Chapter 59: Jin Yusheng

In Beidu, deep in the mountains away from the bustling city, a building whose surface was completely covered in white metal stood silently. Streetlights among the bushes cast a bright white light, projecting sparse shadows of trees onto the building’s shell through the leaves.

There were no inscriptions or signs indicating its purpose around the building, yet several military trucks were parked there. Personnel in black uniforms moved back and forth between the trucks and the building, carrying sealed iron boxes wrapped in black cloth from the vehicles.

After being moved into the building, the iron boxes were sent directly to the cold underground via an elevator and then transported into individual iron rooms that had only one small window.

Words like “Containment Object” could be vaguely seen on the doors of the rooms, along with various numbers indicating danger levels.

At the corner of the fifth basement level of the building was a recording room, where a steady voice sounded.

“The ‘Carnivore’ instance is an eleven-person large team survival type, a trigger-type rule-based weird tale. The main quest is to survive for five days. The rules tested so far are as follows:

“One, the Ghosts in Su Clan Village cannot be killed by forces from outside the village…”

Yang Yundong leaned back in his chair, tired but calmly repeating the rules and various textual details.

A middle-aged man stood silently to the side, holding recording equipment with a solemn expression.

His identity was no secret here—Shao Qingmin, Deputy Director of the Second Office of the Eerie Investigation Bureau.

“…Going to the Village Chief’s house yields sufficient God Meat; the Village Chief’s weakness is sunlight. One must go to the Ancestral Hall to worship, requiring one person to be sacrificed each time… Subsequent developments are unknown, the death point is unknown, and the ending is unknown.”

The moment he heard “ending unknown,” Shao Qingmin understood everything.

He crouched down, grasped Yang Yundong’s hand, and asked in a raspy voice, “Old Yang, what happened?”

Yang Yundong slowly shifted his gaze toward Shao Qingmin, seeing a pair of equally tired eyes.

He continued in a reporting tone: “The four individuals claiming to be Zhao Feng, Zhou Yilin, Chang Xu, and Zhu Ling show tendencies of being Slaughter-path players, meeting the criteria for the high-priority observation list. Their appearance information is as follows…”

Blood seeped from his nose and mouth, the pain arriving as an afterthought. Yang Yundong shook his head gently and instinctively reached into his trouser pocket.

This time, it wasn’t empty. With trembling hands, he pulled out a cigarette and held it in his mouth.

Shao Qingmin helped him light the cigarette. “Old Yang, whatever you have to say, tell me…”

The silver-white smoke drifted upward like silk threads for a while. Yang Yundong took a sharp drag, letting the smoke swirl in his lungs before exhaling.

He stared at the smoke blurring in the air, as if crossing through time and space back to his days in the army.

The experiences of the past forty-odd years flowed through his mind like a river, fading and blurring inch by inch, only to turn into clotted blood as thick as ink after a certain point.

He saw a great fire and those faces that had long since blurred in his memory, instantly turning into pained faces and broken corpses… He said, “Wild beasts know not good from evil. When they are hungry, they eat; when they see something new, they feel curious. Even if they ignite a forest fire, they don’t know what it has to do with them…”

Shao Qingmin suddenly looked up. “Old Yang, you know? Who’s been talking nonsense to you?”

Yang Yundong did not answer, only continued: “In the past, we expelled them, imprisoned them, and killed them. Now, you are thinking of keeping them as pets…”

These words were aimed directly at the Containment Object Reuse Plan that the Investigation Bureau had recently been pushing in secret. Those containment objects were not just inanimate things, but also Ghosts and people contaminated by the eerie.

Shao Qingmin grasped Yang Yundong’s hand and sighed. “Old Yang, this is a last resort. The Final Dungeon might not even be prepared for us humans… What’s wrong with being a beast? We humans also emerged from beasts. The other side of the beast is a god. Fu Jue… he wants to create a god.”

Yang Yundong still did not respond.

He took another drag of the cigarette and exhaled clouds of smoke, his voice carrying the lethargy of memory: “That fire back then, our whole squad went in. Except for me, everyone died inside… I never started a family, but they all had wives and children… Why wasn’t it me who died?”

The man’s pupils dilated, and his voice and breathing gradually weakened together, becoming almost inaudible like a drifting thread: “Old Shao, tell me, the Federation clearly knows it’s eerie, that it’s full of Ghosts, and that people can’t wipe them out… Why… why do they still make us fill it with one life after another?”

…”Why is a person like you still alive in this world?”

Qi Si had a dream.

In the dream, the creatures that had long since died by his hand were all still alive, frequently issuing questions of disdain or hatred.

Children giggled as they tore up his books, announcing in a tone that suggested they had seen it coming: “Qi Si spends all day looking at such scary things; he’s clearly rotten to the core!”

His Aunt held a broom, pointing a finger at him. “Cursed his parents to death, and then came to eat our food and use our things. What bad luck!”

Shovels of mud were showered onto him in a deep pit in a rural wasteland; the vicious dogs kept by the black factory barked all over the mountains; a wet water snake coiled around the neck of the youth hiding behind a Coffin; military trucks filled with people, white-robed saints, corpses being dragged out, a great fire… Various fragmented images mixed before his eyes, and all sorts of shadows took turns appearing on the stage, quite a lively scene.

Qi Si watched this group of monsters and demons making a fuss with boredom, knowing clearly that he was dreaming, yet he had no intention of waking up.

He was a very vengeful person and liked to savor things that had happened in the past, especially the negative, painful, and sad ones.

It seemed that only by doing so could he clearly recognize that he was a demon hiding among the crowd, rather than indulging in a false peace.

And then, calmly and with a clear conscience, he would drag everyone he met—regardless of good or evil, regardless of gender or age—down to hell.

After a long time, estimating that his brain had received sufficient rest, Qi Si leaned back and fell, waking from the dream.

He sat on the sofa, gave a listless yawn, and lowered his head to continue reading the book he had been halfway through before entering the instance.

The book was very short, and he finished it in less than half an hour.

Because he was too bored, he flipped to the afterword and read it word by word.

【During my research, I stayed in a village called ‘Su Clan Village’. The person who hosted me was an elderly woman who called herself ‘Granny Su’. Many of the stories in the book were pieced together by peeling back the layers of her narration…】

Qi Si took out his phone and searched for the three words “Su Clan Village,” but all that popped up was a mess of textual garbage.

The place where the book’s author had gone to gather material was in Yuzhou, but no matter how he searched for the term “Yuzhou Su Clan Village,” he could not find an exact match.

The date marked in the afterword was July 6, 2017, and now it was March 13, 2035. For such a large village to vanish without a trace over eighteen years was eerie no matter how one looked at it.

In the middle of the night, Qi Si determined that no information could be found on the public network and simply entered the Game Forum.

There was only one post containing the keyword “Su Clan Village.”

#New instance ‘Carnivore’ Added to Novice Pool, Known rules as Follows#

This post was made by the Jiuzhou Guild, and Qi Si skimmed through it quickly.

The long-winded discourse was nothing more than a repetition of the textual information from the “Carnivore” instance; it was unknown how the Jiuzhou Guild knew these things.

A group of players below were shouting happily, some saying, “The instance already blew up, why bother with a guide?” and others saying, “Quick, reveal who blew up the instance!”

After searching for a long time and still finding nothing of value, Qi Si directly dialed a friend’s number.

His intention was merely to leave a missed call record and have his friend call back the next day.

To his surprise, his friend answered the phone within a second, unleashing a barrage of words: “Old Qi, isn’t this a coincidence? I was just thinking of calling you to report the investigation results, and you called! You can rest easy with me on the job, no need to rush me…”

“Jin Yusheng,” Qi Si interrupted his friend’s rambling, “if you keep talking nonsense, I can’t guarantee I won’t stuff you into a suitcase the next time we meet.”

To have survived by Qi Si’s side until now and maintained a friendship for six years, this friend was naturally no mediocre person.

This person’s main profession was a Celestial Master, and his side job was an information broker. He usually hung around the gray areas and associated with all sorts of people. He was well-versed in all kinds of trivia and called himself the “Contemporary Jianghu Bai Xiaosheng,” which wasn’t an exaggeration.

“Old Qi, my bad!” On the phone, Jin Yusheng apologized at lightning speed. “Back to the point, I’ve checked the ancestors of the craftsman who made your bracelet for eighteen generations. They’re all law-abiding citizens; I almost went to visit his Aunts and uncles…”

Qi Si felt a bit hungry, so he got up and went into the kitchen to open a pack of instant noodles. He poured the noodles and seasoning into a pot and then scooped a bowl of water into it.

“…I’m not saying this lightly, but you should really see someone about your paranoid personality disorder. I think it not only exhausts you but also wastes your friends.”

Qi Si turned the heat to the maximum and said to himself, “I have one more thing to ask of you. Go check the ‘Su Clan Village’ mentioned in the afterword of the book ‘Yuzhou Chronicles’ to see if it really exists and what the specific situation is. Also, see if there really is a person named ‘Granny Su’.”

He looked out the window through the glass door of the kitchen.

The low-hanging night sky was reflected in a golden glow by car lights and high-rise billboards, and the road with its endless stream of traffic stretched all the way to the horizon.

The city without night showed its full prosperity. All evil spirits, eerie things, and weird tales seemed to exist only in the wonders passed by word of mouth, their living space squeezed out by the noise of the streets.

Qi Si knew there were Ghosts in this world. Before he was sixteen, he could naturally see Ghosts, and when necessary, he had used those supernatural powers to do some not-so-legal things… Unfortunately, six years had passed, and the memories of the past had faded along with his emotions, gradually becoming as light as dried water stains on rice paper, becoming delusions that required evidence to prove their reality.

Even though he had truly encountered various eerie things in the Eerie Game, Qi Si always felt there was a barrier between the game and reality, that it was another layer of illusory dreams and false appearances… but the facts seemed otherwise.

“Hey, I say, why didn’t I notice you were so serious before? You even want to investigate the truth behind some novelist’s fabrications…”

Qi Si hung up the phone, poured the noodles from the pot into a bowl, and tapped his pinky finger, activating the item effect of the 【Evil God Finger Bone】 on the layer of beef bits floating on the surface.

If the eerie could enter reality, it could not possibly do so silently. There must be many organizations in the world focused on the Eerie Game.

Three days ago, the Security Bureau’s investigation into the Liu Ajiu matter was inherently suspicious.

Qi Si had later checked the Federation’s public official reports, and Liu Ajiu had not committed any crimes recently. So, what were those people dressed as police actually investigating?

—Did they also know about the existence of the Eerie Game?

The power of the authorities and various civilian forces growing in the shadows were not to be underestimated.

Qi Si knew that anyone with a decent weapon could easily eliminate him physically.

He stood alone and had never trusted anyone; the only thing he could rely on was his suspected unusual ability to bring game items into reality.

He just didn’t know if, after accumulating enough power, he could also sit at the negotiating table and plot for greater interests.

Qi Si rested his chin on his hand and stared down at the beef bits in the noodles.

The effect of the 【Evil God Finger Bone】 seemed to be literal; it could only change the taste of meat.

The beef bits still looked like beef bits. They might taste like vegetarian food, but Qi Si, who had just experienced the “Carnivore” instance, did not want to swallow this stuff at all.

So, he picked up his chopsticks and began to patiently pick out the beef bits one by one.