It was already three in the afternoon when Du Xiaoyu and Shang Qingbei returned to Xi'er's house.
Du Xiaoyu pushed the door open first, only to see a woman in a red wedding dress sitting on Li Yao’s bed, weeping softly.
Seeing them return, the woman said through her tears, "Liu Bingding is dead... It's my fault. He was trying to save me when those paper figurines caught him..."
Shang Qingbei felt a nagging sense that something was wrong.
The Li Yao he remembered was usually quite calm. Why would she be sobbing like this?
He maintained a composed tone and said, "Xu Yao, calm down first. Tell us exactly what happened."
Shang Qingbei himself didn't know why the name "Xu Yao" had slipped out.
But on second thought, maybe his teammate really was named "Xu Yao." He must have been muddled and misremembered.
"That's right, Xu Yao. We've been looking for you everywhere," Du Xiaoyu added. "To find you, Brother Qi even went down into the well."
Xu Yao lowered her head and explained, "Liu Bingding and I were sent to Double Happiness Town from a hundred years ago. We ran into so many paper figurines... They called me 'Miss Xu' and Liu Bingding the 'county magistrate,' and they wanted to capture us... We ran to the mourning hall together. At the last second, Liu Bingding shoved me into a coffin, but he..."
She didn't finish, but the outcome was obvious. Liu Bingding had not returned. Only she sat here, alive.
"My condolences," Shang Qingbei offered, feeling little grief.
They were merely strangers who had crossed paths, and he hadn't particularly liked the man who was so adept at navigating social niceties. Under the "guaranteed death count" mechanic, true unity and friendship were impossible.
Du Xiaoyu pressed on, "You got into the coffin. What happened then? How did you get back?"
Xu Yao answered hesitantly, "The coffin must have been some kind of passage. I fell asleep, and when I opened my eyes again, I was sitting here..."
She began to cry again. Du Xiaoyu fidgeted, at a loss for how to comfort her.
Shang Qingbei waited impatiently for a moment before interrupting, "You must have triggered a side quest. You should have gotten some clues, right?"
"Yes," Xu Yao said, wiping her tears. Her tone was tinged with accusation. "We saw what happened to the Joy God. She was driven to her death by the people of Double Happiness Town... After she died, they started killing a girl every forty-nine years to use the resentment to suppress her soul."
"Not only that, but anyone who comes to Double Happiness Town looking for someone or learns its secrets gets thrown into the well... The Joy God said that the bones of a girl named Xu Wen are at the bottom."
With that, all the clues clicked into place.
Xu Wen was already dead, her remains at the bottom of the well.
Shang Qingbei turned to the young man in the white shirt leaning against the doorframe and challenged him, "Qi Wen, didn't you say you didn't see Xu Wen at the bottom of the well?"
"I didn't," the young man replied, his pale face devoid of any expression. "It was all bones down there. No way to tell which one was Xu Wen."
Shang Qingbei frowned, about to let fly a sarcastic remark.
But the young man walked straight to the middle bed, pulled a clean white shirt from his backpack, and ducked under the covers to change.
Once he was done, he casually balled up the damp shirt, tossed it under the bed, wrapped himself in the blanket, and closed his eyes.
Du Xiaoyu turned to see the young man settling in for a nap and couldn't help but ask, "What's wrong with you? It's only the afternoon..."
The young man rolled over, clearly intending to sleep and ignore them.
Shang Qingbei's mouth twitched. He could only think that "Qi Si" had been acting strangely ever since he came up from the well. He seemed incredibly weak; he'd likely run into something down there and gotten injured.
But why not just say so? Was he hiding a clue, or was he just too proud to admit he was hurt?
Shang Qingbei shook his head and pulled out the yellow scripture paper with the rules, handing it to Xu Yao. "We found the rules for this instance."
Xu Yao took the paper and began to read with a puzzled expression. She seemed to struggle, her pace agonizingly slow, and after a long while, she still hadn't finished.
Oblivious, Shang Qingbei continued, "Tonight, we'll go out and explore to find a way out of Double Happiness Town. Tomorrow morning, we'll go down the well one more time and find Xu Wen's bones. If we don't know which skeleton is hers, we'll just bring them all up..."
...
"I came to Double Happiness Town to find someone. I never thought that not only would I fail to take her with me, but I would also end up trapped here myself..."
In the world beneath the well, the wailing wind outside gradually subsided, and the sorrowful sound of the suona horn rose once more. Xu Wen let out a visible sigh of relief. "They're gone. Let's hurry to the Mourning God Temple."
As if afraid Qi Si would object, she added, "No coffins are coming today, so we can't leave. We have to take shelter in the temple for now."
Qi Si had been feeling a bit cold from the wind and was huddled in a corner. He stood up now and, picking up on her first sentence, asked, "Who did you come here to find?"
Xu Wen pushed the door open, her gaze complicated as she looked back at Qi Si. "I came for my sister. She went missing. They investigated for a long time but couldn't find her, so I came to look for her myself."
Qi Si thought of the newspaper clipping he had seen in Xi'er's room and raised an eyebrow. "And have you found her?"
"Maybe I did. Perhaps the argument I had with them was because I found her... But I couldn't take her with me... I don't remember any more than that," Xu Wen's voice trailed off.
She turned away and led the way forward. Qi Si followed silently, a sudden feeling washing over him that the plot was unfolding like a cliché horror movie.
Xu Wen had come looking for someone and gotten trapped herself. She then called for help from the four player characters, and the four folklore investigators had come running, boarding the proverbial pirate ship right alongside her.
Qi Si glanced up at the gray, overcast sky, his sense of humor inappropriately resurgent. "Well, now we're all trapped here. I wonder if we can still call for backup."
Xu Wen didn't respond to his quip.
She remained silent for a long moment before asking in a low, ghostly voice, "Do you want to know the secret of Double Happiness Town?"
The two of them stood on the street, one behind the other, flanked by white walls and black-tiled roofs obscured by mist. Gray, indistinct phantoms crowded around them, moving to and fro.
Qi Si lowered his eyes, his tone cool. "If you want to tell me, then tell me."
With her back still to him, Xu Wen began to speak softly. "Double Happiness Town ceased to exist twenty years ago. The entire town vanished overnight, as if it had never been, leaving only a dry well in the middle of a barren field."
"But if you walk on the ruins of the town, you can often see phantoms of houses and crowds, and hear the sounds of people talking. That's why some say the town was 'spirited away,' becoming a place where people get lost and walk in circles forever."
They walked a considerable distance without realizing it. The fog grew thicker, obscuring the houses on either side.
Suddenly, a large temple loomed ahead. It was similar in structure to the Joy God Temple on the surface, built in a two-courtyard style.
The temple shared the same color scheme as the ordinary houses—white walls and black tiles. Under the eaves hung two white paper lanterns, each bearing the single, black-ink character for "Mourning."
This must be the Mourning God Temple.
Qi Si stopped at a distance. "So, you're saying Double Happiness Town is a ghost town?"
"It's hard to say," Xu Wen said, grabbing Qi Si's wrist and pulling him forward. "Most of the people in town are no different from the living. They have body heat, they fear ghosts, they need to eat and drink... They shouldn't be spirits. It's like they're trapped at a specific point in time, their physical states frozen. They neither age nor die."
Xu Wen's grip was incredibly strong, squeezing his wrist until it ached. He couldn't shake free. It felt like a wooden cangue used to escort prisoners, forcing him toward their destination.
Qi Si figured his wrist must be bruised a nasty shade of purple-black, like livor mortis.
He stared at the long, pale nape of Xu Wen's neck and compliantly let her pull him along. "Sounds like they've achieved the immortality so many people dream of. But from my contact with them, they don't act like they've been alive for that long."
Xu Wen said, "That's because they have no memory of their immortality. They are forever trapped in a seven-day cycle, repeating the sins of their past lives over and over, just like game NPCs."
"NPCs?" Qi Si narrowed his eyes at her. "You seem to know quite a lot."
Xu Wen let out a soft laugh and, without warning, shook a shard of a broken mirror from her sleeve, pressing it against the side of Qi Si's neck. "Yes, I know many things, player."
The final word landed with the force of a boulder dropped into a still pond.
Xu Wen, an NPC, knew about players. Her actions were clearly being influenced by some external force, causing her to deviate from the instance's original design...
"Did you pray to Him? Or are you not Xu Wen?" Qi Si feigned surprise, blinking slowly.
Xu Wen continued as if she hadn't heard him. "They draw passing travelers into the town and trap them here to die, their souls never finding release."
"They no longer belong to the mortal world, yet they continue their customs of weddings and funerals, luring innocent girls here only to brutally murder them..."
"The bodies of the dead sink to the bottom of the well, becoming another one of the ghosts, trapped in an endless, repeating cycle of despair."
The sound of ghostly wails began to rise, mixed with desperate, resentful cries.
Specters materialized from the mist—men and women, old and young, dressed in the fashions of various eras. They were clearly all people who had been drawn into Double Happiness Town.
"I want to end all of this," Xu Wen declared, her voice suddenly serious and deliberate.
She held Qi Si fast as they stood before the entrance to the Mourning God Temple. Her hand, whether from excitement or something else, was trembling.
The glass shard slid across Qi Si's neck, leaving a thin red line from which a bead of blood welled.
A deathly chill poured from the open temple doors, so cold it made Qi Si's skin feel numb and stiff, momentarily dulling the pain.
He glanced inside and saw white candles arranged evenly on either side of the main path, and in the shrine, a statue dressed in black with golden eyes.
The statue had an unfamiliar face, its expression impassive, devoid of joy or sorrow. Yet, for a split second, Qi Si felt as if he had seen it somewhere before.
A thousand faces for a thousand people, no self, only the image of all living things. He couldn't tell if a deeply buried memory had been genuinely stirred, or if his mind, under some influence, was piecing together a false image from countless fragments.
The drop of blood on his neck seeped into his collar, staining a small patch of fabric. Qi Si's gaze fell on the incense burning before the statue.
Three for gods, four for ghosts. There were three sticks of incense in the burner, looking as if they had just been lit, only the very tips burned away.
Xu Wen's expression shifted to one of pious solemnity. With one hand holding the glass shard to Qi Si's neck, she pushed him into the temple with the other.
"How do you plan to end all this?" Qi Si asked.
His eyes shifted, noticing a coffin in the side chamber to the left of the Mourning God Temple, though there was only one.
It was utterly different in style from the ones in the Joy God Temple. Its black lacquer surface was carved with intricate golden vine patterns, similar to the narrative murals in the temple, yet their meaning was indecipherable.
They looked more like a curse, a sigil used for communication between higher beings.
After he stared for two seconds, the patterns on the coffin began to writhe, lifting from the surface to become golden phantoms that stretched and twisted wantonly in the air.
Qi Si was suddenly hit with a powerful sense of suffocation, as if those vines were tightening around his very soul, squeezing his heart, binding him completely.
His identity card began to tremble violently. The red-eyed evil spirit on its surface seemed to sense the approaching danger, its misty tentacles thrashing wildly in a desperate struggle.
A primal fear bloomed within him, the way an ant on a tree trunk senses its impending doom as a drop of resin descends to entomb it.
Death. Inescapable death. A foregone conclusion already written into the fabric of his fate...
There was no path forward. All that was left was a final pinch of sand in the hourglass of time...
[Warning! Divine artifact (Data Deleted) detected in instance... Error! Danger!]
Scarlet letters twisted across the system interface, the error message momentarily filling his entire field of vision.
Amid the chaotic red, Qi Si heard a loud *bang* and began to tremble uncontrollably.
The doors to the Mourning God Temple had been slammed shut, the sound shattering his thoughts and sending massive waves through the ocean of his mind.
Xu Wen dropped the glass shard and stepped back, her voice calm as she announced, "The god promised me. Kill you, and everything will be over."
Qi Si wanted to mock this old cliché of making a deal with a dark god, but he couldn't bring himself to laugh.
The physiological fear was impossible to suppress, bringing with it a wave of cold and nausea. The veins in his temples throbbed, and he struggled to breathe.
The phantom vines from the coffin drew closer, and the moment they touched his limbs, they became solid.
A brilliant golden light pulsed along the slender tendrils, making them look like the legendary chains used to seal away evil spirits.
"Should I call you stupid, or what? A god who would make such a demand... can you really trust its promises?"
Qi Si felt himself being drowned in a torrent of complex negative emotions. The pain, sorrow, and despair that weren't his own all transformed into a perverse pleasure as he experienced them.
He hunched over, his voice trembling as he asked, "Was it worth it? Going to all this trouble just to gamble on such a faint sliver of hope?"
Xu Wen smiled. "Even if there's only a one-in-ten-thousand chance, sacrificing you for a shot at saving everyone is worth a try, no matter what."
"Ah, that old utilitarian argument again... sacrificing the few to save the many, sacrificing the present to save the future..." Qi Si was dragged inch by inch toward the coffin. Bubbles of thought popped continuously in his mind, making soft, glass-shattering sounds.
His vision had blurred completely, but his voice was tinged with amusement. "I'm very curious. Why do you so naturally assume that I should be the one to be sacrificed? Because I'm a single individual? Because you think I'm a worthless scumbag who deserves to die? Or perhaps..."
"Because you are at my mercy, with no other choice," Xu Wen said.
"Survival of the fittest, is that it?" Qi Si lifted his eyelids, still unable to see clearly, but the corners of his lips curved into a slight smile. "You preach the law of the jungle, yet you still babble about salvation. How contradictory..."
"I just want to save myself," Xu Wen's voice sounded distant, as if coming from beyond the heavens. "I was going to guilt-trip you, but I didn't realize you have no morals."
She said it with a straight face, her tone cold and indifferent, a complete departure from her earlier demeanor.
Or perhaps she hadn't spoken at all, and the voice existed only in Qi Si's imagination.
But undeniably, the answer was a satisfying one.
Qi Si burst out laughing, a deep, genuine laugh.
He relaxed his body, allowing the vines to drag him into the coffin, pressing him tightly against the cold stone bottom.
Then, the lid slammed down, and his world plunged into darkness...