[Lu Family Courtyard] Night in the Melon Field

The sun had already been high in the sky by the time the melon-field task was finished, so Ren Yi's work as a study attendant didn't last long.

On the surface, he spent some time reading "Ghostly Words" with the eldest young master, Lu Zihan. In reality, he chatted and joked around on the Ghost Net the whole time. Not long afterward, Amu called from downstairs for the young master to come to lunch.

As for his breakfast, how could a servant possibly get breakfast?

As a servant—or at least a servant on the surface—Ren Yi naturally couldn't eat with the master's family. He could only leave the wooden building and squat in the courtyard to eat.

The servants' lunch was simple: a bowl of plain rice porridge and a small dish of pickles. There was nothing particularly disgusting about the food, nor were there any hidden dangers in eating it. It was a rare moment of peace.

Ren Yi did notice, however, that after all the participants had collected their meals, half the porridge was still left in the wooden bucket.

He glanced over the scattered people squatting on the ground and eating porridge, and gained a rough idea of how deadly Aunt Lu Qing's Instance was.

Thirty participants who had gone to the melon field were left, along with ten kitchen helpers, five book organizers, and sixteen members of the cleaning group. The cleaning group had the best survival rate, but they all looked pale and dazed, their eyes full of exhaustion.

And of the participants who had gone to the medicinal herb garden... not a single one had returned.

In just one morning, the number of participants had fallen by nearly a third.

But considering the number of strange entities in the Instance, with each one taking a few participants, the figure wasn't all that outrageous.

Naturally, Ren Yi didn't miss this excellent opportunity to spend his ammunition. While collecting and eating his porridge, he quietly used his ability several times on the participants around him.

Unfortunately, too much time had passed since his earlier highlight moment, and the positive emotions generated by the livestream had mostly dissipated. He absorbed very little energy this time.

He casually took a few mouthfuls of porridge, then put down his bowl and hurriedly finished lunch.

The afternoon's work was uneventful. After their encounter with the strange entities that morning, the remaining participants had either figured out the rules or had outstanding abilities. Hardly anyone died.

The only group worth mentioning was the cleaning group. At dinner, Ren Yi glanced at the crowd collecting food in the corner and saw that only eight of them remained.

Those members who had looked dazed and exhausted at noon were nowhere to be seen. Clearly, they hadn't made it through the afternoon's work.

In that case, wasn't the melon-field group, which had originally numbered a full forty and still had twenty-eight people left, a little too "friendly"?

The watermelon field only used mental attacks in the form of screams, and the instant-kill rule could only be triggered if a participant deliberately damaged a watermelon. It didn't seem particularly dangerous to participants with slightly stronger wills.

Ren Yi suddenly remembered the pitchfork of unknown purpose by the edge of the field. He hadn't known what it was for before, but thinking about it now, it probably wasn't that simple.

Sure enough, after dinner, Amu coldly stopped the remaining servants in the melon-field group.

"You have to keep watch over the melon field tonight, too. Remember, don't let the master's property come to harm."

Ren Yi watched with interest as the expressions of several participants who had relaxed suddenly grew tense. He couldn't be bothered with the commotion and went his own way, heading straight for his field, number seventeen.

Beside the sign at the edge of the field, the pitchfork was still resting there quietly.

Ren Yi bent down and picked it up, weighing it in his hand. It was light, about three chi long, and crudely made, like a toy for a child to play with.

But no matter how one looked at it, this was the only thing Ren Yi had found in the entire Instance whose purpose was to serve as a "weapon."

So, would "hostile units" appear in the melon field at night?

Constrained by the rules of the two worlds, the hostile unit would never be too powerful, and this seemingly unremarkable pitchfork was probably a weapon especially effective against it.

Ren Yi found a flat stone at the edge of the field and sat down. Amid the rising and falling "grand chorus of screams" from the surrounding watermelons, he waited in utter boredom for night to deepen.

As he waited, the night breeze gradually grew colder. A golden full moon slowly rose into the sky, its light illuminating the melon field with extraordinary clarity.

"Bang, bang, bang!"

Several gunshots suddenly shattered the night.

Ren Yi instantly focused and spread his perception in the direction of the gunfire.

The field where the incident had occurred was too far away to see with the naked eye, but his strange-entity perception reached it without obstruction, projecting a clear, three-dimensional image of the area into his mind.

In his perception, half of a participant's body had already been swallowed by the sticky soil. Only his upper body remained aboveground, struggling futilely as he let out terrified, heart-rending screams.

His pitchfork and a light machine gun had been thrown aside, a faint wisp of smoke still rising from the muzzle. Not far away, a watermelon had burst open, its bright red flesh and juice spilling across the ground.

Clearly, it had been shot apart.

Other than that, there was nothing unusual in the field.

Had he lost his mind?

Ren Yi quickly dismissed the thought.

A participant who had survived the day and made it this far could never make the elementary mistake of deliberately damaging a watermelon.

Something new had to have come in.

In that case, either this strange entity was fast enough to have already left the field; or it could attack without approaching and cause participants to misjudge things from a distance; or it had the ability to block perception and could hide itself from the perception of a minor E-Rank strange entity like Ren Yi.

At that thought, a trace of interest flashed in Ren Yi's eyes. Whichever possibility it was, this strange-entity senior's ability was interesting enough.

"Ah!"

Another scream rang out. Not far from the field where the first incident had occurred, another participant suddenly jumped up, as though he had caught sight of something terrifying.

His gaze then fixed on the ground, apparently following the movement of something there.

He rushed forward, seeming to try to stab something with the pitchfork in his hand.

But the watermelons and vines on the ground were too densely packed, and the participant was also worried that falling would damage the watermelons. As a result, his movements were constrained, and he was in a sorry state.

Ten meters ahead of him, a watermelon suddenly began to shake, causing it to let out an even shriller scream.