A village with only a few hundred inhabitants held a banquet that lasted until midnight. Food and fine wine kept being brought to the long table as if they had simply grown out of the ground. By the end, Hao Ren even began to wonder whether the feast would continue forever, like the endlessly revolving flow of time in a wheel—yet the banquet finally ended, ending when Lily was already hugging her rice bowl and snoring.
After the banquet dispersed, the villagers gathered in the square still seemed immersed in endless celebration. The young men and women began dancing an ancient dance around the bonfire, while everyone else shouted and drank the remaining wine. The villagers who had looked numb and crude during the day seemed to have gained some kind of spiritual strength at night, becoming exceptionally... vivid. Yes, "vivid" was the most fitting word Hao Ren could think of.
Catherine and the Wang Brothers had joined the villagers' subsequent celebrations without the slightest barrier between them. Pierre had not managed to avoid it either; two village girls had dragged him to the bonfire, and at least for now, he seemed to be throwing himself wholeheartedly into the revelry. Hao Ren's group, however, politely declined the old village chief and the other villagers' invitations. They used the excuse that they were tired from traveling so far and asked to return to the longhouse to rest. After some negotiation, their request was granted.
The longhouse was some distance from the central square, but the uproar from the square could still be heard clearly from there. The first thing Hao Ren's group did after returning was check their physical conditions individually. Besides relying on their own perceptions, they also had the Data Terminal conduct a comprehensive scan of everyone.
"Everything is