"That NPC called '47' is trouble." Jiang Junjue's voice cut through the silence, making Zhang Yiyu jump.
The fourth floor of the school was unlit. A long, narrow corridor stretched endlessly in both directions, its end lost to sight, evoking the image of a deep, shadowy tomb passage.
The gray concrete walls were mottled with suspicious water stains, closing in like a sealed coffin. Every few steps, an iron door was set into the wall, resembling a tombstone.
Led by Jiang Junjue, the seven-person team—comprising members of the Listening Wind and Kyushu guilds, plus three freelance players—moved cautiously down the corridor, tentatively trying the iron doors set into the walls.
Upon discovering the doors could be opened, Jiang Junjue decisively split the team into three groups to search the rooms separately.
Now, Jiang Junjue and Zhang Yiyu, paired together, entered a room at the far left end of the hall that looked like a classroom. They began to search it inch by inch, starting from the perimeter.
Zhang Yiyu feigned ignorance. "Isn't 47 an NPC who provides clues? What could be wrong with him?"
She had, of course, noticed how unusual Qi Si was, but she had no desire to explain her own abilities to Jiang Junjue.
It wasn't just fear of revealing her trump card; she was also worried she couldn't explain it clearly and would only arouse more suspicion.
"Don't you find him a little too... intelligent?" Jiang Junjue pulled a burlap sack from his inventory and dumped out a pile of gadgets—flashlights, searchlights, electric batons, and the like.
He took out two flashlights, keeping one and tossing the other to Zhang Yiyu. Then he reached into the bottom of the sack, fished out a pack of cigarettes, and lit one with a lighter.
"He thinks to save himself when locked up and starving, shows gratitude when rescued, understands the arrangements we make for him, and can even pick up on subtext... No matter how you look at it, he's just too human."
Zhang Yiyu recalled the threatening look Qi Si had given her and couldn't agree more. "Yes, he's far too human."
With the cigarette dangling from his lips, Jiang Junjue's voice was muffled. "I've run into friendly humanoid NPCs before, but never one this smart. The only time I saw one so human-like was a player who had died in an instance, lost his memory, and then rejoined the team as an NPC. This one clearly isn't that."
"Huh, is that so?" Zhang Yiyu switched on her flashlight and aimed it at the nearest desk.
The desk was wooden, reaching only to her waist. Its surface was twice the size of a standard school desk, large enough for a person to lie on. It was less a desk and more a strangely designed bed.
Zhang Yiyu lowered the beam of her flashlight. The circle of white light slid down the wood grain and settled on a patch of brownish-red. The substance was caked thickly onto the wood, sticky and conspicuous.
The instant she saw it, Zhang Yiyu knew—it was blood!
There were bloodstains in the classroom. Someone had died here...
Fear gripped Zhang Yiyu out of habit, and she wanted to scream. But instinct took over, and her mouth began to water uncontrollably.
Just then, she heard Jiang Junjue ask, "Xiao Zhang, you were staring at that NPC for a long time. Did you see something?"
...Of course. A veteran at this level wouldn't miss a detail like that.
Zhang Yiyu hesitated, swallowed, and recited her prepared excuse. "After clearing my third instance, I got a skill that lets me see the danger level of supernatural entities, and I can also pinpoint their location to some extent. I saw a lot of black smoke around 47, even more than around Ms. Medina. That means he's actually more dangerous than she is."
"That makes sense," Jiang Junjue said, pinching the cigarette between two fingers and exhaling a cloud of smoke. "He must be the core NPC of this instance. His standing is probably close to a demigod's, which would explain his high level of intelligence."
"...Huh?"
"My guild has systematically studied the structure of instances. The basic components are a 'core NPC with a grudge or desire,' a 'background world filled with conflict or injustice,' and a 'horrific event, abstracted and exaggerated.' Generally, there's only one core NPC; otherwise, their objectives would conflict. And since there's more than one Ms. Medina, they can't be the core."
Zhang Yiyu nodded, only half-understanding. "So, what should we do? Should we still trick 47 into testing the death traps?"
"How can you call it tricking?" Jiang Junjue put the cigarette back in his mouth and waved his flashlight around randomly. "He's not showing any dangerous traits right now, which means his core NPC side hasn't been triggered yet. Letting him wander around the instance will help us advance the plot faster..."
The flashlight beam landed in a corner, and Jiang Junjue let out a soft, "Hmm?"
In the circle of light, the pale gray wall bore several dark gray markings, too faint to make out clearly from a distance.
Holding the flashlight steady, Jiang Junjue tiptoed closer.
The markings grew sharper, resolving into lines of intricate characters. Stick-thin figures, some standing, some sitting, crawled across the withered surface like insects and beasts. The scratches—some deep, some shallow; some faint, some bold—seemed to breathe softly across the vast expanse of time, conveying a sense of warmth or chilling cold.
It was a form of writing, or rather... a language. A language that didn't belong to any linguistic family Jiang Junjue knew.
Jiang Junjue stared fixedly at the mass of indecipherable text, silently counting the seconds.
Two seconds passed. No translation popped up on the system interface.
He stared for a full five seconds more, but still no translation appeared.
"Is it not writing? Or is this information just not important?" Jiang Junjue blinked a couple of times and moved the flashlight beam elsewhere.
On the desk nearest to him, a stark white skull had appeared at some point. Its hollow, black eye sockets were fixed on him, as if scrutinizing his every move.
Jiang Junjue's hand trembled, and he nearly dropped the flashlight.
Fortunately, he was a man who had seen it all. He steadied his nerves in a mere second, saving himself from embarrassment in front of his junior.
Beside him, Zhang Yiyu suddenly let out a bloodcurdling scream, like a goose with its neck stepped on.
Jiang Junjue had just managed to calm his racing heart when the high-decibel shriek hit him. He couldn't help it—his shoulders shuddered, and the flashlight flew from his hand, clattering to the floor.
The flashlight landed at a strange angle, standing upright and bathing the classroom ceiling in a pale, white light.
Amidst large patches of water stains, countless faces—some sad, some terrified—were packed tightly together, looking as if they might drip down at any moment.
Jiang Junjue followed Zhang Yiyu's gaze and saw that on every single desk now sat a grayish-white head, facing the two of them in the center of the room, staring intently.
In the silence, their jaws began to move, and they sang in unison.
It was a song with a bizarre melody. The lyrics were incomprehensible, yet it was strangely beautiful...
...
As evening fell, the sky darkened rapidly, painting the world in a damp, gloomy, watercolor wash.
Qi Si casually tossed the note aside and followed the human face, circling around the concrete building toward a low-lying kitchen in the distance.
The school grounds were extensive. Viewed from above, one would see that nearly half the area once covered by a vast maple forest had been hollowed out, paved over with concrete, and then haphazardly dotted with buildings of varying heights.
As he walked, Qi Si observed his surroundings.
To his left was the concrete building. To his right, a wide, open field, with a few clusters of uneven hillocks visible in the distance.
On the horizon, a few dusty gray bumps were set against the darkening sky like festering pustules. They looked like graves.
"After you take me there, will you stay and cook with me?" Qi Si asked the guiding face, his hand resting on his Fate Pocket Watch.
The face turned toward him and snapped viciously, "No! Don't even think about getting me punished by Ms. Medina again!" Qi Si: "..."
It seemed the "47" he was playing had a terrible reputation, disliked by the teachers and resented by the students...
Two seconds later, Qi Si touched his face, composing his features into an expression of pure innocence. "Ms. Medina is an excellent judge of character. If she punished you, it must be because you did something wrong. How could it possibly be my fault?"
The face was taken aback by Qi Si's passive-aggressive remark. It was silent for a long moment before finally uttering, "Because you made a terrible mistake, and we all died."
"Was it collective punishment, or did my mistake trigger some kind of disaster?" Qi Si pressed.
"Because of you... it was all because of you..."
The face didn't answer his question.
It began to tremble violently, slowly turning toward the hillocks on the right.
Sorrow, fear, anger, and pain swirled together on its single face until its features blurred, resembling a great pool of water, constantly contracting and expanding.
"We all died... and were buried in the dirt..."
The face murmured, and Qi Si's head turned uncontrollably to look at the vast expanse of hills to his right.
This time, the scene there was perfectly clear, visible in every detail.
Small burial mounds lay scattered across the black earth. Broken, rotting wooden planks were stuck crookedly into the ground, serving as crude gravestones.
The numbers 1 through 50 were deeply carved into the gravestones. The mound marked "47" had been opened, revealing a black coffin in the pit.
Red and green colors flickered rapidly before his eyes, like sped-up security footage. Thousands of pedestrians in colorful clothes hurried back and forth, moving so fast that they blurred into indistinct patches of color beyond the limit of what the naked eye could capture.
A feeling of suffocation followed as the space around him instantly grew thick and viscous, as if the entire world had been folded over and over by a giant pair of hands and then compressed together.
Scenes of spring, summer, autumn, and winter were crammed into a single frame, translucent layers of color overlapping on a single sheet of paper, as if a paint palette had been suddenly overturned.
Qi Si held his breath, ready to activate the Fate Pocket Watch at any moment, but just as the pressure around him reached its peak, it began to subside.
The blurs of color speeding past on either side of his vision slowed, and the outlines of figures gradually became discernible.
Crowds of people in clothing from various eras walked around him. Qi Si felt like a boulder dropped into a river, the current flowing ceaselessly around him, unchanged through the ages.
Time ticked by, second by second. All the jumbled colors grew increasingly transparent, fading away until they vanished completely.
Qi Si still stood under the leaden gray sky on the cold concrete ground, his hand frozen on the Fate Pocket Watch.
The damp face turned its head and said, enunciating each word, "Number 47, Ms. Medina sent me to take you to the kitchen."
It seemed to have completely forgotten what had just happened, blankly repeating the same line it had said when it first met Qi Si.
The death trap had passed in a confusing blur, without him needing to use his item.
Qi Si glanced again at the distant burial mounds but ultimately suppressed his reckless, death-seeking impulse and quietly followed the guiding face.
The low-slung kitchen building drew closer, casting a deep black, monstrous shadow before him.
It too was made of concrete. Its surface was covered in filthy cracks, the fissures filled with dust like insect eggs.
The door was open, revealing a dilapidated stove and grimy utensils inside. A single glance was enough to imagine the greasy film one would feel upon touching them.
Qi Si looked down and saw several pale, bluish-white mushrooms growing tremulously in the cracked concrete by the door. They looked like the skeletal hands of the undead, struggling to reach up from below the earth, as lifeless as the rest of the school.
After leading Qi Si to the kitchen, the face melted into a puddle of water, seeped into the cracked concrete, and vanished, leaving behind only a small, slightly darker wet spot.
Qi Si waited a moment, but nothing unusual happened. He stared at the kitchen, so filthy there was hardly a place to stand, hesitated for a second, and finally stepped inside.
The stove was pushed up against a crooked wall. On it sat a rusty iron pot, the rust stains blurring into the image of a crying face, which vanished when he blinked.
Beside the pot were three small bottles filled with a viscous liquid. A dark solution bubbled inside, looking exactly like a witch's poison from a fairytale.
To the left of the stove was a large wooden barrel with a lid on it. In the corner to the right, a pile of something was covered by a black cloth, its shape impossible to discern by silhouette alone.
Qi Si lifted the black cloth in the corner.
Piles of mushrooms were growing in the corner. The large ones were the size of a human head, the small ones the size of a fist. They were either black or white, and their caps were covered in moss that looked like scar tissue.
Qi Si blinked. The scene before him rippled outwards and then settled again. When it did, the obviously poisonous mushrooms had vanished completely.
In the spot where the mushrooms had been, there was now a pile of assorted vegetables. He could just make out cabbage, potatoes, and tomatoes—all common ingredients.
Qi Si turned back to the left and lifted the lid of the wooden barrel.
His eyes were met with a dense mass of small fingers, clearly belonging to children. The muscles at the bloody stumps were still twitching. As if sensing his gaze, they all began to squirm, looking as if they might crawl out of the barrel at any second and poke out his eyes.
Qi Si blinked again.
The barrel, once filled to the brim with fingers, was now half-full of white rice.
"Of what I just saw, which was real and which was fake?"
"Were those normal ingredients disguised as a terrifying illusion by a ghost to scare players? Or were they grotesque ingredients made to look normal?"
There were too few clues for Qi Si to make an accurate judgment.
Regardless, the meal had to be made. Whether it was lethal or not, the game wouldn't just wipe out all the players.
Qi Si decided to forget the strange sights and treat the ingredients in the kitchen as ordinary food.
Then, he stared at the iron pot on the stove and fell into deep thought.
"Do I put the water in first, or the rice?"
"How am I supposed to cut the vegetables? Can I stew potatoes, tomatoes, and cabbage together?"
"Which bottle is soy sauce, and which is vinegar? Do I need to add both?"