Chapter 402: Snow Mountain |
Dong Xiwen sat on the bus, his gaze involuntarily shifting to the young man beside him—the one in the white shirt and clown mask—when the driver’s voice announced, “Anyone without a ticket, please get off at this stop.”
As players who had materialized on the bus out of thin air, he and the young man naturally didn't have tickets.
But during a sharp turn earlier, when a funeral portrait had tumbled to the floor, the young man had seized the opportunity. Feigning to help, he had deftly plucked two tickets from the portrait's frame amid the confusion.
He’d kept one for himself and shoved the other into Dong Xiwen’s hand, his voice a cold threat transmitted through the Soul Leaf: “As a teammate, I’ll do what I can to keep you alive. But I expect you to prove your worth. The moment I decide you’re useless, I’ll have no qualms about disposing of you.”
Classic Qi Si.
Dong Xiwen clutched the ticket, the funeral portrait of a stranger staring up at him. He was certain that if the driver checked tickets individually, the discrepancy would be obvious, and both he and Qi Si would be finished.
He was just wondering if it was too late to try and buy a new ticket when the young man beside him chuckled. “No need for that. Those two unlucky souls are about to be thrown off the bus.”
Dong Xiwen followed his gaze. From the fare box at the front of the bus, a torrent of paper money erupted, streaming through the coin slot and flying toward the two passengers whose tickets they had stolen.
The passengers’ ghostly forms flickered twice before vanishing completely. The swirling bills then wrapped around the funeral portrait and urn on their seats, carrying them out through the open doors and tossing them from the bus.
The man's face had turned a ghastly shade of green, his mouth stretched wide in a silent, desperate plea. The woman pressed her face flat against the window, her eyes fixed on Dong Xiwen. Bloody tears streamed from her eyes, nose, and mouth, leaving crimson streaks on the glass.
Dong Xiwen lowered his head. The woman’s face on the ticket in his hand stared back, her printed eyes burning with venomous hatred.
A chill ran down his spine, but the young man—the true culprit—simply patted him on the shoulder, his tone light and unconcerned. A smirk played on his lips beneath the mask. “What's the matter? Don't you find it amusing, seeing them so utterly furious and completely helpless?”
Dong Xiwen found it anything but amusing. A single thought echoed in his mind: *Is this what it means to be a Pseudo-human? He’s completely inhuman!*
The bus rumbled on, rolling past a bleeding stone monument and toward the distant mountain range, leaving the two unfortunate ghosts in its wake.
Dong Xiwen folded the clearly compromised ticket twice and shoved it into his pocket. He struck up an aimless conversation with his brother in his mind, a desperate attempt to distract himself from the busload of ghosts surrounding them.
The young man, meanwhile, pulled out a phone he had somehow managed to bring along and started playing a match-three puzzle game. The silver bracelet on his wrist caught the crimson light of the blood moon, glinting with an eerie brilliance.
...
Elsewhere, Qi Si was leaning against a bus window, lost in thought as he watched the vast, desolate landscape scroll by.
His bus sped onward, caught in a stampede of cattle and sheep. Every so often, an animal would collapse from exhaustion, its body instantly crushed under the hooves of the herd, its final, piercing cry lost in the thundering chaos.
The mountains were close now, looming like colossal monsters clawed up from the earth during a forgotten apocalypse. They bore down on the frantic creatures below, their jagged peaks making everything in their shadow seem utterly insignificant.
The animals at the head of the stampede, moving too fast to turn, slammed into the cliff face, their necks snapping on impact. Those behind them never broke stride, trampling over the corpses of their fallen brethren to leap onward.
The bus plunged into the gaping mouth of a tunnel, and a darkness so absolute it felt physical descended upon them. He could see nothing, not even his own hand before his face. The world seemed to vanish, yet he felt the unnerving presence of a dense, unseen crowd pressing in from all sides.
Xu Yao’s voice echoed in the recesses of his mind. “I’ve made some inquiries. The place we’re headed is called Shangri-La Town. According to legend, the living attain eternal life there, while the dead find purification. That’s why they call it the Holy City.”
Qi Si had heard of Shangri-La. The name came from a novel, *Lost Horizon*, which told the story of four Western travelers who stumbled upon a hidden paradise and experienced a series of strange events.
“Shangri-La” had become synonymous with paradise, an Eden of beauty and bliss, luring adventurers from across the globe to the East in search of the legendary haven.
The Shangri-La Town these players were journeying to was undoubtedly based on the novel’s setting, though he suspected it would be presented in a far more twisted and terrifying manner.
Xu Yao went on, “Forget eternal life. The local spirits told me that anyone who crosses the boundary stone is already dead—they’ve all become ghosts. Passing through the tunnel is like living out an entire life... Say, are you in a tunnel right now? Why aren’t you dead yet? Hehehe...”
The voice suddenly turned shrill. It was still Xu Yao’s, yet it was laced with a venomous malice that was utterly alien to her.
An instant later, the timbre itself shifted, becoming the voice of someone ancient, deliberately strained into a high, thin whisper.
“You are dead... You are finally dead...”
“Stay with us... Come and keep us company...”
The connection to his Soul Leaves severed completely. Qi Si gripped the Cursed Pendulum, ready to unleash it, but an immense weight pressed down on him, pinning him in place.
He was frozen in his seat, unable to move. The ticket bearing his own funeral portrait flew out from his pocket. The face on it—his face—was twisted into a grotesque smile, its eyes darting about wildly.
Voices of men, women, and children swirled around him, their words overlapping as they closed in.
“What’s the point of living? Just die. Death will end your suffering...”
“Die, you monster... You should never have existed...”
“Don’t kill me, don’t eat me... You killed me, you ate me, so now you can burn in hell with me...”
“Qi Si, your cousin put on her red dress. She’s hanging now. Am I scary to look at?”
Qi Si recognized the voices. The ghost from under his bed, coaxing him to his death. The children who had shunned and hated him. The “friend” he had consumed. His cousin, who had hanged herself...
It was as if all the dead from his past had lingered in the world, and now they gathered as one, a jubilant choir to welcome him into the afterlife.
Qi Si stood. He reached out but felt no seatback in front of him. He took a step back, and the seat he had just occupied was gone too.
A bitter wind whipped against his face, stinging like a blade. The unfiltered howls of beasts echoed around him. He was no longer on a bus, but standing exposed and alone in a vast, desolate wilderness.
A woman’s figure materialized in the darkness ahead. She wore a long, blood-red dress, her face obscured by a curtain of black hair. In the blink of an eye, she was standing directly before him.
She tilted her head, and the wind scattered her hair, revealing a familiar face—but her eyes were a startling silver-white. “You killed me,” she stated. “And now, it is your turn to die.”
Her declaration was punctuated by the deafening toll of a bell. In the sanctuary of his mind, the Scarlet High Priest card began to tremble violently. A long-forgotten fear surged through him—the primal terror of confronting a fated nemesis, of knowing the hour of your death yet being powerless to stop your march toward it.
The fear was visceral, physiological. His throat tightened, and he could feel the grinding of his own bones. His heart skipped a beat, his breath catching in his chest before returning with a heavy, painful thud.
Instinct screamed at him to retreat, but he stood his ground. A humorless smile touched his lips. “Qi Xinyue, after all these years, you still haven't moved on? Or... are you Huo, sent here to scare me?”
The woman offered no reply. Her expression was one of gentle sorrow as the edges of her form blurred, and she slowly dissolved into the surrounding darkness.
Suddenly, the world was flooded with an intense, shadowless light. It was a blinding, reflective glare, like an overexposed photograph, bleaching the world in a sterile white that felt utterly devoid of life.
The bus shot out of the tunnel and onto a boundless, sandy plain. On the horizon, a range of jagged, snow-capped mountains stretched out, their sharp, imposing peaks like the bars of a colossal cage. In that same instant, every animal in the stampede halted. They knelt as one, like men in prayer, their hind legs braced on the ground, their front hooves pressed together.
They knelt in pious worship before the mountains, like sacrificial animals willingly offering themselves to a god before a grand rite. The sight was so profoundly moving, so purifying, that it inspired an instinctive urge in any onlooker to fall to their knees in reverence.
Qi Si found himself standing by the open rear door, a good three paces from where he'd been sitting. Had he taken that one step back a moment ago, he would have tumbled from the moving vehicle.
Getting off the bus at an unscheduled stop... the consequences were easy to imagine.
“Qi Si, are you okay? You look pale,” Lin Chen called out, his voice laced with concern. He was already halfway out of his seat, poised to rush over and offer support.
“I'm fine. The wind was just a bit strong,” Qi Si replied, shaking his head as he returned to his seat.
He had a growing suspicion that this instance was an elaborate trap, and he was the specific prey it had been designed to ensnare.
Too many factors were stacked against him, and ill omens were appearing one after another. He didn't know how far the Ancestral God's revival had progressed, but he was certain their destination was under its direct influence and control.
Considering the fall of the first pantheon and the rise of the second, Qi Si had long suspected the Ancestral God was a tool for the self-purification of reality’s rules—and the very source of the apocalypse.
Whenever those rules neared collapse, the slumbering remains of the Ancestral God would reawaken to devour all gods and living things, initiating a universal reboot. It would then repeat the cycle of creation, only to be partitioned and consumed by a new generation of gods.
He and Li had once partaken in devouring the Ancestral God; now, it seemed only logical that they would become its sustenance in turn. It was a fate he had no intention of accepting.
“The next stop is Tunnel's End,” a cold, automated voice announced, shattering the silence. “Welcome to the domain of the dead.” The bus came to a halt beside another boundary stone, and its front doors hissed open.
Xu Yao boarded the bus, lifting the hem of her crimson dress. She nonchalantly chose an empty seat and turned to look back at Qi Si. “Did something happen back there? I suddenly lost contact with you.”
Her expression was one of pure curiosity; clearly, she wasn't asking out of any concern for his well-being.
Qi Si glanced past her. “Are you alone?”
“Not quite,” Xu Yao replied, glancing out the door. “There’s a handsome man with me. Seems you’re the one who roped him into this. You didn't know?”
Right on cue, a young man in a brown trench coat and gold-rimmed glasses stepped onto the bus, steadying himself on the handrail. He gave Qi Si a slight nod. “It’s been a while.”
A slow grin spread across Qi Si’s face. “Lu Li. I never thought the Puppet Master would be willing to let you go.”
This was the same Lu Li from the Hopeless Sea instance—the one who, as a puppet of Fu Jue, had deceived him and nearly infested him with Puppet Threads.
Back then, relying on his limited experience as a new player, Qi Si had assumed Lu Li’s departure with the main group was merely a smokescreen.
But upon reflection, sacrificing a valuable asset like Lu Li—a puppet with connections to the Kyushu Guild—just to mislead him seemed far too costly. It was more likely Lu Li had another mission and had never been killed by the instance's mechanics at all.
Now, after his memories had merged with Qi's, he finally understood the missing piece of the puzzle. The Sea God’s soul and divine power were sealed within Poseidon's Scepter for him to command. So, what had become of the Sea God's physical body and its divine authority?
The answer was now staring him in the face.
With the end of days approaching, the old gods of the second pantheon were destined to become fuel for the new rules. The next generation of gods remained unknown; it was unlikely they would be elevated from the ranks of players, and far more probable they would be resurrected from the first pantheon.
If that were the case, the existence of the Sea God—once a subordinate to the Ancestral God—became a very delicate matter.
Qi Si raised his left hand. The long, scarlet scroll of a contract materialized from thin air and unfurled before Lu Li.
Lu Li caught the golden quill that appeared alongside it and signed his name on the parchment, offering a faint smile of his own. “Your demands were not unreasonable. The Sila Guild will, of course, do its utmost to accommodate them. I hope this demonstrates the sincerity of our desire to cooperate.”
Qi Si sized him up, his tone dripping with sarcasm. “I was under the impression you’d have already twisted into the Sea God's disgusting form. I’m surprised you can still pass for human.”
Lu Li chuckled. “I have you to thank for that. If you hadn’t sent me one of your little cards and pulled me into this Final Instance, I might have forgotten how to walk upright.”
A new Soul Leaf was already sprouting in the depths of his mind. For the moment, Qi Si had lost all interest in conversing with Lu Li.
He had always been one to hedge his bets. When he met Fu Jue in the Sunset Ruins and handed over the [Merchant] card, he was making his preferred choice of envoy clear.
It was no surprise that Fu Jue had understood the hint and sent Lu Li. The subtext of their text exchange had already confirmed his acceptance of Qi Si’s terms.
Still, the concession had come too easily. Qi Si couldn’t help but wonder what Fu Jue was truly planning. It had to be more than simply securing another slot in the Final Instance...
Lu Li calmly took the empty seat nearest to Lin Chen and offered the stone-faced young man a warm smile. “You must be President Lin Wuya. I've heard a great deal about you.”
Lin Chen had adopted a policy of stoic silence ever since Xu Yao boarded, knowing that the less he said, the fewer mistakes he’d make. He was, after all, completely unfamiliar with these two new teammates.
Xu Yao was one thing; he’d met her for dinner a couple of days ago and knew she was an NPC who had escaped the Double Happiness Town instance. She bore him no ill will.
But Lu Li... Qi Si had explained that during the Final Instance, the Unnamed Guild would need to engage in limited cooperation with both the Sila and Kyushu guilds to survive.
Even so, Lin Chen distinctly remembered that Lu Li had nearly killed Qi Si in the Hopeless Sea instance. Even if Qi Si was willing to let it go, he couldn't help but feel a deep-seated distrust.
And now the man was approaching him with a smile? His intentions couldn't possibly be good.
Lin Chen slipped effortlessly into his Lin Wuya persona. “And now you've met me,” he said coldly. “So you can dispense with the flattery.”
Lu Li let out a short laugh and actually turned away, leaving Lin Chen to his silence.
The doors closed and the bus resumed its journey. Now that their group was assembled, the carriage full of ghosts seemed less intimidating. The sinister atmosphere had faded, and the crowded bus almost felt lively.
A fierce wind howled outside, hurling sand and dry grass against the windows with a persistent, rattling sound.
Outside, the plains were covered with kneeling animals, their ranks growing denser the farther the bus traveled. Many had clearly been dead for some time, their flesh rotting away to expose the bleached bone beneath.
Gradually, human skeletons began to appear among the herds of animals. They, too, were on their knees, hands crossed over their chests in a posture of devout prayer.
They looked as if they had been kneeling there for centuries. Their flesh had long since vanished, leaving only yellowed skeletons standing starkly against the landscape, their empty eye sockets reflecting a dim, cold light.
In the distance, the faint outlines of other vehicles became visible. There were not just buses, but also horse-drawn carriages, sedan chairs, and even steam trains—modes of transport from every conceivable era.
Their cargo was always the same: coffins, urns, clay pots, and ossuaries. It was as if all the dead in the world had converged on this single point, a final pilgrimage toward reincarnation.
The bus pulled into an open space paved with white stones and came to a stop. The Paper Figurine in the driver's seat twisted its head around, a muffled voice rumbling from deep within its hollow torso. “We have reached the Holy City. Welcome, travelers, to Shangri-La. Our origin... and our end...”