Chapter 18: Escape Plan

“No, absolutely not…”

Xu Fengling threw her Switch onto the sofa and flopped onto her back, staring fixedly at the crystal chandelier that was always lit overhead.

The castle had no windows or sunlight, nothing that could tell her “what time it is now.”

She could only guess how much time had passed by how hungry she was…

The last time she ate was probably…

Never mind, thinking about it was useless.

Right now, only one thing filled her mind… how to escape.

Ever since she was nearly choked to death last time, the finger marks on her neck took a full five days to completely fade.

During those five days, every time she looked in the mirror and saw those blue-purple bruises, her heart would pound wildly.

But fear aside, the desire to escape only grew stronger.

Why?

Fengling rolled over and buried her face in a cushion.

Probably because she had finally figured it out…

Sister Ling Yue had been lying to her from the very first day.

All that talk about “it’s dangerous outside,” about “the Blood Hunters will catch you”—it was all lies.

Sister Ling Yue simply didn’t want her to go out, she just wanted to keep her locked up in this castle like a…

“A golden canary,” she mumbled the word into the cushion.

No, that’s not right.

A golden canary can at least hop around in its cage, but she couldn’t even get near the door.

Fengling lifted her head from the cushion, her eyes sweeping across the living room.

There were no keys on the coffee table now.

After that incident, Sister Ling Yue had taken away all the keys that could open doors, and had even changed the lock cylinder on the castle’s main gate.

And she had heard Ling Yue call someone to change the lock with her own ears.

The person on the other end of the line had even asked, “Do you want to install an electronic lock?”

Sister Ling Yue had just laughed and said, “No need, just an ordinary one is fine. She can’t open it anyway.”

And at that time, she had been sitting right there playing a game, pretending not to hear.

But every word had pierced her ears like a needle.

“This is so infuriating!”

Fengling sat up, grabbed her Switch, immediately opened The Legend of Zelda, and steered Link right off a cliff.

Link died.

Then she steered Link off the cliff again.

Link died again.

After jumping off a dozen or so times in a row, Feng Ling finally felt a little bit of her anger dissipate.

She put the Switch aside and started seriously thinking about a plan.

A direct assault was definitely out of the question.

She had tried it once… and almost got choked into permanent brain damage, though vampires might not suffer from that symptom.

But sneaking around wouldn’t work either.

Every time she got close to the main door, Sister Ling Yue would appear out of nowhere like a ghost, and each time her excuse was perfectly flawless.

“Little Fengling, did you go the wrong way? The kitchen is over there.”

Her tone was gentle, like coaxing a child, but the underlying meaning was clear: “I dare you to take one more step forward.”

Fengling touched her neck.

Forget it.

Not trying that again.

So, was there a way to make Sister Ling Yue let her out voluntarily?

She thought about it carefully and decided the possibility was roughly zero.

Sister Ling Yue would choke her just for getting near the door.

Let her out voluntarily?

She wouldn’t even dare dream of that.

That left only one method left: deception.

But how to deceive her?

Fengling jumped off the sofa and began pacing back and forth in the living room.

Her little high-heeled leather shoes tapped out a “click-clack-click” sound on the marble floor.

Anyway, the deception had to be very strong, something that would be hard to see through as a trick… and it had to exploit a person’s psychology… a psychological blind spot.

She stopped walking.

A psychological blind spot.

What psychological blind spot could Sister Ling Yue possibly have?

Fengling closed her eyes, recalling the bits and pieces from the past two-plus months.

Sister Ling Yue, as a Progenitor, had lived for thousands of years, had seen countless people and experienced countless things.

That meant she was almost impossible to fool.

No… it should be said, she had never been fooled.

Every time Fengling tried to tell a little white lie, she could see right through it and would say with a smile, “Little Fengling, your left eye blinks when you lie~”

She didn’t even know her own left eye blinked.

But Sister Ling Yue could point it out with pinpoint accuracy.

How do you fool someone like that?

Fengling squatted down and buried her face in her knees, whispering softly, “Ugh… This is too hard… This is basically Hell difficulty…”

She squatted for a while, then suddenly heard footsteps behind her.

She immediately stood up and turned around as if by muscle memory, plastering a smile on her face and calling out loudly, “Sister Ling Yue!”

She saw Ling Yue walking over slowly, holding a cup of red liquid.

Today she was wearing a white chiffon blouse with a black high-waisted long skirt underneath.

Her long hair was casually draped over her shoulders.

She looked very beautiful, gentle, and virtuous.

“Little Fengling, what are you doing?”

Ling Yue tilted her head, her gaze sweeping over Fengling’s face.

“Nothing much! Just thinking about… um… game strategies!”

Fengling raised her Switch and shook it.

“Oh? Strategies for what game?”

“Just… The Legend of Zelda! There’s a shrine I can’t get past!”

Ling Yue walked over and sat down beside her, glancing at the screen.

She saw Link standing on the edge of a cliff, with a bottomless abyss below.

“Little Fengling, that shrine is on the game’s Initial Plateau. You cleared it last month… And, this save file was just created recently. You haven’t even met that Hooded Old Man yet.”

Ling Yue said with a smile.

“…Uh.”

“So, what strategy were you really thinking about?”

Fengling’s mind raced, and she blurted out, “I was thinking about how to speedrun it! Yes, a speedrun! That kind of playthrough where you don’t follow the normal route, using all sorts of glitches and tricks to finish the game fast! You know there are lots of speedrun videos online, right? I want to try it!”

Ling Yue stared at her for two seconds, then asked, “Really?”

“Really, really!”

Fengling nodded vigorously, deliberately blinking her eyes a few times.

She wasn’t sure if her left eye blinked when she lied, but blinking a few times to create confusion couldn’t hurt.

Ling Yue was silent for a moment, then reached out and ruffled her hair.

“Alright then. Little Fengling can play whatever she wants.”

After saying that, she raised the cup and took a sip of blood, leaving a thin red trace at the corner of her mouth.

Fengling secretly let out a sigh of relief.

She knew this was just a temporary cover-up…

Sister Ling Yue must have noticed something, she just didn’t expose her on the spot.

That meant she had to speed things up.

—

Over the next few days, Fengling kept observing Ling Yue’s behavior patterns, trying to find a loophole she could exploit.

She noticed a few things.

First, although Sister Ling Yue was almost always by her side, she would go to that “Private Area” on the third floor for a while at regular intervals.

She didn’t know what she did there.

But each visit lasted roughly between thirty and forty minutes.

Second, Sister Ling Yue’s “surveillance” of her wasn’t visual monitoring; it was more like some kind of sensory ability.

Because sometimes, when Ling Yue was cooking in the kitchen and she approached the main door in the living room, Ling Yue would know immediately.

This suggested it wasn’t sight, but something like magic or a Mark.

Third, Sister Ling Yue really enjoyed “testing” her, just like when she deliberately left the key on the coffee table last time.

In other words, Ling Yue would create opportunities to see if she would make a mistake.

It was probably a form of amusement?

Or maybe a way to confirm her control.

Right now, Fengling was sprawled over the desk, doodling in her sketchbook with colored pencils…

She drew a circle to represent the castle, then drew blue sky and white clouds outside the circle.

Inside the circle, she drew a little stick figure to represent herself, and a taller one to represent Ling Yue.

“If I can make Sister Ling Yue walk into a ‘test’ herself…”

She mumbled, chewing on the pencil as she stared blankly at the sketchbook.

The key was to make Sister Ling Yue feel like everything was under her control.

Fengling turned to a new page and started writing and sketching out plans.

Plan A: Fake an illness.

Vampires don’t get sick, but could she say something was wrong with her blood?

No, Sister Ling Yue would know the truth as soon as she checked.

Plan B: Create a disturbance.

Like starting a fire?

But there wasn’t much flammable material in the castle, and Sister Ling Yue could extinguish it with a single spell.

So that method wasn’t viable either.

Plan C: Fake a breakdown.

Crying, throwing a tantrum, self-harm, threatening suicide?

But would this trick really work? Did Sister Ling Yue actually care about these things?

Plan D: …

She wrote one down, crossed it out.

By the time she got to the tenth-something plan, the sketchbook was full of X’s.

“Ahhhhhhh—this is so annoying!”

She slammed the sketchbook shut with force and flopped face-down onto the desk.

Just then, she heard footsteps on the stairs.

Fengling quickly sat up straight, shoved the sketchbook under a pile of books, grabbed the copy of European Medieval History on the desk, flipped to a random page, and pretended to be reading intently.

“Little Fengling, reading a book?” Ling Yue asked as she walked in from the doorway.

“Mhm! Reviewing what I read before!”

Fengling pointed at the page.

Even though the page was about the Crusades, which had nothing to do with the medieval history she had been reading before.

Ling Yue placed a fruit plate on the desk and glanced at the page.

“The Crusades? I thought you were reading the chapter on the Magna Carta before.”

“Ah? Oh, I’m skipping around! Wanted a change of pace!”

Ling Yue didn’t press further.

She just speared a piece of apple with a fork and brought it to Fengling’s lips, saying, “Open up.”

Fengling obediently opened her mouth and ate it.

The apple was sweet, but her mind was so full of escape plans she couldn’t taste a thing.

“Little Fengling, is something on your mind?”

Ling Yue suddenly asked.

The question almost made Fengling choke on the apple.

“N-no, nothing!”

“You’ve been absent-minded lately. Even when playing games, you seem distracted.”

Ling Yue tapped her forehead with a finger.

“Are you thinking about something you shouldn’t be?”

Right now, Fengling felt her heart was about to jump out of her throat.

She took a deep breath, and then… made a decision.

Maybe it was the buff that comes with a crisis, but a brilliant idea came to her!

“Sister Ling Yue, I… I have something I want to tell you!”