Chapter 128: Shuangxi Town (22) Entering the Trap

By the time Du Xiaoyu and Shang Qingbei returned to Xier’s house, it was already three in the afternoon.

Du Xiaoyu led the way and pushed open the door, only to see a woman in a red wedding dress sitting on Li Yao’s bed, sobbing softly.

Seeing someone return, the woman cried out, “Liu Bingding is dead… It’s my fault. He was caught by those paper effigies trying to save me…”

Shang Qingbei felt that something wasn’t quite right.

In his memory, Li Yao was usually quite calm. Why was she weeping like this?

Maintaining a calm demeanor, he said, “Xu Yao, calm down first and tell us exactly what happened.”

Shang Qingbei himself didn’t know why the name that came out of his mouth was “Xu Yao.”

However, thinking back carefully, it seemed this teammate really was named “Xu Yao.” His head must have been a bit muddled just now for him to remember it wrong.

“Yeah, Xu Yao, we’ve been looking for you for a long time and couldn’t find you anywhere,” Du Xiaoyu added. “To find you, Brother Qi even made a special trip down the well.”

Xu Yao lowered her head and said, “Liu Bingding and I were sent to the Shuangxi Town of a hundred years ago. we met many paper effigies… They said I was ‘Miss Xu’ and Liu Bingding was the County Magistrate’s Assistant. They wanted to capture us… We ran to the mourning hall together. At the last moment, Liu Bingding stuffed me into a Coffin, but he himself…”

She didn’t continue, the ending was self-evident.

Liu Bingding hadn’t returned; only she sat here, having survived.

“My condolences,” Shang Qingbei offered a word of comfort, though he didn’t feel much sadness.

They were just chance acquaintances; he didn’t have much of an impression of that man who was so well-versed in the ways of the world.

Under the “minimum death count” mechanism, true unity and friendship could not exist.

Du Xiaoyu pressed further, “You entered the Coffin, then what? How did you get back?”

Xu Yao said hesitantly, “The Coffin might have been some kind of passage. I fell asleep, and when I opened my eyes again, I was sitting here…”

She started crying again. Du Xiaoyu scratched his head beside her, not knowing how to comfort her.

Shang Qingbei waited impatiently for a while before interrupting, “You triggered a side quest, so you should have obtained some clues.”

“Yes,” Xu Yao wiped her tears and said in a slightly accusatory tone, “We saw the God of Joy’s experience. She was hounded to death by the people of Shuangxi Town.”

“She was locked in a cursed Coffin. Once the Ritual was completed, she would have become an idiot… She managed to escape the coffin with great difficulty, but she was pursued to a dead end by the townspeople and could only jump into the well.”

“After she died, Shuangxi Town continued to kill a girl every forty-nine years, using resentment to suppress her soul.”

“Not only that, but anyone who comes to Shuangxi Town looking for someone or who knows the town’s secrets will be thrown into the well… The God of Joy said that the remains of a girl named Xu Wen are at the bottom of the well.”

At this point, all the clues were linked together.

Xu Wen was already dead, right at the bottom of the well.

Shang Qingbei looked back at the young man leaning against the door frame and questioned, “Qi Wen, didn’t you say you didn’t see Xu Wen at the bottom of the well?”

“I really didn’t see her.” The young man’s pale face didn’t change in the slightest. “The bottom of the well is full of white bones. I don’t know which one is Xu Wen.”

Shang Qingbei frowned, about to say something sarcastic.

The young man, however, walked straight to the middle bed, took out a set of white shirts from his backpack, then lifted the quilt to cover himself and changed underneath it.

After changing, he casually crumpled up the wet shirt, threw it under the bed, wrapped himself in the quilt, lay down on the bed, and closed his eyes.

When Du Xiaoyu turned around, he saw the young man making a move to go to sleep and couldn’t help but speak up, “What’s wrong with you? It’s only the afternoon…”

The young man rolled over, looking like he wanted to sleep in peace and didn’t want to deal with anyone.

Shang Qingbei’s mouth twitched. He felt that ever since “Qi Si” came up from the well, he had been acting strangely and seemed very weak. In all likelihood, he had encountered something down there and got injured.

But why didn’t he just say so? Was he hiding clues, or was he just being stubborn?

Shang Qingbei shook his head, pulled out the yellow sutra paper with the rules written on it from his pocket, and handed it to Xu Yao: “We found the rules for this instance.”

Xu Yao took the paper and began to read it with some confusion. She seemed to find it difficult to read, her speed very slow, and she didn’t finish it for a long time.

Unaware, Shang Qingbei continued, “Tonight we’ll go out to explore and find a way out of Shuangxi Town; tomorrow morning we’ll go down the well again to find Xu Wen’s remains. If we don’t know which one is hers, we’ll just bring them all up…”

…”I came to Shuangxi Town to find someone. I didn’t expect that not only would I fail to take her away, but I’d also get trapped here myself…”

In the world below the well, the sound of the wind outside the door gradually died down, and the mournful sound of the suona rose again.

Xu Wen let out a visible sigh of relief: “They’re gone. Let’s get to the Sangshen Temple quickly.”

As if afraid Qi Si would question her, she added, “No Coffins are coming today, so we can’t leave. We can only go to the temple to take shelter first.”

Qi Si had been a bit cold from the wind earlier, so he had curled up in the corner to wait. He stood up now and followed up on Xu Wen’s first sentence: “Who were you looking for?”

Xu Wen pushed open the door and looked back at Qi Si with a complicated expression: “I came to look for my sister. She went missing. They couldn’t find her even after investigating for a long time, so I came to look for her myself.”

Qi Si thought of the newspaper clipping he had seen in Xier’s room and raised an eyebrow: “So, have you found her now?”

“Maybe I have. Perhaps the reason I got into a conflict with them was because I found her… but I can’t take her away… I don’t remember much more than that.” Xu Wen’s voice lowered.

She didn’t look back again and led the way ahead.

Qi Si followed silently, suddenly feeling that the plot development was a bit like the tropes of a melodramatic horror movie.

Xu Wen got herself involved while looking for someone, so she sought help from the characters played by the four players; the four folklore Investigators really were at her beck and call, boarding the pirate ship together.

Qi Si looked up at the gray sky, his sense of humor reviving at an inappropriate time: “Well, now we’re all trapped here. I wonder if we can still call for backup.”

Xu Wen didn’t take the bait.

She was silent for a long while before asking gloomily, “Do you want to know the secret of Shuangxi Town?”

The two of them stood one after the other on the street. On both sides were white walls and black tiles obscured by mist, and around them, gray ghostly figures crowded and passed by.

Qi Si looked down and said indifferently, “Tell me if you want to.”

With her back to him, Xu Wen began to speak softly: “As early as twenty years ago, Shuangxi Town ceased to exist. The entire town vanished overnight, as if it had never been, leaving only a dry well in the center of the flat land.”

“Walking on the town’s ruins, one can often see the phantoms of houses and crowds, and hear the voices of people talking. Therefore, some say that Shuangxi Town has been’spirited away’ and become a ghost wall.”

The two of them had walked a long distance without realizing it. The mist grew thicker and thicker, making it impossible to see the houses on either side.

Ahead, however, a large temple suddenly appeared. It was similar to the God of Joy Temple on the surface, both being of the two-entrance specification.

The temple had the same color scheme as the ordinary houses—white walls and black tiles. Two white paper lanterns hung under the eaves, with the word ‘Funeral’ written on them in black ink.

That was probably the Sangshen Temple.

Qi Si stopped at a distance and asked, “In other words, Shuangxi Town is a ghost town?”

“It’s hard to say.” Xu Wen grabbed Qi Si’s wrist and led him forward. “Most of the people in the town are no different from living people. They have body heat, are afraid of Ghosts, and need to eat, drink, and sleep. They shouldn’t be Ghosts. They’re like they’re trapped at a certain point in time; their physiological state is fixed, neither aging nor dying.”

Xu Wen’s grip was very strong, squeezing Qi Si’s wrist until it hurt. He couldn’t shake her off; it was like a wooden cangue used for transporting prisoners, shackling him toward his destination.

Qi Si expected his wrist would definitely be bruised, and it would still look ugly, like a corpse spot.

He stared at Xu Wen’s long, fair neck and allowed her to pull him along: “Sounds like they’ve achieved the immortality many people hope for. But I’ve interacted with them, and their behavior doesn’t make it seem like they’ve lived for so many years.”

Xu Wen said, “Because they have no memory of immortality. They are forever trapped in a seven-day cycle, repeating their crimes from before they died over and over again, just like NPCs in a game.”

“NPCs?” Qi Si narrowed his eyes at her. “It seems you know quite a lot.”

Xu Wen chuckled and, without warning, shook a broken mirror shard from her sleeve and held it against the side of Qi Si’s neck: “Yes, I know a lot of things, Player.”

The last word was like a giant stone falling into a pond, resonant and powerful.

As an NPC, Xu Wen knew of the players’ existence; her behavior was clearly being interfered with by some power, to the point of deviating from the instance’s own design… “Did you pray to Him? Or are you not Xu Wen?” Qi Si blinked, feigning surprise.

Xu Wen continued on her own: “They draw passing travelers into the town, then let them be trapped to death inside, so that even their souls cannot be liberated.”

“Even though they no longer belong to the mortal world, they still continue that set of customs for weddings and funerals, abducting innocent girls and then cruelly murdering them… The bodies of the dead sink to the bottom of the well, becoming members of the ghosts, repeating the cycle forever without liberation.”

The sound of ghosts crying rose gradually, mixed with cries of despair and resentment.

Ghostly figures billowed up from the mist—men, women, old and young, wearing clothes from various eras. They were clearly all people who had been drawn into Shuangxi Town.

“I want to end all of this.” Xu Wen suddenly became serious, saying each word deliberately.

She held Qi Si as they stood before the Sangshen Temple. Whether from excitement or some other reason, her hands were shaking slightly.

The broken glass cut Qi Si’s neck, leaving a bloody mark and dripping beads of blood.

The wide-open temple doors breathed out a chilling cold. Qi Si’s flesh was frozen stiff, and for a moment, he couldn’t even feel much pain.

He glanced inside the temple and saw white candles evenly distributed on both sides of the aisle, and an Idol with black robes and golden eyes in the shrine.

The Idol had an unfamiliar face, its expression indifferent, without joy or sorrow.

Qi Si, however, felt for a split second that he had seen Him somewhere before.

A thousand faces for a thousand people, no self-image, the image of all living beings—for a moment, he couldn’t quite tell if a memory buried deep in his mind had really been triggered, or if his brain, after being induced, had pieced together an illusion from countless fragments.

The blood from his neck seeped into his collar, wetting a small patch of fabric. Qi Si’s gaze fell on the incense offering before the Idol.

Three for gods, four for Ghosts. There were three sticks of incense in the incense burner. They looked like they had just been lit, only the tips having burned off.

Xu Wen put on a pious and solemn expression. With one hand holding the broken glass to Qi Si’s neck, she pushed him into the temple with the other.

“How do you want to end all of this?” Qi Si asked.

He shifted his gaze and saw that the side room on the left of the Sangshen Temple also contained a Coffin, though there was only one.

The style of the Coffin was very different from the ones in the God of Joy Temple. The pitch-black surface was carved with golden vine patterns, similar to the narrative murals in the divine hall, yet their specific meaning could not be deciphered.

It was more like a curse, a type of curse that circulated between higher existences.

After his gaze lingered for two seconds, the patterns on the Coffin began to move, floating off the surface of the casket and transforming into golden phantoms that stretched out freely in the air.

Qi Si suddenly felt a strong sense of suffocation, as if those vines were strangling his soul, tightening around his heart, and binding his entire being.

His Identity Card began to tremble violently. The red-eyed evil spirit on the card seemed to realize danger was coming, waving its tentacles made of mist and struggling fiercely.

An instinctive fear arose, like a drop of resin enveloping an ant on a tree trunk, or a sentient animal sensing its own death in advance.

Death, inevitable death, was the already destined and certain outcome written in fate… There was no more road ahead, and the remaining time was but a pinch of fine sand in the hourglass… 【Warning! A god-level creation has appeared in the instance (data deleted)… Error! Danger!】

Scarlet handwriting twisted on the system interface, and error screens instantly filled most of his vision.

Amidst the chaotic red, Qi Si heard a “thud” and began to tremble uncontrollably.

The door of the Sangshen Temple was closed, and his shattered thoughts sent giant waves splashing through the ocean of his mind.

Xu Wen dropped the glass shard in her hand, stepped back, and calmly declared: “God promised me that if I kill you, it will all be over.”

Qi Si wanted to make a sarcastic comment about this old trope of a deal with an evil god, but for a moment, he couldn’t quite bring himself to laugh.

The physiological fear was hard to suppress, triggering feelings of cold and nausea, a throbbing pain in the blood vessels at his temples, and difficulty breathing.

The vine phantoms on the Coffin drew closer and closer, and the moment they wrapped around Qi Si’s limbs, they suddenly became solid.

Golden light pulsed on the slender branches, making them look very much like the legendary chains used to seal evil spirits.

“Should I call you stupid or what? Can the promise of a god who would make such a demand really be trusted?”

Qi Si felt himself overwhelmed by complex negative emotions. The pain, sadness, and despair that didn’t belong to him all turned into pleasure after he felt them.

He arched his back, laughing until he shook: “To go to all this effort just to gamble on a tiny shred of hope, is it worth it?”

Xu Wen smiled: “Even if there’s only a one-in-ten-thousand chance, by sacrificing you alone, there’s an opportunity to save everyone. It’s always worth a try.”

“It’s that same old utilitarianism of sacrificing the few to save the many, sacrificing the present to save the future…” Qi Si was dragged inch by inch toward the Coffin by the vines, bubbles of thought constantly bursting in his mind with the light sound of breaking glass.

His vision was already a complete blur, but his voice carried a hint of a smile: “I’m curious, why do you take it for granted that I should be the one sacrificed? Because I’m a single individual, or because you think I’m a piece of trash whose death isn’t worth mourning, or…”

“Because you are under my control and have no choice,” Xu Wen said.

“The theory of the survival of the fittest?” Qi Si lifted his eyelids, still unable to see the scene before him clearly. “Believing in the law of the jungle while still clamoring about saving the world, how contradictory…”

“I just want to save myself.” Xu Wen’s voice was as distant as if it came from beyond the heavens. “I originally wanted to morally kidnap you, but I didn’t expect you to have no morals.”

She spoke quite seriously, her tone indifferent and cold, a completely different person from her previous self.

Or perhaps she hadn’t spoken at all, and that voice existed only in Qi Si’s imagination.

But it couldn’t be denied that this answer was satisfying.

Qi Si’s shoulders shook as he laughed loudly, laughing until he was out of breath.

He relaxed his body, allowing the vines to drag him into the Coffin and press him tightly against the bottom of the cold stone casket.

Then, the Coffin lid slammed down, and only darkness remained before his eyes…