"Dong——"  

A heavy bell toll sounded right beside Lin Yu’s ear.  

He was somewhat startled to realize that he was no longer in that “void” of darkness.  

Instead, he found himself in a spacious but dimly lit room.  

The entire room was decorated in a medieval Baroque style—luxurious yet dilapidated.  

Thick carpets, exquisite oil paintings, crystal chandeliers, wrought iron candle holders...  

Every item was covered in dust and cobwebs. Upon closer inspection, some even bore dark red stains that looked like dried blood.  

On one side of the room was a massive floor-to-ceiling window. The wooden window frame was adorned with moon phase relief carvings as decoration.  

Moonlight slanted through the window, barely illuminating the room.  

From all this, Lin Yu deduced that this was likely a room inside an old, long-abandoned Western-style castle.  

At the center of the room stood a wooden long table.  

Lin Yu was currently sitting at the head of the table.  

Beside him and in front of the table sat six other people.  

Six people...  

Including himself, that made seven in total.  

Exactly the number of “players.”  

So these six must be the other players in this game!  

Lin Yu quickly composed himself and calmly scanned the six people.  

Four men and two women, with no obvious commonality in age or temperament.  

The only thing they shared was a look of varying degrees of suspicion and confusion on their faces.  

“It seems not only are they all ‘players,’ but none of them have any clue about this game.”  

As an “experiential” actor, Lin Yu had some knowledge of psychology to better understand his characters’ minds.  

He couldn’t read minds at a glance, but judging by the expressions on their faces, he could roughly tell their states of mind without much difficulty.  

At the same time, Lin Yu noticed a detail.  

In front of each person, including himself, lay a brown envelope on the table.  

However, Lin Yu didn’t mention this out loud.  

Since he wasn’t clear on how this game was played yet, he didn’t want to speak up and become the center of attention under such uncertain circumstances.  

Especially since his ability was the “Fraudster”—a class that required deception to be effective.  

A few seconds later, someone couldn’t hold back and spoke up.  

“Everyone, may I ask if you’re like me? That after dying, you ended up in a pitch-black space and saw some strange things like words and games?”  

Among the group, a middle-aged woman wearing glasses whispered, “What exactly does all this mean?”  

Hearing her, Lin Yu understood immediately.  

Although he had quickly figured out the situation...  

Lin Yu knew this wasn’t just because he calmed down quickly.  

More importantly, he was a contemporary university student who often surfed the internet and had seen many fictional works about battle royales and death games.  

Among the seven people present, it was obvious that a few looked like they had never been exposed to this kind of fictional content.  

Still, Lin Yu didn’t intend to remind them at this moment.  

Because someone else was already about to do so.  

On the other side of the table, a chubby young man wearing thick glasses and a white printed crew neck shirt heard the middle-aged woman’s question and couldn’t help but speak up:  

“I think this situation is very similar to some anime and novels I’ve seen... Basically, it’s a group of people who died accidentally but were chosen by some god to play a brutal game, using their abilities to overcome the challenges and survive... Although cruel, it’s also our chance to change our fate!”  

“Bang!”  

Suddenly, a muffled bang sounded as a man with a scar across his face, a fierce expression, and a lean build slammed his fist on the table.  

“Damn it, what kind of bullshit god is this? I already died for no reason, and now after death, I have to suffer in this crazy place.”  

The scarred man seemed to be recalling the last scene before his death, his face extremely dark.  

“I actually think this isn’t a bad thing,” a young woman with a gentle yet shy demeanor tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, blushing slightly and spoke softly, “Just like the glasses-wearing young man said, at least we still have a game to play now, instead of truly being dead.”  

“Hmph, you believe whatever that fatso says?” The scarred man sneered at her, “What if that so-called god is just messing with us?”  

The young woman pursed her lips under the scarred man’s stare, clearly unwilling to argue with this obviously dangerous guy.  

Seeing her silence, the scarred man snorted coldly.  

After just a few sentences of conversation among the four, Lin Yu had already made some judgments about their personalities.  

The glasses-wearing chubby guy seemed a bit silly, looking like a naive high schooler who hadn’t been exposed to society.  

The scarred man was fierce, quick-tempered, and eager to send a clear message: “I’m not someone to mess with.”  

The two women... The middle-aged one appeared quite serious and earnest, while the younger was softer and more fragile.  

Lin Yu used his psychology knowledge to analyze these personality traits because no matter what the game content was, he would definitely have to interact with these six people.  

They could be opponents or teammates.  

So the more he understood them, the better his chances of winning the game.  

As for the two who hadn’t spoken...  

Lin Yu looked at the last two who remained silent like himself.  

One sat directly opposite him, a short young man around his own age in his early twenties, with shifty eyes, furtively observing the others.  

He occasionally licked his lips, seemingly very nervous.  

The other was the tall man who had been sitting beside Lin Yu all along.  

Square-faced, stern-featured, well-built, and exuding power.  

Like Lin Yu, he listened carefully to everyone’s words.  

After the scarred man finished speaking, this square-faced tall man knocked on the table and spoke.  

“Alright, everyone, stop arguing. No matter what that ‘god’ wants, since we all appear in this game, it means we’re all grasshoppers tied to the same string...”  

After he finished, Lin Yu immediately rejected this thought in his mind.  

Grasshoppers tied to the same string?  

Not necessarily.  

And just as Lin Yu had this thought, seemingly to prove the square-faced man wrong, a chilling rustling noise suddenly came from the wall beside them.  

They turned to look and saw a large, glaring line of blood-red characters appearing on the wall.  

Then one line after another of blood characters appeared, quickly covering the entire wall:  

“Among you seven, two outsiders have infiltrated. Find them! Expel them!”  

“Among you seven, two outsiders have infiltrated. Find them! Expel them!”  

“Among you seven, two outsiders have infiltrated. Find them! Expel them!”