Chapter 2: I Want to Get Out!

“Ugh!”
Chen Yu felt as if his head were about to be split open from within.
The intense pain, accompanied by a dizzying sense of vertigo, swept through every nerve in his body with wild abandon.
“Damn it… I only had two bottles of cheap liquor!”
“Is it really supposed to hit this hard?”
With great effort, Chen Yu pushed himself upright, his hand instinctively massaging his throbbing temples.
He slowly pried open his heavy eyelids.
What greeted him was darkness.
A musty, rotten smell permeated the air all around.
“Hm? Where am I?”
“Who the hell dragged me here?!”
He remembered clearly—he’d been out at a roadside barbecue with a few buddies, drinking and eating skewers.
How had he ended up, upon awakening, in this godforsaken dump?
His actions seemed nothing more than the confusion of a man suffering a hangover.
But outside, chaos had erupted!
“Bang!”
In the control room, the director slammed the table and leapt to his feet.
“Who the hell hired this actor?!”
He roared, veins bulging on his forehead, his gaze murderous.
“He’s supposed to play a corpse! Why did he get up? Huh?!”
Host Lin Bing stood nearby, anxiety written all over her face, hardly daring to breathe.
Cold sweat soaked her back.
This was a national live broadcast!
Such a serious accident left her mind utterly blank.
How was she supposed to salvage this?
Was she supposed to tell the millions watching, “Sorry, just now that segment was a bust, let’s start over?”
If so, the prestigious name of “Revisiting Old Cases” would be shattered today!
The three contestants, who had been ready to enter and show their skills, now sank back into their seats, exchanging embarrassed glances.
The show had always seemed so professional—how could it make such a rookie mistake?
Meanwhile, the live stream was exploding as if a bucket of ice water had been thrown into a pot of boiling oil!
“Holy crap! Holy crap! Holy crap! What did I just see?!”
“In broad daylight, a corpse just came back to life?!”
“Damn, production team! You turned a detective show into a supernatural one!”
“Hahaha! Welcome to the series that can’t be watched by day, but never escapes you at night!”
“What the hell are you doing, production team? You scared my honey in my arms! Compensate me!”
Inside the broadcast van, every staff member’s eyes snapped onto the director’s face, now dark as the bottom of a pot.
The director’s chest heaved, fists clenched tight.
He wanted nothing more than to storm into that shabby room and tear apart the incompetent actor.
But reason told him the most urgent thing now was to come up with a solution.
Admitting, in front of the entire nation, that this was a major production error?
That would be a public confession of his own lack of professionalism.
“How many… viewers are online right now?”
The staff member monitoring the numbers stammered:
“D-Director… S-seven… over seven million! And it’s still rising!”
“How many?!”
The director’s eyes nearly popped out.
The usual peak for their show was barely over three million.
What was happening today? The numbers had more than doubled!
“Director! Look!”
The moderator handling live chat pointed at the screen, as if she’d discovered a new continent.
“After the actor ‘came back to life,’ the audience seems… even more excited!”
The director quickly turned to the monitor.
Sure enough!
The comments were flooding in, the activity surpassing any previous episode!
Even more astonishing, the real-time viewer count was climbing at a terrifying rate!
“Director, maybe… we should just go with it?”
Lin Bing, seeing this bizarre situation, cautiously suggested a bold idea.
“Let’s see… what this idiot actor is going to do next?”
The director listened, brows furrowed, glanced again at the rapidly ticking viewer count, and his mind waged a fierce internal battle.
In the end, his thirst for ratings outweighed everything.
“Well… that’s all we can do!” he said hesitantly, forcing the words out through clenched teeth.
At that moment, Chen Yu was still clutching his aching head, slowly rising from the floor.

He was still in a state of extreme confusion.
He looked around in a daze, discovering he was inside a sealed, musty-smelling room.
All he could see was a heavy iron door.
He staggered toward it.
The latch was unlocked, but when he pulled the cold handle with all his strength, the door didn’t budge.
“Looks like… it’s locked from the outside!”
Chen Yu’s heart sank.
What the hell was going on?
Had he been kidnapped?
Or was this some malicious prank by one of his buddies?
Damn it!
If he ever found out who did this, he’d make them pay!
Just as his anger was rising and he was about to curse—

“Ding!”
A cold, mechanical electronic prompt sounded in his mind, without warning!
“Detective System activated!”
“Binding host’s soul…”
“Binding successful!”
“Analyzing current world information…”
“What the hell?!”
Chen Yu was thunderstruck, rooted to the spot, his pupils contracting.
“Host is currently in a crisis state,”
“Beginner skill activated—Rewind!”
“Beginner tasks issued:”
“Task one: Escape the room!”
“Task two: Solve the current case!”
“Upon completion, skill points will be awarded: 600–1000 points, depending on performance.”
“What… what is this? A system?!”
Chen Yu was utterly bewildered, feeling his worldview was being ground into dust.
Was this hallucination from fake liquor?
While his mind was crashing from this sudden shock, the live stream viewer count quietly broke a staggering threshold!

“Ten… ten million online?!”
Inside the broadcast van, the director was dumbfounded at the glaring numbers on the screen.
The audience… liked this?!
Was “coming back to life” really so appealing?
What was the point of painstakingly planning a detective show?
The live chat’s tone began to shift.

“Whoa, why has this guy suddenly frozen? Is he lagging?”
“Is he unable to keep acting? Was that last move his dying breath?”
“Do you think the camera will suddenly zoom in, giving us a close-up of his face… You can’t blur anything on live TV…”
“Hey, upstairs! Please don’t say that—my kid’s still watching! If you scare them, you pay!”
“I’m out, I’m out! This show is getting weirder and weirder! The dancing girl next door, her chair’s about to fall apart!”
Chen Yu, locked in the musty room, was oblivious to the chaos online.
He didn’t know that every move he made was under the gaze of millions.
He forced himself to calm down, trying to digest the shocking information in his mind from the “Detective System.”
Then, his hand, almost unconsciously, brushed the cold, damp tile at his feet.
The moment his fingers touched the tile—

Buzz—!
Chen Yu’s vision flashed white!
His pupils instantly turned an eerie pure white!
Deep in those hollow eyes, a blurry scene emerged!
It was a man who looked very much like him—in dress, build, and appearance.
The man was lying weakly on the cold floor,
His hands desperately scraping at the moss growing in the cracks between the tiles, then shoving it into his mouth and chewing.
The scene was filled with despair and hunger!
It lasted only a second or two before the vision receded like a tide.
Chen Yu’s pupils returned to normal, and he was hit with a violent sense of dread and nausea.
“What the hell… was that?!”
He panted heavily, sweat beading on his forehead.
“A system-given… ability? Rewind?”
He wasn’t stupid.
Though he’d only recently graduated from the police academy and had yet to find a job in his field,

But four years of police training had sharpened his investigative instincts and fortified his psychological resilience.
He quickly linked the vision in his mind to his current predicament.
After thinking it through, his gaze sharpened, and he rose decisively, heading straight for the only thing in the room that might hide a clue—a solitary picture frame on the wall.
He reached out, tentatively touching the edge of the frame.

Buzz!
The familiar sensation returned!
His vision shifted again!
He saw, from the perspective of the man from before,
The picture frame on the wall, clear as day.
Inside the frame, instead of indistinct mold,
There was a refined, gentle-looking woman sitting gracefully on a sofa, a faint smile at her lips, gazing quietly at “him.”
Chen Yu couldn’t see “his” expression,
But he could feel the man’s facial muscles straining to form an extreme expression—obsession!
A nearly pathological obsession!

Wait!
Chen Yu’s consciousness jolted!
He suddenly noticed a detail that sent chills down his spine!
He hurriedly raised his hands to his cheeks.
These eye sockets!
This nose bridge!
These lips!
Holy shit!!!

That wasn’t his own face!!!

“Am I… did I transmigrate?!”
“And my soul landed in this unlucky bastard?”
“Even worse, I’m bound to some damned detective system?!”
A barrage of questions made his headache even worse.
“But… why haven’t I inherited any memories from the original host?”
“Who am I? Where am I? What am I supposed to do?”
No!
“I know what I’m supposed to do!”
“Get out of this hellhole!”
Chen Yu stopped worrying about it.
Now, nothing mattered until he escaped this room!

But there was nothing here—how was he supposed to leave?
A door locked from the outside, a strange photo of a woman, and not a single other clue.
The door was locked from outside, that was certain.
The gap beneath was sealed tight with years of moss, not a sliver of light could get through.
Forcing it open?
That was pure fantasy!

In the live stream, viewers watched the “actor” wander the room like a headless fly, and the chat lit up again.

“What’s this guy doing? Acting weird as hell.”
“Is he trying to escape the room?”
“You’re kidding, right? If it was possible, wouldn’t Luo Xiangdong have escaped?”
“Man! I was hoping to see the big shots deduce the case, but now it’s turned from a smart detective show into a low-budget escape room reality show! Boring, I’m out! 886!”
The director, in the broadcast van, looked like he could wring water from his gloomy face.
He stared at the rapidly scrolling comments and the dropping viewer count.
Even after the drop, nearly five million watched—numbers past episodes never reached.
But falling from the peak of ten million to this, with numbers still sliding, tore at his heart!

“Director… maybe I should go out and formally apologize to the audience?”
Lin Bing, seeing the increasingly hostile chat, looked at the director, anxiety written all over her.
She was frantically composing an apology in her mind, thinking how to minimize the negative impact of this disaster.
Hearing her, the director’s eyes flickered with indecision.
He hated to lose such a massive audience.
But if he let the incompetent extra keep messing around, “Revisiting Old Cases” might truly be ruined!
The show’s core was suspenseful investigation, not watching a madman flail in a room!
This was a fatal deviation from the show’s purpose!

He clenched his fists, a painful decision forming in his heart.
Just as he was about to order an apology and restart, his words stuck in his throat.

Because on the screen, the once aimless Chen Yu suddenly stopped in his tracks!
He looked up sharply and, with a voice that shattered the silence, shouted at the air:
“I know how to get out!”