Chapter 552: Ten!

The words Xiao A had just spoken felt intimately familiar.

When my Liver Aperture Dao Lock opened, fragments of memory surfaced. Those scenes featured just me and Xiao A.

I had said something similar to her back then. Now, Xiao A had tweaked those very words and repeated them back to me, which left me confused.

'She might have recognized me already.' I couldn't make out her features behind that mask, but I could feel the weight of her gaze.

A long moment passed. Just as I opened my mouth to speak, Xiao A abruptly turned around. A slightly disappointed voice drifted from behind her Paper Doll Mask: "No, you're not him."

Balancing on the twisted steel rebar with her body practically suspended in midair, the mysterious Xiao A lifted the hem of her multi-colored dress. Right then, she looked just like a young girl longing for her family.

"Why did you seek me out? Can you just explain this clearly?" I tried to chase after her, but Xia Chi politely blocked my path. Seeing his deferential stance, my mind flashed back to the warning he'd given me at the very end of the lethal livestream—if I ever met a woman with an 'A' in her name in the real world, I was to kill her on sight without exchanging a single word.

I had never understood what that meant. Even now, staring right at Xiao A, I still couldn't untangle the relationship between the two of them.

'Is it because Xiao A can never leave the Deep Dream Layer, so if I encounter her in reality, that person has to be an imposter? But who would bother impersonating her?'

"Why are you all in the Deep Dream Layer? Who does this woman with an 'A' in her name refer to out in the real world? Is Xia Qingzhi part of the Live Show or not? Where is the real Xia Qingzhi?!" The cascade of questions was driving me insane. I shoved Xia Chi out of the way and marched toward Xiao A in her multi-colored dress.

"Did we know each other before? I have memories of you in my head." The opening of my Liver Aperture Dao Lock had forced new memory fragments to the surface. Usually, I wouldn't have asked something like this so bluntly, but the sheer pressure this dream broadcast had heaped onto me was crushing. Between the bizarre encounters and the endless brushes with death, I just threw caution to the wind and stopped overthinking it.

"You're not him." Xiao A had no intention of actually answering me, merely repeating her previous line.

"Who is 'he'? If you're going to declare that I'm not him, you should at least give me something to work with. At least tell me what similarities we share and why I triggered your misunderstanding!" Trying to converse with this woman was utterly exhausting; it felt like we were operating on entirely different frequencies.

"Him?" Xiao A gazed off into the distance, as if caught in a memory. "You definitely aren't him. He's already dead; there's no way he could appear here. I've watched your streams. It's just that your personality is remarkably similar to his."

In her crisp voice, Xiao A revealed an earth-shattering secret: "The 'he' I'm talking about was the Live Show's very first live show streamer, and the only streamer to ever successfully accumulate ten thousand points."

"What?! Ten thousand points!" My jaw dropped. I genuinely couldn't fathom someone surviving that many streams and actually completing the impossible task of hoarding ten thousand points.

"That's right. Counting you, there have been about ten streamers officially recruited through the Live Show's exams. He was the first, and you are the tenth." Trailing one hand along the bent rebar, Xiao A strolled across the exposed base of the Clock Tower. The steel beam beneath her feet was only a few centimeters wide, but it hardly seemed to matter. Walking in bright red high heels, she moved with the elegance of a queen presiding over the entire Dream Realm.

I narrowed my eyes and kept quiet, letting my thoughts spin.

Ten streamers. That number wildly exceeded my expectations. I had initially assumed there would only be three or four. After all, with an entity as clandestine as the Underworld Live Show, the more people who knew about it, the higher the risk of exposure.

"When did he even become a live show streamer? Ten thousand points... assuming one stream every three days with a net profit of twenty points per session, it would take him at least five solid years to hoard that much!" In reality, netting a twenty-point surplus from every broadcast was practically impossible. I knew that better than anyone. Every stream was a life-and-death trial; you had to spend your points to strengthen yourself just to scrape together a slightly better chance of surviving.

"It is difficult. Before he succeeded, I also believed no one could ever pull it off." Xiao A stood at the edge of the towering structure. In the distance, the 'thoughts' that had finished their hunt had already returned, clustering together like a massive storm cloud. "Because of that, the vast majority of streamers aside from him chose another path."

"Another path?" Recognizing that Xiao A was about to reveal something critical, I listened intently, refusing to miss a single syllable.

"Yes. Setting aside him and two streamers whose deaths are already confirmed, three of the remaining seven betrayed the Live Show and broke free of its control. Those three are myself, Xia Chi, and the man Xia Chi took you to meet earlier." Xiao A's voice was perfectly level, as if defecting from the Live Show and braving its retaliation wasn't a major issue at all. But when she spoke again, I realized just how wrong I was.

"The three of us are the Traitors of the Live Show Missions. In our pursuit of freedom, we wound up plunging ourselves into an even more desperate predicament." A faint ripple of emotion finally bled into Xiao A's tone. "The Live Show is far more terrifying than it lets on. We underestimated it. We completely underestimated it."

Her grip on the railing slowly tightened. Her slender, pale fingers formed a jarring contrast against the rust-eaten steel. "In the beginning, we thought the Live Show was being orchestrated by the hidden sects from the shadows. A lot of the items inside the Live Show are exceptionally precious artifacts that only major sects with centuries of heritage possess, and as far as we knew, they were the only ones capable of establishing something like this. But over time, we gradually realized that the Live Show itself had absolutely no connection to those hidden sects. A coalition of those sects might have possessed the power to construct the Live Show, but they never could have kept the secret buried so flawlessly, operating entirely without a sound."

"Not the hidden sects? Then who else could it possibly be?" I had come into contact with some of those hidden sects myself—places like the Miaozhen temple and Maoshan. Sects wielding genuine power were fearsome entities in their own right.

"I don't know," Xiao A answered without missing a beat. "That question has always haunted me, too. The Live Show is extremely mysterious. All of its staff wear Paper Doll Masks and operate with the precision of a machine. They rarely make mistakes and leave almost no loopholes. It's as if they are a single entity, puppeted by an invisible hand behind the curtain."

I chewed on Xiao A's words and realized she had a point. I had been a live show streamer for a decent amount of time now, yet from start to finish, I had only ever encountered a single person from the Live Show: the examiner wearing the Paper Doll Mask. "Wait, do you think it's possible that the examiner is actually the first streamer in disguise? That the person you're looking for is him?"

"A highly interesting theory, but impossible." Xiao A turned her head and threw a glance my way, as if I had finally sparked a sliver of her interest. "I once saw the examiner and the first streamer appear together. There's no way they're the same person."

She waved a hand, signaling for me not to interrupt. "To pick up where we left off, the Live Show wasn't established by a coalition of hidden sects. Just to verify that information, the three of us Traitors even engaged in conflicts with a few of those so-called righteous, orthodox sects. It was exactly because that relationship soured that we were unable to borrow the strength of the hidden sects during our final rebellion. We nearly died, ultimately forcing us to flee in panic into the Deep Dream Layer."

"The word 'rebellion' isn't quite accurate, is it? From where I'm standing, you were escapees at best. Trying to pull off something so incredibly risky without full preparation was way too impulsive."

"It's all the same." Xiao A paused, evidently not expecting me to suddenly interject with a critique like that. "In reality, we had prepared to the absolute limit. It's just that the Live Show seemed to know every card in our hand before we played it. Like a prophet, it calculated our exact next move and deployed countermeasures in advance. Against an opponent like that, no one can win."

A howling wind tore across the top of the Clock Tower. The mechanical ticking of the hands echoed in my ears; standing here, I could viscerally feel time constantly slipping away.

"So that's how it is." I had definitely overestimated these Traitors. I previously thought they might actually possess the capital to rival the Live Show, but instead, they had been absolutely steamrolled. Hearing this only fueled my curiosity about the Underworld Live Show even further. "You mentioned there were ten streamers in total. Can you tell me who the rest are, besides your group?"

The first streamer was missing, two were confirmed dead, and three were Traitors. Subtracting me, that left exactly three remaining.

"The weakest of those remaining three is named Chen Jiuge. However, the man is something of a special case. I wouldn't recommend tangling yourself too deeply in his karma." Xiao A stared down at the dreamscape city from her high vantage point. She seemed perfectly aware of what Chen Jiuge had been doing in the dream earlier, but she simply didn't care.

"It's the final two you need to be careful of. One of them goes by the epithet of the Butcher. His absolute favorite pastime is hunting down other streamers. He is a steadfast enforcer of the Live Show's rules, and simultaneously the sharpest blade in its arsenal. One of those two streamers whose deaths were confirmed? The Butcher killed him." Xiao A shot a glance at the pocket where I kept my Underworld Live Show Phone. "You know about the emergency call function, right? I strongly advise against ever using it, unless you're eager to die a lot faster."

I nodded. The memory surfaced of cracking open that leather suitcase after my first interview and finding traces of blood still crusted on the selfie stick and phone. Perhaps the very set of equipment I was using had been salvaged from a dead streamer.

"As for the final streamer, nobody has ever seen him. He is the most mysterious among our ranks. I only know that the man exists, and that what he loathes above all else are Fate Usurpers. That's the extent of it."

Listening to Xiao A's breakdown left me a little dazed. Sure enough, not a single person capable of surviving that many streams was right in the head. Chen Jiuge was one thing, but the remaining two? One was nicknamed the Butcher and actively hunted streamers on his own platform, while the other was even more of a freak—a nameless entity who harbored an inexplicable hatred for Fate Usurpers.

'I have the potential to become a Fate Usurper. That means it's completely impossible for either of those two to ever become my allies. And if I end up offending these three Traitors on top of all that...' Thinking up to here, a bitter smile tugged at my lips. It looked like my situation really wasn't too great after all.