Chang Xu dragged the skeleton he had brought down from the clock tower, making his way through the coconut grove.
His mind began to unravel their last conversation, replaying Qi Si's words from when they parted.
‘Sila’s standard configuration for a formal instance is a three-person team. That means there are two puppets left.’
‘There’ll be plenty of time to catch up on sleep when I’m dead.’
‘I’m already a target. It's anyone's guess if I'll even survive this instance.’
A dark premonition surfaced as the scenes replayed before his eyes.
Chang Xu's intuition told him something terrible was about to happen. He and Qi Si were on the edge of a cliff, clinging to a withered branch, ready to plunge into the abyss at any moment.
It was getting late. Chang Xu placed the skeleton among the trees and turned back toward the inn.
The coconut palms on either side thinned from a dense grove to sparse trees, and the view opened up before him. A two-story wooden building stood silently in the clearing.
Beneath the sallow sky, the inn was eerily still, silent as a tomb. The air was unnervingly stagnant and heavy, like the few minutes before a downpour on an overcast day.
Chang Xu strode forward.
Just as his hand was about to touch the handle, the door was pulled open from within.
The man who opened it was short. Upon seeing Chang Xu, he recoiled as if he’d encountered someone dangerous, his gaze filled with disgust and wariness.
Chang Xu’s gaze swept past the man, scanning the first-floor lobby.
Including him, there were only eight people in the lobby. Qi Si was nowhere to be seen.
Every face was grim. They stared at him, their expressions broadcasting a clear message of distrust.
Chang Xu realized at once that something involving Qi Si must have happened while he was away.
A man sneered, "Ye Linsheng is dead. Did you know?"
Chang Xu remembered 'Ye Linsheng' as the long-haired young man who was always with Lu Li.
His gaze sharpened. Before he could speak, the short man yelled, "Enough talk! Let’s get him! He's been stuck to that Si Qi since the instance began. They're probably working together!"
The players rose to their feet, grabbing their weapons and closing in, their eyes predatory.
Chang Xu’s back instinctively tensed. A faint blue light shimmered at the tips of his left fingers, slowly coalescing into a black playing card.
[Name: Fate Poker]
[Type: Skill]
[Effect: You can use it as a normal cutting weapon, or you can use it to prophesize and even rewrite the fate of others (Awaiting evolution, specific methods of operation yet to be discovered).]
[Note: Your destiny is not written within the world's threads, so you cannot receive the favor of the god of fate. Fortune is nowhere to be found, while misfortune follows you like a shadow. With the gods absent and their thrones empty, to whom can a belated believer pray?]
A dozen cards materialized, hovering around him in a protective ring. He watched the expression on each person's face, knowing in his heart that Qi Si had likely met with disaster.
A throwing knife flew at his face. Chang Xu sent a card forward, and with a flash of blue light, it sliced the knife in two.
The melee erupted. In Chang Xu’s vision, the players' forms blurred into swaths of color. The trajectories and impact points of their weapons and attacks were highlighted with red lines, crisscrossing and dissecting a space now rendered in a pale gold.
The lines varied in intensity, their color deepening or fading based on the estimated severity of the damage. His Fate Poker cards met the most lethal attacks, shattering in midair the instant they made contact.
Glimmering blue motes of light scattered like snowflakes, but the players' assault was relentless.
Chang Xu never struck back. He only sidestepped the deep crimson lines, then leaped forward, deliberately crashing into a chaotic spray of watery red.
Blood splattered, soaking into his black clothes and vanishing from sight.
He rapidly analyzed the situation and, without a sound, charged toward Lu Li, who was sitting behind the others.
"Damn it! Protect Professor Lu!"
One player realized what was happening, but it was too late.
A blue glint, trailing droplets of blood, shot toward the corner. Chang Xu stood before Lu Li, steady as a monolith, and pressed a card against his throat.
The players froze. The scene devolved into a stalemate.
Blood oozed from Chang Xu's black clothes, dripping onto the floor in a shallow ring around him, but his voice was perfectly level. "Where is Si Qi?"
Lu Li met his gaze. "What is your relationship with Si Qi?" he asked.
"He's my teammate," Chang Xu said. "I promised him I would do everything I could to get him out of this instance alive."
Lu Li smiled. "He's a puppet. He killed Ye Linsheng. Did you know?"
Qi Si is a puppet? How could that be?
In Rose Manor, he seemed completely unfamiliar with the Sila Guild, and even now, he showed no interest in their ideology...
Chang Xu remained silent.
Lu Li feigned an epiphany. "Oh, that's right. Hansen, Si Qi, and now you. That makes three puppets. We've found them all."
"I am not a puppet," Chang Xu said coldly. "But I suspect you are. You've been eager to seize a leadership role and have deliberately guided our investigation. You're the suspicious one."
"Still trying to deny it?" the short man scoffed. "You're the one who's been with Si Qi. If it isn't you, who is it?"
Without warning, bells began to toll. Overlapping waves of sound washed down from the heavens, blanketing the entire island. The bells chimed nine times, slow and deliberate.
Lu Li managed a smile, his voice taking on a solemn tone as it mingled with the tolling bells. "We shouldn't jump to conclusions. Perhaps Chang Xu was also deceived by Si Qi, making him a victim, just like the rest of us."
"The Puppet Master is skilled at performance and manipulating people. He can easily craft any persona to deceive and lay his traps. Since the puppets are under his control, they naturally inherit these abilities."
"This very situation might be part of Si Qi's plan, designed to make us suspect each other and thin our numbers."
His words were spoken with such certainty that a shadow fell over Chang Xu's expression.
He suddenly realized that he couldn't actually rule out the possibility that Qi Si was one of Sila's people.
In *Rose Manor*, Qi Si's scheme had ensnared both him and Lin Chen. He'd been skilled enough to act his part from start to finish without Chang Xu seeing through the facade.
How could he be sure that Qi Si's behavior this time wasn't also a deliberate act of deception?
Besides, in the *Flesh Eating* instance, Qi Si had indeed been the most suspicious one...
The short man asked hesitantly, "How can we tell if a living person is a puppet?"
Lu Li fiddled with his fingers and said lightly, "The puppet strings must be attached to the puppet's right pinky finger. If you cut it off and see if it turns to wood, the truth will be clear."
His voice was calm and unhurried, offering a viable solution. Compared to life and limb, a pinky finger seemed like a trivial sacrifice.
Chang Xu glanced at his own right hand. With a thought, a black card materialized and slashed downward.
A pale pinky finger rolled onto the floor. Its edges were red, but it was clearly made of flesh.
Blood gushed from the wound, dripping to the floor and covering the dried bloodstains Lu Li had left the night before.
The short man bent down to look at the finger on the floor, then offered an awkward, apologetic smile. "Chang Xu, sorry about that. We misunderstood you."
Lu Li gave a wry smile. "The Puppet Master is as skilled as ever at playing mind games. If I hadn't dealt with him before, I fear we would have harmed another one of our own."
The players offered feigned apologies and words of concern, but there was little genuine feeling behind them.
The responsibility for a group decision was a burden easily shared, leaving little for any one person to carry.
Chang Xu seemed to feel no pain from his wound. Still holding Lu Li hostage, he asked calmly, "Now, can you tell me what happened?"
Lu Li sighed. "Si Qi killed Ye Linsheng. By the time I realized what was happening, it was too late. He almost killed me, too, but thankfully, an item on Ye's body activated and restrained him... Only then did I realize he was one of Sila's puppets."
He placed a papyrus-like item on the table.
Chang Xu picked up the sheet between two fingers, his eyes scanning the system prompt that appeared on its surface.
[Name: Hammurabi's Code (Damaged)]
[Type: Item]
[Effect: After suffering a fatal attack and losing your life, there is a 10% chance to reflect the attack back to its source.]
[Note: An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.]
Probability again?
Chang Xu felt he had discovered a point of suspicion, but he couldn't connect the dots logically.
Words, their truth and falsehood indistinguishable, resurfaced in his memory.
‘In the collective decision-making of irrational individuals, the probability of wrongly killing an innocent person is over fifty percent.’
‘You might encounter a lot of things you don't understand next. I don't expect you to trust me without reservation.’
‘Brother Chang, if everyone decided I was the mastermind, would you believe them?’
The situation was undeniably strange, and Qi Si seemed to have anticipated it.
Should he trust Qi Si? Should he believe that he had been framed?
Chang Xu's mind was in turmoil. His brow furrowed. "Where is Si Qi? I want to see him."
Lu Li took a deep breath and exhaled. "On the second floor, in Ye Linsheng's room."
Having gotten the information he wanted, Chang Xu released Lu Li and quickly ascended the stairs.
He returned to his own room and reached under the pillow of Qi Si's bed. The Sea God statue was gone.
A chill settled in his heart as he followed his memory to the room Lu Li had mentioned.
The pale corpse of the long-haired young man was sprawled across the large bed, like a dead fish belly-up.
Meanwhile, the young man in the white shirt lay slumped in a corner, his body entangled in countless blood-stained threads, contorted into a bizarre posture.
Trailing a long smear of blood, Chang Xu walked past the bed and straight to the corner of the room, his gaze falling upon the body on the floor.
The young man's eyes were lifeless, his skin had the texture of wood. From head to toe, there was no trace of humanity left in him. He was, without a doubt, a puppet that had been 'dead' for some time.
Seeing is believing. All his previous doubts and struggles settled into dust. Chang Xu felt a strange sense of calm, greater than any he had ever known.
—He had been deceived. And the one who deceived him was dead.