Chapter 408: The Thighbone Trumpet is a Human Leg Bone |
The wind and the singing receded, and with them, the biting cold. Qi Si got to his feet, discovering he was only as tall as the bedside.
He wore a long, red robe embroidered with gold, its voluminous sleeves tangling around his limbs and swaying with every step. Barefoot, he strained to push open the wooden door, only to be thrown into a world flooded with light.
A light so piercing it could blind someone filled every corner. Qi Si squinted, slowing his pace as he advanced with caution. A voice whispered in his ear, indistinct at first. But as he took a few more steps forward, the words sharpened into focus.
"Qi, where are you going?"
"Qi, stop. You shouldn't be going there..."
"Qi, wait for me..."
The light slowly dissipated, or perhaps his eyes simply adjusted to the brilliance. A colossal golden tree stood between heaven and earth, its branches, leaves, and vines forming an intricate web that seemed to cage the world.
Qi Si found himself at the edge of a cliff, overlooking a boundless expanse of ruins. Broken flagstones and fragmented stone walls crisscrossed the landscape, while a distant golden sun hung suspended over a collapsed temple.
The scene felt inexplicably familiar, yet he couldn't recall where he might have seen it before. He stopped and turned. Behind him stood a child in a black robe, their face a blank mask, a hand extended toward him.
The sunset vanished. In its place, where the sun and moon should have hung, a pair of silver-white eyes were suspended in the sky, gazing down upon the world with a cool, placid indifference. A vaporous white veil unfurled in every direction, gradually blanketing the boundless earth.
A sudden, viscous sense of restraint washed over Qi Si, as if he were a minuscule insect being submerged in amber. He tried to speak, but was met only with a suffocating silence.
Once more, he found himself at the cliff's edge, gazing down at the ruins. His feet grew heavier with each step, as though an unseen force was dragging him back, threatening to trip him.
"Don't go down..." someone said from behind him.
Was that concern? Or fear? But if being alive meant nothing more than being trapped in a tedious cage, he might as well try dying.
A smile touched Qi Si's lips as he abruptly threw himself over the edge.
The wind roared in his ears, but he never hit the ground. When his vision stabilized, the blood-red robe he wore was dripping away its color, transforming into a white shirt within seconds.
A woman took his hand in hers, bandaging a bleeding cut on his finger. As she worked, she chided him gently, "Qi Si, you're always so mischievous. You've hurt yourself again..."
Qi Si stared at the woman. "Who are you?" he asked.
The woman paused, startled, before her expression softened into a gentle smile. She reached out to touch his forehead. "What's wrong? I'm your mother..."
...
Qi Si awoke to daylight. Blazing white sunlight, reflected off the ice outside, pierced the windowpane, feeling both cold and piercingly bright against his cheek.
The hymns that had echoed through most of the night had fallen silent at some point, leaving only the howl of the wind against the panes and the distant, dissonant clatter of bone tiles and wind chimes.
The self-inflicted cut on his index finger had stopped bleeding, and he felt no pain. Qi Si lowered his gaze to it for a moment, then, a thought striking him, he raised that same finger and tapped it against his chin.
Gods didn't need to sleep, yet he had slept. This could only mean he had reverted to his human state—mortal, and vulnerable to ghosts and monsters...
In a sense, the Weird Game was surprisingly fair to the other players, at least in how it leveled the playing field by suppressing everyone's abilities.
Qi Si sat up and walked to the window.
Beneath the ice, countless bodies lay serene and whole, their eyes shut in quiet repose. The forest of corpses he had witnessed last night seemed like nothing more than a bad dream; not even a stain of blood remained.
Qi Si went to the nightstand and picked up the diary Chu Yining had left behind. He gave it a casual shake, and the pages that had been stubbornly sealed shut the night before suddenly fluttered open, revealing a new entry.
[January 2, 2014, written at the Snow Mountain Inn:
[Vasilievna is dead. So much blood. All over the room, the bed, the glass... They flayed her. Her skin is hanging on a frame in the corridor. They're calling it a Human Skin Thangka.
[The old man who runs this inn said thangkas have to be made from a young woman's skin because it's more delicate, purer. That's why Vasilievna's dead... Who's going to be next? Is it me?
[Lin Jue said the Weird Game is supposed to be fair, that it wouldn't target a specific gender. He told me not to worry. I know he's just trying to console me. We're already dead. Why would the Final Instance be fair to us...
[I have to get out of this inn today. If one person dies a day, then tomorrow it's my turn... The path we took to get here is gone. The only way out is over the mountain. If I can just get over the snow mountain, I can leave Shangri-La. That's it. Cross the mountain, clear the instance...]
The script on the page was brand new, the ink still wet to the touch. It was as if one could feel the warmth of the writer through the paper, close enough to smudge the fresh strokes.
Witnessing such a scene, one couldn't help but wonder if a parallel world overlapped with this place, if another, unseen team of players was experiencing the very same instance, leaving behind these entries in real time.
But to most, that team of players was a relic of the past. Twenty-two years was more than enough time to bury the history of an entire generation.
In the new entry, Chu Yining was no longer as composed as she had been on the first day. Her words were jumbled, her logic a mess.
After the gruesome death of a female player, she had quickly realized the danger she was in and made the risky decision to cross the snow mountain.
Who would have accompanied her? What was their fate? For now, it was impossible to know.
Qi Si cautiously tried to turn the pages of the diary, but the ones that followed remained stuck together. It seemed he would have to wait until tomorrow to read the next entry.
He casually rolled up the diary, stuffed it into his pocket, and his gaze shifted to the large bed beside him.
Lin Chen was on his side, bundled up completely in his quilt, fast asleep. Sunk deep into the bedding with his mouth slightly agape, he looked fully prepared to sleep in until noon.
Qi Si leaned over and gave his back a firm pat. "Lin Chen. Wake up, it's morning."
Lin Chen pulled the quilt over his head and grumbled, "Mom, ten more minutes..."
Qi Si's patience wore out. He ripped the quilt away and hauled him up.
A commotion began to build outside the door—a jumble of voices and muffled, frantic footsteps converging in one spot. "It's Mu Chuqing! Mu Chuqing is the one who's dead! I didn't see her when I woke up, I just thought she'd gone to look for clues..." The sharp cry came from the talkative player from yesterday, Yu Su.
Qi Si pushed the door open, and a thick, metallic stench of blood hit him full in the face.
A crowd had already formed around the doorway, obscuring much of the bloody scene from view. An expression of deep apprehension was etched on every face.
Xu Yao and Lu Li were also in the crowd of onlookers. Xu Yao appeared unconcerned, her eyes scanning the scene with detached curiosity, while Lu Li stood with his brow deeply furrowed, lost in thought.
Through the gaps between the players, he could just make out a mangled corpse standing like a statue in the doorway. Blood trickled from its hollowed eye sockets, and gory intestines spilled from its gaping abdomen.
Behind the body, a picture frame now hung on the wall that had been bare the previous night. In the center was a freshly flayed sheet of human skin, its edges still dripping blood that streaked the wall in vertical red lines.
Lu Li pushed through the crowd and approached the flayed skin. Bending slightly, he wiped away some of the blood from its surface. "This is a Human Skin Thangka," he announced. "From the pattern and the inlaid jewels, it depicts Mahakala. A traditional thangka of this kind is supposed to be made from the tanned back skin of an eminent monk after his peaceful death. This one, however—"
He paused, his fingers tracing the skin's edge. "The cuts at the neck are ragged, and the skin on the limbs is torn. The victim clearly struggled violently as they were flayed alive and must have screamed for help. Yet none of us heard a thing or came to her aid. It's safe to conclude that once targeted, death is inescapable."
Lu Li's voice was cold, his enunciation precise, and his words painted a horrific picture in the players' minds:
A woman's skin, violently stripped from her body. She thrashes her limbs in a frenzy but cannot break free from an invisible restraint. Her desperate screams and cries for help go unheard.
Only when the entire sheet of skin was peeled away, when the living person was reduced to a gory, mangled corpse, did her despair finally cease with her life.
She stood in the middle of the hallway, dead but defiant, her muscles still twitching with reflex spasms. Only after a full night did they fall still, yet it seemed as if she could be reawakened at any moment...
"It's an insta-kill trap," Fu Jue concluded, glancing at the female player huddled and trembling in the corner. "The only way to solve it is to not get chosen. Yu Su, you were with Mu Chuqing. Did she do anything out of the ordinary yesterday?"
The player named Yu Su, having swung from boisterous to the opposite extreme, stared at the blood on the floor in terror, her voice thick with tears. "I don't know. We both went to sleep early. I don't know what happened after that... *sob*..."
Her helplessness seemed genuine; she clearly couldn't offer any useful information. But for a player handpicked by Fu Jue for the Final Instance, her reaction was bizarre, to say the least.
These were supposed to be top-ranked players, hardened by countless life-or-death situations. They had witnessed scenes more horrifying than this hundreds of times. How could she fall apart at the sight of a single corpse, reacting even worse than a novice player?
Most of them came to the same silent conclusion: though Yu Su was alive, she had likely been afflicted as well. This 'affliction' was more insidious than Mu Chuqing's death—it wasn't physical harm, but a wearing down of her spirit and soul. The trigger, however, remained a mystery...
The players exchanged glances, their expressions turning grim.
Qi Si, remembering the entry in Chu Yining's diary, looked at Yu Su. "Did you reveal your room number to any NPCs yesterday?"
Wiping her tears, Yu Su stammered, "I... I think so. Mu Chuqing and I ran into a ghost on our way back yesterday. The old man from downstairs walked us to our room..."
Fu Jue stated, "If that's true, then revealing your room number to a ghost is very likely one of the triggers for this death trap."
"That can't be right," Jiang Junjue said, blinking. "Say Dream and I didn't hide when we went to our room. I saw that old man lurking at the end of the hall and even greeted him."
Say Dream added, a note of lingering fear in his voice, "I knew that old man was bad news yesterday. I was terrified all night. It's a miracle nothing happened to us. A real shame about Chuqing..."
Fu Jue shot them a glance and said coolly, "The second trigger condition is being female. According to their esoteric beliefs, a woman's skin is more delicate and pure, making it the ideal material for a Human Skin Thangka."
"What? You've got to be kidding... The Weird Game is sexist now?"
Right on cue, the rattling sound of a prayer wheel drifted up from the stairwell. Sang Ji, the innkeeper, ascended shakily to the second floor and proceeded down the hallway as if no one else was there.
The players fell silent, instinctively parting to create a narrow path for him to pass.
Sang Ji stared straight ahead as he limped slowly toward the blood-drenched skin on the wall. He abruptly pressed his palms together and began to chant, "Oh, Ancestral God, this thangka is from a pure maiden. It will surely bear your most immaculate power..."
The old man muttered a few more unintelligible words to himself before turning to the players, his face splitting into a toothless grin. "My dear guests, the new thangka has arrived. Please, enjoy it. All of us here in Shangri-La love thangkas, and I trust you will grow to love them too."
Yu Su opened her mouth to speak, but Li Yunyang moved swiftly, clamping a hand over her mouth. She forced a smile. "Thank you, sir. We will be sure to admire it."
Sang Ji nodded, satisfied, and shuffled away.
Li Yunyang didn't release her hand until his figure had vanished down the stairwell.
Yu Su burst into miserable sobs. "Mu Chuqing is dead... Does that mean I'm next tomorrow? *Sob*... I don't want to die..."
"I thought the slots for the Final Instance were supposed to be precious," Xu Yao finally muttered to Lu Li, her patience gone. "Looking at her, it seems like just anyone can get in."
A male player from the Kyushu Guild looked embarrassed. "Yu Su was never like this before," he muttered, mostly to himself. "In all the other instances, her expression never wavered. She was always the tough, quiet type. I don't know what's happened to her..."
But Yu Su continued to sob, her face a crumpled mess, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the "tough, quiet type" he described.
Li Yunyang's brow furrowed. She knelt in front of her. "Yu Su, how are you feeling? Does anything hurt?"
Yu Su just shook her head frantically. "Big sister, I'm scared..."
Everyone froze. Yu Su and Li Yunyang were roughly the same age, both in their mid-twenties. It made no sense for her to be calling Li Yunyang "big sister."
The situation had become utterly bizarre. Jiang Junjue, as if suddenly recalling something, pulled a sheaf of papers from his coat and handed it to Fu Jue. "I found these in my room last night. I didn't understand what they meant then... but everyone should see this."
Fu Jue took the papers, glanced at them, then passed them to Lu Li, who in turn handed them to Xu Yao.
The papers were passed around until everyone had seen what was written on them.
The pages were covered in a dense, twisted scrawl that looked like a child's graffiti. Every line repeated the same sentence—
[We've become children again.]