Chapter 136 – Pilot Run

Qi Si opened his eyes in his own bedroom, belatedly realizing—just as expected—that he’d forgotten to ask about the bracelet again.

He stifled a yawn and was suddenly struck by a thought.

An entity on the level of Qi could influence his cognition; couldn’t it also erase his hostility?

Was his current wariness toward Qi itself a carefully engineered product of its manipulation?

The layers looped like nested dolls; nothing could be pinned down, and every angle came with perfect self-justification.

Qi Si had always been paranoid, a chronic sufferer of persecutory delusions—terminal, incurable.

But this time he couldn’t reach any negative conclusion.

Qi had plainly told him everything he wanted to know and even promised not to bother him again—already a huge concession.

Was this unprovoked kindness the indulgence of a god for an ant, or was a bigger pit waiting up ahead?

“In the end I’m just too weak—every step has to be timid and calculated. All my scheming is merely struggling to stay alive.”

Qi Si shook his head, drifted upright from the bed, and looked down to find himself wearing a red suit and slacks.

His white-pajama-clad body lay on the bed, eyes shut tight.

Another episode—physical illness.

With nothing urgent on his plate, Qi Si didn’t rush back into his body; instead he floated along the ceiling, idily surveying his tidy bedroom.

The room was spare and neat; a palm-sized statue in bridal red lay quietly by the pillow—the Statue of the Joyous God Xu Yao had become, smuggled out of the game.

From his vantage point he saw wisps of black smoke coiling round the statue; its smiling vermilion lips seemed ready to drip blood—sinister and bizarre.

After two seconds a stream of non-verbal data told him he could trigger its effect at will.

He could mail the statue anywhere and remotely turn an area into a ghost-zone—simple, convenient, hard to trace.

“Looks intimidating, but who knows how strong it really is or what it can actually do.” Qi Si rubbed his chin in thought.

Footage from the instance’s ending showed Shuangxi Town, a “B-rank eerie,” swallowing every living thing that crossed its border; even the official Eerie Investigation Bureau had been powerless.

So how much havoc could the Statue of the Joyous God wreak in reality?

He didn’t expect it to rival Shuangxi Town, but it shouldn’t lag too far behind.

At the very least it should trap everyone in a village so not even a fly could escape.

Imagining the coming terror, Qi Si drifted around the room wanting to share his delight—only to find not a single ghost to brag to.

He drifted back, aligned himself above his inert body, and sank down to let soul and flesh rejoin.

The merger left him dizzy; he rolled over, fished out his phone and opened the Forum.

First he searched the name “Xiao Fengchao.”

#Is big-shot Xiao Fengchao doing stand-up? His streams always make the game feel less scary!#

#Name-and-shame: Tingfeng Guild’s Xiao Fengchao extorted our member’s item—shameless!#

#Anyone know what happened to Xiao Fengchao? He’s been quiet for ages.#

…Hundreds of posts sketched the player called “Xiao Fengchao.”

—He’d burst onto the scene as a loud-mouthed streamer with a flair for drama.

—Reviews were polarized: he’d rescue people, but also blackmail and loot corpses; he’d spend days flaming foes on the Forum.

—Once a Tingfeng Guild bigwig, maybe even its leader, he vanished after only a few years and lived on only in other players’ chatter.

Qi Si noticed his last post was dated July 11, 2025—a throwaway line about heading into an instance.

Clearly the man who’d once stirred up the Eerie Game had most likely died inside one.

The only oddity: he always streamed his runs, yet left no footage of that last trip, almost as if he’d sensed the danger.

Qi Si clicked into his profile.

The top post was a strategy guide with ten-thousand-plus replies; candle emojis mingled with players’ laments about fear and death.

Leaving an instance required ten million points—an unreachable number for most—so players were trapped in a seven-day death cycle, scrambling through lethal instances.

Some grew numb, blew every point on safer instances and lived day to day; others collapsed in despair and simply wanted to die.

Most comments were bleak, yet some tried to cheer the posters on.

The final reply was dated March 27, 2028—about seven years ago.

Qi Si browsed a few pages out of curiosity and clicked into the profiles of those cheerleaders.

The most recent activity was three years ago—odds were they’d met bad ends too.

“Urging others up an unreachable mountain while dying on the road yourself?” Qi Si clicked his tongue and shook his head.

After enjoying the electronic gravestones for a while he exited and typed “Shuangxi Town” into the search.

The hottest hit was a plea posted twenty-seven years ago; the OP wrote in panic:

【My girlfriend vanished near Pengcheng’s Shuangxi Town—I’m sure it’s linked to the Eerie Game! She’s not a player and I can’t reach her! The police won’t believe me, they say I’m making trouble, but lots of others have disappeared there too—it has to be eerie-related! Anyone nearby please help back me up, at least get them to search…】

Other players raised doubts:

【2L: Are scams for real-life meet-ups using this story now? (sweat-smile)】

【3L: Plenty of haunted places out there—how’s the OP sure it’s tied to the Eerie Game?】

【4L: I believe the OP, it doesn’t sound fake. But testimony won’t help—non-players can’t know the game exists, so they still won’t believe.】

The OP replied several floors later:

【I’m not lying—if you’re worried you don’t have to come! But please spread the word; once enough people know, they’ll have to take it seriously!】

The reason I’m certain my girlfriend’s disappearance is tied to the Eerie Game is because it’s just too much of a coincidence. Yesterday my countdown hit zero and I went to pick an instance, only to find a brand-new one called “Shuangxi Town” in the pool. According to the timestamp, it unlocked the very day she vanished. I don’t know what the link could be—but how could it be pure chance?

I’m sure the Security Bureau knows something; after all, so many people have gone missing. Even if they don’t, someone must. The Eerie Game is already large-scale—there’s no way no official body is overseeing it!

Nothing in those words sounded false, and the chorus of doubt quieted. A few still hurled sarcasm, but most who checked the facts offered sympathy and concern.

#41: Don’t panic, OP. Rally every friend and relative and search. Your girlfriend might not be caught up in anything eerie; it could be coincidence.

#78: I searched online—there really have been disappearances around Shuangxi Town, but the local Security Bureau posted a denial. Looks like they’re dropping the investigation.

#219: I work in the system. I pulled some strings and was told it’s complicated; the Federation won’t intervene. Everyone should treat this cautiously.

Back then, players knew almost nothing about the Eerie Game; they were still feeling their way, strangers to most of its workings.

Shuangxi Town was the first eerie to appear simultaneously in the game and in reality, stirring the curiosity—and the urge to investigate—of nearly every player. More and more people crowded into the thread, chattering away, and the replies soon topped a thousand floors.

Yet no one ever stepped forward to offer real help.

Two days later, the original poster left a final message:

I’m going to designate myself into the “Shuangxi Town” instance. I promised my girlfriend I’d stay with her always. Still, I beg you all—keep an eye out for news. Maybe she isn’t caught in anything eerie; maybe she just doesn’t want to talk to me right now… oh, her name is Xu Wen.

The instant Qi Si read the name “Xu Wen,” his stomach cramped.

He exited the thread and skimmed other records about Shuangxi Town.

Unlike Su Clan Village, whose name was taboo, Shuangxi Town—perhaps because it had appeared early or involved many people—was discussed freely on the Forum, including plenty of comments damaging to the Federation’s credibility.

Qi Si noticed that on 27 April 2017 the Shuangxi Town eerie was finally dealt with by an unknown force, whereas Xiao Fengchao te-clearing the instance had occurred on 21 April 2017.

“So the game’s influence on reality is deeper than I thought. It can drop eeries into reality, turn real eerie events into instances, and even steer the course of reality to some extent. Reality and the game complement each other, interact, and let a single incident yield several servings of sin—economical and efficient.”

Qi Si marveled, and the ternary theory of “rule, god, and world” that Qi had told him surfaced in his mind again.

Unlike theory-crafters obsessed with the world’s essence, he enjoyed the process of exploration more than the answers themselves.

Now he knew part of the truth—and saw far more unknowns beyond it.

The Eerie Game existed to reclaim the “sin” scattered across the world and feed it back into the rule. The most efficient way to produce sin was to link reality with instances—one dish, many meals.

Yet only a minority of instances connect directly to reality—Carnivore, Shuangxi Town, and a handful of others.

Rose Manor and Dialectical Game are completely fictional backdrops that simply grab players and throw them into the scene.

Hopeless Sea references the Bermuda Triangle and triangular trade, seeming closely tied to reality, but Qi Si is certain no major news broke in that region after he cleared it.

He refuses to believe the Eerie Game would design anything that strays from maximum profit; could those surreal, reality-defying instances really be idle fabrications?

“If every instance were generated only from real-world eeries, the pool couldn’t be so vast and unfathomable. Fictional instances have advantages—they can ferry new eeries into reality where locals probably lack matching countermeasures—but the payoff is still low.”

Qi Si ran the numbers in silence, then a new question struck him.

Qi had never specified how many planes the rule and the gods actually control… “Time does not exist,” yet under the rule’s order there must be a main axis marking the relations among events.

The Eerie Game consumes no real time yet offers livestreams—an anti-logic mechanism—so neither the “game plane” nor the “reality plane” can be that axis.

Other planes must exist within the system. “rules govern countless worlds with different settings; instances and players come from different worlds, mingling, contaminating each other… vast chaos indeed churns out more sin.”

“But why haven’t I met players from other worlds? Two eyes, one nose, no communication barrier—if we weren’t from the same world, I’d have noticed something off.”

As his thoughts drifted, a word suddenly popped into Qi Si’s mind—

“pilot project.”

Right now, Qi Si plans to ferry eeries into reality on a large scale, yet he still starts by picking one lucky village as a pilot.

The Eerie Game might be doing the same: preparing a massive sin-reclamation and choosing one lucky world as its pilot.

That would explain why the game’s mechanics look partly chaotic, with details shifting—subjective and idealistic.

Because everything is still just a test.

Qi Si almost felt like laughing. If Qi hadn’t deliberately misled or tricked him, then for thirty-six years four million people have struggled between life and death like ants in a death spiral, round and round.

Across infinite dimensions, in the eyes of gods humans are mere specks—finite, negligible… but so what?

The greater the gap, the more dramatic the story, isn’t it?

Qi Si returned to the Forum’s front page.

There, new posts refreshed relentlessly, exuding a feverish, almost morbid liveliness.

#Looking-for-partner—any cute guys notice me? I don’t wanna die a virgin#

#How to invest in streams and fleece the system—OP used this trick to rack up points and hasn’t entered a new instance in a year#

#Finally got into Tingfeng Guild and drew a slot to exchange with Kyushu—recording it here, hope I get to meet God Fu#

…Under the crushing pressure of death, fear is useless.

Humans have always adapted to their environment; they face a hopeless world with optimism.

Deconstruct, entertain, then revel…