Chapter 86: Queue |
A pus-yellow eye filled half the sky, its gaze encompassing the entire island.
The moment that gaze met his, countless fragmented thoughts flooded Qi Si’s mind, threatening to overwhelm his reason and become his entire reality.
His consciousness was slowly being torn apart, his emotions meticulously sorted and layered into sediment. Qi Si felt like a molting snake, his outer shell stripped away piece by piece, leaving only his most vulnerable core to face the grotesque horror.
Suddenly, he was granted a new perspective, one that looked down from above.
He watched his own body rise from the bed and walk, step by step, to the window, gazing almost obsessively at the distant sea.
Fish-scale-like shadows drifted on the fog-shrouded surface of the water. The floating corpses of the unjustly dead, having traveled far to worship their god, prostrated themselves in pious reverence. A gentle, almost stagnant breeze carried a song from afar.
Qi Si heard himself murmur:
“I want to see the sea... I really want to go to the sea...”
[Identity Card hidden effect “Lucid Dream” has been triggered. This effect cannot be activated again in this instance.]
A bubble of rationality inflated, then burst with a soft pop.
Images flashed through his mind as every clue he had previously gathered scrolled past his eyes, reordering and reassembling themselves.
Xu Maochun and Gao Musheng represented two different ways to die... The window in Xu Maochun’s room had been wide open...
The variables and the deduction all occurred and concluded within a second. In that flash of inspiration, his dissociated soul poured back into his body. Qi Si let momentum guide his arm as he raised a hand and shut the window.
The simple action exhausted nearly all his strength. He gasped for breath, leaning back against the center of the window frame with a heavy thud.
The strange song stopped abruptly. The grotesque scene was blocked out, leaving tranquility and terror separated by a single wall.
With a portion of his consciousness restored, Qi Si reached up and touched his face. His skin was ice-cold.
He felt the joyful smile still plastered on his lips and imagined he must look like a porcelain doll with blush painted on its cheeks.
The thought made him laugh, a genuine, unsettling sound. He had to use his hand to physically smooth the muscles of his lower face back into a neutral expression.
A faint creak came from his back, like sharp fingernails scratching a wooden wall.
The sound triggered a tactile sensation, and Qi Si felt a faint itch spreading across his back.
The half-centimeter-thick wooden board suddenly felt as thin as paper, transmitting the sensation of something stroking him through his clothes. From time to time, something would strike different parts of the window, the impacts growing heavier, as if testing for the easiest angle to break through.
The good news was that the first death trap was indeed the window. As long as it was closed, he was safe.
The bad news was that the window was about to be smashed open.
Qi Si’s gaze slowly shifted to the bed where Chang Xu lay, dead to the world, and then to the nightstand beside it.
He hooked the nightstand with his foot, dragging it over to the window and placing it directly beneath the seam. Then, in a few quick strides, he lunged onto the bed and hauled the corpse-like Chang Xu off it.
In that same second, the window was once again blown open by the wind.
Qi Si, still dragging Chang Xu, kept his head down and his eyes fixed on the floor, trying his best not to look at the scene outside.
As he neared the window, he hoisted Chang Xu upright, using him as a shield.
He had to admit, the guy looked lean, but he was surprisingly heavy. The weight made Qi Si stagger, and he nearly fell backward.
He shuffled over to the nightstand he’d positioned earlier, arranged Chang Xu in a sitting posture on top of it, and slammed the window shut again. When he let go, Chang Xu’s back pressed firmly against the wooden frame—perfect!
Chang Xu’s eyes were shut tight, his body slumped against the window like a corpse. The pounding from outside, *thump, thump*, continued without pause.
Qi Si stepped back, stroking his chin as he studied his handiwork for a moment, still not entirely at ease.
So, he pulled a thin wire from his bracelet, stretched it across the side of Chang Xu’s neck, and secured the ends to the wall panels.
The second rule was explicit: it was safe to sleep in the hotel rooms.
If the window were to be forced open, the wire would sever Chang Xu’s neck, directly contradicting that rule.
Qi Si watched the old wooden window with a leisurely, malicious smile.
“You can certainly keep trying to kill me, but first, you’ll have to figure out how to blow this window open without harming this sleeping man...”
“The rules are absolute. Even a god must obey them. Can you bear the cost of breaking them?”
He calmly sat down on the bed, as if he had already determined the solution and the answer.
And, as it turned out, he had.
The pounding outside the window ceased. The silence was so profound that he could even hear the ticking of his watch.
Qi Si tapped his fingers idly on the edge of the bed, waiting in the quiet for a long while. Nothing new happened.
A look of understanding dawned on his face, his sardonic smile now tinged with a hint of pity.
“So, this is what cold, rigid rules are like.”
A low sigh dispersed into the night air. Qi Si leaned against the bed to rest, casually retrieving a small recorder from his inventory and pressing the play button.
[Brother and sister go to grandma’s house...]
A crisp children’s song rang out. Qi Si expressionlessly skipped to the next track.
[Fearing, praying, I see only the sea and the souls of the drowned...]
The song was mournful and melodic, like a lament, proclaiming the purest faith in survival itself.
The distant waves seemed to surge nearby, the roar of the tide filling his ears.
Qi Si pulled a strangely shaped idol of a sea god from under his pillow and held it in his hand, thinking silently:
“What, exactly, is a god?”
...
To the question of what a god was, a fourteen-year-old Qi Si had a vastly different answer than he did now.
He thought, if the sun were to suddenly plummet from the dark sky, igniting a raging forest fire that dimmed the stars and moon—that would be a god.
Qi Si had always been an unpopular child. Just a few months into middle school, his strange behavior had already led to his classmates isolating him.
He was happy for the peace and quiet, often sitting alone in a corner, silently engrossed in dark and bloody books.
Until one day, a boy with gold-rimmed glasses sat down next to him, holding a book of his own.
The boy said, “You like mystery novels too. I like them too. Let’s be friends.”
In truth, Qi Si had never liked mystery novels; it just so happened that the book in his hands, *The Devil of Dartmoor*, had elements of mystery.
He asked the boy, “They said they’d beat up anyone who talks to me. Aren’t you scared?”
The boy smiled gently. “I’m the class president. They won’t dare do anything to me.”
After that day, the number of isolated people went from one to two.
Qi Si had stopped believing in true friendship back in elementary school, but he was still moved by the boy’s self-sacrificial gesture.
After accidentally seeing bruises on the boy, he said, “I can help you kill them. I won’t leave much of a trace.”
The boy shook his head. “There are some things you just can’t do. Humans weren’t born to be beasts.”
Qi Si tilted his head, looking at him. “Then I’ll let you kill me. That will end all the trouble.”
The boy chuckled but didn’t answer. Later, Qi Si was abruptly transferred to a middle school in the countryside. As he was leaving, he only had time to press a book into the boy’s arms—
*The Devil of Dartmoor*.
...
In her room, Liu Yuhan leaned against the wooden window, not having slept a wink all night.
The moment she uncovered Yuna’s secret, she knew that she and Zhang Hongfeng were as good as dead. The arrival of their final end was merely a matter of time.
She shouldn’t have taken Zhang Hongfeng to the kitchen. Even if there were crucial clues there, she shouldn’t have been so reckless and impulsive...
In the past few instances, she had solved the mysteries time and again with her “Strange Talk Notebook” skill. It had all been too easy, so much so that she had grown careless of the potential dangers.
Now she realized that as a decision-maker, a single mistake could not only cost her own life but also the lives of the many people who trusted her judgment...
But it was too late. Liu Yuhan couldn’t help but smile bitterly to herself.
At this point, what good was learning a lesson? Would she even have a future?
For the past year, she had placed too much faith in “intellect” and “information,” believing that the ability to solve puzzles was all she needed to survive in the treacherous instances.
After earning points, the first thing she always did was not to buy life-saving items, but to enter old instances to study their puzzles and tricks, writing walkthroughs...
Amid the chorus of flattery, being called an “expert,” had she not lost herself, truly believing her individual skills were so exceptional that she could rise above the instances themselves?
No, to be precise, it wasn’t that she was lost, but that she was indulging herself. Survival wasn’t easy, and living was simply too exhausting for her. She didn’t want to waste too much energy considering other things. She even felt that death wasn’t so unacceptable...
But with the grim reaper at her door, who could truly face a silent, anonymous death with equanimity?
Self-pity was useless. Liu Yuhan forced herself to collect her thoughts, burying her head in her notebook to scribble and draw.
Yuna hadn’t brought her any soup to help her sleep. Even if she could fall asleep, she would inevitably be startled awake later in the night. She might as well use her final moments to deduce what she could. Perhaps she could find a crucial clue and escape her fate.
Over and over, she rewrote everything she had seen and heard since entering the instance, detailing even the expressions and gestures of every player, like a struggling student in the last half-hour of an exam, desperate to fill in the blank spaces just to get partial credit.
The clock chimed, announcing that another two hours had passed.
The countdown to her death ticked relentlessly on. Her concentration began to wane, and memories from her past surfaced one after another, like the legendary revolving lantern that appears before one’s dying eyes.
She thought of the small town she had been cooped up in for the first half of her life—dark, dirty, cramped, and oppressive.
She thought of the mountains of homework, the red banners, and the train bound for Jiang City, flanked by towering skyscrapers.
She thought of the endless accusations and curses, the petty, tangled quarrels...
The noise and chaotic images swirled together into a blur, but within the mottled colors, a black metal card stood out with stark clarity. At that time, she had reached out to touch it as if possessed, just as she had accepted that fountain pen from her father’s hand so many years ago.
[In the Weird Game, you can obtain anything you desire.]
That was what the voice had told her.
Without hesitation, she had said, syllable by syllable, “I want a new life.”
The midnight bell struck twelve times. Liu Yuhan heard a faint rustling sound outside her door. It grew nearer, then more distant, as if something was wandering about, searching.
The gruesome image of Gao Musheng’s corpse flashed in her mind. Liu Yuhan felt as if she’d been plunged into an ice cellar. Her teeth chattered uncontrollably, and her face was as white as a sheet.
In the face of death, everyone is fragile. She began to regret being so impulsive, antagonizing Yuna, and recklessly exploring with only two people...
—If you could do it all over again, would you still enter the Weird Game?
She heard her own voice calmly ask the question.
She nodded, then shook her head. “I don’t regret it.”
In that instant, the pages of the notebook before her flew open. Embroidered lines of fiery, dark-gold text burned themselves onto the paper in rows of crimson gilt.
[Analyzing clues... Progress: 1%]
The unknown presence outside had already locked onto its target. The soft rustling stopped at her door, and a serpentine, sandy sound began as it scraped against the wood.
[Analysis Progress: 37%]
The things started knocking. A chorus of *thump, thump, thump* rose from all sides, not as an inquiry or a request, but as a test, a threat.
[Analysis Progress: 61%]
The knocking grew louder, turning into a frantic pounding. The swarm outside sought to break into the room with brute force. The decaying wooden door was already on the verge of collapse...
[Analysis Progress: 96%]
The door was smashed open from the outside. Countless black shadows flooded into the room. They were monsters, half-human and half-fish, their bodies dotted with grotesque scales that dripped a suspicious slime.
In her final moments, Liu Yuhan became surprisingly calm. She lowered her head and stared intently at the floating notebook, where an illusory golden fountain pen was sketching and scribbling across the page.
A strange image began to take shape: a pair of scarlet eyes embedded in a vast darkness. Beneath that bloody gaze stood a pale human figure...
[Analysis Progress: 100%]
With the final stroke, the figure in the picture gained a face and an expression.
It was a familiar face, yet it seemed so alien now. He was smiling playfully, but his eyes held the detached pity of a higher being observing mere insects and beasts.
“Oh, gods, save me, the cabin is crowded, with bodies and cargo piled high...”
An ancient song drifted in from the hallway. It was filled with the static of a recording, yet it was still able to soothe a troubled mind and bring a moment of peace.
Liu Yuhan looked up. The half-fish, half-human ghouls, which had been just inches away, seemed to have been placated. They stopped one by one, slowly turning to listen, craning their necks toward the source of the music.
They began to move, like sleepwalkers hearing a summons from their homeland, following the sound in a hazy, dazed procession.
On some strange impulse, Liu Yuhan followed them out. Perhaps it was the notebook’s guidance, or perhaps the song itself possessed a kind of magic.
She stood in the corridor, submerged in a dreamlike collective consciousness, swept along and disturbed by emotions that were not her own.
The ghouls had already shed all their agitation. They were like innocent, unknowing children, shuffling their feet and leaving wet trails as they formed a queue in the hallway.
They were of all different shapes and sizes, but they prostrated themselves as one, driven by the desperate hope for life that only the dead can truly know.
Liu Yuhan stood dejectedly among the crowd of ghouls, her shoulders slumped as she gazed ahead.
A young man in a white shirt and black trousers held an old-fashioned recorder high in one hand. With his other hand, he gestured downward, like a conductor leading an orchestra.
“...Give up hope, give up hope, there is no hope of returning home...”
The song flowed from the recorder.
Surrounded by the grotesque, twisted monsters, the young man was calm, even cold. He looked down on them from above, without joy or sorrow, indifferent to gain or loss, truth or illusion, solitude or communion.
But in that moment, he truly held a person’s life and death in his hands.
—Like a god.