Seven Days and Nights with the Werewolf

Night 1·04

“What’s going on? What are you all talking about?” A door on the second floor creaked open silently, and a figure stood in the doorway. She wore a white silk camisole nightdress from the villa’s supplies, the stiff fabric clinging to her curvy figure—only her soft, slightly bloated waist and belly betrayed the signs of a woman who’d given birth.

A child peeked out from behind her legs, rubbing his sleepy eyes, his small face docile and sweet.

Li Sinian straightened up and explained, “Since you’re awake, come down for a meeting. It looks like none of us will be sleeping tonight. —Someone’s already been attacked.”

Du Wei went to knock on the remaining doors, rousing everyone one by one. Two girls supported Ding Zihui downstairs, while the others hurried back to their rooms to set down their biscuits and clothes. Yang Song watched them file into their rooms, her face pale and uncharacteristically silent.

“What do you make of this?” Li Sinian followed Fang Daichuan into his room, twisted open a bottle of cold water, and pushed it toward him.

Fang Daichuan stared blankly at the shadow by the head of the bed, then shook his head slightly. “I have no idea. Honestly, my mind’s still a complete blank—I can’t wrap my head around any of this.”

Li Sinian let out a bitter laugh and shook his head.

“Just say what you’re thinking,” Fang Daichuan said, staring at him wide-eyed.

“There are really only three possibilities,” Li Sinian took a sip of water himself. “First: Ding Zihui was really attacked. When it happened, you, me, Yang Song, Du Wei, Chen Hui, Du Chaosheng, and the man with the beer belly were all in the first-floor hall. That means at least one werewolf is among the five people who were on the second floor—and they’ve already made their first move. We can rule out the child; even if he had the guts and the brains, he’s not tall enough to reach Ding Zihui’s arm. That leaves four adults.”

Fang Daichuan blinked, frowned, and thought for a moment before nodding hastily. “That makes perfect sense.”

He’s so cute when he’s like this. Li Sinian couldn’t hold back a smile. “Well, duh. Anyone with a brain could figure that out.”

“What are the other possibilities?” Fang Daichuan asked.

“Second: this whole thing is a show Ding Zihui put on for us. There’s no other werewolf—*she* is the werewolf, and she cut her own arm when no one was looking.” Li Sinian’s voice was cold, the lamplight casting a shadow under his straight nose, making his lips look unusually thin and grim.

Fang Daichuan shook his head firmly. “Impossible. Don’t forget—she asked me to go upstairs with her. What if I’d said yes? She never would’ve had the chance to pull this off. And when I ran up, she was genuinely terrified—her pupils were dilated, her core muscles were tensed up tight, but her legs went limp little by little. That kind of reaction can’t be faked; not even many professional actors could pull that off.”

Li Sinian nodded. “You’re right. Scratch that one.”

“You’re just gonna take my word for it that easily?” Fang Daichuan looked surprised, scratching his head. “I don’t even trust myself half the time.”

Li Sinian looked a little embarrassed, coughed into his fist to cover it up, and smiled. “Actually, when I was supporting her to check her wound, I felt her waist and thighs. All her pockets were flat—nothing bulging out, no syringes or venom vials. And when I looked at the wound, it was still bleeding. If she’d cut herself and then disposed of the needle, a tiny scratch like that would’ve scabbed over already.”

Fang Daichuan’s face contorted in shock. “You touched her waist and thighs?!?”

Li Sinian’s expression remained calm and unflappable as he reassured him. “It’s a special situation. I didn’t have any other intentions, and I was gentle—she didn’t notice a thing.”

“There’s a trick for everything, huh?” Fang Daichuan stared at him in utter disbelief.

Li Sinian raised his right eyebrow. “I’ve had practice. My family situation… was complicated. When I was a kid, I was forced to join a scam ring. They’d take in kids and make them beg, steal, that sort of thing. We had a master who taught us all these little tricks and techniques.”

He spoke so casually that Fang Daichuan couldn’t tell if he was making it up or telling the truth. But a young man with a healthy body and a handsome face—someone who could easily make a living with his looks—choosing to run with mercenaries and break the law… he couldn’t have come from a normal family. Fang Daichuan’s mind immediately conjured up a dramatic backstory worthy of a blockbuster movie.

“What’s the third possibility?” Fang Daichuan said, quickly changing the subject—he understood perfectly that mentor-type characters always had a tragic childhood they’d rather forget.

Li Sinian fell silent, walking over to the window to stand in the wind. The gale carried the crash of waves and the sharp, briny stench of the sea—a deep, deathly smell of decay and microbial growth. After a long moment, he sat back down next to Fang Daichuan and spoke in a low voice. “There’s a third possibility. I don’t want to say it, and I don’t want to think about it. But if I’m right… things are going to get very bad.”

He turned to glance at the door. Fang Daichuan’s room was at the far end of the corridor, right outside the spot where Ding Zihui had been attacked. Li Sinian fixed his gaze on the door, his voice slow and deliberate. “What if… there was someone else in that second-floor corridor that night?”

Fang Daichuan pictured the scenario he was describing, and goosebumps broke out all over his body. “Can you just say what you mean without the dramatic build-up? I… I might be big, but I’m a total coward!”

It was the truth. Fang Daichuan had always been a scaredy-cat, his courage no bigger than a cherry pit. He could handle rollercoasters and pirate ships, but anything spooky or supernatural had him running for the hills. His college roommates had teased him mercilessly for it. Once, the whole dorm had gathered to watch a horror movie—a terrible Chinese one with no actual ghosts, just the cast sleepwalking and having hysterics. Everyone had gotten bored halfway through and left to brush their teeth, chat, and fool around. Only Fang Daichuan had tiptoed down, turned off the computer with a mournful face, and said, “You guys can leave it here, but I’m too scared to go to the bathroom alone tonight.”

Listening to Li Sinian spin his creepy theory, Fang Daichuan was transported back to that old fear. He scrambled onto the bed in an instant, pulled the covers tight around himself like a cocoon, pressed his back firmly against the wall, and nodded for him to continue. “O-okay, go on. But give me a heads-up before the scary parts! I’m gonna recite the core socialist values to protect myself first.”

No matter how solemn Li Sinian tried to be, he couldn’t keep a straight face after that.

He sighed, tore his gaze away from the door, and plopped down on Fang Daichuan’s bed, leaning against the headboard next to him. He spoke in the plain, matter-of-fact way Fang Daichuan had asked for. “What I mean is… what if Ding Zihui and another werewolf planned this together? She specifically asked you to go upstairs with her—could it be that she was putting on a show for you? Or worse… that she was gonna kill you outright?”

As he said the last word, a sudden gust of wind howled in through the window, and Fang Daichuan jumped so high he nearly hit his head on the mattress.

“Have you ever read golden-age mystery novels?” Li Sinian asked, continuing on. “There’s a professional term for it—*multiple solutions*. In reality, all reasoning is just backtracking the sequence of events based on the final outcome. So what if two completely different sets of facts lead to the exact same result? When we backtrack from that outcome, we end up with two totally different versions of what happened.” He explained, “Right now, what we see is: Ding Zihui tried to get you to go upstairs with her, Ding Zihui was attacked, we ran up and found no one, no traces left on the ground. Backtracking from those surface facts gives us two totally different paths. If this were just a puzzle game, I’d try to test Ding Zihui’s true identity. But this is real—life or death. I’ll admit it; I’m not brave enough to take that risk.”

“Why do you think things are gonna get ‘very bad’?” Fang Daichuan repeated his earlier words, still fixated on that part. In his eyes, if anyone here knew the most about what was really going on, who had the full picture, it was Li Sinian—he’d been the boss’s right-hand man, after all, and the boss had spoken to him so familiarly. If *he* thought things were bad, Fang Daichuan might actually have a mental breakdown.

“When I say bad, I just mean a feeling—like neither side is to be trusted.” Li Sinian let out a long breath. “Right now, there’s no proof that Ding Zihui is a werewolf, but there’s also no proof to refute the idea either. I’m afraid the only way to prove someone’s innocence in this game… is to die.”

“I guessed the werewolves might make a move, but I didn’t think they’d be this desperate. We all said we’d survive together, but how could the werewolves not have other plans? In seven days, if the number of villagers is more than the number of werewolves, the system automatically declares the villagers the winners. When that happens, if the boss starts shooting all the werewolves, how many people do you think will actually stand up for them? How many will fight back?” Li Sinian let out a bitter, mocking laugh.

“Whether Ding Zihui is a werewolf or not doesn’t matter. What *does* matter is that the werewolves are the ones who’re panicking the most right now. Do these werewolves have a way to contact each other in secret, to test and confirm their allies without us finding out? That’s what scares me the most.”

Fang Daichuan shrank back into the corner of the bed.

“If there was no cover-up or lying, things would be simple. But the werewolves will do anything to find each other. Once they confirm their allies… not only will we be completely at a disadvantage for the first few nights, but later on, trust will break down, suspicion will spread, and our chances of winning will be practically zero. And what about the villagers? Will some of them be so scared of dying that they’ll throw someone else under the bus? Does everyone here have their own hidden agendas? After all, in a game, if you get killed, it’s fine—as long as your teammates survive, everyone wins in the end. But in the real world, what does it matter if your side wins? Dead is dead.”

Fang Daichuan shivered. Everyone could hold it together a little on the first night, but as more people died, they’d all fall into an abyss of mistrust. No one wanted to die.

This was the real Prisoner’s Dilemma. Fang Daichuan’s heart plummeted into an icy river. *Surviving*—that was the best reason of all for turning on each other.

About twenty minutes later, everyone had changed their clothes and gathered downstairs again.

After what had happened, the atmosphere had shifted drastically. Everyone stared at each other with far more caution, thirteen pairs of eyes darting across the long table, their gazes skittering away the second they met.

“What’s going on? What exactly happened?” asked a woman who’d just come down. She was in her sixties, her skin and the corners of her eyes sagging with age, her arms flabby—no amount of plastic surgery or makeup could hide the weariness in her eyes and the small, telltale signs of her years.

Fang Daichuan explained the situation briefly. Ding Zihui sat off to the side, staring at her arm, too distracted to listen. “So when this happened, all of you were in your rooms?” he asked casually. “Did any of you hear or see anything?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?!” a man frowned, looking offended. “Are you accusing us?”

Fang Daichuan stared him down. “Yes. The werewolf is definitely one of you. The rest of us were all on the first floor when Ding Zihui was attacked—who else would we suspect?”

The man slammed his fist on the table, ready to argue, but when he saw Fang Daichuan’s muscular frame, he clamped his mouth shut.

The elderly woman, secure in her age and the fact that Fang Daichuan wouldn’t dare lay a hand on her, let out a cold laugh. “It’s possible one of us is a werewolf. But you lot, who claim to be innocent—you’re not exactly squeaky clean either.”

It was the truth, and Fang Daichuan had no way to refute it.

Another stranger spoke up then, a man in his forties with a gentle, scholarly air. He’d been woken up in the middle of the night and faced with this chaos, yet he remained calm and level-headed as he suggested, “Why don’t we search each other? And our rooms too. Anyone with a syringe can smash it right here, and we can all reveal our identities.”

Fang Daichuan was about to agree when Li Sinian stamped hard on his foot, making him jolt in pain. Thankfully, his acting training kicked in, and he kept his expression neutral—only a single bead of cold sweat dropped onto the tabletop.

He turned to glare at Li Sinian, who flicked his eyes left and right in a tiny, almost imperceptible gesture.

Fang Daichuan glanced back at the table. Sure enough, no one said a word. No one agreed, no one argued—they all stared at the table in front of them, as if they hadn’t heard a thing.

I’m still too naive. Fang Daichuan broke out in a cold sweat then, a real one. Every step is a trap; you have to be on guard for everything. He finally understood: the werewolves would never agree to a search, of course. And the villagers, who had no idea who the real werewolves were, didn’t dare speak up for fear of exposing themselves.

When will this nightmare end? Despair crept into Fang Daichuan’s heart. The villagers couldn’t identify the werewolves if no one dared to stand up—but standing up meant risking being killed by the werewolves… it was a vicious cycle.

Du Chaosheng was the first to speak up. “I think Mr. Chen’s idea is a good one. Let’s just get it over with. If we all reveal our identities, no matter if we’re villagers or werewolves, this game will only end with both sides losing if we keep playing. We’d be better off finding a way to survive together.”

Fang Daichuan gritted his teeth, ready to ignore Li Sinian’s warning and chime in, to rally everyone behind the idea. He opened his mouth—then caught a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye, followed by a loud *thud*.

All the words died in Fang Daichuan’s throat. Everyone turned to look at the source of the sound. It was the sweaty man with the beer belly. He’d been sitting next to Yang Song, and now he’d collapsed face-first onto the floor with a heavy crash.

Yang Song jumped to her feet, her chair scraping loudly against the floor, and ran to the far corner of the room, away from the body. Fang Daichuan stared at the top of her head; the wall she leaned against was hung with a huge deer head, its long antlers glinting in the lamplight, their shadows twisted and menacing, splayed out like claws.

This time, it had happened in plain sight of everyone. All thirteen of them had been sitting right there at the table.

Li Sinian stood up slowly and rolled the man over. His pupils were dilated to the max, the whites of his eyes bloodshot, and a frothy white foam bubbled from his lips.

Fang Daichuan swallowed hard, his voice shaking even though he’d tried to put all his strength into it. “…Is he dead?”

Li Sinian lifted his eyes and nodded slightly.

Chaos erupted. Everyone jumped to their feet, as if a switch had been flipped. Ding Zihui buried her head in her hands and cried softly, the poor girl broken by the constant shocks and fear. “What’s happening?” “How did he just die like that?” “This can’t be the second floor’s doing now, can it?” “No one even touched him!” “Do you think it was a heart attack? We don’t even know what wolf venom does to a person…” Fang Daichuan’s head throbbed violently, the overlapping voices a meaningless jumble—he couldn’t make out who was saying what.

Li Sinian checked the body carefully, rolling him over once more. On the back of his neck, there was a small, perfect, round needle prick.

Everyone fell silent at once, the room dead quiet.

Fang Daichuan’s vision swam, black spots dancing in front of his eyes. He grabbed the edge of the table to steady himself, barely keeping from collapsing to the floor.