Chapter 275: Wraith (22) Inaction and Impermanence

The sky gradually brightened as mist rose like steam. Morning light, thin as silk ribbons, spilled through the window lattices into the room on the second floor of the Residence.

Tang Yu and Lin Chen woke up on the bed at the same time.

Last night, following the old woman’s request, they had entered the same room. Not long after, the door had been locked from the outside.

With the experience from the first night, they quickly completed their bed assignments and division of labor.

Lin Chen slept on the bed near the door, guarding the two lanterns to ensure they didn’t tip over.

Tang Yu sat on the bed near the window, holding various weapon-type items to guard the window and prevent the Ghosts outside from breaking in.

Near the Zi Hour, the pile of corpses outside the window erupted in bursts of shrieks, as the smoke condensed from various demons and monsters rampaged about.

Fortunately, the players’ item reserves were relatively sufficient, and the Residence’s terrain was easy to defend but hard to attack. The two finally held off the Ghosts outside the Residence and waited for the watchmans gong of the “Third Watch of the Zi Hour.”

The ghost swarms receded layer by layer like a tide. Under the influence of the dungeon mechanics, the two inside the room fell into a deep sleep, and when they opened their eyes again, it was already daylight.

Lin Chen immediately contacted Qi Si through the Soul Leaf: “Brother Qi, are you okay? Nothing unexpected happened last night, right?”

Two seconds later, Qi Si’s weak and ghostly voice rang out: “I’m still alive. I’ve made some significant discoveries; we’ll talk when we meet. Wait a bit. If no one opens the door after half an hour, I’ll come and open it for you.”

Lin Chen breathed a sigh of relief and said, “We’re not in a hurry. Yesterday we waited a full hour before the door opened.”

Qi Si: “Mm, then keep waiting.”

…On the vast and deserted main road of Yanghua Town, Qi Si carried the watchmans gong and walked slowly toward the Residence.

It would take him at most half an hour to get from his current position to the Residence.

Judging from yesterday morning’s situation, it would take the old person managing the Residence at least an hour to open the doors for the locked-in players.

He didn’t need to worry about returning late and being discovered by Lin Chen and the others as having been out of the room, which would expose his identity as a Wraith.

What Qi Si was more concerned about were the discoveries from last night.

The moment the Zi Hour gong sounded, he had entered the Ink Soul Scroll as planned. Carried by the Shadow Ghost summoned from the black umbrella, he shuttled between wooden buildings, courtyards, and alleys.

The specific details were blurry; he only remembered that the originally pitch-black night sky had paled in an instant. The white dawn light rising from the east diffused in all directions with the refraction of the mist, and the entire Yanghua Town was covered in a layer of milky-white glaze belonging to the early morning in just a few seconds.

Day had broken.

The moment time crossed the Zi Hour, when the darkness was at its peak and living beings fell into deep slumber, daylight arrived abruptly without warning or transition.

The townspeople, who had been lying like corpses on beds, stone slabs, and in various corners, transformed into white-faced, red-cheeked scarecrows at one moment, then returned to normal the next. They wobbled to their feet, walked out of their doors, and gathered on the streets.

Qi Si recalled that Qiu Xin had fainted on the street during the Zi Hour last night but woke up the next day unharmed. He surmised that this batch of townspeople shouldn’t be able to see the players’ presence.

He ordered the Shadow Ghost to carry the Ink Soul Scroll back to the ground and stand in the middle of the crowd. As expected, he didn’t attract a single gaze.

All eyes passed through him as if through Nothingness. The townspeople coming and going stepped past his body without a hint of tactile sensation, as if he were completely isolated from the world, belonging to another layer that would never intersect with the townspeople.

He stood for a while, suddenly feeling a premonition, so he followed his heart and raised his hand to strike the watchmans gong once.

“Bang—”

The clear sound of the wooden clapper exploded in the crowd. The townspeople turned their heads in unison, looking toward the direction of the sound.

“Did you hear that? It’s the sound of the clapper!”

“But isn’t it daytime? Why would there be a clapper sound?”

“I heard it; the sound came from over there! But why is there nothing there?”

“How ghostly. I keep feeling like there might be someone there we can’t see…”

The voices were noisy and gradually became scrambled and unclear.

The Ink Soul Scroll’s duration ended, and Qi Si fell heavily to the ground.

When he woke up again, the time on the Pocket Watch of Fate showed exactly 6:00 AM… At 6:30, Qi Si arrived at the Residence on time and went up to the second floor.

It was much as he had expected; the person managing the Residence hadn’t arrived yet. On the wooden door of the room where Tang Yu and Lin Chen were staying, the iron lock was still hanging tightly.

He pulled a wire directly from his bracelet, inserted it into the keyhole, and picked the lock.

Inside the room, Lin Chen and Tang Yu were sitting on their beds in silence.

Hearing the door open, the two stood up almost simultaneously and rushed to the doorway.

Tang Yu was the first to ask: “Lin Wen, how is it? Did you find anything?”

Qi Si took a stack of photographic negatives from his sleeve and handed them to Lin Chen behind him.

Lin Chen took the photos and, following Qi Si’s instructions, laid them out in a row on the wooden bed near the window.

Under the ethereal morning light, the black photos reflected fragmented light and slowly developed color amidst the dancing shadows.

The first two photos showed scarecrows sleeping in a house.

These were probably two poor families; seven or eight scarecrows were squeezed into a cramped little house, covered with quilts like living people, some lying on their sides, some on their backs.

Without exception, they didn’t look much like humans. With large heads and wide bodies, though crudely made, one could still see a general shape—they were tigers made of straw!

“So the scarecrows were actually made in the shape of tigers. No wonder those townspeople’s shadows are all tiger shadows. Is this to ward off evil or to scare people?”

Tang Yu grumbled, then looked at the photos, marveling: “What kind of item is this? If we had brought it out earlier and snapped photos in all directions, we might not have even needed to go to the east of town to know the true forms of the townspeople.”

“These are the photographic negatives from Teacher Luo and the others. I had them sent over last night,” Qi Si said with a smile. “But before realizing the townspeople might be scarecrows, no one would think of wasting items to take landscape photos in a dungeon, right?”

He lowered his head and reached out to fiddle with the photos, dividing them into several sections in pairs.

Tang Yu leaned in closer, pinching a photo with two fingers to examine it: “Teacher Luo and the others could send things over? That means items can travel between different spaces?”

“It seems so. Sounds, items, text—many things can serve as anchors shared between two spaces.”

Qi Si spoke vaguely, raising a finger to point at the middle set of photos, gesturing for Tang Yu to look.

That was a set of photos that could be called horrific, dyed entirely in a midnight-like grayish-black. Looking closely, however, one would find that wasn’t the original color.

Every corner of the photo was packed with distorted, ashen human faces. It was only after this kind of overlapping, which could trigger intense trypophobia, that the color of the image appeared as dark as ink in its visual effect.

Looking carefully, one would find that the reason those human faces were distorted was that they were in high-speed motion. Consequently, their movement trajectories could be glimpsed between the deeper outlines—

Among several parallel arcs like dragons or rainbows, the human faces crawled out from the straw tigers piled like corpses on the ground, surging in the same direction, breaking past the edges of the photo toward an unknown destination.

Qi Si waited for Tang Yu and Lin Chen to finish looking at this set of photos, then silently pushed them aside and pushed a new set of photos in front of them.

This set of photos was similarly obscured into pitch-black by crowded human faces. The movement trajectories were similar in shape to the first set but in the opposite direction.

They came from outside the frame, pouring into the tiger-shaped scarecrows on the ground with the momentum of a rainbow.

And in the latest set of photos, those scarecrows that had been poured into stood up, bathed in the morning light.

Yes, time had actually turned from night to day in an instant!

“In that case, the mechanics of this dungeon are clear,” Lin Chen murmured in summary. “Once it hits the Zi Hour, all the Ghosts inside the scarecrow shells undergo a change simultaneously. Some leave, and some enter.

“They probably don’t have that much time to pick specific scarecrows, or they simply have no memory or consciousness to make a choice, so it’s basically random possession.

“The same ghost might have to change shells every day, and the identity and memory come with the shell. So from our perspective, the townspeople’s identities keep swapping around.”

Qi Si remained noncommittal, only nodding slightly, and briefly recounted his experience last night with a mix of truth and lies.

His narration omitted Qiu Xin’s existence and focused on the situation where Yanghua Town welcomed daylight after the Zi Hour.

He looked at the two and said calmly: “I don’t know if you still remember, but the night before last, near the Zi Hour, the Ghosts outside the Residence turned into black smoke and rampaged. The next day, we found an identical mountain of corpses behind the Residence in the east of town.

“I suspect those Ghosts lingering on the corpses are the source of the Ghosts possessing the scarecrows. The Ghosts in the west of town become townspeople after the Zi Hour, while the Ghosts in the east of town are active before the Zi Hour.

“At the point of the Zi Hour, the original Ghosts on the scarecrows fly toward the east of town to lodge in the mountain of corpses there; the Ghosts from the west of town run out from the mountain of corpses, possess the scarecrows, and live like living people, enjoying their daytime.

“From this, it seems all townspeople are Ghosts, and they need to use scarecrows as bodies to pass off as living people. With just a single fire, they could easily be burned to nothing.”

Tang Yu frowned and asked: “Those Ghosts want to live like living people, so they possess scarecrows—that’s understandable. But why split into two batches and take turns? Can’t they just make a few more scarecrows?”

“Not enough space.” Qi Si lifted his eyelids to look at the ceiling. “Whether before or after the Zi Hour, the townspeople’s activity space is in the west of town. The east of town is a mirror space belonging to Nothingness.

“And the number of townspeople is only increasing; it’s almost enough to occupy the entire Yanghua Town. Since half the town has been allocated to someone else, they can only make do and live in the housing in shifts.”

Tang Yu: “…The urban planning of this town is really imaginative.”

Lin Chen thought for a moment and asked: “Nothingness is silent and colorless, and generally doesn’t interfere with other existences. Why arrange them separately in the east of town?”

“Who knows? Maybe someone is scared to death of Nothingness…”

Qi Si said casually, then changed the subject: “There’s one more thing that’s clear: this dungeon is shrouded in a massive hallucination. Not only can we not see the real world, perceiving the ruins as a prosperous town, but those townspeople are also deceived by hallucinations, unable to see things that a certain existence doesn’t want them to see.

“They can’t see the corpses behind the Residence, and they can’t see the scenes of the other half of the day. After the Zi Hour last night, the batch of townspeople who newly possessed the scarecrows couldn’t see my presence.

“Deceiving players is understandable, but blinding NPCs doesn’t make sense from a game design perspective. Tell me, why do you think that is?”

“For stability,” Lin Chen blurted out.

After a brief contemplation, he murmured: “I remember the Tao Te Ching says: ‘In ancient times, those who were good at following the Tao did not use it to enlighten the people, but to keep them ignorant. The reason people are difficult to govern is because they have too much knowledge.’ The less truth the public knows, the easier they are to manage and the less likely they are to create unrest.”

He paused and looked at Qi Si: “By the way, Brother Lin, the phrase ‘That which is looked at but not seen is called Yi; that which is listened to but not heard is called Xi’ also comes from the Tao Te Ching. I wonder if there’s a connection between the two.

“I’m getting an increasingly strong feeling that this dungeon seems to be constructed according to the thoughts of the Taoist Tao Te Ching, building a Peach Blossom Spring hidden from the mortal world.

“Ghosts, spirits, and Nothingness can all exist without interfering with each other, each enjoying their own lot. The highly respected Master Meng hasn’t appeared for a long time, living simply and governing through inaction. The identities of the Ghosts are randomly swapped every day, following the course of nature.

“But many clues are contradictory. In the letters we found on the first day, whether it was the belief in resisting foreign tribes or the subsequent decision to clear the fields and strengthen the walls, those are all Confucian thoughts. Joining the tiger plague to escape the chaos of war fits the principle of ‘tyranny is fiercer than a tiger’… I still haven’t been able to figure out exactly what’s going on.”

Lin Chen poured out everything he had thought of like beans from a bamboo tube, earning a look of profound respect from Tang Yu beside him.

“You know quite a lot. How do you do it? Even if you prepared outside the dungeon and entered a designated one, this is a bit much, isn’t it?”

Lin Chen smiled sheepishly: “Maybe it’s because I’m still in university. The school library has quite comprehensive materials, and I memorize some when I have nothing else to do. Actually, I don’t know that much; there are many things I haven’t memorized yet…”

“…Are you sure you’re a university student and not a high schooler? I remember when I was in university, I’d already returned all my high school knowledge to my teachers.”

“Haha, I only started actively expanding my knowledge base after entering the Eerie Game…”

While the two were bantering, Qi Si gathered the photos scattered on the wooden bed, turned around, and walked out of the room.

He went downstairs at a moderate pace toward the Residence’s main entrance, where he saw an old man in a black straw raincoat and a scholar in green clothes walking in one after the other.

The old man was carrying a bunch of keys. It seemed he was the one coming to manage the Residence after the death of the previous old woman, and he most likely wouldn’t survive past tonight.

The scholar had an unfamiliar face, yet he acted as if he were familiar with the players.

He carried a jar of wine, placed it on the Residence’s table, and smiled at Qi Si: “I am Li Yi. Master Meng asked me to send some good wine to you righteous warriors. Later, I will lead you all to find that Tiger Demon’s lair.”

He undoubtedly possessed the memories of the previous two scholars, though his personality was different.

Qi Si returned a friendly smile, passed him, walked out of the Residence’s main entrance, and looked toward the east.

Before long, a figure in a purple skirt appeared at the intersection, carrying a lantern and walking toward the Residence.

Qiu Xin had arrived.