With a dull thud, the black coffin slammed onto the ground.
The sudden impact scattered the clustered wreaths of fog, sending up clouds of white dust that swirled inseparably with the mist.
Before Shang Qingbei's eyes, a crowd of heads bobbed. Shadowy figures of men and women, young and old, all dressed in black mourning clothes, formed a hazy circle around him. The phantoms vaguely wiped at their eyes as mournful wails, like the cries of ghosts, rose and fell in waves.
“Sob... what a poor, unfortunate child...”
“Dead... so pitiful. They didn’t even get to enjoy life for long...”
“Hee hee hee... A bad lot in life. Couldn’t bear the good fortune...”
While the first few remarks still held a trace of sorrow, the last was delivered in a tone brimming with obvious glee, as if they were delighted by the death.
To say they were delighted wasn't quite right. It was more like the private joy of a survivor, as if the sword of Damocles that had been hanging over their heads had finally fallen, grazing past them to strike the person beside them.
Goosebumps prickled across Shang Qingbei's skin, one wave after another, and he gave a violent shudder.
The already pervasive chill intensified, surging through him as if he were standing naked in a winter gale. The knife-like north wind seemed to scour his very bones, freezing every vein and sinew to the core.
A gust of wind swept through, and the phantoms before him dissolved with a whisper, scattering like dust and sand into the air, only to slowly drift back down.
All the strange phenomena vanished. There were no ghostly shadows, no chanting. The world was suddenly, strangely silent and peaceful.
Only the coffin, resting quietly amidst the piles of paper money, proved that something strange had indeed just happened, that ghosts had walked these streets.
Staring by moonlight at the bone-white fragments scattered around the coffin, Shang Qingbei shivered again. Then, a soft puff of air tickled the back of his ear.
A wisp of cold air stirred his hair, a touch as light as an insect's wings, making the back of his neck itch.
“When a ghost blows out your candle, you don’t get a say in the matter.”
Li Yao's words echoed in his ears. Shang Qingbei stiffly turned his head and saw the young man in the white shirt and black trousers standing right beside him. In stark black and white, like a funeral portrait, he was slumped loosely against the door, breathing rhythmically.
Shang Qingbei had just let out a breath of relief when a tide of anger, born from his receding fear, surged up. "Qi Wen, we're both players! Stop treating me like a kid and scaring me for no reason—it's not funny at all!"
"Scare you?" The youth, thin as paper, raised an eyebrow in confusion. "Why are you so timid? Didn't Xu Wen say that as long as the yang fire on your shoulders isn't extinguished, ghosts fear humans?"
These words were spoken with such sincerity, as if he were genuinely comforting a terrified teammate. But the accompanying smile was clearly mischievous, and his whole demeanor had the condescending air of someone placating a child.
The thought that he had been scared to the point of fainting while "Qi Wen" had calmly stood by and watched filled Shang Qingbei with indignation.
How could he see a ghost without even breathing hard? Was he even human? Even for a veteran player, this was too much, right?
He became even more convinced that "Qi Wen" was definitely one of those veteran players who had suffered significant mental corruption.
As a thought struck him, Shang Qingbei turned his head to the youth and asked in confusion, "Where's Xu Wen's makeup mirror? I remember you were holding it, and you even had the LED light on."
"The makeup mirror?"
The youth tilted his head. His calm face, illuminated by the moonlight, was even paler than the piles of paper money on the ground. His bloodless lips were ashen, like inscriptions on a tombstone.
A sense of wrongness suddenly bloomed. Shang Qingbei belatedly realized that his surroundings had grown dark at some point. Only the ghastly moonlight provided any illumination, and it was no help at all; it only cast a bizarre, eerie pallor over everything, making the shadows dance like phantoms.
The youth suddenly gave a brilliant smile, revealing teeth as fine and white as pebbles. "I must have left it in the courtyard. Come back with me and get it."
Shang Qingbei felt his wrist seized by a hand like an iron vise, gripping him so tightly his bones ached.
The youth looked thin and weak, but his strength was immense. Without another word, he began to drag Shang Qingbei back toward the courtyard.
Wrong! Something's wrong!
Feeling the icy touch where their skin met, a terrifying suspicion formed in Shang Qingbei's mind.
He hooked the arm holding the dictionary around a doorpost, using it as leverage to plant his feet, and frantically looked around.
His surroundings had become unfamiliar. The white-walled, black-tiled houses had all vanished, leaving only a vast expanse of watery mist.
In the flat, empty space, only a large, black-and-white mansion rose before him. Two white paper lanterns hung from the eaves, each painted with a sinister-looking "Double Happiness" character in black ink.
The closed black wooden door was ajar, hanging crookedly. A dark red, blood-like liquid oozed from the crack, flowing slowly and viscously toward his feet.
The towering mansion felt like a tomb. A sudden thought struck Shang Qingbei: if he went inside, he would die!
"No thanks, Qi-ge. I'll wait here for you. You go ahead," Shang Qingbei said, trying to sound composed as he looked up at the youth, who stood half a head taller.
The youth twisted his head at an angle impossible for a human, his deep, lightless eyes looking down at him. "We'll go in together."
Shang Qingbei saw that under the moonlight, the youth's shadow was stretched long and thin—but it was the shadow of a woman, with elaborate hairpins in her hair and dressed in long sleeves and a narrow robe!
...
"How beautiful."
Outside the courtyard, Qi Si stared intently at the black coffin before him and couldn't help but sigh in admiration.
Standing beside him, Li Yao shuffled a stack of paper money in her hands and shook her head. "A Soul-Suppressing Coffin is an object of great evil. If it's not filled with enough corpses, I fear it will turn on the living."
"Is that so?" Qi Si narrowed his eyes, turning his head to look at the tall woman behind him. "Are ten corpses enough? If not, I can add a few more."
Li Yao lowered her head as if drowsy, her voice cool and faint. "How do you have so many corpses?"
Qi Si smiled. "I forgot to mention. I'm a taxidermist. I deal with corpses all day long."
He rested his right hand on his left wrist and tapped idly on the surface of his Fate Pocket Watch, making a soft "tap, tap" sound.
On the third tap, Li Yao's voice, now slightly distorted and sinister, spoke up: "Then tell me, am I dead or alive?"
The pale woman snapped her head up. On her powdered face, only her lips were blood-red. Her pupil-less eyes curved into crescents, coordinating with her mouth to form a ghastly, chilling smile.
A chill spread from the soles of his feet, seeping into every limb and bone. His skin felt as if it were coated in a thin layer of frost.
A physiological tremor ran through Qi Si, but he merely straightened his thin shirt, tilted his head, and watched the woman before him as if carefully weighing his answer.
"Mortals walk the mortal path, ghosts tread the spirit road. The living and the dead do not mix; yin and yang must stay apart—"
A bizarre chant droned on beside the coffin, mixed with insincere wails:
"Sob... Get in the coffin, quick. Once you're in the coffin, everything will be fine..."
"Hee hee hee... It's better to be dead. Once you're dead, you won't have to worry about anything..."
The scattered whispers and murmurs suddenly fell silent, cut off by a piercing chant:
"You bring nothing at birth, and take nothing at death. Your fate is numbered, so seek neither fortune nor woe—"
Like a final verdict closing a coffin lid, the words instantly suppressed all other sounds, leaving only their own echo lingering in the air.
"So noisy." Qi Si scoffed softly and raised a hand to his forehead.
Having received no answer for a long moment, the woman stretched her blood-red mouth into a grin, her face so close it nearly touched Qi Si's nose. "You've seen plenty of corpses. So tell me—am I dead, or am I alive?"
... "Tick, tock."
The sound of a water clock tick-tocked in her ear at a steady, endless rhythm.
Li Yao felt a flutter of panic in her chest. She groggily opened her eyes to a world of red.
The red gauze canopy above her head swayed without a breeze. On the bedside table, a single white candle burned.
A blood-red "Double Happiness" character was pasted on the wooden door directly in front of her, assaulting her vision and making her eyes ache.
Li Yao found herself sitting on the edge of the bed, wrapped in a heavy, elaborate red wedding gown that made it hard to breathe.
"Where... is this?"
She pinched her wrist and felt a faint sting. She understood then: this wasn't a dream, but a mechanism of the instance itself.
Was it a death trap, or a piece of backstory?
Li Yao wrote supernatural novels for a living, so she knew a thing or two about ghosts and ghouls. She knew all too well that the more you fear something, the more it will come after you.
Maintaining her composure, she stood up as quietly as possible and crept toward the door. She tentatively reached out and gave it a push.
The door actually opened.
Before her was a completely unfamiliar courtyard. In the center of the grounds, which were covered in red confetti-like debris, was an ancient, dark-green well. A woman in a red dress sat beside it.
The woman's hair was very long, so long it trailed on the ground. She was as still and silent as a sculpture woven from strands of hair.
She's a ghost!
Li Yao held her breath and took a small step back into the room. Her elbow brushed against the door, making a soft thud.
The woman's head snapped around, her cold gaze pinning Li Yao to the spot. "Help me... please, help me... will you?"
...
Having dealt with the woman who was clearly a ghost, Qi Si strolled back into the courtyard, pulling the door closed behind him.
Tonight's events were definitely not right.
He had woken up for no reason in the middle of the night, and the first thing he saw was the ghost that had been Xi'er crouching by his bed. The putrid stench hit him so hard it almost made him vomit.
A moment later, Li Yao had woken up too and asked if he wanted to go outside and take a look.
Driven by a familiar interest in her mystic-like aura, and the thought that "since I'm already awake, it would be a waste not to check things out," he had readily agreed.
The two of them left the house and stood outside the courtyard for a while, watching the funeral procession approach with its noisy music, and saw them place the coffin at the gate.
And then, for some inexplicable reason, Li Yao had turned into a ghost.
Looking back, the whole thing reeked of a tangible strangeness.
Even his own decision-making process had been bizarre, more instinctual than rational.
It was a bad feeling, making Qi Si feel like he was starting to think like an idiot of Chang Xu's caliber.
"An instance that can influence your judgment?" he thought listlessly. "I hope this effect doesn't carry over into the real world. Otherwise, I'd be better off just dying right now." With that, Qi Si walked straight to the east wing and pushed the door open.
His four teammates were sleeping like logs. From left to right, they were Li Yao, Liu Bingding, Du Xiaoyu, and Shang Qingbei.
The bed in the middle, his own, was empty. The cotton mattress was still warm.
"Was I only gone for that short a time? Was I the only one who got caught in it, or is something else going on?" Qi Si's thoughts drifted as he reached over to Du Xiaoyu's bed.
Du Xiaoyu was out cold, snoring like a thunderstorm with a pool of drool on his pillow.
Even when Qi Si roughly lifted his pillow and took the phone from underneath, he showed no signs of waking.
Qi Si stepped aside and pressed the power button on the phone.
A bright startup ringtone played as the phone's blueish glow illuminated his ghost-pale face, casting it in shifting patches of light and shadow.
Despite how long it had been used, the phone's battery was still full.
With his eyes half-closed, Qi Si's fingers swiped nimbly across the screen a few times. He opened the contacts and dialed the only number listed.
A phone began to ring nearby. Muffled by the door, the sound was faint and hard to place, but he could still pinpoint its direction.
—It was outside, in the coffin. Xu Wen's phone was in the coffin.
"So Xu Wen really is dead? Looks like that saves me the trouble of talking to her." Qi Si shoved his hands into his pockets, which seemed to be bulging with something.
He pulled out a handful and saw it was a clutch of crumpled paper coins.
What was going on? When did this stuff get on him? He had no memory of it at all.
Qi Si was never one to hesitate. As soon as doubt took hold, he immediately got up from the bed, crept over to Li Yao's side, and stuck his hand into her pocket.
His fingertips brushed against the rough surface of paper money. He quickly pulled his hand back and gently tucked the blanket back in place.
He repeated the process with the other sleeping players and got the conclusion he was looking for.
"Only Li Yao and I have paper money in our pockets. What's the logic behind that?"
Qi Si sat back down on his own bed, lost in thought.
Double Happiness Town is a ghost town, and paper money is ghost money. Did the instance put it on the players so they would have something to spend?
Or did it mean someone was already dead, had become a ghost, and that's why they had paper money on them?
Qi Si stroked his chin, thinking with relish: "If I've become a ghost, that makes things convenient. I can just kill all the other players."
Of course, it wasn't much trouble now, either.
Whether he was a ghost or not, he could always try killing someone first to see.
Qi Si drew a blade from his silver bracelet and swiped it at the back of Liu Bingding's neck.
The expected resistance of slicing through skin never came. The blade passed right through the flesh and bone as if through a phantom.
Can't kill them?
Qi Si narrowed his eyes and tried stabbing Du Xiaoyu on the other side. The result was exactly the same.
Refusing to accept it, he tried on every single person. Not one of them shed a single drop of blood.
On the system interface, a line of text silently appeared:
[In this instance, you cannot kill players who are asleep]