Chapter 123: Shuangxi Town (17) Who is the Guest

Unknown time, unknown location.

Liu Bingding opened his eyes and found himself dressed in a bright red wedding robe, sitting in a closed side room.

The side room was decorated like an ancient wedding chamber; a large “Double Happiness” character was pasted on the window, and red curtains fluttered down from the ceiling and bed frame like blood dripping into clear water.

A line of white text refreshed on the system interface in the upper-left corner of his vision:

【side quest (Mandatory): Escape the Xu Residence with “Miss Xu”】

“Who’s ‘Miss Xu’? I hope this isn’t some elopement plot. Looking at these decorations, could I have ended up in Shuangxi Town hundreds of years ago? This place is called the ‘Xu Residence.’ Does it have something to do with Sister Xu?”

Liu Bingding kept muttering to himself as he cautiously stood up and walked toward the window step by step.

“Clack.” Something fell out of his sleeve.

Liu Bingding bent down to pick it up.

It was a thick stack of folded legal petitions. Judging by the ink bleeding through the paper, they were densely packed with writing.

Liu Bingding unfolded the paper, and large blocks of text refreshed on the system interface like swarms of flies, making his head spin.

【This student was born poor and abandoned his studies for farming. During a year of famine and displacement, my sisters were abducted by villains and trapped in Shuangxi Town…】

He couldn’t finish reading the whole text at once, so Liu Bingding scrolled to the end. The signature clearly read “Zhang Sheng.”

“What’s going on? Zhang Sheng knew his sisters were abducted, so he filed a complaint with the county yamen?”

The voices of two people came from outside the door:

“Over there, they’ve already followed the Old Madam’s orders and put the young lady in a Coffin. We’ll just turn her into a simpleton along with that batch of goods when the time comes…”

“While the young lady is still unconscious, let’s kill that little county magistrate first. It’ll prevent any complications if he tries to send word out.”

Even as dense as he was, Liu Bingding could tell that these newcomers meant trouble.

He looked around, lifted a chair by the bed over his head, and crept toward the door, waiting there with bated breath.

With a “creak,” the wooden door was pushed open from the outside.

Liu Bingding closed his eyes and swung the chair with all his might three times, resulting in three soft thuds.

There was no solid feeling of wood hitting flesh; instead, it felt like hitting a wad of paper. Most of the force was absorbed, causing him to stumble from the momentum.

“Hee hee hee… hee hee…”

The things that entered from outside let out sharp, eerie laughter.

Liu Bingding struggled to steady himself. When he looked closely, how could those two shadows be human?

They were clearly two paper figurines dressed in paper clothes, their limbs and heads crudely fashioned from coarse paper, with rouge and smiling faces painted in red onto their deathly pale cheeks.

Liu Bingding was startled and took a large step back. His leg hit the edge of the wooden bed, the pain making his whole body shudder, nearly causing him to collapse onto the bed.

“Hee hee… hee hee hee…”

The two Paper Effigies seemed amused by him, letting out even sharper laughter.

They waved their arms in unison and floated toward him with sinister smiles, blocking his path completely.

From Liu Bingding’s perspective, he could even see a dab of bright red on the Paper Effigies’ pale fingertips.

The red seemed to grow and lengthen as if it were solid, turning into nails as sharp as swords, thrusting toward him menacingly.

Liu Bingding’s entire body trembled. He reflexively reached into his pocket, fumbled around, and grabbed an item, throwing it forward.

The item spun in the air, emitting a light so blinding it could cause sightlessness… then darkness, a darkness that could swallow everything.

Elsewhere, Li Yao lay flat in the darkness, her eyelids feeling as heavy as if they were glued together, impossible to open.

Her consciousness was as scattered as willow catkins, difficult to form into a coherent perception. She seemed to have fallen into a deep, dark dream, gradually forgetting who she was, where she came from, and where she was going… The last image in her memory was an eerie smiling face almost pressed against the tip of her nose, belonging to a Paper Effigy dressed as a servant… A Paper Effigy?

Li Yao’s mind jolted, and she finally opened her eyes, but what lay before her was the same darkness as in her dream.

She instinctively stretched her arms, and her elbow hit a hard wooden board, causing a dull ache in her joint.

Now fully awake, she reached out to feel her surroundings.

There were wooden boards from above her head to beneath her body; she was actually sealed within a cramped space.

The shrill sound of a suona suddenly rang out, its sharp, long notes like fingernails scratching on glass.

The distance of the sound was hard to gauge; it seemed to come from afar, yet also sounded as if it were playing right in her ear.

So noisy… Li Yao felt the wooden board beneath her move, swaying and bobbing like a ship on the sea.

She seemed to have been lifted up.

“Whose daughter is crude and foolish, simple-minded and good for childbearing.”

“Whose destitute profligate son, grandly buys a bride.”

“A Coffin is carried as a red sedan, white paper flies everywhere to open the ghost path.”

“Only praying for husband and wife to share life and death, their souls returning on the same day to be buried in the same mound.”

High-pitched, loud chanting rose up, accompanied by the unpleasant suona. It was as if the voice itself were an instrument, together performing a discordant song.

A piece of memory revived in her mind, her subconscious sending a warning: if she didn’t escape the Coffin soon, once the Ritual was complete, she would lose her memory and consciousness and become a fool!

Xu Yao began to struggle frantically, hammering at the Coffin over and over, producing a series of bangs.

“Save me! Let me out!”

“Save me… Let me out…”

She cried out loudly, her voice gradually taking on a sobbing tone, like the wailing of a lonely ghost.

The suona music faded at some point, and a muffled voice spoke through the thick Coffin lid: “Why should I save you? Can you give me any benefits?”

…It was already noon in Shuangxi Town. The hands of the Pocket Watch of Fate pointed to the Roman numeral XII.

Sister Xu stood in the middle of the empty main road and said with a chuckle, “Only four guests came in total. Where would a girl come from? If there were a girl, she’d have to be one of our townspeople.”

“Huh?” Du Xiaoyu, who was closest to Sister Xu, blankly began counting on his fingers. “There were clearly five of us. Me, Li Yao, Liu Bingding…”

“We remembered wrong.” Qi Si interrupted him, his gaze fixed on Sister Xu. “We are indeed four people. All men, no women.”

The smile on Sister Xu’s face grew even more radiant, her whole face wrinkling up. She seemed extremely satisfied with Qi Si’s words.

Du Xiaoyu didn’t understand why, but he knew something was likely wrong and sheepishly fell silent.

Sister Xu slowly turned her body and continued leading the way. Her swinging legs and short, stout body made her look like a spinning top.

The three people and one ghost walked in silence for a while longer before Shang Qingbei leaned in toward Qi Si and asked in a low voice, “Is Li Yao a ghost?”

“Not necessarily. It’s also possible she triggered some mechanism and is temporarily excluded from Shuangxi Town.” Qi Si’s expression remained unchanged. “I thought after hearing Xu Wen’s phone call at the start of the instance, ‘this instance has more than one space’ was already our consensus.”

Shang Qingbei’s eye twitched slightly. “It’s already been confirmed that there’s something wrong with the phone, yet you still believe Xu Wen’s words?”

“In those details, she had no reason to lie to us, did she?” Qi Si took a few quick steps to stay within three meters of Sister Xu. “The most clever lies often contain partial truths. Only then is it harder to distinguish what’s real from what’s fake.”

“How do you determine which information is true and which is false?” Shang Qingbei questioned.

Qi Si looked back at him and smiled. “I don’t. Everything I’ve said is just my speculation. You’re free to have your own.”

“…” Hearing that familiar tone used for coaxing children, Shang Qingbei knew the conversation was over.

Qi Si got the moment of peace he wanted. He strolled leisurely across the bluestone pavement, following Sister Xu toward Xier’s house, while Li Yao’s various actions since entering the instance surfaced in his mind.

That girl didn’t waste words; most of what she said related to supernatural knowledge or the instance’s background, making it easy to extract important information.

In the early morning, she had said worriedly:

‘Before entering this instance, I dreamed that I died. My body was placed in a very dark, deep place, and I could hear the sound of water. Now I remember—that should be inside a well…’

‘I remember that in the dream, there were many other corpses around me, and I think I even saw you…’

Could these be important clues?

Qi Si feeling something, took out his phone, opened the camera app, and tapped the lens switch to enter selfie mode.

What appeared on the screen was a haggard face that only looked sixty or seventy percent like him, covered in messy stubble.

Within the sunken eye sockets, hollow eyeballs took up almost the entire space, their surfaces covered in coarse bloodshot veins, exuding a strong sense of inhumanity.

As a fake item, the phone existed independently of this instance, thus remaining unaffected by the instance’s cognitive distortion and showing the player’s true appearance at that moment.

Normally, Qi Si might have treated this as a trait of a typical role-playing instance and ignored the inconsistencies.

But now he couldn’t help but be suspicious. His soul had come into this strange body, so where was his real body?

In the supernatural tale Li Yao found, Zhang Sheng 【tripped and fell into a well, saw the skeletal remains, and felt a sense of dejected melancholy】.

A normal person’s first reaction to seeing a floor full of corpses would be fear; why did Zhang Sheng feel melancholy?

There was only one possibility: what he saw at the bottom of the well was his own corpse. He knew he was dead and had become a ghost.

Qi Si inexplicably thought of the Dialectical Game instance.

Even if a duplicate killed the original, they could still achieve clearance; the Eerie Game seemed to intentionally use Ghosts to replace players, achieving an effect of invading reality.

The current situation was much the same. He had inexplicably become another person, someone who looked like him but wasn’t… “We’re here. You’ve had a long day, so go inside and get some good rest.” Sister Xu stopped at the intersection and pointed ahead.

The deserted alleyway was clean and wide, with the decorated residence looming at the end. Both the players and the NPC present knew someone had just died inside, but none of them showed any sign of abnormality.

The residence door wasn’t closed, yet none of the players walked in.

Qi Si watched Sister Xu walking in the opposite direction, his gaze falling once more on the Soul-Summoning Bell at her waist: “Sister Xu, didn’t you say earlier that you lost your bell? Why are you wearing it again?”

Sister Xu stopped and turned her head with a smile: “I found it on the cutting board. It turns out this old woman took it off while cooking.”

“Why take it off? Isn’t it better to keep it on all the time? If you keep taking it on and off, what if you lose it for real?” Qi Si’s tone was sincere, as if he were genuinely offering advice.

“I took it off because I wanted to.” Sister Xu gave a perfunctory reply and continued on her way, gradually disappearing into the distance.

Shang Qingbei adjusted his glasses and analyzed: “It seems the Soul-Summoning Bell has the effect of warding off evil. Sister Xu herself is a ghost, so she can’t wear it for long. She only wears it to cover things up when delivering food so we won’t notice something’s wrong with the meal.”

“Wrong.” Qi Si fiddled with his phone without looking up. “What if we know the food is problematic? What if we don’t? Over seven days, it’s impossible for us not to eat anything at all.”

“Location is the key. Sister Xu wore the Soul-Summoning Bell twice: once when she came to Xier’s house in the evening, and once when she went to the God of Joy Temple after the incident at the banquet. It’s because she knew that at those times and places, Ghosts would be causing trouble.”

“Isn’t Sister Xu a ghost? Why would a ghost be afraid of Ghosts?” Du Xiaoyu asked, not understanding.

Qi Si glanced up and said flatly: “Firstly, she might not consider herself a ghost. Secondly, she has a guilty conscience.”

Du Xiaoyu was taken aback and quickly searched his mind for the corresponding information.

This morning, Sister Xu said: ‘There have been a few hauntings in our town. We went to the Empress’s temple together to burn paper and pray for her protection, and those hauntings were all suppressed in the well.’

Shang Qingbei frowned: “It makes sense for there to be hauntings at the God of Joy Temple, but why would there be hauntings at Xier’s house too?”

“Someone died at Xier’s house, and they were killed either directly or indirectly by Sister Xu.” Qi Si switched his phone to his left hand and raised his right hand to his eyes; his fingertips were as pale as usual, without any dirt. “Remember the bloodstains we saw on the windowsill on the first day? That should count as a very clear clue.”

“Xier is an orphan… Was Xier’s family killed by Sister Xu?” Du Xiaoyu voiced his guess, only to look up and see Qi Si looking at him as if he were an idiot.

“Why don’t you make a bolder guess? For example, is Xier really a resident of this town? Did Sister Xu have us stay in this residence with Xier just because it was the only place with empty rooms?” Qi Si’s smile took on a hint of irony. “Is it possible that this residence itself is meant for guests from outside the town, and Xier was once a guest too?”

“Ring ring ring…” The phone rang without warning, interrupting Qi Si’s words.

Qi Si looked down at the caller ID; the name “Xu Wen” was unmistakably clear.

He pressed the answer button and turned on the speakerphone.