Chapter 32: The Flesh Eaters |
The old woman introduced herself as Su Po. As the eldest resident of Su Clan Village, she commanded a certain degree of respect.
As she led the players into a courtyard, she gave them a brief overview of the village.
Su Clan Village had no chief or officials. All affairs were managed by Su Po and her grandson, A'Xi, and they were the ones who received all visitors. The old woman, who looked as if a strong gust of wind might scatter her bones, was, for all intents and purposes, the village matriarch.
After listening to Su Po’s explanation, Yang Yundong frowned and repeated a question Qi Si had asked earlier. "What about the other villagers?"
Su Po answered with a smile, "It’s the middle of the day, so they’re all resting. Once the sun sets, they’ll crawl out to get to work."
The phrasing was unsettling, to say the least. Zhang Licai muttered under his breath, "God, don't tell me the rest of the villagers are ghosts."
No one paid him any mind.
Zhu Ling, observing that Su Po seemed perfectly human, let a gentle smile grace her lips. "Su Po, your grandson is adorable, but he’s a bit too thin. Growing boys should eat more meat, you know."
She casually steered the conversation toward the topic of "meat"—the very thing on all the players' minds.
Her words struck at the heart of the instance's mystery, and several players couldn't resist jumping in, talking over Zhu Ling to press for more information.
"What will happen if you eat meat again? And why?"
"Your grandson mentioned something happened here, that no tourists have visited for a long time. What was it?"
"And why does the ancestral hall need a caretaker? Is there some kind of custom?"
The questions tumbled out one after another, a chaotic barrage from all sides.
Su Po's voice was frigid. "That is our village’s affair. It has nothing to do with outsiders like you. All you need to do is stay your five days and be on your way."
She turned, her movements slightly sluggish, and began to walk away, her body swaying with each step.
The eleven players dared not linger, following her in silence. Before long, they were all gathered in the courtyard.
The courtyard was sparsely furnished. In one corner, a well had been sealed for some unknown reason, its stone rim crumbling and clearly long abandoned.
A massive round table sat in the center of the yard. Though yet unladen with food, its presence lent a touch of life to the otherwise desolate space.
To the west, a woodshed was filled with a haphazard pile of firewood. A chopping axe and a hoe leaned crookedly against the side.
The main house stood to the north. A vibrant, inverted character for "fortune" was pasted on the door, but against the grim, dusty wood, the splash of crimson failed to inspire any sense of festivity. If anything, it felt jarringly out of place.
To the east was a row of side rooms, their roof tiles in disarray and their doors shut tight. They were plastered with tattered yellow talismans, which immediately brought to mind one thing: ghosts.
Zhu Ling pointed to the talismans. "Those are just common charms for warding off ghosts and ensuring safety," she explained in a low voice. "But they’ve lost their power. They must be a clue."
Zhou Yilin sniffled, analyzing quietly, "I bet the village was... was already haunted, even before the villagers turned into ghosts."
Yang Yundong countered, "It could also mean the villagers themselves have something to hide. As the saying goes, a clear conscience fears no knock at midnight."
"I've seen charms like these before," an old man with a thick accent chimed in. "After a great disaster, when many people die, every family puts them up to ward off bad luck."
His name was Zhu Dafu. Dressed in a faded blue cotton shirt, with a full head of white hair, he had the unmistakable look of an honest, hardworking farmer.
As the other players turned to look at him, he self-consciously rubbed his coarse arm with an equally rough hand. "My family used to have a yard like this," he said, a bit awkwardly. "Several families would live in one big compound. I wonder how many empty rooms they have here... if there’ll be enough for all of us."
Hearing this, Su Po cracked a wide smile. "Six rooms in total. The people in them all died, so they’re all vacant now."
She pointed to the rooms, counting them off one by one. "Shitou’s mother used to live in this one. She hid a handful of wheat in her trouser leg instead of turning it in. The commune found out and beat her to death."
"A family of six lived in that one. They boiled grass roots and elm bark to eat. They couldn't pass it, and their bellies swelled up like balloons. All of them died."
"And the one at the very end... the old man in there had bad legs and couldn't leave his bed. When they found him, he’d starved to death. Nothing but skin and bones..."
According to Su Po, every single room had been the site of a death, each one unique, and every one of them horrific.
The players' faces grew grim.
In the real world, hearing of such suffering might be little more than a morbid curiosity, a story to be shared, perhaps met with a few fleeting tears of sympathy. But here, in the instance, they knew with absolute certainty that the dead did not always rest. They could become ghosts, hungry for vengeance.
Zhang Licai’s face was ashen. "Do we really have to stay here?" he stammered. "Can’t we find somewhere else?"
Su Po heard him and sneered. "Our village only has these six empty rooms. Each can hold two people at most. Since you all arrived together, you can figure it out amongst yourselves."
It seemed the matter was not up for debate.
A short-haired woman with an azure dragon tattooed on her shoulder strode over to Zhou Yilin. Placing a firm hand on her shoulder, she announced, "You and me, little sister. We're rooming together."
There were three women and eight men among the eleven players. If they followed the conventional method of separating the sexes, one woman would inevitably be left on her own.
The tattooed woman had no intention of being the odd one out. Zhou Yilin might be weak, but she was still a body—and would make a perfect scapegoat if trouble arose. Zhou Yilin flinched, about to protest, when Zhu Ling spoke up from the side. "I suggest we pair a veteran—someone on their third instance—with a newcomer. That way, if something unexpected happens, we’ll be able to react appropriately."
Not to be outdone, the tattooed woman shot back, "What does the number of clears matter? For all we know, you just got carried by a stronger player."
Listening to the players bicker, Qi Si silently edged away from the group.
Seeing that no one had noticed him, he decided to approach Su Po, who was standing off to the side.
The ancient crone was playing a finger game with the skeletal A'Xi, her own fingers swollen and puffy. When she saw Qi Si approach, she stopped and sized him up from head to toe.
Qi Si met her gaze, pretending to choose his words with care. "Su Po, you must know that all of us tourists came here from far and wide because we heard the legend of the 'divine meat.'"
He paused, a hint of doubt coloring his tone. "It's just, legends get distorted as they're passed from person to person... Judging by your age, you must have been here when it all began. Could you tell me the real story behind this 'divine meat'?"
"The 'divine meat'..." Su Po began to recount, a look of reminiscence washing over her features. Beneath wrinkled eyelids, her murky eyes shifted, seeming to gaze past Qi Si’s shoulder into the distant, twisted memories of a bygone era.
"We were starving back then, you see. So hungry we couldn't sleep at night. But on that particular night, every one of us fell asleep and had the very same dream. We dreamt of a god whose face was a blur. It told us that Its body had fallen in our village, and that if we promised to worship It, we could eat Its flesh."
"The next morning, we all woke at the exact same moment and went to the place the god had shown us. And It was there. It was so beautiful... not breathing, not moving, just as if It were asleep. We knew it was the god’s body, but even though the god had taken pity on us, had given us permission to eat Its flesh... we were too afraid."
"So we left It there. But then... It began to give off the aroma of cooked meat. We had never smelled anything so divine in all our lives."
As she spoke, Su Po swallowed audibly, a thick, gurgling sound almost like a purr. She licked her lips, her eyes gleaming with a raw greed, as if she were relishing the memory of that long-ago feast.
Qi Si felt a growing unease as Su Po’s gaze began to linger on him, carrying the distinct and predatory message that she wanted to take a bite. The feeling was deeply unsettling.
He shifted his weight, turning slightly to break her gaze. "And then what happened?"
"Then... then our old village chief led the way. He cut off a piece of the flesh and cooked it for us. It was the most delicious thing we’d ever tasted... the flesh of a god..." Su Po chuckled, her story continuing at an unhurried pace. "Before long, we discovered that the wound on the god’s body had healed completely. You couldn't even see where the cut had been made. It was no wonder the god was willing to let us eat Its flesh—no matter how much we took, It was never harmed."
"Every one of us survived. Later, when the harvests returned, we stopped eating the god’s flesh. We built a shrine and enshrined It there. But we were still so poor... so the god came to us in another dream. It told us we could let outsiders visit our village, eat Its flesh, and pay us for the privilege..."
As Su Po finished her tale, Qi Si asked abruptly, "What happened to your old village chief?"
Su Po had previously claimed the village had no chief, yet one had featured prominently in her story. The contradiction was highly suspicious.
Su Po replied, "The chief? He went with the god. Went to become a god himself."
A thought struck Qi Si, and he raised a subtle eyebrow. "Could you tell me how that happened, exactly?"
"Becoming a god is becoming a god. What more is there to say?" Su Po grumbled, her tone laced with obvious impatience.
He couldn't push any further.
Qi Si knew he had reached a limit. He offered a polite smile, excused himself, and melted back into the group of players.
By now, the players had finished assigning rooms. The tattooed woman had lost her argument with Zhu Ling and, grumbling that "there’s no room for chivalry in a death game," had forcibly paired up with a man as thin as a reed.
Having been absent for the debate, Qi Si was naturally the one left over. He was assigned the room closest to the main house.
He didn't mind. In fact, he had been deliberately isolating himself since entering the instance, hoping for exactly this outcome.
Famine leads to cannibalism. Though he couldn’t be sure if this instance would go down that path, Qi Si still felt that, given his own capabilities, being alone was the safest option.
The others showed no reaction, but Zhu Ling approached him, her face a mask of concern. "Chang Xu, if you run into any trouble, just yell. I’m in the room next door, so I’ll hear you and come right away."
She appeared deeply worried, as if genuinely concerned for the well-being of a fellow player she had only just met.
Qi Si couldn't be bothered to discern whether her concern was genuine or feigned. He simply offered a polite smile and a word of thanks.
Zhu Ling registered his standoffish attitude and raised an eyebrow in a flicker of disappointment, but she didn’t dwell on it. Turning away, she returned to Zhou Yilin's side and began giving her meticulous instructions.
Su Po hadn't distributed any keys; the doors to the side rooms were unlocked, merely pushed shut.
Qi Si slid the door open. Inside was a wooden bed, about a meter and a half wide, covered with a quilt bearing a folksy, rustic print. The colors, however, were severely faded, and from a distance, the fabric was mottled with gray patches that looked like dirt stains.
Next to the bed stood a rectangular wooden table, its edges chipped and worn in several places. On it lay a crudely made tourist pamphlet—nothing more than a piece of cardstock folded in half, with a few lines scrawled inside.
A thick layer of dust coated the table, and Qi Si had no desire to touch it.
He walked over and glanced down at the open pamphlet.
On the front page, a cryptic poem was scrawled in stark letters:
[When the granaries are bare, what comfort for the starving gut?]
[For miles they eat the dirt, and die with bellies pierced by wood and stone.]
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