The temperature inside had risen to thirty-eight degrees Celsius.

The time shown on the decorative wall clock was 1:20 p.m. It had been exactly one hour since Gu Yuhuan answered the first question correctly and the teasing male voice announced that the “Eighty-One Deadly Questions” app was downloading.

After answering the first question correctly, Gu Yuhuan’s tightly strung nerves relaxed a little. The intense mental exertion had already made her feel hungry, and with the air conditioner no longer running, the room temperature had risen sharply. The heavy loss of moisture made her extremely thirsty, and her lips were cracked from dryness.

During that one-hour period, Gu Yuhuan tried every method she could think of, yet she was unable to leave the living room. It was as if the place had become a sealed space—she could not get out, nor could she contact the outside world in any way.

The food on the table was still untouched, but she wasn’t sure whether she was allowed to eat it, nor whether the orange juice on the table was safe to drink. She was also strongly averse to eating at this moment. Just an hour and twenty minutes earlier, her parents had been dining…

In fact, even now she couldn’t be certain whether something had truly happened to them.

Even so, she was both really hungry and had no appetite.

【Ding-dong. “Eighty-One Deadly Questions” app download complete.】

Gu Yuhuan said nothing. At least for the moment, she had no intention of interacting with that voice.

【Question Two (Multiple-Choice): Which of the following characters come from Grimm’s Fairy Tales?】

A: The miller’s huntsman’s son
B: Bluebeard’s wife
C: The wild-lettuce maiden
D: The Daughter of the Sea
E: Mr. Korbes

—Here it comes again.

Gu Yuhuan’s heart pounded violently a few times.

She had only just finished the first question, and now the second appeared immediately. Was she going to be trapped in this room until she completed all eighty-one deadly questions?

What on earth was going on?

The virtual clock began running again. This time, the remaining time displayed was ninety-six hours. The sheer abundance of time stunned Gu Yuhuan into stillness. 96 hours, a full four days, just to answer a multiple-choice question. No matter how she looked at it, something felt off.

Gu Yuhuan took a deep breath and began to focus on the question itself.

The first question had been a single-choice question. Multiple-choice questions were a type of exam question, and as a member of the Huaxia student body who had just graduated from university, Gu Yuhuan was very familiar with them. In a single-choice question, only one of the provided options meets the requirements of the question; the rest are distractors. Choose correctly and you gain points; choose incorrectly and you lose them.

In a multiple-choice question, at least two of the listed options meet the requirements.

Choosing incorrectly, choosing too many, choosing too few, or not choosing at all all result in no points.

In standard exams, multiple-choice questions were usually worth more points than single-choice ones, precisely because they were more difficult.

Although not everyone had read Grimm’s Fairy Tales, nearly everyone had at least heard of it. As a classic among the world’s fairy-tale literature, many of its stories were household names—Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel, and so on. Animated and live-action adaptations appeared on screens every year, endlessly reworking the original tales. Gu Yuhuan herself had seen several different animated versions.

Even so, this question was still difficult for her.

She first eliminated option D, The Daughter of the Sea. That fairy tale comes from Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales, making it an incorrect answer.

Options B, C, and E all came from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Only option A was unclear, which made Gu Yuhuan hesitate. If she were simply answering an exam paper and encountered a question like this, she would choose A, B, C, and E without hesitation, because her intuition told her that option A should also come from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. But that was only because the consequences of a careless mistake in an exam were not severe. If she made a mistake here, she didn’t dare imagine the outcome.

During the few minutes of Gu Yuhuan’s hesitation, option E, Mr. Korbes, turned gray.

【A user has already selected option E. Option E is correct. Other users may no longer select it.】

Gu Yuhuan: “What does that mean?”

There was no response.

Gu Yuhuan waited a little longer and realized that the voice truly had no intention of answering her. Unable to obtain any further information, she could only guess on her own. These so-called multiple-choice questions might not follow conventional rules. Perhaps all she needed to do was select one correct answer from among several correct options. In that case, this “multiple-choice” question might actually be easier than a single-choice one.

At that moment, she recalled which story in Grimm’s Fairy Tales the miller’s huntsman’s son from option A appeared in.

So among the three options she could now be certain were correct, was there any difference between them?

There probably was.

【A user has already selected option C. Option C is correct. Other users may no longer select it.】

Gu Yuhuan’s expression grew grave. She did her best to keep her voice from trembling. “I choose B.”

【Answer correct. Reward: one little red flower.】

【Player has triggered the “Bluebeard’s Wife” instance—Bluebeard is a big bad villain! Please kill King Bluebeard and escape the fairy-tale world.】

***

An ancient castle stood amidst a vast expanse of withered branches. The outer walls were overgrown with climbing vines, and the servants’ neglect made it appear all the more gloomy and sinister.

The weather was bad as well—overcast and heavy, as if rain would fall at any moment. However, the king of this castle insisted on going out in such weather. As a result, Queen Gu Yuhuan, who had come to see him off, had her hair blown into disarray by the wind and shivered pitifully in the cold gusts.

“I will be away for a long time. All the keys in the castle will be entrusted to you. You may open every room and go inside to have a look, except for the small house governed by this golden key. You must never open it. Can you do that, my dear?”

A servant reminded the queen to maintain the basic etiquette befitting her status.

Gu Yuhuan could only stiffly lift the hem of her skirt and force an awkward smile at the tall man before her.

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

The man’s pupils were dark brown. His expression was clearly cold and detached, yet sweet words came from his mouth, as if he were deeply reluctant to part from his newly wed queen. Everything about him felt profoundly strange. And his blue beard amplified that strangeness infinitely, making Gu Yuhuan feel creeped out every time she faced him.

“I trust you, of course. You’ll be obedient, won’t you, my dear?”

The man grinned.

Gu Yuhuan noticed his crimson tongue and couldn’t help but shift her gaze slightly away. The intense discomfort left her with no mental space to answer King Bluebeard’s question.

That small movement clearly displeased the man, yet for some unknown reason he suppressed the emotion. Only the smile at the corner of his lips grew more bizarre: “Come, my dear, take this set of keys!”

Gu Yuhuan reached out her hand, but the man did not immediately give her it. Instead, he suddenly lowered his head and leaned close to her ear: “You know this, my dear. If you disobey my orders, there will be punishment…”

His tone was strangely distorted, “Ah! The beautiful queen will have her head chopped off.”

…Gu Yuhuan smelled blood. It was coming from the man’s mouth.

Every hair on her body stood on end. She swore that when the man leaned close to her neck, he made a gulp sound and swallowed.

“All right, my dear.”

The man slowly stepped back, seeming extremely reluctant to leave her side, though his gaze was icy cold. “Stay in the castle and wait for my return, my dear!”

The words “my dear” were spoken by Bluebeard with increasing emphasis each time, so sickeningly sweet that it made one feel nauseated.

King Bluebeard climbed into the carriage. The servants standing beside Gu Yuhuan stiffened their faces and began to sing together—

“Oh! The queen has a handsome little lover,
She thinks the king does not know.
She has betrayed the king,
And will walk towards death!
Oh, my poor queen~”

When they finished the last line, they all turned their heads in unison to look at the “poor queen” mentioned in the lyrics.

Terrifying.

Gu Yuhuan: “…”

Everything was so absurd, yet so real.

The moment the carriage departed, torrential rain poured down. Gu Yuhuan had no choice but to return to the castle in clothes that had become unbearably heavy from being soaked through.

The virtual clock counted down: 94 hours.

It had been a full two hours since Gu Yuhuan arrived at the castle and became King Bluebeard’s queen. During that time, she had stood silently to one side, watching King Bluebeard pack his luggage. She had no idea what was in it; all she saw were large, heavy-looking chests being loaded one after another onto the carriage.

All of these chests were carried up by King Bluebeard himself. His strength was astonishing. If Gu Yuhuan tried to oppose him with brute force alone, the outcome would be beyond doubt. Bluebeard could easily kill her with just one hand.

The time limit for the second question was ninety-six hours—four full days. How was she supposed to kill Bluebeard within four days?

In truth, she knew nothing at all about this damned game.

But Gu Yuhuan felt that there had to be other clues.

“Bluebeard” is one of the stories in Grimm’s Fairy Tales. It is filled with bloodshed and violence, and categorizing it as a “fairy tale” is utterly inappropriate. The story tells of an ordinary man with three sons and one daughter. A king with a blue beard suddenly comes to this ordinary family and asks to marry the daughter and make her his queen. The father, of course, agrees.

After the marriage, life is exceedingly luxurious. No matter what the queen wants, it is satisfied.

What the queen does not know is that the golden key her husband gives her before setting off on a journey will lead her to discover a great secret that could cost her her life.

If she uses the golden key to open the door, then when King Bluebeard returns, he will kill the queen.

Before leaving home, the queen once said to her three brothers, “If I call for you, you must immediately put down whatever you are doing and come to help me.”

All three brothers agreed.

The clever queen stalls for time. When the three brothers arrive, they kill Bluebeard. All of King Bluebeard’s property goes to the brothers, who then find another husband for their sister, and she goes on to live a prosperous life.

The story of Bluebeard itself provides a method for killing King Bluebeard.

“Your Majesty, it is time to dine.”

Because of the rain, there was not a single trace of light inside the ancient castle.

The servants emerged from nowhere, dressed in drab gray clothing, heads perpetually lowered so their faces could not be seen. They made no sound when they walked. They set the food on the dining table, lit the candles on the candelabras, and then stood in the dim light like lifeless corpses without souls.

Gu Yuhuan was already extremely hungry, yet in this dining hall that felt like a haunted house, she had absolutely no appetite.

In the end, she drank a glass of water and ate two pieces of dry bread.

After the meal, the servants silently cleared the table.

Once everyone had left, a slip of paper appeared out of thin air on the tabletop.

[The Laws of Bluebeard:]

1. Keys may only be used to open doors after nightfall.
2. Bluebeard only kills during the daytime.
3. Bluebeard despises an unfaithful wife above all else.
4. The beautiful queen has a handsome lover who will appear in the latter half of the night.