The investors behind Jade Water Bay Manor had quite the twisted sense of humor. The mirror wall in the women's changing room was actually a one-way mirror that could be observed from outside. Ning Zhe found this incomprehensible.
To build such a luxurious project at Jade Water Bay required both substantial financial resources and extensive connections. A man meeting both conditions could easily sleep with an award-winning actress. Why resort to such risky petty tricks to peek at his own female employees changing clothes?
Ning Zhe couldn't understand the manor investors' dark fetish, but undeniably, some people had exactly this sort of preference.
And there were quite a few such people.
Leaving the changing room, Ning Zhe quickly ascended to the second floor and entered Bai Zhi's room to meet the mother and daughter.
As soon as he entered, Ning Zhe removed the suit he wore. His short scattered hair became long hair pinned behind his head. The shirt and trousers transformed into a form-fitting waitress uniform, both long legs wrapped in flesh-toned stockings.
"Ning Zhe?" Feng Yushu, sitting on the bed, looked curiously at him entering in a female identity. "How did you..."
"Don't ask too many questions. When I tell you what to do, just follow instructions." Liu Yunzhi's thin, high-pitched voice emerged from Ning Zhe's throat. "Where's Bai Zhi?"
"She... fell asleep." Feng Yushu shook her head and glanced at her daughter curled up on the bed like a caterpillar, sighing softly.
Bai Zhi truly treated this place as a dream, unable to distinguish reality from fantasy. Her entire person had become quite strange.
"I feel her behavior is very odd. Whether her actions or speech, she doesn't seem like the daughter I usually know. It's like she's a different person." Feng Yushu said softly. "A Zhi is a very quiet child. Though she has no friends, she's gentle to everyone, even superficially. But today..."
"Maybe what you usually know isn't the real her?" Ning Zhe said casually. "When you're ready, come out. We're about to begin."
"All right." Feng Yushu stood up from the bed and followed Ning Zhe out the door into the corridor.
The electrician's corpse that had been possessed by the ghost earlier still lay by the balcony, unmoved.
"Listen, what you need to do is very simple." Ning Zhe pulled a flashlight from his pocket and placed it in her hand. "In a moment I'll count to three. You turn on the flashlight and shine it to cast my shadow. The ghost will be attracted very quickly."
"If nothing unexpected happens, the ghost will possess that corpse to kill me. I need you to stare at it fixedly, watch the entire process of the ghost killing me without even blinking."
"I will be killed by the ghost in Liu Yunzhi's identity. After I die, you must immediately turn off the light without any delay. Understand?"
"I understand." Feng Yushu gripped the flashlight tightly and nodded solemnly.
She understood what Ning Zhe was doing now. He had advanced to the final step. He was preparing to use one close-range death to test out the ghost's specific killing trigger conditions.
"Before we start, I have a question." Feng Yushu suddenly asked, "Why Liu Yunzhi? Why not that Brother Li?"
Ning Zhe had already stolen the identity of "Brother Li as known by Xie Yaoan." Though Old Li was now barely breathing, he was still alive. Why didn't Ning Zhe use his identity for the experiment, but instead went to great lengths to steal Liu Yunzhi's identity?
"Because Old Li's identity isn't complete enough." Ning Zhe said flatly.
"Not complete enough? What does that mean?" Feng Yushu grew more confused.
"Literal meaning. All right, time waits for no one. Let's begin."
"Mm."
Feng Yushu nodded and flipped the flashlight switch. Colorless white light emerged, dispersing the darkness ahead, projecting the silhouette of a woman in a skirt on the wall. The electrician's corpse lay not far from Ning Zhe.
Ning Zhe quietly awaited the ghost's arrival, his heart utterly calm.
He didn't explain further to Feng Yushu his reasons for choosing Liu Yunzhi, because those reasons involved the underlying logic of Taiyi's rule. Rules were the lifeblood of ghosts, and simultaneously Ning Zhe's own lifeblood. The more people who knew their detailed intelligence, the more dangerous he became.
Reviewing Taiyi's rule once more:
[When someone mistakes Taiyi for someone they know, using mistaken cognition as a medium, Taiyi can steal the corresponding person's identity and related memories]
Simply put: whoever you think he is, he becomes.
A person is the sum of all social relationships. A person's image appears differently in different people's eyes. One person's identity can be subdivided into the son known by the mother, the brother known by buddies, the student known by teachers, and so on.
The same identity is dissected into different identity slices at different angles in different people's different perspectives. All slices overlapping together form a complete person.
When Taiyi disguises itself as person A, the more people who know A are successfully deceived by it, the more identity slices Taiyi obtains, and the more complete its theft of A's identity becomes.
Complete to a certain degree, it can even deceive rules. Even the Snake God Zhaoyu's rules.
When Ning Zhe violated the death taboo in He Village, enough villagers mistook him for the Snake God. His Snake God identity was complete enough to deceive the rules, transferring the death taboo punishment he should have received onto the Snake God.
But the "Old Li" identity Ning Zhe currently possessed wasn't complete enough.
He possessed only the single slice of "Old Li as known by Xie Yaoan." At most add one more: Liu Yunzhi.
If these two were Old Li's parents, siblings, or other very close people with deep understanding of Old Li, Ning Zhe might still possibly steal a sufficiently complete identity through their cognition. But this wasn't the case.
They were merely ordinary colleagues. Their understanding of Old Li was one-sided, incomplete. Such crude impersonation couldn't deceive the rules.
Then what method could most quickly steal the most complete identity, allowing Ning Zhe to rapidly obtain a life for trial and error?
Or to rephrase the question: in this world, if you had to find the person who understands you best, who would that person be?
The answer is yourself.
No one understands you better than yourself, not even a psychologist who can see through your inner thoughts.
Through that one-way mirror wall in the changing room, Ning Zhe successfully deceived Liu Yunzhi, making her think the reflection in the mirror was herself, stealing the most complete identity to date.
No deception is harder to see through than deceiving yourself. No one understands Liu Yunzhi better than Liu Yunzhi herself.
The flashlight's illumination fell on Ning Zhe's skirt, making the flesh-toned stockings on his legs look almost like white stockings. Silent time quietly passed. Suddenly a stirring came from the corridor. That corpse stood up.
The ghost had arrived.
Chapters in advance there: patreon.com/Thaniel_a_goodchild