Chapter 94: Hopeless Sea (18) Role

When Chang Xu opened his eyes, the bell of the Clock Tower in the distance struck the fourth chime.

He sat up straight from the bed, his whole body feeling as if it had fallen apart, his waist and back suspiciously aching, just as if he had sat stiffly on a hard bench all night.

Feeling puzzled, he tilted his head slightly and saw Qi Si sitting on the bed next to him, head lowered, fiddling with the watch on his left wrist.

There were also a man and a woman standing awkwardly to the side; it was none other than Zhang Hongfeng and Liu Yuhan.

For a moment, Chang Xu thought he was still dreaming; otherwise, why would he see this scene of people gathering around to watch the moment he opened his eyes?

Maintaining his composure, he turned his head to look at Qi Si: “What happened last night? What did you do?”

The experience at Rose Manor had already given him some understanding of Qi Si’s unscrupulous way of doing things.

Therefore, his first reaction now was: Qi Si had discovered part of the solution to the instance and had implemented it behind his back.

Qi Si looked up at Chang Xu and smiled brilliantly: “Many interesting things did indeed happen last night, and I did indeed learn the worldview of this instance…”

Chang Xu pricked up his ears, holding his breath.

Then he heard the young man say regretfully: “It’s a pity that I still don’t intend to tell you this time.”

“…” Listen to that, is that something a human would say?

Zhang Hongfeng sensed that the atmosphere was off and quickly tried to smooth things over: “If Si Qi doesn’t want to say, he probably has his reasons. I’ve heard before that the more you know about some things, the more dangerous it is.”

Liu Yuhan added from the side: “Si Qi saved us last night. Without him, neither Uncle Zhang nor I would be alive right now.”

Chang Xu had an intuition that these three people in the room were keeping something from him, most likely having reached some agreement behind his back.

But without concrete evidence, he couldn’t press them too hard and had to swallow this bitter pill.

This whole thing reeked of something wrong. Chang Xu stared at Qi Si, his tone firm: “You didn’t drink the Calming Soup last night. You induced me to drink the Calming Soup first because you wanted to act alone while I was asleep.”

Qi Si replied with an “mm,” and tossed the Recorder over: “Didn’t someone on the Forum summarize it? The Eerie Game generally doesn’t tie a player’s life or death to an NPC’s mood. Making us curry favor with Yuna to get the Calming Soup is definitely not the only solution to the death point.”

“I had some guesses about how to survive the night, so I wanted to test them. If it succeeded, everyone would be happy; if it failed, it would only be my death, and by the way, it would also disrupt Sera’s plans. Why not do it?”

“What method?”

“The song heard at the Clock Tower can dispel the eerie. I guess that the reason the boy was able to arrive at the Clock Tower unscathed was thanks to the help of that song.”

Chang Xu suddenly frowned: “Why would you take such a big risk? You clearly had the Calming Soup…”

“What are you thinking?” Qi Si lowered his eyes and sighed, “I just wanted to crack the worldview and improve my performance score.”

Everyone’s definition of the value of life is different. In Qi Si’s eyes, if he couldn’t control the overall situation in the most perfect way, he might as well die.

He sometimes even had self-destructive tendencies, making suicidal choices that went against rational principles when he was interested, and looked forward to seeing the final outcome, even if it was terrible.

–But to others, this was completely a melodramatic act of sacrificing oneself to test the rule.

For a moment, Chang Xu felt that he had misunderstood Qi Si a lot; perhaps he didn’t have as little moral bottom line as he thought.

Just as he was about to say something, Qi Si stood up on his own, walked straight to the door, and pushed it open to leave.

Zhang Hongfeng and Liu Yuhan had come to avoid disaster, and now that the crisis was gone, the two felt it inappropriate to linger, so they each expressed their thanks and left.

Chang Xu was left in confusion for a moment, then quickly took a few steps to catch up with Qi Si. When passing by the wall, he intuitively felt something was wrong.

The wall that should have had the oil painting “Moses Leaving Egypt” hanging on it was empty. The frame was gone, and the bedsheet used to cover it was scattered on the floor, wet and bunched up.

Looking around, there was no sign of the frame anywhere in sight. Instead, a pile of suspicious broken glass was scattered at the doorway, making one think of the worst for no reason.

Just as Chang Xu was about to ask, he heard Qi Si explain in a casual tone: “Oh right, last night I handled the paintings in all the rooms. The method was simple: I smashed them onto the heads of the fish monsters and used the interaction of forces to break the glass of the frames.”

Actually, there was no need for a special explanation. As soon as Chang Xu walked out the door, he saw a dozen paintings, now without frames, spread across the corridor floor, completely soaked by the water on the ground, their colors mottled and chaotic.

His expression turned serious: “The rule states that you cannot damage the facilities inside the hotel, otherwise Yuna will be very angry when she finds out.”

“It wasn’t me who destroyed them; it was the fish monsters,” Qi Si said with an innocent face. “Instead of getting angry at us guests who have come from afar, Yuna should go slaughter a few fish to vent.”

Chang Xu frowned: “But the fact is, the oil paintings in our rooms are damaged. The rule has a certain flexibility, and it wouldn’t be unreasonable for Yuna to give us trouble.”

Qi Si looked at him and smiled: “Brother Chang, you can trust me. All the oil paintings in all the rooms are scrapped; if we die, we die together. Considering the minimum death count mechanism, the law doesn’t punish the masses, so it’s highly likely to be fine.”

Here we go again… Chang Xu silently gave a “6” in his heart. Although he felt this method was a bit underhanded, he couldn’t help but relax.

Compared to the first day, the players got up quite early today. Not long after the fourth chime of the bell, a row of people was standing neatly in the corridor.

After seeing the oil paintings on the ground, they looked at each other. Thinking of the broken door locks, their gazes toward one another were full of wariness.

As the culprit, Qi Si remained calm and composed: “I’ve roughly counted, and the oil paintings from all the rooms are here. Whoever destroyed the paintings must have considered the risk of violating the rule and destroyed all the artworks collectively to avoid Yuna holding individuals accountable.”

“Is that so?” a player asked the person next to him in a low voice, “The painting in my room is gone, what about you guys?”

“Ours are gone too; they should be here as well.”

“Ours too.”

Having received a definite answer, the expressions of the group eased up quite a bit.

The anomaly of the oil paintings was truly eerie, and being able to solve it all at once could be considered a permanent solution—a good thing.

Qi Si stood in the corridor for a while, then leaned against a corner, belatedly feeling exhausted, and let out a languid yawn.

Chang Xu followed closely behind him and asked: “You didn’t sleep last night, can you hold up?”

Qi Si narrowed his eyes and said in a joking tone: “The ancients said: ‘Why sleep long while alive, for after death, there will be eternal sleep.’ When I die, there will be plenty of time to catch up on sleep.”

This sounded very ominous. Chang Xu raised his eyebrows slightly: “Did something happen? I have had quite a lot of contact with the eerie; if there is something wrong, perhaps I can help.”

Qi Si evaded the question: “Brother Chang, you only sleep this little time every day, aren’t you sleepy?”

“Not sleepy.” Chang Xu shook his head, “Falling asleep when the bell strikes ten and waking up when it strikes four, converted to a 24-hour clock, I can sleep twelve hours a day. And adults only need seven to nine hours of sleep.”

Qi Si smiled strangely: “You have such good energy, I’m envious, envious.”

While the two were talking, Lu Li, supported by the long-haired young man, walked out of the room.

He had changed into a suit, and the bleeding on his leg had stopped. Apart from his pale complexion, he didn’t look too different.

After standing firm against the wall, he looked around at the players gathered in the corridor and frowned slightly: “One person is missing; Hans didn’t come out.”

Qi Si remembered that Hans was the white man with a full beard, who had questioned Lu Li’s cohabitation proposal on the first day and quarreled with the long-haired young man on the second day—a character who refused to submit to anyone and liked to be unreasonable.

Such a person didn’t seem like the type to oversleep; it was highly likely that he was in grave danger.

A few players realized this and went to ram Hans’s door. After a loud “bang bang” sound, the door was violently broken open.

The players filed in one after another. Qi Si, feeling listless, mixed in with the crowd and walked into the room.

Unlike the room where someone had died the day before, this room was quite dry, and the salty, fishy smell of the sea remained within normal limits, which the players had long since gotten used to.

The faint smell of blood was almost imperceptible, and looking around, there wasn’t a trace of blood to be seen. The most conspicuous things were the mold spots and stains on the walls.

Hans’s body lay quietly flat on the bed, just as if he were asleep.

If it weren’t for the fact that such a loud commotion hadn’t been able to wake him, no one would think he was a corpse at this moment.

Qi Si walked closer and could see fine feathers faintly visible on his neck through the quilt. These feathers were different from the first day’s feathers; they were more delicate and soft, flat and wide in shape, and if they were on a wing, they should belong to the part near the wing root.

The short man watched for a while and cursed in a low voice: “Bastard! Yuna has even started categorizing things, producing different feathers every day to adapt to her various needs… She really treats us like piglets!”

Zhang Hongfeng looked worried: “She is the host, and we are the guests. We can’t do anything about her; we still have to leave this damned place as soon as possible…”

“Everyone need not panic. NPCs are all restricted by the rules. The number of people Yuna can kill every day is limited, and she needs to follow the rules…”

Lu Li said calmly, looking at the corner of the room. Not knowing what he had noticed, his expression changed slightly.

The long-haired young man helped him walk over. Although the other players didn’t know the situation, they followed suit.

In the corner, a very inconspicuous iron hammer lay quietly at an angle, with spots of blood still on the hammer head, not yet cleaned.

Lu Li let out a long sigh, his voice hoarse: “If my feeling is correct, this is the murder weapon that almost killed me yesterday. Only this type of standard iron hammer could smash the back of my head from that angle.”

The real culprit who was being desperately searched for yesterday evening died this morning; this matter seemed absurd no matter how you looked at it.

A player raised a question: “Could it be a frame-up? Who would leave a prop outside?”

Immediately someone said: “No, it must be him! Putting the weapon outside must have been for self-defense, but it’s a pity he still died.”

That person drew a conclusion and then analyzed rationally: “I should have thought it was him earlier. To quickly penetrate the victim’s skull, one must be at least taller than the victim. There aren’t many among us who are taller than Professor Lu, and he happened to be the strongest among them.”

This hindsight argument was well-reasoned and received unanimous approval from the players. Looking at the corpse on the bed again, everyone’s eyes held a sense of “he deserved to die.”

Lu Li signaled the long-haired young man to help him to the bedside.

After standing still, he yanked off the sheet covering the corpse, his gaze falling on the right side of the body.

Qi Si leaned forward and followed Lu Li’s gaze. He saw the corpse’s right hand twisted in an eerie way, the skin mottled with wooden grain marks, as if it weren’t a human hand, but a piece of wood.

Observing carefully, one could see a circle of white thread wrapped around the little finger of that hand, with a flexible texture, exactly the same as the thread used to pull a Puppet.

“Puppeteer,” Lu Li spat out the word, his voice hoarse, “I have dealt with him. Everyone, be careful not to touch the Puppet’s corpse… Any contact may result in being parasitized by Puppet Threads.”

Upon hearing this, the players scrambled to retreat, some even backing out of the door, wishing to be as far away as possible.

As official players, their ability to gather information wasn’t that bad, and they were no strangers to the title “Puppeteer.”

That was the elusive leader of the Sera Guild, one of the existences symbolizing top-tier strength in the Eerie Game.

It was said that he was a madman who treated human life like grass, a crazed Slaughter-path player who loved to parasitize and manipulate the souls of other players, designing schemes to make innocent people kill each other, enjoying it so much that it seemed like he was just conducting anthropological experiments.

Near-god-like authority combined with an unscrupulous way of doing things, the people in the Forum gave him a more precise and vivid title—”Natural Disaster.”

Unavoidable, without warning, and once encountered, you’d have a one in ten chance of survival… a natural disaster.

The players whispered, carrying palpable fear.

“Puppeteer? You’re not joking, right? How could it be him?”

“I’m so unlucky. I hadn’t even reached the deadline; I must have been bored to match into an instance at this point!”

“A person of that level is actually here… that’s impossible, right?”

For most people, the Puppeteer only existed in legends.

Real name, appearance, gender, and ability were unknown. All more specific information was shrouded in a fog, as if he himself were a code, a totem, born for the Sera Guild.

Such an existence, packaged into a myth by word-of-mouth stories, would actually participate in person. What exactly is so special about this instance?

“It’s not the Puppeteer himself.” Lu Li took a deep breath and regained his composure, “If he were here, none of us would be alive right now.”

“What came should only be his Puppet. When not under his control, there’s no difference from ordinary players. He has thousands of Puppets on hand and might not necessarily notice us. We just need to clear out all the Puppets as soon as possible.”

Lu Li paused, his eyes behind his lenses sweeping over all the players: “Sera’s configuration for official instances is generally groups of three. That is to say, it’s very likely there are still two Puppets mixed in among us. From now on, you must be careful of everyone—including me.”

The deathly silence spread like threads in the nearly stagnant air.

Five people had already died. Among the remaining ten, the enemy was in the dark while they were in the light; no one could be trusted.

The pressure brought by the main quest and the instance’s own mechanics had not yet been fully diluted, and the new crisis that had been brewing for a long time was now unveiled. No one could maintain a good state of mind.

From beginning to end, Qi Si observed Lu Li’s expression with a half-smile. At this moment, he suddenly spoke up: “How did Hans die?”

Nine gazes gathered on him.

As if unaware, he pointed from afar at the corpse on the bed: “Hans most likely spent points to enter this instance specifically. Before entering, he must have had some understanding of this instance’s information. Just how useless must he be to die so inexplicably?”

“Who knows?” The doubt was obvious. Lu Li raised his hand to adjust his gold-rimmed glasses and let out a sigh, “The mechanics of the instance, the rules of the eerie, are things that can never be fully exhausted…”