FCPADT 15

Chapter 15

So this strange staircase counted as a dungeon for the players?

Tang Yu quickened his pace, wanting nothing more than to leave those players behind.

Yan Lang stood at the stairwell entrance, watching Tang Yu’s retreating back — almost running — and his expression turned faintly dazed.

“It wasn’t me who ended the loop.”

Miaodongli, who had just been enthusiastically singing Yan Lang’s praises, froze mid-sentence.

“Huh?”

“After I exited the hidden dungeon, I went back into that looping staircase. I walked it over and over again — no matter what I did, I couldn’t get out. Not until…”

“Until what?”

“Until Tang Yu appeared. Then the loop ended.”

“What??”

Once Miaodongli realized Yan Lang wasn’t joking, he was utterly shaken.

“Brother Yan, you mean Tang Yu was the one who ended the loop?!”

What the hell just happened?
That pretty, decorative NPC suddenly felt mysterious — unfathomable, even!

“I’m not sure how he did it,” Yan Lang said. “But if it wasn’t just coincidence, then yes — Tang Yu must’ve been the one who broke the loop.”

“Whatever it was, we picked the right NPC to butter up!” Miaodongli said excitedly. “What are we waiting for? Brother Yan, let’s go keep flattering him!”

But the usually forward Yan Lang stopped his overeager teammate.

Miaodongli looked at him, puzzled, as Yan Lang said calmly,

“He looks like he wants to be alone right now. If we go rushing over, we’ll only disturb him — it might backfire.”

“True, true!”
Miaodongli was easily convinced. “Oh, right, Brother Yan, you know what I ran into earlier on that creepy staircase? A paper doll that looked exactly like you! Nearly scared me to death!”

“How much like me?”

“Really, really alike — drawn vividly, lifelike even. But it only looked like you, not felt like you. Like… an empty imitation.”

Miaodongli spoke with great seriousness.

Yan Lang’s eyes lingered on him, and then he suddenly smiled — a slow, amused smile.

“And now, can you tell the difference between a paper doll and a real person?”

“Of course!” Miaodongli said quickly, flattering him. “You’ve got such a fun soul, Brother Yan. No paper doll could compare!”

Yan Lang didn’t reply.
While Miaodongli babbled on, Yan Lang hid both hands behind his back. With his right index finger, he pressed hard into the skin of his left wrist.

A tiny hole appeared easily — but no blood came out.

Out of the corner of his eye, Yan Lang glanced at the strange, hollow wound. He tugged down his sleeve, covering it neatly.

Tang Yu held his breath and opened the dorm room door.
He’d expected to see chaos — a complete mess.

Instead…

Two bulging burlap sacks sat neatly in the middle of the floor.
Aside from those, nothing else seemed disturbed. His senior’s bed was still sealed tight behind that long, dark curtain.

It looked as if… nothing had happened.

No—
there was something.

Tang Yu’s gaze fell to the floor.

The thick layer of dust made the footprints perfectly visible.
Following the trail, he saw they all converged toward his senior’s bed.

He froze. His hand lifted toward the curtain, but just before touching it, he drew back. His long lashes trembled uncontrollably. He didn’t dare imagine what the player might’ve done near his senior’s bed.

“…Senior?”

His voice was quiet, careful — afraid of waking him if he were napping.

From behind the black curtain came Li Sheng’s cold voice:

“What is it.”

When you couldn’t see a person’s face or posture, every shred of emotion had to be read from their words.

Li Sheng’s tone was flat, the timbre cold — even his questions sounded like commands, as if warning others to speak only if necessary.

“Senior, someone helped me move my living supplies into the dorm this morning,” Tang Yu said softly. “I don’t know if they might’ve disturbed you…”

His voice trailed lower and lower. His thick lashes drooped, guilt and self-blame shimmering in his pale eyes like tears waiting to fall.

He wasn’t actually crying — his skin was simply too fair, and the thin skin beneath his eyes always carried a faint flush. With those long lashes drooping, he radiated a kind of fragile sadness that felt painfully pure.

He looked so pitiful it was almost impossible to scold him — one could only want to comfort him softly.

Silence stretched.
So quiet it was frightening.

Li Sheng didn’t respond. Tang Yu thought maybe that silence was the response — an unspoken sign of displeasure.

“…I’m sorry.”

He lowered his head slightly, exposing a sliver of white neck.

“Senior, I’m willing to compensate for any damage they caused. If you’d allow it, I can also take care of the dorm cleaning from now on.”

That was the plan he’d come up with on the way here.

If he couldn’t make up for the players’ damage with money, he could at least compensate through labor.

The room was full of dust — clearly, Li Sheng didn’t clean much. His Constitution stat was only 1.
Tang Yu had never even seen a living person with a stat that low.
He’d only seen 2 or 3 in hospital patients.
Li Sheng always stayed in bed — probably because he was too weak to handle even simple chores.

The air pressure in the room seemed to drop.
After a long silence, from behind the curtain came two words, cold as ice:

“Idiot.”

Tang Yu blinked, unsure who the insult was aimed at.

He didn’t take it badly.
He’d long grown used to words like “idiot” or “fool” — after all, his attribute panel constantly reminded him of his Intelligence: 5.

And Li Sheng’s intelligence score was high enough to justify calling him that.
Tang Yu knew better than anyone: every single point of difference in intelligence was an unbridgeable chasm.

He’d realized it the first day of school, when he saw the intelligence stats of his classmates.

Still, no one had ever actually called him stupid to his face before.
And whenever someone did, he only had to calmly say, “ugly,” in perfect diction — and it’d be a fatal strike.

His thoughts drifted, and his face went blank, dazed in thought. Combined with his faintly flushed eyelids, he looked as if the word idiot had hurt him too much for words.

“…You don’t have to clean anything.”

The words came curtly from behind the curtain.

Tang Yu hadn’t caught the first part clearly. He only heard the bit about cleaning.

Indeed, the room could use some tidying. The table was so dusty it made him not even want to eat there.

He placed the lunch box on the table, looking as though he couldn’t even bother with food, and walked toward the door — as if to prove his sincerity with action.

Just then—

Ding-dong!

A message notification.

Tang Yu paused, pulling out his phone.
A message from Shen Junxing:

“Xiao Yu, I left your lunch downstairs at the dorm building.”

Unlike this morning, when he’d left breakfast right at Tang Yu’s door, Shen Junxing had specifically mentioned downstairs — emphasizing that he hadn’t come up this time.

Instinctively, Tang Yu glanced toward the hallway.
Empty. Quiet.

Without thinking much of it, he closed the door.

The thin wooden door separated inside from outside.
What Tang Yu didn’t see — in that instant as the door clicked shut —
was that both ends of the corridor erupted into massive shadows, flooding forward like underground rivers, engulfing the hallway and surging toward Room 623.

Yet just before they reached the door, the darkness stopped — a small gap remained untouched.
If one looked closely, they’d see a tiny paper doll standing there like a door guardian.

It was palm-sized, almost laughably small compared to the flood of shadow —
but it stood proudly, little legs kicking wildly at the encroaching dark, stomping it back with fierce determination.

The shadow tried again, flowing up the walls like spilled ink, cascading downward in an attempt to sneak inside.

In a flash, the little paper doll leapt lightly into the air —
floating as if weightless —
and stomped on the new wave of shadow from above.

Enraged, the darkness surged up like a tornado, wrapping around the paper doll, trying to tear it apart.
But the doll spun with the vortex, dodging and slipping free, fluttering back to guard its post at the door.

The two sides clashed — chasing, dodging, striking again and again.
One was two-dimensional, the other three-dimensional; one flat, one solid.
The doll couldn’t pin down the shadow, and the shadow couldn’t shred the doll.

It looked almost like a cartoon — an absurd little battle no one inside could see.
The only “audience,” Tang Yu, stood just beyond the door, broom in hand, wondering where to start sweeping.

Hmm… probably best to move those two big sacks first.

He set the broom aside and walked toward them —
but before he could touch them, his phone chimed again.

Ding-dong, ding-dong.
Messages from Shen Junxing, one after another:

“By the way, Xiao Yu, did you unpack all the living supplies yet? I can come up and help you.”

“There’s so much stuff — it must be exhausting to do alone.”

“You’ve never done heavy work yourself all these years.”

“Just thinking of you living in that unfamiliar dorm, dealing with those rough conditions, and having to manage everything alone makes me feel awful.”

“Even if your new roommate helps a bit, I know you won’t let a stranger do too much. And honestly, what guy your age knows anything about organizing or cleaning properly? They’d never be as thorough as me.”

‘Proud puppy.jpg’

Shen Junxing always talked a lot — but today, he seemed especially talkative.

Before Tang Yu could even decide how to reply, Li Sheng’s voice came again from behind the curtain:

“Tang Yu. There’s something of mine downstairs — a stack of white paper. Go get it.”

Even his requests sounded like orders.

For anyone else, that tone would’ve been irritating. But Tang Yu didn’t mind.

“Okay.”

He opened the door with a swift motion.
The hallway outside was empty as ever.

He didn’t look down — and so didn’t notice the tiny paper doll standing silently at his feet, pressed against the threshold.

Nor did he see the shadow creeping around his step, rippling faintly as his shoe touched it.

Unaware, Tang Yu lifted his foot, stepped on the lingering shadow, and walked toward the stairs.

The moment he turned to go down, the shadow lunged back, wrapping around the little paper doll.
But the doll only gave it a few half-hearted stomps — too busy to care —
and in that moment, the door to Room 623 creaked open a sliver.

Through the narrow gap came a dazzling flurry of movement —
countless white paper dolls flew out from behind the dark curtain like a snowstorm, or like doves spiraling through the air.

Four or five of them grabbed brooms and began sweeping furiously from the doorway inward, so frantic that sparks nearly flew from the bristles.
In no time, their snowy white bodies turned gray with dust.

When they reached the two giant sacks blocking the way, more paper dolls arrived, hefting the heavy loads together.
It looked like ants carrying elephants, their tiny legs wobbling as they made space for the cleaners.

Dust flew everywhere.
Some airborne dolls darted through the haze, untying the sack openings and leaping in.
Inside, they worked tirelessly, hauling out every item —
tiny, diligent workers buzzing like bees.

The dorm was soon chaos — a storm of white and gray little figures hustling everywhere.

The most eye-catching of all were the four holding the corners of a bedsheet.
They floated above Tang Yu’s dusty bed, waiting for something.

Under the bed, another doll came hopping along, struggling under the weight of a water basin.
With each bounce, droplets splashed everywhere, sending nearby dolls scattering in panic.

A nervous doll holding a stiff rag followed behind, staring at the basin full of water in fear.

The next second, another doll kicked it forward.
The poor thing tumbled in, rag and all, soaking through before crawling out again, dripping wet.
It didn’t even argue — just started scrubbing furiously at the bedboard.

The kicker wasn’t idle either, grabbing clean tissues to wipe up the water stains.
When the tissues tore, it simply plastered itself to the board and wiped with its own body.
One wet, one dry — the two dolls ran across the surface until, panting, they were replaced by new ones.

Then the four dolls in mid-air descended together, pulling the bedsheet tight over the spotless board.
Not a single wrinkle remained.
Seconds later, the pillow and blanket followed, placed perfectly by the next relay of helpers.

Inside, the paper dolls bustled in a frenzy of activity, while outside, the shadow fumed, spinning madly, desperate to break in and wreak havoc.
But more and more dolls streamed out, lining up at the doorway hand-in-hand, stomping in unison to keep the darkness at bay.