A bell began to ring, its clear, cold notes wavering in the air.
The sound drifted closer and closer to the temple, until it seemed to be just outside, separated from them by only the thinnest of wooden doors, ready to burst in at any moment.
As the delicate, ethereal ringing continued, the frantic pounding from within the coffin began to weaken, blow by blow, as if soothed. Gradually, it faded into a vast, silent emptiness.
Qi Si rose from the coffin and glanced toward the side chamber to his right. The maggots and rotting flesh that had littered the floor were gone, leaving the ground as clean as if they had never existed at all.
The Joy God Temple now appeared to be nothing more than an ordinary place of worship. Aside from the Joy God statue that had stepped down from its shrine, there was nothing else out of the ordinary. The only proof of what had just transpired was the Soul-Suppressing Nail clutched in his hand and the still form of Du Xiaoyu lying on the floor.
The ringing outside ceased, followed immediately by three soft but distinct knocks on the temple doors.
Auntie Xu's raspy voice drifted eerily through the wood. "Esteemed guests, are you in there? Please, open the door."
Shang Qingbei shot Qi Si an questioning look.
With the situation outside unknown, Auntie Xu's timing was unsettlingly precise. Her tone suggested she knew exactly what had happened inside the temple, making the entire situation feel suspicious.
"Open it," Qi Si said, walking over to Du Xiaoyu, who was still playing dead. "We can't just sit in this temple for seven days." He reached into the boy's pants pocket, pulled out the phone, and slipped it into his own.
As if a switch had been flipped, Du Xiaoyu's leg twitched. His eyelids fluttered, and he groggily blinked them open.
He sat up in a daze, looking around in utter confusion. "Qi Si, why am I on the floor?"
"You don't remember?" Qi Si replied, turning to gesture vaguely toward the entrance. "We came to investigate the temple earlier, triggered a death trap, and got stuck inside. I suppose we survived the time limit, and now Auntie Xu is here to let us out."
The memories finally rushed back to Du Xiaoyu. He staggered to his feet, his eyes cautiously scanning the room.
When his gaze fell upon the two statues kneeling below the shrine, his face paled, and he stumbled back a few steps in lingering fear.
Just then, Auntie Xu knocked twice more, her voice louder this time. "There was a bit of an incident this morning. Please forgive our poor hospitality. It's mostly taken care of now. Why don't you three come back with me?"
Du Xiaoyu couldn't bear another second in that temple. Seeing the encouraging nods from Qi Si and Shang Qingbei, he scrambled toward the door and threw the bolt open.
The heavy doors swung open, revealing Auntie Xu's wrinkled face, heavily caked in white powder. "If you three wanted to visit the Joy God Temple, you should have told this old woman. What would you have done if something had happened?"
Qi Si's eyes fell on the bell hanging from Auntie Xu's waist. He asked with feigned ignorance, "What could possibly happen? From what you've told us, the Joy God is your protector. Surely she wouldn't wish us any harm?"
Auntie Xu’s face crinkled into a sycophantic smile. "The Joy God is a kind deity, but she died young, when she was just a girl, so her temper can be... fickle. Every forty-nine years, she gets into a foul mood, which is why we must hold a grand banquet to cheer her up."
Qi Si lowered his eyes, his expression carefully arranged into one of concern. "But with Xi'er's passing, the banquet has been ruined. Doesn't that mean something terrible will happen?"
Auntie Xu let out a dry cackle. "The people of this town will handle it. You guests just have a good time, see the sights, and don't you worry your heads about it."
She turned her back to them, her unnaturally tapered legs moving nimbly across the stone path. In moments, she was more than five meters ahead.
Having just woken from his stupor, Du Xiaoyu's mind was still foggy. Without a second thought, he hurried to catch up.
Shang Qingbei had already moved to Qi Si's side when he'd let Du Xiaoyu open the door. Now, they walked together, trailing far behind the other two.
The white mist in the alleyways had dissipated. A pale, cold sun hung high overhead, casting a washed-out, overexposed light on the white walls and black-tiled roofs on either side. There wasn't a single shadow among the brightly lit houses, nor any sign of ghosts. The terrifying encounter felt like nothing more than a bad dream.
Shang Qingbei lowered his voice. "Do you think something's wrong with Du Xiaoyu? He was just lying there, yet those two statue-ghosts ignored him and came straight for us. Could he have some kind of item that diverts a monster's attention?"
"No," Qi Si said, pretending not to notice the attempt to sow discord. He shook his head with a faint smile. "If he had an item like that, he wouldn't be so terrified. I suspect the ghosts in this instance have unique rules of engagement. Perhaps they don't attack people who are asleep—who knows?"
Shang Qingbei thought to himself, *That's absurd,* but didn't argue further.
Into the silence, Qi Si suddenly called out, "Auntie Xu, how did you know we were in the temple?"
Auntie Xu smiled. "This town isn't very big. This old woman just took a wild guess, and it turned out to be right."
Her tone was so transparently false it was almost comical, but Qi Si let it drop.
He already had his answer.
Xu Wen knew the players had arrived in Double Happiness Town, and Auntie Xu knew the three of them were in the Joy God Temple. Ruling out the possibility that these NPCs were clairvoyant, only one explanation remained: the players were carrying some kind of tracking device.
And the only item from this instance that the players carried with them at all times was the phone.
Shang Qingbei had arrived at the same conclusion. He murmured, "Even if Xu Wen and Auntie Xu aren't working together, they must both be ghosts, able to sense the location of something. That phone... it's the problem."
Qi Si said nothing. He slipped his hand into his pocket and took out the phone. Its case was as cold as a corpse.
He pressed the power button, opened the browser, and, from memory, repeated his previous searches.
[Soul-Suppressing Coffin: Adorned with Soul-Suppressing Nails at its four corners, it wards off demons and binds yin spirits. A vicious corpse is sealed within the sarcophagus, its resentment lingering through the ages. To open the coffin is to invite certain calamity...]
[Soul-Summoning Bell: It lures the yang souls of the living from their bodies and guides the yin ghosts of the dead back to the mortal realm. The boundary between yin and yang is illusory; when the bell rings, all returns to primordial chaos...]
[Person in the Well: Water is of the yin element, and wells are vessels of fortune. The stronger the yin energy within a well, the greater the master's prosperity; as the yin accumulates, so too does their good fortune flourish...]
The clues painted a picture of a world that was seemingly logical and self-consistent:
To secure wealth and fortune, the people of Double Happiness Town would, every forty-nine years, brutally murder a young woman on her wedding day. They would cast her body into a well, using her yin energy to enrich its waters.
Once her purpose was served, the corpse, heavy with resentment, was nailed into a Soul-Suppressing Coffin and taken to the Joy God Temple to be suppressed by the Joy God herself.
This perverse practice had turned Double Happiness Town into a domain of ghosts, forcing Auntie Xu to wear a Soul-Summoning Bell just to prevent the players from noticing anything amiss.
But what if... what if the clues provided by the phone were fake?
Who ever said that something written in black and white couldn't be a lie?
Stripping away the extraneous information, many details that had been overlooked before now surfaced with stark clarity:
Being lodged in Xi'er's house, with the excuse that it was the only vacant room...
The story of Zhang Sheng's beautiful sister, who had vanished near Double Happiness Town...
The bloodstains on the windowsill... the thick calluses on Xi'er's fingers from holding a pen...
The coffin that had wept... the lyrics sung to the suona's mournful tune...
The old man in the temple, who had said that keeping a seven-day vigil made one a resident of the town...
All of this pointed to a completely different version of reality, one the players had subconsciously ignored, misled by the clues on the phone.
He had to admit, the entity that had set this trap possessed a precise understanding of human psychology.
The phone was planted on Liu Bingding's body, and then Qi Si was guided to have the players discover it, creating the preconceived notion that it was a crucial item.
The novelty of a modern electronic device in the game spurred the players to explore it immediately, leading them straight to the photo and entry for the [Soul-Suppressing Coffin].
The image of the blood-soaked coffin perfectly matched the instance's eerie atmosphere, making it instantly believable. Then, Xu Wen's phone call interrupted their train of thought, causing even Qi Si to overlook a critical detail: the information from the entry had never been logged in the system interface.
Most of the information Xu Wen provided over the phone was later proven false. Qi Si, having noticed this surface-level trap, failed to consider that a much larger lie lay hidden beneath the obvious deception.
The horror depicted in the photo materialized within the instance, serving as a subtle psychological suggestion that the related clues were authentic. The subsequent process of taking photos, using image recognition, and obtaining more clues created the illusion of agency and control.
A vast net had been silently woven from the moment the players entered the instance, tightening gently and slowly until everyone was ensnared within it.
In fact, the moment the [Person in the Well] clue appeared, Qi Si had felt a vague sense of wrongness. That was why he had taken a series of actions—deleting the photo, goading Xi'er into suicide.
He felt he was being led, manipulated, and he had wanted to shatter the mastermind's plan with his unpredictable behavior.
But it had been useless.
"Beyond just misleading information, they're even using fake clues and fake items? I see, I see now..." Qi Si raised a hand to cover his eyes, a silent laugh shaking his frame.
Because it was a fake item, both he and Qi could freely alter it—he could delete photos, and Qi could change the phone's battery life...
If the clues on the phone were real, how could the Weird Game possibly have allowed him to modify them so easily, to create an information gap through such a crude method?
"The deception wasn't entirely seamless. The timeline is set in 2008, yet the phone is a modern model. That itself was a red flag. But I dismissed it as an oversight by the Weird Game, subconsciously ignoring it."
"I entered the instance too late, I lack experience, and I carelessly overlooked certain details. My judgment of some higher-level entities was also flawed. In some respects, I was far too arrogant and complacent..."
Qi Si committed the lessons learned to memory, not forgetting to thoroughly mock himself in the process.
He was not a god; he could not be omniscient. All he could do was constantly analyze his failures and strive to be more meticulous and cautious in the future.
He ran a finger along the side of his lips, his thoughts clearer than ever. "The situation isn't irreversible. The fact that the fake item created by that entity could be altered by me and Qi suggests its standing isn't as high as I imagined, and it's not targeting me under the game's official rules. In that case, the minimum death count mechanic should still be in effect."
"It can fabricate false information, but it cannot bury or destroy the real clues. The roles of the phone and Li Yao overlap; they could even be seen as contradictory. If the phone is fake, then Li Yao's identity becomes highly questionable..."
Li Yao's words echoed in his mind.
‘Li Yao. My fifth time. I mostly write supernatural fiction, so I know a fair bit about folklore.’
‘In Taoism, seven is the nascent yang number, the intersection of yin and yang. On the seventh day, the soul returns to settle its debts and sever its worldly ties.’
‘The feng shui of the Joy God Temple is very strange. I glanced inside as I passed by earlier. The yin energy inside is incredibly heavy. It’s like they’re raising a ghost to devour itself—using poison to fight poison, as if to suppress something.’
The Weird Game had never specified the number of players in this instance. Who was a player, who was an NPC—who could really say for sure?
Qi Si's eyes narrowed. He called out, "Auntie Xu, have you seen Li Yao on your way here? The young woman who came with us."
Auntie Xu stopped in her tracks. She turned to face him, her toothless mouth slowly stretching into a cavernous, black smile. "A young woman? There was no young woman. Only four of you came, all fine young men."