked.

“Did you hear that?”