Outside the courtyard, pale moonlight spilled from the sky like a bolt of white silk, and twisted shadows knotted together on the ground.
Shang Qingbei watched as the young man's lips stretched from ear to ear. The grotesque smile seemed permanently fixed on his face, and Shang Qingbei couldn't help but read the blatant irony and mockery in the expression.
Cornered by the creature with nowhere to retreat, he took a deep breath, raised the dictionary high, and brought it crashing down toward the young man's face.
The heavy dictionary swung down with all his might, but it met no solid resistance, feeling instead as if it had sunk into a heap of cotton.
Unable to stop his momentum, Shang Qingbei stumbled forward, nearly falling flat on his face.
Shaking his arm, he straightened up. The young man was gone. In his place, a small paper figurine fluttered lightly to the ground.
The paper figurine was about the size of a doll, its body a ghastly white from head to toe. The only color was a tangled mass of jet-black hair on the back of its head and two dark orbs for eyes, giving it a sinister and malevolent look.
[The town is filled with paper soldiers and horses, shrouded in unending gloom.]
The passage from the book of strange tales had come true right before his eyes. He feared more crises lay ahead.
Shang Qingbei took a shallow breath and pulled a black ballpoint pen from the dictionary.
[Name: Reading Pen]
[Type: Item]
[Effect: After touching a supernatural entity with the tip of the pen, you can randomly obtain some information related to it.]
[Note: The Weird Game Reading Pen. Just point and learn!]
This was a reward he had obtained in his third dungeon. Some might have considered it useless in the early game, as it did little to increase one's combat power or chances of survival, but he felt differently.
Information was the most valuable resource in a puzzle game. The ability to acquire accurate intelligence at low risk allowed one to face unexpected situations with more composure and maintain an advantage in any strategic encounter.
For society to maintain peace and stability, it was necessary to keep the majority shortsighted, turning them into expendable resources, while a select few mastered the core truths of the system and did the exploiting.
Shang Qingbei was a firm believer in this principle, and he was equally certain that he belonged among the "select few" who grasped that truth.
Maintaining his composure, he bent down and touched the tip of his pen to the paper figurine lying motionless on the ground.
New text appeared on the system interface:
[Name: Guiding Paper Figurine]
[Note: Carry the green lantern, walk the ghostly path, guide the soul home, cross the river of oblivion.]
"What does that mean?" A chill crept down Shang Qingbei's spine. "If I had actually followed it, given the rules of this dungeon, I would've been dead for sure, wouldn't I?"
He slowly crouched beside the paper figurine, trying to get a better look, but his vision suddenly warped. The world began to swirl like a bucket of haphazardly mixed oil paints, twisting into a vortex that spun faster and faster...
Something shoved him, and Shang Qingbei shot upright in bed, gasping for breath.
Before him was a familiar wooden window, the very one from his room. In the moonlight filtering through it, he could make out the wooden table beneath the windowsill.
The sound of thunderous snoring filled his ears. He turned his head and saw Du Xiaoyu, fast asleep and drooling.
Everything that had just happened... was it all a dream?
The chill lingered on his skin, and Shang Qingbei sat there, stunned, subconsciously rubbing the goosebumps on his arms.
He caught a glimpse of a figure in his peripheral vision and faintly heard a voice nearby.
The bride in her red wedding dress was sprawled on the empty bed, muttering incoherently, "Xi'er is scared... Xi'er will hide for a little while..."
...
In his room, Qi Si sat on the edge of the bed, idly fiddling with his phone. He watched the time tick by, minute by minute, from three-thirty until it was precisely four in the morning.
He rested the hand wearing the Fate Pocket Watch on his knee, glancing at it occasionally to compare it with the time on his phone.
The good news was that the flow of time in this dungeon matched the objective time on the Fate Pocket Watch perfectly. This meant the time-reversal function would work, saving him the hassle of any complex calculations.
The phone screen had been on for quite some time, yet the battery hadn't drained at all. It seemed this dungeon wasn't so tedious as to force players to conserve power or hunt for chargers and outlets.
Since he couldn't sleep anyway, Qi Si opened the phone's default browser and typed in "Double Happiness Town."
Black, ink-like text materialized on the bright white screen:
[Double Happiness Town is renowned far and wide for hosting both weddings and funerals for over a century. It not only serves the local residents but also sells items such as wedding dresses, mourning attire, bridal veils, and paper figurines to neighboring communities. Every forty-nine years, a grand ceremony takes place where a bridal sedan and a coffin travel side-by-side, marking a convergence of life and death, yin and yang. It is rumored that one can commune with the divine during this event.]
It was all information the players had already pieced together or could have easily inferred from the clues.
Qi Si then searched for "Xu Wen." As expected, a ghostly image of a bride in a red wedding dress popped up.
It wasn't particularly frightening; it was more like an informational pop-up telling players, *This is what Xu Wen looks like.* An interesting idea struck Qi Si. He quickly typed "Qi" into the search bar and pressed search.
The identity card in the upper-right corner of his vision began to vibrate violently. After a three-second loading screen, a message appeared in the middle of the page:
[Your network connection is unstable. Please try again later.]
The phone screen flickered twice, then went black. Blood-red, indecipherable symbols began to snake across the dark surface, coalescing into comprehensible meaning the instant he looked at them.
"An interesting experiment," Qi Si heard his own voice remark, in his own tone, from within the sanctum of his mind.
A moment later, the screen lit up again. The battery indicator in the corner had dropped by half, as if the power had been forcibly ripped away.
"Is this a threat?" he wondered. "A warning that He'll disable this item if I try that again?"
"Hmm," Qi Si mused. "Back in the *Flesh-Eating* dungeon, He couldn't act or communicate directly. In the *Dialectic Game*, He could interfere with the plot. In the *Hopeless Sea*, He could disrupt other players' skills and create false impressions of them working. And now, He can even tamper with key items... His authority is returning quite quickly."
Qi Si's eyes narrowed. He materialized the identity card at his fingertips and clenched his fist.
The card dissolved into smoke, slipping through his fingers, only to solidify again two seconds later. On its face, the Humanoid Evil gazed at its holder with a mocking smirk, as if whispering in his ear, "You can never escape."
After the *Hopeless Sea* dungeon, Qi Si had begun to suspect that the identity card system wasn't as useless as the forums claimed. Its mechanics were just so complex that most players were only seeing the tip of the iceberg.
As a perfectionist, it was only natural that he had set his sights on the Scarlet High Priest card.
Since he could only bind a single main card, he was determined to get the very best. And even though he hadn't obtained it yet, his loathing for the Humanoid Evil card was entirely mutual.
After all, the card had clearly been designed and forced upon him by Qi to serve as a conduit between them. If he wanted to gain more autonomy in their ongoing game, he needed to shed Qi's influence as much as possible.
He already possessed the authority of contracts, after all. Whether it was a trap remained to be seen, but at least it was functional.
For a scumbag like him, wasn't it perfectly normal to burn the bridge after crossing and then stab his benefactor in the back?
Qi Si dismissed the indestructible, irremovable identity card and, with a blank expression, opened the phone's photo album.
At some point, a new photo had silently appeared in the album.
The photo was taken from an overhead angle, showing a dry well built from black stones in the center. The mouth of the well was crumbling, and a frayed, tattered rope was coiled beside it.
It must have been an overcast day when the picture was taken; a white mist hung in the air, and the bottom of the well was lost in absolute darkness. It looked like an eye of the earth—a dark orb set in the yellow soil, giving the unsettling feeling that something was lurking within.
[The Person in the Well: Water is of yin, and wells gather wealth. The heavier the yin energy within a well, the greater the household's fortune. The more yin accumulates, the deeper the wellspring of blessings...]
"This doesn't sound like any orthodox Feng Shui theory I've ever heard of..." Qi Si raised an eyebrow, recalling the bits of "supernatural lore" he had picked up from Jin Yusheng.
The living belong to yang and the dead to yin. To actively encourage the accumulation of yin energy was, no matter how you looked at it, utterly bizarre.
There appeared to be another line of fine print below the entry. Qi Si's eyes drifted down, and he read it silently:
"And what better way is there to accumulate yin energy than sinking the body of someone who died unjustly to the bottom of a well?"
As his brain processed the text, a gruesome image formed in his mind: a rotting corpse in red robes, half-submerged in the frigid well water, its wide-open eyes staring up toward the light, venomously glaring at anyone who passed by.
*They say Lady Joy was once a young woman, hundreds of years ago, but she had the misfortune of falling for a heartless man. He left her and never returned. Utterly heartbroken, she threw herself into the well on the west side of town. Before she died, she made a solemn vow to watch over all the newlyweds to come...*
*Her Ladyship loves nothing more than the laughter of newlyweds, and she despises faithless lovers. If anyone's heart should stray, she will show them no mercy!*
Auntie Xu's sinister words replayed in his mind. Qi Si tapped his fingers on the edge of the bed, lost in thought.
"'Lady Joy drowned herself in a well, so her resentment must be immense,' he reasoned. 'Yet they claim she loves watching newlyweds and punishes the faithless. If you strip away the legend's romantic veneer, the grand wedding ceremony held every forty-nine years is obviously a ritual sacrifice, a drama staged to let a vengeful ghost claim lives.'"
"'The more yin energy accumulates, the greater the fortune. If that were true, and it were up to me, I'd be capturing people nonstop, torturing them to ensure they died filled with resentment, and then dumping their bodies into that well.'"
"'So, is that the real story behind the corpse Zhang Sheng saw at the bottom of the well in that old tale? He probably didn't fall in by accident—he was pushed, wasn't he?'"
The general outline of events seemed to fall into place, but Qi Si's intuition screamed that it was all too simple.
Still, based on the information he had, it was the only logical conclusion. Any further speculation would just be conjecture, and that would only cloud his judgment later on.
"'If my theory is correct, then this dungeon is brimming with 'sin,'' Qi Si murmured, his gaze drifting to the item bar in the lower-left corner of his vision."
In the last slot, the icon of a white trident sat unobtrusively. As his thoughts focused on it, a silver-white border appeared around it, indicating it was selected.
[Name: Poseidon's Scepter]
[Effect: Makes you appear more like a god (The more sin it absorbs, the stronger the effect seems to become).]
He just wondered what the process of absorbing that sin actually entailed.
"So cold... It's so cold at the bottom of the well..."
A faint sobbing echoed from behind him, as if the information on his phone were bleeding into reality.
Qi Si turned toward the sound.
Li Yao was awake. Her hair was a mess as she huddled in a shadowy corner of the room, her entire body trembling uncontrollably. She was clearly no longer lucid.