Meanwhile, after placating the groom's relatives, Mistress Xu gathered a group of men and marched menacingly toward Xi'er's home.
Li Yao pulled Liu Bingding along, quietly trailing behind the group without attracting the attention of any of the NPCs.
[Name: Passerby]
[Type: Skill]
[Effect: Slightly reduces presence, decreasing the probability of being noticed by NPCs.]
[Description: You are a drop in the ocean, a whisper in the wind. No one will pay you any mind. You are just another face in the crowd.]
It was a skill the two had acquired in their third instance—in a rare occurrence, they had both received the exact same one.
The skill’s effect was weak, having only a negligible impact on NPCs, and its description felt more like a mockery of their real lives. But now, it was finally proving useful.
Mistress Xu walked surprisingly fast, her agility belying her age. Li Yao and Liu Bingding were panting by the time they managed to catch up.
They didn't dare get too close, maintaining a ten-meter distance from Mistress Xu, afraid of being discovered by the NPCs and breaking the skill's effect.
They rounded a corner and came upon a single-courtyard house. The walls were mottled, piled high with red gauze, and the wooden door stood half-open, as if in invitation.
They had arrived at Xi'er's house.
Mistress Xu and the men were nowhere to be seen; they had evidently already entered the residence.
The sky had unknowingly grown overcast, casting a hazy, gray shadow over all the red and white buildings. Without the sun, the recently dispersed white mist once again rose from the shadows, unfurling with the delicate grace of fine silk.
With a death so fresh, even the gentle breeze carried the damp chill of mortality. The air was unnervingly still, the only sound the rustle of wind against the corners of their clothes.
Li Yao instinctively lightened her steps, her feet tapping softly on the stone slabs as she approached the gate.
She pushed the wooden door open gently. Despite her care, it still let out a drawn-out creak.
The wind blew the door wide open, and once the sound of scraping wood faded, the world fell silent once more.
Li Yao held her breath for two seconds. Nothing happened.
There wasn't a single NPC in the courtyard.
Liu Bingding edged closer, his voice low. "What's going on? We couldn't have gone the wrong way. You don't think Mistress Xu never even came to Xi'er's house, do you?"
Li Yao uttered two words: "An illusion."
"What should we do?" Liu Bingding mumbled. "I don't know anything. I'm flying completely blind here..."
"Let's go inside first. With no one around, it's the perfect chance for us to investigate," Li Yao declared, striding into the courtyard.
The west wing was sealed with red paper and cloth, a sea of crimson. Strips of red fabric hung from the eaves like a ghost's long tongues, trembling in the wind.
Li Yao walked toward the doorway of the west wing, which was so plastered with paper that its interior was completely obscured. Her feet made a soft crunching sound on the red paper scraps littering the ground.
She stopped beside the door, her hands at her sides, and stared blankly at the wrinkled "Double Joy" character pasted on it before finally pushing her way inside.
The room seemed as if it hadn't been cleaned in a very long time. The moment the door opened, a cloud of dust billowed into their faces, making both of them cough. Fibers and dust motes floated in the air, and the smell of decaying, damp wood filled their lungs, leaving a heavy, oppressive feeling.
There were no bodies inside, no sign of anyone. It seemed to have been sealed for a long time, untouched by any living thing.
Li Yao walked step by step toward the base of the wall.
Liu Bingding's eyes followed her, landing on the large, splotchy brown stains that marred the pale gray wall.
"It's blood," Li Yao said. "Judging by the splatter patterns and angles, these are bloodstains left during a struggle."
Liu Bingding noticed that the brown stains on the wall varied in darkness, clearly indicating they had been spattered at different times and from different angles. There was also a smear, thick at the bottom and faint at the top, that looked as if someone's wound had been dragged across the wall.
Li Yao glanced around before her gaze finally settled on a wooden bed against the wall.
The bed was exquisitely carved, though its corners were thick with cobwebs. It was covered with a bright red wedding quilt and mattress, now gray with dust, their color having faded to the wine-red of a festering wound.
Li Yao walked over, unzipped the edge of the quilt, and pulled out a folded gray sheet of paper.
It was a newspaper. When she unfolded it, a report with a photograph was revealed:
[20-Year-Old University Student Disappears While Traveling, Police Investigation Underway]
Liu Bingding leaned in for a look, his eyes fixing on one spot.
He pointed at the face of the missing person in the photo and said uncertainly, "Isn't... isn't this Xi'er? I'm great with faces, I can't be mistaken. But isn't Xi'er a simpleton?"
"Mistress Xu lied to us," Li Yao stated coldly.
The moment she finished speaking, the scene around them began to curl and fold like wet paper. It started to crumble and shatter from the edges, dissolving like a collapsing skyscraper into clouds of gray-white mist. The mist then slowly took on a vivid red hue, burning like a fire as it sketched out a new scene.
[Side Quest Updated]
[Side Quest: ...]
...
On the town's path, the fog was as thick as a layer of clouds, obscuring everything. All that remained was a massive black coffin resting before Qi Si, emitting pitiful, sorrowful sobs. "Let me out... Why don't you take my place..."
Seemingly realizing that they couldn't deceive Qi Si, the voices of Shang Qingbei and Du Xiaoyu gradually distorted, reverting to the original female voice.
Qi Si stood silently in the fog, listening, his eyes lowered as he examined the coffin from head to toe. He noticed that each of the coffin's four corners was secured with a strangely fashioned bronze nail. They weren't hammered in securely; each had come loose by about half its length, though thankfully they hadn't fallen out completely.
"Save me... Let me out..."
The young woman's voice from inside the coffin continued to plead for help, its sound distorted by the thick wood, as if it were coming from underwater.
"Why should I save you?" Qi Si asked curiously. "What's in it for me?"
The air fell silent. The thing inside the coffin seemed to have been struck dumb by the question and remained quiet for a long time.
Growing a little bored of waiting, Qi Si walked over, took a small awl from his custom bracelet, and hammered the loose nails back in, one by one.
Just as he finished hammering the last nail, a fierce gust of wind swept through, blowing the coffin away into a pile of gray sand. The wind also cleared much of the fog, revealing a bright and clear sky.
The footsteps that had vanished behind him reappeared. There were exactly two sets, no more, no less.
Shang Qingbei and Du Xiaoyu had clearly encountered the same bizarre funeral procession as Qi Si.
Du Xiaoyu's voice trembled with palpable fear. "Qi-ge, did you see that just now? It was creepy as hell. Someone in the coffin was begging me for help, asking me to let her out... I even heard your voice and that other guy's..."
"What's there to be afraid of? In my experience, that probably wasn't a death trap, just a special scene to provide clues," Shang Qingbei said dismissively. "A wedding and a funeral combined either means a ghost marriage or they're marrying the bride off in a coffin. I've heard that some remote, backwater places have strange customs like that."
Du Xiaoyu spat on the ground. "You're full of it. How come I've never heard of a custom like that?"
Shang Qingbei clutched his dictionary and shot him a disdainful look. "Being uncultured isn't the scary part. What's scary is being ignorant and thinking you know everything."
Just as Du Xiaoyu was about to retort, Qi Si cut him off. "My father was a professor of folklore at a university. I think I recall him mentioning a similar custom, but when it came time for fieldwork, they couldn't find a single trace of it."
"And... what I'm more curious about is, since the well is already filled with 'bones laid out in neat order,' why would they go through the trouble of encoffining the dead instead of just throwing them into the well?"
"Who knows?" Shang Qingbei shrugged. "Maybe the bottom of the well is actually a burial chamber, with coffins all lined up neatly."
Qi Si raised an eyebrow. "Explain."
Sensing the young man's genuine curiosity, Shang Qingbei warmed to his topic. "I suspect the ghost story we found at the beginning is the key to solving this instance's mystery. The scholar 'lost his footing and fell into the well, where he saw bones laid out in neat order, and was struck by a sense of melancholy.' If the bottom of the well were just a pile of rotting corpses, he wouldn't have felt melancholy; he would have been horrified."
Qi Si's eyes narrowed into a smile. "Not bad. That makes sense. Keep it up."
Shang Qingbei was speechless.
The three walked on for a while longer until the vermilion gates of a temple became faintly visible ahead. Two bright red lanterns, each emblazoned with the "Double Joy" character, hung before the gates, swaying without a breath of wind.
The Joy God Temple, dedicated to the Joy God.
It seemed someone was burning paper offerings inside. The scent of incense wafted out, and wisps of smoke carrying black paper ash drifted from the doorway, rising toward the sky.
The Joy God statue enshrined on the altar seemed to have moved a little further out. Its crimson skirt cascaded down like flowing fire, with faint golden patterns tracing wave-like ripples. Only the statue's eyes remained hidden, its ghostly white face resembling that of a corpse in an ice cellar.
The statues of the newlywed couple kneeling below the god were all facing the entrance, as if kowtowing to the players outside. The outermost layer of paint on the statues had chipped away in large patches, revealing a verdigris interior that made them look like two freshly unearthed zombies from a distance.
Qi Si quickened his pace, crossed the threshold, and the Identity Card in the upper right corner of his vision began to tremble more violently, extending tentacles and spewing gray mist.
Inside the temple, on the altar, the statue had a very familiar face. Its scarlet gaze fell calmly downward, its expression both compassionate and mocking.
Qi Si took one look, and after matching the face to his memory, he finally couldn't help but burst out laughing. "The Joy God? ... Her Ladyship? ... Are we playing dress-up now?"
He truly hadn't expected a certain malevolent god to be so damn persistent.
This didn't give him any sense of satisfaction at being singled out. Instead, it only annoyed him more, making him feel it was time to move 'burning the bridge after crossing it' up his to-do list.
Du Xiaoyu followed Shang Qingbei into the Joy God Temple and, hearing Qi Si laughing for a while, asked hesitantly, "Qi-ge, what's wrong?"
Qi Si reined in his inappropriate amusement, pressed his lips together, and pointed at the statue that had been replaced by Qi.
Du Xiaoyu followed his gesture, looking confused. "Why does this Joy God look like a man? Pretty handsome, though, hehe."
Shang Qingbei had also noticed the two points Du Xiaoyu mentioned and scoffed, "What's so funny about that?"
"Yes, not funny at all," Qi Si agreed with a perfectly straight face, forcing the corners of his mouth down to a normal level.
Under Shang Qingbei's wary gaze, he nonchalantly shifted his eyes to survey the surroundings.
The interior of the Joy God Temple was much larger than it appeared from the outside. Besides the central path leading to the altar, which was cordoned off by incense sticks and candles, there were two side chambers, each the size of a room.
The left chamber held six neatly arranged coffins, all identical to the illusionary one Qi Si had seen in the fog—the same carvings, the same nails.
The smoke from the burning paper offerings was coming from the right chamber. Red gossamer curtains hung from the ceiling, separating the chamber from the main hall. Through the veil of fabric, they could vaguely make out a hunched figure kneeling in the center of the chamber, presumably the one burning the offerings. It was rather strange that this person had remained completely unmoved despite all the commotion the players—mainly Qi Si—had just made.
Qi Si walked around a candle stand, approached the chamber, and gently lifted the curtain.