Chapter 402: Snow Mountain (II) Hurrying to the Holy City

Dong Xiwen sat on the bus and, hearing the driver shout, “Those without tickets, please get off at this stop,” couldn’t help but glance at the youth beside him wearing a white shirt and a clown mask.

As players who had appeared on the bus out of thin air, he and the youth naturally had no tickets.

However, back when the bus had made a sharp turn and the funeral portraits fell to the floor, the youth had used the pretext of helping to pick them up to snatch two tickets in the chaos.

The youth kept one for himself and stuffed the other into Dong Xiwen’s hand, even threatening him through the Soul Leaf: “As a teammate, I will do my best to ensure your survival, but I also hope you can demonstrate enough value. I wouldn’t want to kill you on a whim one day because I feel you’re no longer useful.”

Very well, that was very Qi Si.

Holding a ticket printed with someone else’s funeral portrait, Dong Xiwen felt that if the driver checked them one by one, both he and Qi Si—whose faces didn’t match the photos—would be finished.

Just as he was considering whether it was too late to buy a ticket now, he heard the youth beside him chuckle. “No need. Those two unlucky Ghosts are about to be kicked off the bus.”

Dong Xiwen followed the youth’s gaze and saw countless banknotes gushing out from the coin slot of the fare box at the entrance, flying toward the two passengers whose tickets had been stolen earlier.

The passengers’ phantoms flickered twice and vanished. The banknotes swept up the funeral portraits and cinerary urns from the seats and tossed them out of the open bus door.

The door closed again, and Dong Xiwen saw the figures of the two passengers through the window once more.

The man’s face had turned a sickly green, his mouth agape in an eerie way as if he wanted to say something; the woman pressed her face against the window, staring straight at Dong Xiwen, blood and tears streaming from her eyes, nose, and mouth, leaving a bloody print on the glass.

Dong Xiwen lowered his head. The woman’s portrait printed on the ticket in his hand was also looking at him, her gaze filled with resentment and hatred.

He was slightly startled, but the youth, the culprit behind it all, patted his shoulder nonchalantly. The corners of his lips beneath the mask curled upward. “What’s wrong? Don’t you find it interesting to see them so furious yet utterly helpless?”

Dong Xiwen didn’t find it interesting at all. Only one thought crossed his mind: Should I say as expected of a humanoid? You really aren’t human!

The bus continued forward, driving past the bleeding stone tablet and toward the mountain range ahead, leaving the two unlucky Ghosts behind.

Dong Xiwen folded the clearly problematic ticket twice, stuffed it into his pocket, and chatted idly with his brother in his mind, forcing himself not to pay attention to the busload of Ghosts.

The youth, meanwhile, took out a phone he had somehow brought along and started playing happy match. The silver bracelet on his wrist reflected the light of the blood moon, shining brightly… On the other side, Qi Si leaned against the window, staring blankly at the vast natural scenery outside.

The bus sped forward, mingled within a herd of cattle and sheep. From time to time, an animal would collapse from exhaustion, only to have its body instantly crushed by its companions behind, letting out a high-pitched mournful cry.

The mountain was very close now, looking like a tall monster crawling out from underground at the end of the world, hideously pressing down on the stampeding living creatures, making everything at the foot of the mountain seem so small.

The animals in the front row ran too fast to turn in time and crashed into the mountain wall, breaking their necks. The animals following behind did not stop; one after another, they stepped onto the bones of their predecessors and leaped forward.

The bus rushed into a pitch-black tunnel. A darkness so thick you couldn’t see your own hand fell over them. It felt as if there was nothing around, yet it also felt as if the space was crowded with people.

Xu Yao’s voice rang out from the depths of his mind: “I’ve asked around. The place we’re going is called ‘Shangri-La Town.’ Because legend says the living will gain eternal life there and the dead will be purified, they call that place the ‘Holy City.'”

Qi Si had heard of “Shangri-La Town.” It came from a novel called “Lost Horizon,” which told the story of four Western travelers who accidentally entered the secret realm of Shangri-La and encountered various bizarre events.

“Shangri-La” had once become a synonym for utopia, Eden, beauty, and happiness, enticing adventurers from all over the world to come to Long County in search of this legendary place.

The “Shangri-La Town” the players were heading to was likely generated with reference to the settings in the novel, though it would most probably be presented in a distorted and horrific manner.

Xu Yao continued, “You can forget about eternal life. I heard from the Ghosts here that everyone who crosses the boundary stone is dead and has become a ghost. Passing through a tunnel is like passing through a lifetime… Are you in a tunnel right now? Why aren’t you dead yet? Hehehe…”

The voice in his ear suddenly became sharp. It was still Xu Yao’s tone, but it carried a malice and viciousness that didn’t belong to her.

In an instant, even the tone became unfamiliar—it was an old voice that was deliberately pinched thin.

“You are already dead… You are finally dead…”

“Stay here… Come and keep us company…”

The connection with the Soul Leaf was completely severed this time. Qi Si held the Cursed Pendulum in his hand, ready to swing it at any moment, but his body felt as if it were being pressed down by a certain force, growing heavier and heavier.

He was pinned to his seat, unable to move. The ticket with his funeral portrait on it flew out; the face identical to his was smiling eerily, its eyeballs rolling back and forth.

The voices of men, women, old, and young spiraled from all directions, circling him and chiming in one after another.

“What’s so good about being alive? Die. Once you’re dead, you won’t feel pain anymore…”

“Go to hell, you monster… You shouldn’t even exist…”

“Don’t kill me, don’t eat me… If you kill and eat me, then come to hell with me…”

“Qi Si, Big Sister put on red clothes and hung herself up. Do you think Big Sister looks scary?”

Qi Si could distinguish the owners of those voices: the ghost that had tried to lure him to his death from under the bed, the children who had excluded and hated him, the “friend” he had eaten, the older cousin who had committed suicide by hanging… All the dead from his past seemed to have lingered in the world without leaving, and were now gathered together, joyfully welcoming him to the world after death.

Qi Si stood up but didn’t touch the back of the seat in front of him. He took a step back, and the seat that should have been there had also vanished.

A biting wind whipped against his face, painful as a knife’s cut; the howling of wild beasts reached him without obstruction. He seemed to be exposed to the open air, standing alone in a vast, deserted wilderness.

A woman’s figure stood in the darkness ahead, wearing a bright red long dress, her face covered by long hair. In the blink of an eye, she floated right before him.

The woman tilted her head to look at Qi Si. Her hair was blown aside by the wind, and her familiar face was actually set with a pair of silver-white eyes. “You killed me. Now you are going to die too.”

The proclamation was accompanied by a thunderous tolling of a bell. The Crimson High Priest card in his Hall of Thought trembled violently, and a long-lost fear welled up from the bottom of Qi Si’s heart. It was as if he had encountered a natural enemy written by fate—clearly knowing his time was up, yet being forced to hasten toward his dead end.

This fear was physiological, causing his throat to constrict and his bones to grind. Even his heartbeat and breathing skipped a beat, before thudding down heavily in the next second.

Qi Si instinctively wanted to retreat, but he ultimately stood his ground firmly. With a half-smile, he asked, “Qi Xinyue, so many years have passed, and you still haven’t gone to reincarnate? Or… are you the ‘Or’ that came to intimidate me?”

The woman did not answer. Her gaze was kind and sorrowful, and the edges of her silhouette faded degree by degree, gradually merging with the darkness.

The sky suddenly brightened—the kind of brightness that left no shadow, so bright it was reflective. Like an overexposed photograph, it was a vast expanse of white, which instead felt deathly still.

The bus drove out of the tunnel and into a vast, sandy plain. At the end of his vision lay a row of jagged snow mountains, their silhouettes winding and towering like the edges of a cage.

All the cattle and sheep running alongside the bus stopped at the same moment and knelt down like humans, their two hind legs supporting them on the ground and their front hooves joined before their chests.

They knelt in devout worship toward the snow mountains, like livestock voluntarily offering themselves to the gods on the eve of a sacrificial rite. The moment one looked at them, a purifying spiritual call was generated, making the witness subconsciously want to kneel and kowtow.

Qi Si found himself standing next to the open rear door of the bus at some point, a full three steps away from his seat when he boarded. If he had taken another step back just now, he would likely have fallen off the bus.

Getting off at a stop where one shouldn’t—the outcome could well be imagined.

“Brother Qi, are you okay? You look terrible…” Lin Crow’s voice was concerned. Half his body was already out of his seat, making a move to come over and support him.

“I’m fine, the wind was just a bit strong earlier.” Qi Si shook his head and sat back in the rear row.

He had a faint inkling that this instance was like a meticulously woven trap, and he was the prey that this trap was calculatingly trying to capture.

There were too many unfavorable factors, and bad omens were appearing one after another. He didn’t know the progress of the Ancestral God’s revival, but he was certain that the place they were going next was influenced and controlled by it.

Combining the end of the first generation of gods and the beginning of the second generation, Qi Si had long guessed that the Ancestral God might be a tool for the rules’ self-purification, as well as the source of the apocalypse.

Whenever the rules bordered on collapse, the sleeping bones of the Ancestral God would revive once more. After devouring all gods and living beings, it would usher in a reboot, repeating the process of creation and being shared as food by the various gods.

He and Li had once shared the Ancestral God as food; now, they might conversely become the Ancestral God’s food. It was logical, but he was unwilling.

“Tunnel Rear Station reached. Welcome to the realm belonging to the dead.” The cold broadcast voice broke the silence. The bus stopped beside another boundary stone and opened its front door.

Xu Yao lifted her bright red skirt, walked onto the bus, and casually picked an empty seat. She turned back to look at Qi Si. “Did something happen just now? I suddenly couldn’t contact you.”

There was a hint of curiosity in her expression; asking this was clearly not out of concern for Qi Si’s safety.

Qi Si looked behind her and asked, “Is it just you?”

“Not quite.” Xu Yao looked out the bus. “There’s also a handsome guy who seems to have been abducted in by you. Didn’t you know?”

A young man wearing a brown trench coat and gold-rimmed glasses stepped onto the bus while holding the handrail, nodding slightly to Qi Si. “Long time no see.”

Seeing this, Qi Si grinned. “Lu Li, I didn’t expect the Puppeteer to actually be willing to let you come.”

The newcomer was none other than Lu Li, who, in the Hopeless Sea instance, had played him as Fu Jue’s puppet and almost parasitized him through Puppet Threads.

At that time, Qi Si had relied on his then-shallow experience of just having entered the Eerie Game to deduce that Lu Li leaving the island by ship with the main group was to release a smokescreen.

But if analyzed carefully, it would be far too uneconomical to discard a puppet like Lu Li, who had a Jiuzhou background, just to mislead him—Lu Li likely had another mission and might not have died from the instance’s mechanics.

And after merging with He Qi’s memories, Qi Si finally understood what the missing piece of the puzzle was: the Sea-God’s soul and divine power were sealed in the Sea-God Scepter for his use. So, what about the Sea-God’s physical body and authority?

The answer was obvious.

With the apocalypse imminent, the Old Gods of the second generation were destined to become nourishment for the rules. The candidates for the New Gods were not yet known; there was a small probability they would be promoted from the players, but a high probability they would be restored from the first generation of gods.

If it were the latter, the existence of the Sea-God, who had been a subordinate god to the Ancestral God, would be very subtle.

Qi Si raised his left hand, and a crimson Contract scroll condensed in the void, flying toward Lu Li.

Lu Li caught the golden quill that appeared out of thin air and signed his name on the scroll, also smiling slightly. “The request you made was not excessive. Sera will naturally do her best to satisfy it. I hope you can feel the sincerity of our cooperation.”

Qi Si sized him up, his tone slightly sarcastic. “I originally thought you had already turned into that disgusting form of the Sea-God. I didn’t expect you could still maintain a human shape.”

Lu Li laughed. “I also have to thank you for being willing to send me a small card and pull me into the Final Dungeon. Otherwise, I would have forgotten how to walk upright as a human.”

A new Soul Leaf was already growing deep within his Hall of Thought, and Qi Si temporarily lost interest in continuing to deal with Lu Li.

He had always liked to play both sides and hedge his risks. When he met Fu Jue in the Ruins of the Sunset earlier and handed him the 【Merchant】 card, it was a hint of his desired candidate.

Fu Jue had caught his hint and sent Lu Li over as he wished, which wasn’t unexpected. The subtext of the text message conveying the intent to cooperate was that he had accepted the conditions Qi Si proposed.

It was just that this concession was too easy. Qi Si couldn’t help but start wondering what Fu Jue was actually after. It was probably more than just taking one more slot in the Final Dungeon… Lu Li sat down composedly in the empty seat closest to Lin Crow, smiling warmly at the expressionless Lin Crow. “This should be Guild Leader Lin Crow, right? I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Lin Crow had maintained a silence of ‘the less said, the fewer mistakes made’ ever since Xu Yao boarded. Truly, he wasn’t familiar with either of the two new teammates.

Xu Yao was fine; they had met once during dinner the day before yesterday. He knew this girl was an NPC who had run out of the Shuangxi Town instance and bore him no ill will.

But Lu Li… Qi Si had told him before that during the Final Dungeon, to ensure the Unnamed Guild’s survival in the cracks between various powers, they would conduct limited cooperation with the Sera Guild and Jiuzhou Guild.

But he clearly remembered that Lu Li had almost killed Qi Si in the Hopeless Sea instance… Even if Qi Si could let bygones be bygones, he still couldn’t help but feel resistant.

And this guy actively striking up a conversation as soon as he arrived—it was obviously with bad intentions, okay?

Lin Crow automatically entered the role of “Lin Crow,” saying coldly, “You’ve seen me now. You don’t have to ‘hear’ anymore in the future.”

Lu Li chuckled and indeed turned his head, no longer looking at Lin Crow.

The door closed, and the bus continued forward. Now that everyone was here, the busload of Ghosts didn’t seem so intimidating. The eerie atmosphere diminished significantly; looking around at the crowded heads, it actually seemed quite lively.

A powerful wind howled, whipping up sand and hay that beat frantically against the window glass, making strange “tap-tap” sounds.

The plain outside was filled with all kinds of kneeling animals. The further they went, the denser it became. Some of them had been dead for a long time, their flesh beginning to rot and exposing the white bones beneath.

Gradually, human remains appeared among the animal colonies, likewise kneeling on both knees with hands crossed over their chests in a devout prayer posture.

They seemed to have been kneeling here for hundreds of years. Their flesh had completely vanished, leaving only yellowish skeletons standing hollowly, their eye sockets reflecting a dim, cold light.

Other vehicles could be faintly seen in the distance—not just buses, but also horse carriages, sedan chairs, steam trains, and other means of transport from various eras.

The vehicles were loaded with Coffins, cinerary urns, ceramic jars, bone vases… All the dead in the world seemed to have come here by common consent, to reincarnate, to go on a pilgrimage.

The bus drove into an open space covered with white stones and stopped. The Paper Effigy in the driver’s seat turned its head, a muffled voice coming from its abdominal cavity: “Holy City reached. Welcome to Shangri-La, our origin, our end…”