Last night, Qi Si had asked Yuna, "At this point, I'm quite curious what your wish is. To carve out a sea domain of your very own, beyond the shores of reality, and crown yourself its queen?"
Yuna had smiled and signed, "That was their wish."
The slaves believed fervently in the existence of a Sea God. In their despair, they leaped into the ocean, like antelope flinging themselves from a cliff.
They used their lives as a sacrifice, their collective consciousness constructing an eternal, unending dream that sealed off the entire sea route to that foreign land.
It was as if by doing so, their people would never have to leave their homes again; as if by doing so, they could forever avoid that continent that filled them with such dread...
But reality defied their wishes. The existence of this "Bermuda Triangle" did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm for the "Triangle Trade." Profit-driven merchants simply charted new routes, all to continue their pursuit of power and gold.
"A foolish and naive idea," Qi Si commented with a laugh. "Trying to fight human greed with escapism and retreat. Their so-called sacrifice was nothing more than a useless, self-indulgent gesture."
Yuna lowered her eyes, the smile on her lips deepening. "It wasn't entirely useless."
A series of bizarre, fleeting images coalesced into a coherent scene, visions of the past unfolding with stark clarity.
Yellowish-green wastewater flooded the streets. A stench of rotten vegetables and mutton fat permeated the houses. On the shore, dead fish with pale, upturned bellies often washed ashore, and it wasn't long before these less-than-fresh carcasses were sent to the fishmonger's stalls.
A girl born in such a town was mute from birth, with hideous fish scales growing on her throat.
People called her a devil, said her condition was a curse. Some demanded she be burned as a witch, but the red-robed, red-eyed bishop never gave his approval.
The town depended on the sea for its livelihood. The townspeople often went out to fish and trade, and the girl frequently sailed with her parents on their boat.
One day, the girl's parents pulled a strange corpse from the sea.
Horrified by the corpse's appearance, her parents quickly threw it back into the water. The girl, however, as if guided by some unseen force, took the divine idol from the body and secretly kept it.
After the idol returned to the town with the girl, all the townspeople began to hear the whispers of an evil god and dream of a strange sea.
They didn't know the source of the change and attributed it to the girl's curse.
They had stumbled upon the truth by accident, but the girl didn't care. The world had never shown her kindness, so she saw no reason to show it any quarter.
As long as the townspeople couldn't kill her, she would do whatever it took to further her own interests.
She began to devotedly worship the strange idol, probing the voice of the sea, seeking its deeper secrets. She wanted to escape the town that bound her and finally take control of her own destiny.
Then one day, the girl received a sign from the Sea God.
The identity card of the Scarlet High Priest delivered a revelation in her dream. The god spoke: "Offer the storm enough sacrifices, and I shall grant you what you seek."
And so, the girl used her beauty to board a foreign vessel, traveling with the slaves to a distant continent...
Yuna's memories came to an abrupt end there.
Qi Si's tone was a mixture of a sigh and admiration. "You used their lives to prove your worth as a follower of the Sea God, gaining the eternal existence you craved in this sea, free from torment and discrimination. The lamb waiting for slaughter transformed into the one wielding the knife... Are you saying that through your deliberate exploitation, they finally served a purpose?"
Yuna nodded, signing a cryptic phrase: "Lost and desperate lambs need a god to guide them, even if that god is nothing but a vicious lie."
Qi Si fell silent for a long time. Then, as if he had finally understood a grim joke, he burst into a fit of crazed laughter, laughing until tears streamed down his face.
...
Angela wasn't a member of the Sila Guild. By process of elimination, the answer was obvious.
Under the jaundiced sky, a faint smile played on Qi Si's lips as he walked alone toward the inn.
The two-story wooden building was saturated with damp air. The salty, fishy smell was so tangible it felt like a layer of salt crystals coating its surface. Against the sallow sky, the brown structure was inconspicuous, looking as if it might merge with the background and vanish at any moment.
With a strange sense of solemnity and gravity, Qi Si paused before the inn's entrance, then pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The other players had not yet returned. Only Lu Li, with his injured leg, remained on watch in the main hall.
He sat in the shadows, holding a black-covered book. His fingers held a page, and he flipped through it quietly, as if simply enjoying a leisurely holiday afternoon.
Qi Si watched him in silence.
Lu Li looked up and smiled faintly. "Time is precious, even in the Weird Game. It shouldn't be wasted. When you don't know what to do, reading is always a safe bet."
His voice was casual and relaxed, as if he were merely chatting with an old friend after a long separation.
Qi Si walked over and stopped just half a pace from him, asking with interest, "Is that book any good?" Lu Li closed the book and held up the cover.
The cover was not entirely black; in the upper right corner was an exquisitely strange oil painting.
The stark white corpse of a half-naked woman lay on a dissecting table, flanked by a gray-black skeletal Grim Reaper and a tall, gaunt horse.
"*The Demon of Dartmoor*," Lu Li said. "A very interesting story. A legendary demon pushes an innocent maiden off a sea cliff. Its core themes are surprisingly similar to the horror legend behind this instance, aren't they?"
"Beauty and ugliness, good and evil, the brutality of human nature, the folly of the masses—these elements combine to form timeless literary motifs. And until you reach the very end, you never know who the true culprit is, or who will come out on top."
Qi Si laughed. "It's just a boring story that plays with narrative tricks."
Lu Li wasn't angered by the comment.
He reopened the book, his voice as calm and still as a deep pool. "Many simple answers and straightforward events, when touched by a novelist's skilled hand, can take on unprecedented complexity and artistic beauty. The moment we open the pages and immerse ourselves in the story, we are all trapped within its confines. How, then, could we possibly see the ending?"
Qi Si caught the hidden meaning and let out a laugh.
After a moment, he began ticking off the points on his fingers, recounting the events since they entered the instance. "Day one, you were the first to propose cooperation, intending to seize the leadership role."
"But you knew that veteran players aren't as naive as newcomers; they wouldn't trust you completely after just a few words. So, you had Hansen raise objections, then had Ye Linsheng step up to defend you. The three of you staged a whole performance to effectively distract everyone else, making us subconsciously overlook the suspicions surrounding you."
"After that, you conveniently produced the Kyushu Guild's badge, placing yourself on the moral high ground and establishing a 'righteous and friendly' persona. Then, you had Ye Linsheng reveal your so-called real-world identity, completely dispelling the other players' suspicions and reaping their trust."
Qi Si let out a soft breath and gave a self-deprecating smile. "Even I was almost fooled. Although the first day's events followed the logic of a play almost perfectly, filled with the artificiality of a deliberate performance, who would have thought two people would be willing to sacrifice themselves to act out their parts so seamlessly and passionately?"
Lu Li tilted his head back to meet Qi Si's eyes, his gaze behind the lenses dark and unreadable.
Qi Si continued, "Day two, you cast yourself as the victim, playing a self-injury ploy to further deepen the others' trust in you and simultaneously arouse my suspicions about Angela. At the same time, you planted the existence of a 'Sila Guild member' as a hidden clue, setting the stage to introduce the 'Puppet Master' this morning."
"You used Akeso's Blessing, a life-saving item with only a ten percent success rate, to create a fog of pseudo-randomness, obscuring the traces of your scheme. Any normal person would assume that even if a strategist's plan involved a gamble, they would never pin their hopes on such low odds. They'd just think your injury was an unlucky coincidence."
"And that's when the information about the 'Puppet Master' became the key. Once the premise was established—that three people were being completely controlled by a single, rational mind—all the inconsistencies were resolved. You are all puppets, which is why two of you could be sacrificed without hesitation, all to establish the authority of one."
"Probability can be fixed. Increasing the success rate might be difficult, but reducing it to zero is easy. You just needed your accomplice to injure your leg, then take out a long-since-deactivated Akeso's Blessing and claim it saved your life. With the other players' trust already secured, no one would question your story."
Lu Li set down his book and adjusted his gold-rimmed glasses. "In that case, why don't you guess what I'm truly trying to accomplish by going to all this trouble."
Qi Si pulled a chair over, placing it opposite Lu Li, and leaned back into it, his right hand resting loosely on his knee. "There are too few clues for me to deduce your ultimate goal, but I know you've had your eyes on me ever since Chang Xu and I formed an alliance."
"An alliance of two among fifteen people isn't worth so much attention. I'm inclined to believe that either I or Chang Xu has some quality you're interested in. At first, I thought your target was me, but now it seems I was flattering myself."
"My guess is, you want to control me in order to manipulate Chang Xu into doing certain things. I also know that you must have investigated Chang Xu beforehand, or at least know a fair bit about him."
At this, Qi Si shook his head with a resigned air. "I shouldn't have gotten so close to that idiot who live-streams everything... A guy like that is bound to be analyzed inside and out. He might as well die early, before he gets his teammates killed."
"You're half right, and you seem quite confident." Lu Li sat calmly in his chair, his gaze gentle, like a teacher patiently answering a student's questions. "But have you ever considered that I've already successfully manipulated you?"
"You thought you could only be infested by the puppet threads by touching a puppet's corpse, didn't you?"
A shadow fell over him from behind, silent and sudden. Qi Si tilted his head slightly, catching the long-haired young man named Ye Linsheng in his peripheral vision.
The young man's eyes were vacant, his lips trembling slightly as if he were muttering some incantation.
Qi Si felt a sharp, needle-like pain in his right pinky finger, a jolt that shot straight to the bone.
He raised an eyebrow. "In the dream two nights ago, you were lucid but pretended to be disoriented and grabbed my hand. That's when you planted the puppet thread, wasn't it?"
"A good guess, but it's too late." Lu Li smiled gently and snapped his fingers.
Qi Si suddenly felt as if a hand had clamped around his throat, and he couldn't utter a single sound.
His body was no longer his own. His joints, his muscles, even his thoughts became as stiff and unresponsive as long-unoiled machinery, failing to connect with his nerves.
He remained seated, frozen in his chair like a statue, and looked up to see Lu Li standing.
The young man in the gold-rimmed glasses leaned over, casting a long, thin shadow as he placed the book in Qi Si's lap.
He smiled strangely, then let out a soft sigh. "I'm very sorry, but I have no other choice."
I was really nervous when I wrote this part of the story. I probably won't dare to check the comments for the next couple of days... I'm out of here.