When he was studying in school, Sun Hao always sat in the very last row. He had poor grades and wasn’t athletic; the good students didn’t include him, and the “bad students” didn’t either. During physical education class when they played basketball, he was never once put on the court he was completely invisible in everyone’s eyes.
There was never anything commendable about him, yet he had never grown accustomed to being ignored.
He loved reading novels, especially plots where underdog male leads were bullied before suddenly having an outburst and slapping everyone across the face.
It seemed as though the male protagonist in the novels was none other than himself. He firmly believed he possessed undiscovered talents, desperately wishing someone would scoff at him so he could immediately shout out, “Do not bully a young man into poverty!”
He always carried a bottled-up urge to make a stunning debut. When he first arrived here, fear had knocked him down, but once he grew accustomed to it, that drive bubbled back up to the surface.
Xian Chengyue’s indifference, Su Yan’s ignoring of him, and Lin Min’s questions devoid of any real concern were like daggers thrust straight into his heart.
He had to do something! Make everyone look at him with newfound respect! Make them regret it!
Yet right now.
Sun Hao’s legs were trembling; he couldn’t even smell the reek of urine emanating from his own lower half.
The villagers, who had been chattering endlessly just moments before, stared straight at him without even blinking.
There was no light in the villagers’ eyes, and the color rapidly drained from their faces, transforming them from “humans” into “ghosts.”
“What did you say?!” The villagers suddenly roared back in a fury.
Sun Hao watched as the villager standing closest to him abruptly flushed beet red, veins bulging violently on his forehead as his thin arms suddenly morphed with strange muscles, covered from top to bottom in dense, writhing cord-like veins resembling earthworms.
“Who would hide chickens!”
“You city folk just look down on us, don’t you?!”
“Kill him!”
“Kill him!”
Sun Hao’s feet felt as though they had been nailed to the ground; he couldn’t move his legs. Forget running, he couldn’t even manage a step.
The hoes in the villagers’ hands were raised high, catching a cold gleam despite the overcast sky.
Sun Hao slumped backward onto the ground, twisting his body in a desperate attempt to crawl away.
“Your hoe is too blunt! The head didn’t come off.”
“The bone didn’t even snap in two, he’s still breathing. Try my blade.”
Sun Hao wasn’t dead yet. With wide eyes, he felt a dull pain in his neck—a pain so intense that it made him feel as though his head and body had already parted ways. Staring with a fixed gaze straight ahead, toward the direction of the courtyard.
He shouldn’t have come out. He was just about to enter his junior year of college, he still had plenty of time, he hadn’t achieved his stunning debut yet, he…
“Your blade’s good, the bone snapped clean through.”
“Just clinging on by a sliver of skin.”
The villagers stared down at Sun Hao’s corpse, then stepped over it with cheerful smiles. The bit of skin that had originally kept the head attached to the neck was severed entirely as the villagers’ footsteps rolled Sun Hao’s head tumbling forward all the way down the path.
Sun Hao did not return to the courtyard before the sun went down that day.
“Did something happen?” Lin Min kept looking outward, but Sun Hao never showed up.
Her hands were tightly clenched together in nervous anticipation, staring unblinkingly at every single figure that appeared outside the courtyard gate.
She didn’t like Sun Hao because he had a terrible temper and threw tantrums even under these circumstances.
Yet she didn’t want anything bad to happen to him either. After all, they lived in the same room, had spoken to each other, and had both ended up in this inexplicable place by pure coincidence.
Until Liang Shu and the others carefully carried in a plate of mung bean pastries, until the final thread of daylight vanished entirely, Sun Hao still hadn’t returned.
Lin Min cowered in the corner, weeping into her hands in terror.
Crying herself out didn’t bring sleep; keeping her eyes wide open, tears spilled endlessly down her face, sinking silently into the pillow.
Once Lin Min finally drifted off to sleep, Xian Chengyue quietly slipped out of the room. This time, Su Yan didn’t sneakily tail behind him, following openly right in Xian Chengyue’s footsteps instead. Once they cleared the courtyard, Su Yan asked: “Xian-ge, do you think Sun Hao is dead?”
Xian Chengyue didn’t halt his pace, nor did he turn his head, his voice devoid of any fluctuation: “Who is Sun Hao?”
Su Yan: “…”
Su Yan’s voice trembled slightly, sounding as though he wanted to laugh or cry, but forcefully holding it back: “The guy who shared our room, the one who didn’t go out with us yesterday.”
Xian Chengyue: “Dead.”
Su Yan sighed, saying regretfully: “He was still so young, what a pity.”
Xian Chengyue couldn’t be bothered to listen to Su Yan voice his reflections Su Yan always had a mountain of reflections to voice, pitying this person and sympathizing with that one. Having listened to it all day long, Xian Chengyue found himself desperately wondering why on earth such a chatterbox as Su Yan existed in this world.
Yet he never once interrupted Su Yan’s speech.
While mentally shielding himself against Su Yan’s endless nagging, Xian Chengyue simultaneously analyzed his own mindset.
He analyzed all the way up to the mountainside without reaching a conclusion, ultimately deciding that Su Yan was simply too pathetic, and his own heart was far too soft.
Thinking of this, the corners of his mouth twitched upward in a faint smirk.
He considered himself a good person, albeit with strictly limited goodness.
“Xian-ge?” Su Yan failed to realize that Xian Chengyue hadn’t been listening to him at all after all, Xian Chengyue wore the exact same expression whether he listened or not.
Xian Chengyue: “Mhm?”
Su Yan’s foot suddenly caught on a rock, nearly causing him to trip. Re-stabilizing himself, he noticed that Xian Chengyue had pulled ahead by a large margin once more, prompting him to hurry forward and resume his previous question: “Xian-ge, will the sacrifice be dangerous?”
“I keep having this feeling that the sacrifice is going to be the real headache.” The moonlight was too dim, forcing Su Yan to pay close attention to the terrain as he spoke. The narrow path beaten out by humans and wild animals had no guardrails on either side. Once you climbed to the mountainside, a momentary lapse in attention could send you tumbling down into the grassy slope beside the trail. Below lay a steep drop; even if you didn’t die from the fall, you’d surely break a leg.
Xian Chengyue replied with cold detachment: “It’ll be more of a headache than you think.”
Su Yan: “How do you know, Xian-ge? Zhao-ge told me earlier that instances with lots of newbies are usually simpler.”
Xian Chengyue: “Any instance with me in it is never simple.”
Su Yan froze: “Xian-ge, don’t blame yourself.”
Xian Chengyue frowned slightly, failing to understand why Su Yan’s stream of consciousness leapt so far: “Blame myself?”
Su Yan played the role of the ultimate, pure “white lotus” anyway, it was pitch dark, and since it was just the two of them, there was no shame in it: “It’s solely because Xian-ge you’re here that the task got harder. But originally we had no choice, and Xian-ge, you didn’t have a choice either.”
He was exceptionally understanding.
He had never been this understanding in his entire life.
Xian Chengyue: “Mhm, you’re right.”
Entering this place, compassion and guilt had nothing to do with him anymore.
He had only a single goal: to walk out alive. He didn’t harm others, but he wouldn’t help them either.
How other people fared, and whether they could walk out alive, he didn’t care in the slightest.
“The chickens were indeed hidden away,” Xian Chengyue stated abruptly. His gaze rested upon the mountain peak; looking from here, a mud-brick cabin was faintly visible on the mountain, though obscured by dense shadows and dim moonlight, it remained somewhat indistinct.
Su Yan: “NPCs will mess with the quest like that?”
Xian Chengyue: “They’re people too, they just drew a different task from ours.”
The remark ended there, yet it sent a sudden wave of cold sweat prickling across Su Yan’s skin.
Those villagers and the village chief were they people?
Living people, or people who had died here?
When they reached the mountain peak, that mud-brick cabin finally revealed its true appearance it was even more dilapidated than the houses in the village. Aside from the village chief’s residence, which boasted grey bricks and tiled roofs in Baijiatun, almost all the other houses were primitive mud-brick huts with broken tiles for roofs.
As for this cabin on the mountain peak, the roof didn’t even have broken tiles just ordinary thatch.
The poverty here left Su Yan astounded.
Xian Chengyue walked up to the front door of the mud-brick cabin and gently pushed the wooden door open by a crack.
Then he stepped back, signaling for Su Yan to look inside.
Su Yan peered in with one eye. Inside sat wooden cages a dozen or so wooden cages arranged within, and trapped inside those cages were chickens!
“Xian-ge…” Su Yan instinctively lowered his voice.
Xian Chengyue: “Now that we know, let’s go.”
Su Yan’s voice remained very low: “Aren’t we going to catch one and take it with us?”
Xian Chengyue shook his head: “No need, just come back the day before the sacrifice.”
Su Yan didn’t know what Xian Chengyue was planning, nor could he guess it; but whatever Xian Chengyue said, he’d just follow along he’d figure it out eventually.
A smile curved the corners of his mouth, though the night was too deep for the person walking ahead to see.
When they returned to the courtyard, Xian Chengyue hung his shirt outside as usual.
Su Yan tossed and turned in bed his head was entirely filled with the realization that Xian Chengyue hadn’t changed his underwear in several days. Someone as fastidiously particular as Xian Chengyue must be feeling so uncomfortable he wanted to cry right now, right?
Thinking about it this way, Su Yan couldn’t help finding it amusing, completely forgetting that his own underwear hadn’t been changed in days either.
Dawn arrived amidst a piercing shriek.
The moment that scream rang out, the split second Su Yan opened his eyes, he saw Xian Chengyue had already left the room.
The morning light was chilly, with a lingering mist hanging over the mountains.
Liang Shu stood with disheveled hair, running out of the courtyard with a look of shock and fury. Ignoring Xian Chengyue entirely, she shouted tearfully right in the middle of the courtyard: “Who was it?! Who took the mung bean pastries?! Have you no shame?!”
“Have you no shame at all! We ground soybeans for three days! Three days! My hands are bleeding!”
The other occupants of Liang Shu’s room ran out as well, joining her in cursing aloud.
Yet their shouting gradually grew softer and softer.
Until they finally couldn’t help breaking down into loud, sobbing cries.
“I’m begging you! That’s our group’s task item, taking it is useless to you!”
“Give it back to us, whatever you want us to do, we’ll go find it for you!”
Even the two boys in their group were crying while pleading.
Xian Chengyue stood by the doorway, watching the occupants of the other rooms emerge.
Chen Wei, who had just woken up and hadn’t finished dressing yet, buttoned his shirt as he walked over to stand beside Xian Chengyue: “Xian-ge, this is?”
Xian Chengyue: “Someone got impatient.”
Chen Wei’s expression grew solemn: “This trick is utterly disgusting.”
Using another group’s task objective to turn in for completion wasn’t strictly forbidden; if you were lucky you cleared it, and if you were unlucky and failed, you wouldn’t be penalized either.
Few people resorted to this. Even upon entering the inner world, human nature couldn’t be snuffed out overnight, and such bottom-feeder, backstabbing actions were avoided by the vast majority once someone opened Pandora’s box in a given instance, others would inevitably emulate it, and by then nobody would know if they’d be next to draw bad luck.
Only veterans would pull something like this.
And veterans who had cleared a substantial number of trials at that.
“You can go outside at night,” Xian Chengyue told Chen Wei. “Water is the medium, but it’s also the prerequisite.”
Chen Wei widened his eyes, nodding eagerly: “I remember, thank you Xian-ge.”
“The village chief has wine,” Chen Wei whispered. “We took turns walking through the village during meal times and confirmed the village chief definitely has fermented glutinous rice mash at least. Glutinous rice mash counts as wine.”
Only then did Xian Chengyue spare Chen Wei an extra glance.
Looking somewhat embarrassed, Chen Wei lowered his head with a smile: “Xian-ge, I know. I have to use my own brain; I can’t rely on you forever.”
“As long as you keep your head on straight.”
Su Yan stood off to the side with his arms crossed, grinding his back molars.
What kind of self-reliance act was this manipulative green tea putting on?
He managed to extract the most crucial piece of intelligence straight from Xian Chengyue—otherwise, would he ever have stumbled upon a chance for self-reliance?
Amidst the sound of Liang Shu and her roommates’ weeping, Su Yan had eyes only for Xian Chengyue, and the Chen Wei standing right beside him.
After taking his very first step, Su Yan realized he was only on the first floor, while Chen Wei was already up on the fifth.