Years ago, Xu Yao had asked the Matron Xu of that time, "Our family is already so wealthy. Why do we have to keep hurting people?"
Matron Xu had replied, "If we don't do it, they'll just find someone else who will. If we can't give them what they want, they will no longer respect and cherish us, and we won't be able to keep our place here."
The engine of sin, once started, could not be stopped. For the sake of a comfortable life, generation after generation of the Xu family's descendants cast aside their own names, donning the mask of "Matron Xu" and offering up innocent souls like shamans in an ancient, bloody rite.
Had things gone as planned, Xu Yao too would have one day become the new "Matron Xu," contentedly enjoying the riches born from sin. Steeped in this world day after day, year after year, she would have grown accustomed to profiting from others' suffering, becoming as savage as a beast that drinks blood and devours flesh.
But Xu Yao did not want such a life.
Call her naive, call her foolish, but she desperately hoped to end the cycle of sin in her generation. She even went so far as to save a magistrate who came to investigate Double Happiness Town, protecting him from the other villagers under the pretext of "love at first sight."
She and the magistrate bought time by pretending to prepare for their wedding, eventually gathering enough evidence. She saw him safely out of town, then deliberately led the pursuers away herself.
Driven to desperation, she threw herself into a dried-up well. She thought that would be the end of it, but to her horror, she discovered that death was not the final destination.
Her soul was trapped at the bottom of the well, washed day and night by the bone-chilling water, forced to watch as her own corpse decomposed into a skeleton.
Some face death without fear because they are driven by ideals and conviction, armed with the courage to accept its finality. Others do not fear death simply because they do not comprehend it; blinded by a deluded sense of self-sacrifice, they throw their lives away rashly and impulsively.
Xu Yao was, without a doubt, the latter.
When she decided to seek justice for the girls who had been victimized, the worst outcome she imagined was losing her comfortable, privileged life and fleeing to some faraway land with the magistrate.
As the townspeople closed in on her, she had a desperate thought: to end it all with her own death. On one hand, her family had destroyed so many innocent lives; it seemed only fair that she pay with her own. On the other, she harbored a secret hope that her death might inspire guilt in the others.
But now, she was starting to regret it. Why did she have to endure so much pain and torment when she had done nothing wrong? She was dead, so why did those people feel no remorse? Why wouldn't they even leave her soul in peace?
When she first died, Xu Yao was, after all, just a sixteen-year-old girl. She knew a little about many things, but truly understood very little.
For the first few years, she wept day and night. As her ghostly power deepened, she began to saturate the surrounding ground with her aura, conjuring strange visions and nightmares.
Later, more and more bodies were thrown into the well. She and countless other wronged souls were trapped at the bottom, suppressed and helpless.
Over the long years, she absorbed enough resentment that she gradually stopped pitying herself and instead learned to harbor bitterness and hatred.
She resented the cruelty of the townspeople and the heartlessness of Matron Xu, spending every day plotting how to take their lives in revenge.
In her endless waiting, she heard the voice of a god.
The god promised she would become the ruler of Double Happiness Town. Matron Xu and the townspeople would be like puppets for her to control, and Xi'er and Xu Wen, who had recently been murdered, would be reborn and drawn into a seven-day cycle.
Like a child playing a game, Xu Yao made the townspeople die over and over. She let the first few rounds of players clear the instance with ease, only beginning to take her deal with the god seriously when she grew bored—
To kill any outsider who entered Double Happiness Town.
Undeniably, she felt a long-forgotten thrill in the killing. Why should she be dead while they were allowed to live? Why was she trapped at the bottom of a cold well while they could simply pass through and leave?
A century of confinement had taught Xu Yao to hate. She even grew to hate the magistrate she had personally helped escape.
Why didn't he come looking for her? Why didn't he come to save her?
When they parted, he had sworn he loved her. So why, in all that century, had he never once returned?
If it hadn't been for him, she never would have ended up in this state...
After listening to Xu Yao's account, Qi Si sighed. "That magistrate didn't abandon you. He came back and searched for you for a long time, but the townspeople concealed the truth, and he never found a trace of you. After he died, his spirit was trapped in another world, where he asked everyone he met for news of your whereabouts."
"I'm guessing that even though you were trapped in the well, you couldn't move freely on the grounds of the Mourning God Temple, nor could you see the face of every spirit, could you?"
Xu Yao gave a stiff nod.
Qi Si nodded in understanding. "If I'm right, that evil god wanted you to fester with hatred, so it kept you apart, making sure you would always just miss each other. If I may be so bold, could you tell me the appearance and title of the god you made a deal with?"
Xu Yao's face turned a ghastly pale, as if it might start dripping ichor. Her eyes were vacant. "He wore a long black robe. I can't recall his face clearly, only that his eyes were gold... His title is... *The Lord of Time and Space who roams the boundary between life and death, the Master of Fate who commands disaster and fortune, the Immortal Existence who heralds doom and apocalypse.*"
The instant the last word was spoken, Qi Si felt a gaze, as tangible as a physical weight, descend from the heavens and lock onto him.
His spiritual perception registered the sharp *crack* of shattering glass, and then silence. A fissure had split the world's barrier, but the damage went no further. The higher-dimensional being, blocked on the other side, could only gaze on from an impossible distance, powerless to intervene.
Qi Si knew his [Gods Prohibited] contract had taken effect.
He calmly stroked his chin, adopting the air of a practiced charlatan as he recited a line from memory. "The being you made a deal with is the most cruel and terrifying evil god in existence. It harbors the same malice toward all living creatures. Its greatest pleasure is to tempt them into sin, then watch them writhe in the agony of their own making."
"At this point, it will never let you and the magistrate find happiness. Unless..."
Qi Si trailed off, swallowing the rest of his sentence. He then leaned closer to Xu Yao, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "You may not know this, but there's more than one god in this world. From what I know, there is a great being named 'Qi'..."
For the next three minutes, Qi Si exhausted his pitifully small reserve of positive adjectives to paint "Qi" as an understanding, benevolently meddlesome god. He assured Xu Yao she was welcome to pray to this deity anytime. The only price? Find a way to kill Xu Wen.
Xu Yao remained noncommittal, lowering her head thoughtfully. Qi Si, for his part, said nothing more.
On the system interface, a silver-white notification finally appeared.
[All other players have died. The 'Minimum Death Quota' mechanism has been triggered.]
[You no longer meet the conditions to complete the main quest. Do you wish to abandon it?]
Qi Si listlessly muttered, "Yes."
The outcome was just as unsatisfying as he'd expected, but there was nothing to be done.
The main quest was to get Xu Wen out of Double Happiness Town. However, Xu Wen had clearly sided with the enemy; it was obvious she didn't need any rescuing from the players.
The real problem was that as long as she was holed up on the grounds of the Mourning God Temple, Xu Yao couldn't reach her, let alone kill her. And that meant there was no way to bring out her corpse...
After all, Qi Si couldn't just go through all that trouble again, brazenly tell her, "The entity you made a deal with has been kicked out, so just tag along with me now," could he?
[You have abandoned the main quest. Your final rating will be significantly lowered.] [Congratulations, player, you have cleared the team survival instance: 'Double Happiness Town.']
The system's voice was as cold and robotic as ever, making the word "congratulations" drip with irony.
Qi Si watched with half-lidded eyes as the light faded, like a cinema screen just before the movie begins. Then, in an instant, sound and light returned.
First, a passage of classical text appeared.
[At the bottom of the well was a small opening, from which a faint light seemed to glow. A scholar named Zhang, lost and anxious, entered through the opening and found himself in a wide, open space.]
[The land was flat and expansive, with houses arranged in neat rows. All the people, men and women, young and old, were dressed in burial shrouds. The scholar surmised that he had entered the netherworld.]
[He entered the Mourning God Temple, where he lit incense and pleaded his case. A divine oracle proclaimed: 'On the sixth day, guard the spirit temple and avoid the paper effigies. On the seventh day, find allies and carry out the coffin.']
[The scholar followed these instructions and at last returned to his home. Upon reaching the county seat, he reported to the Magistrate of Pengcheng, who then dispatched his deputy to accompany him back.]
Then, the scene shifted to a modern video clip.
Inside a stark white office, two men were in the middle of a heated discussion about Double Happiness Town.
"Director, someone else has gone missing within the borders of Double Happiness Town. At this point, we can basically confirm it's a localized supernatural phenomenon. I measured the paranormal fluctuations in the area—it's at least a B-class event." The speaker was a young man in a white uniform with his hair tied back. His face was obscured, but the words on his ID badge were clear: [Weird Investigation Bureau].
Behind the desk, a middle-aged man sat as still as a statue. "Xiao," he asked, "did those missing people enter the perimeter of Double Happiness Town of their own volition?"
"Yes," the young man replied, his voice laced with self-blame. "If we'd moved faster, set up the cordon sooner, they wouldn't have..."
The older man cut him off. "At least now we understand the mechanism of this phenomenon. As long as no one enters that specific area, they won't be affected. Report to headquarters immediately. Designate Double Happiness Town a no-entry zone, and then build a concrete wall around it."
"But... what about the people who went missing?"
The director sighed. "Do you have any idea what a B-class phenomenon entails? We could throw our entire branch at it and still not resolve it. We might even trigger a worse mutation! This is the best-case scenario. As long as people stay away, no one gets hurt. If it turns out it needs to 'feed' on a few people periodically, I'll petition the council to throw some death-row inmates in."
"But four people are already missing. Their parents and children are staging a sit-in at the public security bureau..."
"Tell the bureau to stall them. If worst comes to worst, we'll transfer a few soldiers with no family connections to 'go missing' too. That will be their closure. All they really want is money. If they still don't back down, treat them as a resistance cell."
"..."
"Xiao, you need to understand something. We can't save everyone, and we can't afford meaningless losses. When the fate of all humanity is at stake, small sacrifices are... necessary."
The image slowly faded to black, the voices receding into the distance as lines of silver text appeared on the screen.
[The suffering of the few is meaningless next to the comfort of the many. Those with vested interests preach morality and righteousness to protect their own reputations, all while standing idly by, calling their inaction 'a necessary sacrifice.']
[Double Happiness Town: Normal End - 'The Sacrifice' - has been recorded.]
[Automatic teleportation from instance in three minutes.]
Seeing the galling words "Normal End," Qi Si made a resolution. The moment he was out of this instance, he was adding the so-called "Lord of Time and Space" to his little black book.
For now, however, he was more concerned with the "Weird Investigation Bureau" from the video clip.
Did this organization only exist as lore within the instance, or was it possible it existed in the real world as well?
...
In the world beneath the well, Li Yao wandered aimlessly through a maze of white, misty alleys. She moved among the indistinct spirits, her own form as hazy as fog.
She remembered now that she was already dead. Her memory of that death had simply been erased, turning her into a clue-providing NPC doomed to wander endlessly through Double Happiness Town.
And now, though her memories had returned, she knew that when this instance ended, the players would either be dead or gone their separate ways. Only she would be sent back to the beginning, reset into an ignorant NPC once more.
Her past was a blur, and her future would be the same. No hope, no end in sight.
Li Yao sighed to herself when, out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of a brilliant golden light shooting skyward from the distant Mourning God Temple.
It was a sight she had never witnessed in any previous cycle. As if compelled by some unseen force, Li Yao followed the golden light all the way to the Mourning God Temple, pushed open the doors, and stepped inside.
The temple held no idol, not a single soul in sight. There was only a massive coffin resting in the center of the hall.
The golden light was seeping out from the seams of the coffin.
Li Yao approached and, with a great effort, pushed off the heavy lid. The moment it crashed to the floor, the light vanished completely, leaving only a pale corpse lying inside the coffin.
"Qi Wen?" Li Yao gasped, recognizing the man in the coffin.
She struggled to pull and drag the body out of the coffin. The skin was ice-cold and the muscles were rigid; she could tell the young man had been dead for quite some time.
Even though she knew she was an NPC and "Qi Wen" was a player—two entirely different beings—Li Yao still felt a pang of sadness.
She knew how awful it was to die, and so she always wished for others to live full lives, free from the suffering of death.
"If you die here, you'll turn into one of those paper effigies, won't you? Too bad I'll forget you soon. I suppose in the next game, you'll be the one chasing me all over town, huh?" Li Yao murmured to herself with a wry smile.
Perhaps it was because her memories had just returned, and she had so much to say with no one to listen. She leaned against the coffin and began to ramble.
About being murdered, then saving people, again and again and again...
If a living Qi Si had been lying there, he probably would have been so disgusted he'd have started banging his head on the floor. Fortunately, at that very moment, Qi Si was busy watching the "Normal End" video and mocking the hypocrisy of "humanitarianism," completely deaf to Li Yao's glorious history from a world away.
"In the last instance... hmm..." Li Yao's voice trailed off as her mind wandered. Her dangling hand brushed against the pad of the corpse's right pinky finger.
The next second, a text box popped up before her eyes:
[Name: Evil God's Finger Bone]
[Type: Item]
[Effect: ...]