“That script is long dead. It's likely no one can read it anymore, save for the ghosts of the indigenous people themselves.”
Inside the Indigenous Victims Memorial Hall, a female guide dressed in black raised a small red flag, gesturing toward a massive concrete wall etched with peculiar symbols.
Only then did Chang Xu realize that the chaotic, otherworldly scrawls were, in fact, a form of writing.
The guide turned, a warm smile on her face as she addressed the two players following her. “Your tour application mentioned that you wish to study the surviving indigenous documents. I'm afraid I have to pour some cold water on that idea—no one can understand a word of what's written.”
So, the players were here to read ancient texts...
Chang Xu listened absently, his gaze once again drifting toward the memorial portrait of Qi Si on the wall.
Qi Si was in this instance, too. Though Chang Xu didn't know whether he was dead or alive, that fact alone was enough to put him on high alert.
The sensation of being impaled by the Poseidon's Scepter was impossible to forget—a feeling of being pulverized from the inside out, of his very being disintegrating into dust from the point of impact.
Back then, on the verge of death, he had awoken from the dreamscape of the Hopeless Sea to find himself submerged in the ocean. There was no wound on his chest, yet the phantom pain remained excruciatingly real.
He had struggled just to stay afloat, craning his neck to gasp for air while forcing himself to watch the instance's conclusion. It wasn't until the three minutes were up and he was transported out that he finally succumbed to unconsciousness.
He had barely escaped with his life. Rationally, he knew the old adage—don't hate the tool, hate the one who wields it—but emotionally, Chang Xu simply couldn't view Qi Si with any semblance of calm.
Besides, he had replayed the end of the Hopeless Sea instance in his mind several times, arriving at conclusions much like those of the Weird Investigation Bureau:
First, the Poseidon's Scepter was extremely dangerous. While it hadn't fallen into the hands of the Sila Guild, having it in Qi Si's possession was just as unsettling.
The details surrounding Qi Si's escape from the Puppet Master's control were suspect. It was impossible to rule out the chance that Liu Yuhan, the one who broke the news, had been turned.
Second, Qi Si showed a propensity for becoming a "slaughter-stream" player. Though there was no concrete evidence, he couldn't be trusted.
Chang Xu's habit was to eliminate any potential threats to his life, and his intuition screamed that Qi Si was an immense one.
But without direct evidence, he couldn't bring himself to act against someone who might be innocent.
Besides, could the Bureau's word truly be trusted? By what standard was good and evil even judged?
He had requested to turn off his live stream for future instances, arguing it could expose his capabilities, but the Bureau had denied his application.
They had never trusted him. From the very beginning, they were watching his every move...
To avoid tipping his hand, he had no choice but to feign ignorance.
The entire world felt like a glob of green, viscous slime woven from lies, encasing him completely.
He could trust no one but himself...
Without warning, a low, narrative voice echoed in his mind:
[Your family has long been plagued by “Insomnia,” with generations trapped in the torment of sleeplessness.]
[You've recently learned that this affliction stems from the curse of an evil god worshipped by the indigenous people, and the witchcraft to break this curse is known only to them.]
[The indigenous culture has been severed, but fortunately, some of their documents survived the disaster and are preserved in the memorial hall.]
[Your task is to decipher the information in these documents to find clues that will free your family from this affliction.]
Simultaneously, two lines of silver text materialized on his system interface:
[Main Quest Updated]
[Main Quest: Decipher the documents in the memorial hall]
"Decipher"... Does that mean I not only have to understand them but also read them aloud?
Chang Xu snapped back to the present, forcing his attention onto the instance.
Thanks to a certain teammate, he knew a fair bit about linguistics. He understood that learning a new language from scratch was no simple feat, and deciphering a dead one was a near-impossible task.
Besides, the task felt completely out of sync with the usual tone of the Weird Game...
Say Dream, evidently noticing the peculiarity as well, smiled at the guide. "Ms. Medina, we can worry about the documents later. We were just trying our luck, really. For now, could you just give us a brief tour of the memorial? We'll be here for several days, and we wouldn't want to trouble you for a guide every single time."
The guide nodded with a smile and led them toward a hall where skulls were displayed in glass cases. "According to indigenous custom," she began, her voice sweet, "the heads of the dead were made into ornaments and carried with them. The soul, sealed within, would impart wisdom to future generations. These are the skulls of some of the children who died here at Red Maple Boarding School. Legend says they could once sing and speak..."
...
Red Maple Boarding School. Third floor, Dormitory 10.
Qi Si stored anything suspicious in his inventory, then lay down on his bed at exactly a quarter past three, closing his eyes and feigning sleep.
About fifteen minutes later, Chen Lidong returned, looking disheveled and defeated. Hearing Qi Si's deep, even breathing, he suspected nothing and quietly climbed onto the top bunk.
At four o'clock on the dot, the white beam of a flashlight cut through the darkness from down the hall. The door slid open, and the light swept across Qi Si's face, completing the nightly room check.
At precisely six, a piercing bell rang out as if in a frenzy, heralding the dawn of a new day.
Ms. Medina's shrill voice exploded down the corridor. "Get up, all of you! Don't you dare bring your lazy habits into my school! If you break the rules again today, I won't be as lenient as I was yesterday!"
They didn't need her to remind them. This was a matter of life and death, something no one would cast aside. The players scrambled out of bed, hurried from their rooms, and gathered in the corridor, not daring to delay.
Qi Si stood beside Ms. Medina, basking in her borrowed authority, and surveyed the listless group.
He noted the dark circles under all the male players' eyes; they had clearly been awake all night. The female players, by contrast, seemed much better off. Aside from Zhang Yiyu, who was stifling a drowsy yawn, the rest looked reasonably alert.
It seemed the "Insomnia" had, for now, only spread among the men, most likely transmitted during last night's showers.
But it was only a matter of time before everyone became infected.
Even if the female players tried to take precautions, Qi Si would find a way to slip the bacteria into their meals.
The bacteria... Qi Si was suddenly reminded of the poisonous mushrooms he'd collected from the kitchen entrance last night.
He had nearly forgotten about them entirely. The fact that he was only recalling them now was deeply unsettling.
But where had he put them?
With everyone watching, Qi Si couldn't exactly pull his backpack out of his inventory and start rummaging through it.
Trying to recall them from memory yielded nothing, as if that specific recollection had been forcibly scooped out of his brain.
The signs of forgetting were becoming more apparent with each passing moment. For now, it was just minor details, but once his memory of crucial clues began to fade, solving the instance's mysteries would become exponentially harder...
Ms. Medina slowly surveyed the group. "Your performance just now was satisfactory. It seems there are no lazybones among you who like to lie in bed. That's good. You've already fallen behind. From now on, I expect you to diligently study our superior culture."
Qi Si noticed her gaze lingered a little longer on the players with dark circles, as if she were trying to read something in their expressions.
After scanning every face, Ms. Medina's voice suddenly sharpened. "Which one of you was awake last night and went to the archives?"
Hearing the first part of her question, half the players' hearts leaped into their throats. But as she finished, most of them breathed a collective sigh of relief.
They had all gone to the office, and it seemed they had covered their tracks well enough not to be discovered by Ms. Medina.
They wondered which unlucky soul had gone to the archives, and how they could have been so clumsy as to leave traces for Ms. Medina to find.
The players were still unaware that Qi Si had set fire to the books in the archives and framed a player named Yamakawa Nobuhiro. Some stared straight ahead, feigning ignorance, while others darted cautious glances at their companions, their expressions a mixture of pity and morbid curiosity.
Qi Si's expression remained unchanged. He kept his head slightly bowed and his eyes downcast, the very picture of innocence.
After half a minute of silence, Ms. Medina moved. Her footsteps echoed—*tap, tap, tap*—as she walked toward Qi Si, closing in step by step like a cat stalking a mouse. In the dead silence, broken only by breathing and her approaching steps, Qi Si let his consciousness brush against the icon for the Fate Pocket Watch in his inventory, ready to activate it at a moment's notice.
The few seconds stretched into an eternity. But then, the woman brushed past him and stopped in front of Zhang Yiyu. She placed a wrinkled hand on the girl's shoulder and asked, enunciating each word, "Did you go to the archives last night?"
Zhang Yiyu knew she was a terrible actor and guessed her expression must have given her away.
She had been clinging to a sliver of unrealistic hope, but the moment Ms. Medina stood before her, the blood ran cold in her veins. Her mouth moved on its own. "Yes," she heard herself say. "I went to the archives last night."
Ms. Medina studied the girl's face coldly for a moment, then suddenly grew agitated, muttering under her breath, "Not you... it wasn't you. Number 16, you're a good child..."
Before the bewildered eyes of the other players, she abandoned Zhang Yiyu, turned toward the stairwell, and vanished around the grim, cold corner.
She left only a single command hanging in the air: "Number 47, get to the kitchen and prepare breakfast. The rest of you, go to the dining hall. You will read and recite your lessons until eight o'clock. We eat at eight sharp."
Qi Si glanced back at the petrified Zhang Yiyu, catching the sight of her throat working as she swallowed. A clear sign of hunger.
It felt like a deliberate turning point engineered by the instance—a stone tossed into a placid lake, designed to create splashes and ripples...
Qi Si slipped through the crowd without a word and hurried down to the first floor.
He didn't head straight for the kitchen. Instead, he made his way to a corner to the left of the main entrance.
There, on the dusty wall, hung a calendar. The date read: June 2, 1869.
According to the note he'd found, yesterday was June 1st, which made today, logically, June 2nd.
The records would be destroyed on June 3rd. The players were running out of time.
What bothered Qi Si was that it was completely out of character for him to have missed this spot during his initial sweep. Yet he was only now learning the exact date—
There was only one possibility: he had found this information before, and then forgotten it.
And it seemed he had anticipated this forgetting, which was why he'd recorded the information on paper beforehand.
But how could he have known?
Qi Si lowered his head, his eyes scanning every corner of the room.
Everywhere he looked, small notes were stuck to the surfaces of objects, each bearing a word in black ink: *door, wall, floor, calendar, table...*
Someone had once forgotten the names for everything and used exhaustive labels to combat their amnesia. But once the meanings of the words themselves were lost, the memories they propped up would vanish forever...
He couldn't possibly have missed these details on the first day. The only explanation was that he *had* noticed them, and then, irreversibly, forgotten.
Qi Si's breathing grew ragged. He couldn't tell if it was out of fear for the doom that awaited him, or a grim sense of schadenfreude for the victims who had already suffered this fate.
He took a pen from his backpack and wrote a single word on his palm: "Forgetting."
Next, he took out a fresh sheet of paper and wrote a sentence on it, mouthing the words silently as he did: "I wish to form a contract with myself. For the duration of this instance, I will discreetly record any and all information and details regarding the people, events, and objects I encounter."
Golden vines swayed in the dark, somber palace of his mind, weaving themselves into words.
[Contract signed. This contract is guaranteed by the rules of the world. No entity may defy it.]
Qi Si put away the paper and pen and shouldered his backpack once more.
A short while later, the rest of the players trooped down to the first floor behind Ms. Medina, a large procession turning into the dining hall.
Listening to the shuffle of their footsteps, Qi Si didn't look back, instead following the route to the kitchen from memory.
The sky was now bright. In the distance, the maple forest and the graves on the hill were clearly visible. The vast, dense swathes of green, rather than feeling vibrant, were suffocating.
In the broken crevices of the concrete by the kitchen door, the mushrooms Qi Si had picked only yesterday had already grown back, sprouting precariously. Overnight, they had reached the length of his hand, their pale, greenish-white caps staring up at him like dead eyes.
Qi Si stared back at the cluster of mushrooms.
The records had stated that when a victim of Insomnia died, the bacteria would sprout into mushrooms on the spot where they fell.
Which meant someone had died right here, by the kitchen. A victim of the disease.
The records indicated that sick children were isolated in the confinement room. Even if they died from the illness, it would have been in there. So what had happened here?
Was a child let out to cook? Or... perhaps the victim didn't die from the disease at all, but was killed before the quarantine began?
An image began to form on the surface of the clustered mushrooms. A human face slowly took shape, gaining volume and form until it coalesced into a ghostly apparition before his eyes.
A man with a blurred face was yanking a young, brown-skinned girl by the hair, slamming her head against the wall again and again.
The girl screamed, crying out in a language Qi Si didn't understand. She struggled with all her might, but the man held her fast, like a cruel child pinning down a turtle.
Blood bloomed from the crown of her head, quickly streaming down her face. Her struggles grew faint, her limbs went limp, and then she was still.
Only then did the man release her, as if his work was not yet done. He turned and began to pull at the girl's trousers...
Qi Si: "..."
Human predilections are hardly universal. He was suddenly beginning to understand how certain viruses managed to propagate.
Thankfully, the sickening vision didn't last long. It flickered for a mere two seconds before shattering into dust and settling back onto the surface of the mushrooms.
Witnessing such a thing first thing in the morning had successfully ruined Qi Si's appetite.
He entered the kitchen, his face a blank mask. With the ease of practice, he scrubbed the pot and set water to boil, then pulled out his backpack from his inventory and began to rummage through it.
The poisonous mushrooms he'd gathered earlier were at the bottom of his pack, and he found them after a moment of searching.
He tossed them straight into the pot, mashing them to bits with a spatula.
Since he was already infected with Insomnia, he might as well break the bystander effect by dragging everyone else down with him. If he was going down, they were all going down together.
Only then would the players unite and be motivated to act.
Having deftly completed the act of poisoning, Qi Si felt not a shred of guilt. In fact, he felt he'd made a significant contribution to boosting his temporary teammates' motivation to clear the instance.
He calmly strolled over to the corner on the right and lowered his gaze.
Just like yesterday, the spot was crowded with mushrooms of all sizes. He blinked, and they transformed into a pile of tomatoes, potatoes, and other vegetables.
In the tropical heat, the vegetables were no longer fresh after a day, and a faint odor of rot hung in the air.
Qi Si grabbed a few vegetables that still looked edible and tossed them into the large pot. Then, a question suddenly struck him—
The true form of these vegetables was unquestionably the mushrooms. Everyone had finished their meals yesterday, so why hadn't some of them been infected right away?
The files had stated unequivocally that the mushrooms contained the bacteria, and there was no reason to doubt them.
Which meant there was only one other possibility...
Qi Si narrowed his eyes. "The mushrooms in the kitchen are a symbol, a clue. The food the children were forced to eat was what contained the bacteria. This was likely a premeditated poisoning."
"And since the players are experiencing an illusion, their susceptibility to the illness and its severity are influenced by their state in reality, not by what happens within the illusion itself."
"But what, exactly, constitutes 'reality' in this instance? That concrete room where I was confined, where all the players gathered?"