Summary 5

This page contains an original arc analysis written for readers of the English translation.

Arc Five: Horror Game Natives — When the NPC Knows the Rules Better Than the Players

Arc Five is where I Am the Villain’s Father stops pretending the game is fair and starts exposing the machinery behind it. Up until now, Ji Xiu has been fixing broken families and broken systems from inside their worlds. Here, he steps into a world that openly admits it exists to kill people for entertainment.

The setting is deceptively ordinary: Ji Family Village, a quiet rural place where outsiders come to stay for a few days. The villagers are polite. The food is simple. The atmosphere feels wrong in the way horror always does—too calm, too repetitive, too carefully arranged.

Ji Xiu enters this world as Wang Qiuyue’s husband and Ji Chunsheng’s father. The players arrive thinking they are guests. In reality, they are livestock.

From the beginning, the rules are stacked against them. Ghosts wake up the moment outsiders arrive. At first, they can only kill one person a day, and only if certain conditions are triggered. As the days pass, those restrictions loosen. By the final day, survival becomes impossible unless the players have already escaped.

Wu Letong, an experienced player, understands this and takes leadership immediately. He is clever, cautious, and ruthless when necessary. He also makes the classic mistake of horror game veterans: he assumes NPCs are either tools or obstacles.

Ji Xiu quietly proves him wrong.

The first crack appears with the middle-aged man in the group. He is loud, entitled, and cruel, the type who believes surviving once means he’s untouchable. When he kicks Da Huang, the family dog, it isn’t just an act of casual violence—it is a killing condition. In the original timeline, this man dies first.

This time, Ji Xiu intervenes.

He kicks the man out of the house without hesitation, not for strategy, but because some lines do not get crossed. Wu Letong watches this happen and thinks Ji Xiu is reckless. What he doesn’t realize is that Ji Xiu already knows the consequences. The man will die anyway. Ji Xiu simply refuses to let his family be used as the trigger.

That single choice shifts the entire trajectory of the game.

Instead of the middle-aged man dying quietly, the killing conditions ripple outward. The bathroom incident is the clearest example. Two girls, Lu Zhizhen and Huang Wenli, nearly die to a hair ghost that shouldn’t have activated yet. The bathroom resets afterward, as if nothing happened, gaslighting the survivors into doubting their own senses.

This arc’s core theme emerges here: memory is the most dangerous weapon in this world.

The villagers are not ordinary ghosts. They were once murdered by Wang Qiuyue and her son after they killed her family. They revive endlessly, losing all memory of death each time. As long as they don’t remember, they are harmless. Once they remember, they become catastrophes.

The true killing condition is realization.

Ji Xiu knows this because he has lived it before. He knows that the worst outcome isn’t a single death—it’s the entire village remembering everything at once. That is when the world collapses.

Wu Letong doesn’t know this.

When danger strikes by the river, his instincts kick in. He saves Lu Zhizhen using a talisman, but abandons Huang Wenli without hesitation. From a survival perspective, it’s efficient. From a human perspective, it’s devastating.

Huang Wenli’s moment of betrayal is small, quiet, and brutal. She realizes she was never important. She was just convenient.

Ji Xiu arrives seconds later and ends the threat in a single strike. He kills the awakened ghost cleanly, efficiently, and without drama. The players finally understand what they are dealing with: Ji Xiu is not an NPC. He is something far worse and far better.

What makes this arc hit hard is that Ji Xiu is not trying to win the game. He is trying to protect his family.

When the villagers collectively awaken earlier than expected, Ji Xiu understands why. The players behaved too well. No one died. The game got impatient.

So it raised the difficulty.

This is the moment where Arc Five becomes openly hostile. The villagers lure Ji Xiu away and abduct Ji Chunsheng. Wang Qiuyue’s composure shatters. For the first time, her calm mask cracks completely. She is a ghost, but she is also a mother.

Ji Xiu doesn’t hesitate.

He picks up a firewood cleaver.

That cleaver is not special by design. It becomes special because of what it has done. Over countless cycles, it has drunk the blood of ghosts again and again, evolving into an A-rank weapon. The game notices. Wu Letong notices too, and for the first time, he understands just how outmatched he is.

The final battle at the deep pool is not heroic. It is slaughter.

Hundreds of awakened villagers surround them. Ji Xiu charges without speeches, without fear, and without mercy. The ghosts remember him. They remember dying to him. Terror overwhelms rage.

Ji Xiu kills them anyway.

What makes this arc terrifying is that he can do it because death is temporary for them. They will revive tomorrow. He plans to kill them again. And again. And again.

Not for revenge, but to protect his wife and child from ever being hurt again.

The game world breaks.

Instead of punishment, the game throws Ji Xiu into another setting: a modern city where humans and ghosts coexist openly. Here, ghosts walk the streets, hold hands with humans, and live ordinary lives. Vengeful ghosts are regulated by law. Power is tracked. Authority exists.

For the first time, Wang Qiuyue and Ji Chunsheng don’t need to hide.

They step into the sunlight.

The system scrambles to respond. Protective bracelets appear. Taoists rush in. Alarms scream and then fall silent. The game bends its own rules to contain Ji Xiu, because outright confrontation no longer works.

Arc Five matters because it exposes the truth behind everything that came before.

The worlds are not tests of morality. They are pressure cookers. Villains are not anomalies. They are predictable outcomes of repeated cruelty, neglect, and memory manipulation.

Ji Xiu doesn’t clear the game by following its rules. He breaks its cycles.

And once he does, the game is forced to adapt.

Which means the real conflict is only just beginning.