The Old Woman called herself "Granny Su." She was the oldest person in Su Village and was held in high regard.
As she led the players into the courtyard, she gave them a brief overview of the village.
Su Village had no village chief or other officials. Granny Su and her grandson, A-Xi, handled everything, and their family dealt with all the visitors, too. The old woman looked like she might fall apart at any moment, yet she was essentially the head of the village.
After hearing Granny Su's introduction, Yang Yundong frowned and asked the same question Qi Si had asked earlier. "Where is everyone else in the village?"
Granny Su smiled as she answered, "They're all resting during the day. Once the sun goes down, they'll crawl out to work."
The way she put it sounded strange no matter how one looked at it. Zhang Licai muttered under his breath, "Good grief, are all the other villagers ghosts or something?"
No one paid him any attention.
Looking at Granny Su, who seemed no different from a living person, Zhu Ling suddenly broke into a warm smile. "Granny Su, your grandson is adorable. He's just a little too thin. Boys should eat more meat."
She had deliberately steered the conversation toward "meat," the thing the players cared about most.
Granny Su's expression suddenly darkened, and she said harshly, "You can't eat meat. If you eat any more, something bad will happen."
Her words pointed straight to the crux of the instance. Several players couldn't help but cut in over Zhu Ling to press her for answers.
"What will happen if we eat more meat? Why would something happen?"
"Your grandson said something happened in the village, and no one came to visit for a long time. What was it?"
"Why does someone have to stay behind to look after the Ancestral Hall? Is there some special reason?"
Questions came flying at her all at once, with everyone talking over one another.
Granny Su said coldly, "That's our village's business. It has nothing to do with outsiders like you. Just stay here for five days, then leave."
She turned around with some stiffness and shuffled ahead, swaying as she walked.
The eleven players followed without delay, keeping quiet. Before long, they had all entered the courtyard.
There wasn't much in the courtyard. For some reason, the well in one corner had been sealed off. Its edges were broken, and it had clearly been abandoned for a long time.
A huge round table stood in the middle of the courtyard. No food had been served yet, but its presence lent the desolate place a touch of human warmth.
The woodshed on the west side was piled with crooked stacks of firewood. A woodcutter's knife, a hoe, and other tools leaned nearby.
The main house stood to the north. A bright red, upside-down "fortune" character was pasted on its door. But the heavy, dingy background did little to make the place feel festive; if anything, the red looked out of place.
On the east side stood a row of side rooms, divided into small compartments. The roof tiles were scattered, and the doors were shut tight. They were plastered with ragged yellow talismans, making it hard not to think of ghosts.
Zhu Ling pointed at the talismans on the doors and explained in a low voice, "These are the most common kind, used to ward off ghosts and pray for safety. But they've lost their power, so they're probably clues."
Zhou Yilin sniffled and quietly reasoned, "I think... before the villagers turned into ghosts, the village was already... already haunted."
Yang Yundong said, "Maybe the villagers have something to hide. If you've done nothing wrong, you don't have to fear a knock from a ghost."
"Comrades, I've seen talismans like these. After a major disaster kills people, every household puts them up to drive away bad luck," an elderly man interjected in a thick accent.
His name was Zhu Dafu. He wore a faded blue cotton shirt and had a head of white hair. He looked every bit the honest, hardworking farmer.
Noticing the players looking at him, he awkwardly rubbed one rough arm with his equally rough hand and said, a little sheepishly, "My family used to live in a courtyard like this. Several households would share one big compound. I wonder how many empty rooms there are here, and whether there'll be enough space for us."
At this, Granny Su grinned. "There are six rooms in all. Everyone died, so they're all empty now."
Pointing at the rooms one by one, she counted them off. "Stone's mother used to live in this one. She hid a handful of wheat in her trouser leg instead of handing it over. The commune found out and beat her to death."
"That one housed a family of six. They boiled grass roots and elm bark to eat. They couldn't pass it, their bellies swelled like balls, and they all died."
"In the innermost room, there was an old man who couldn't get out of bed because his legs didn't work. When they found him dead, he was nothing but skin and bones..."
According to Granny Su, someone had died in every room. Each had met a different, but equally tragic, end.
The players' faces all turned grim.
In the real world, other people's suffering might be something to discuss as a curiosity, or to shed a few tears over in sympathy. But in an instance, they knew all too well that the dead could really turn into ghosts and come back for revenge.
Zhang Licai's face went pale as he stammered, "Do we really have to stay here? Can't we find somewhere else?"
Granny Su sneered at him. "These are the only six empty rooms in our village. Each can hold two people at most. You came here together and know one another, so work it out among yourselves."
Apparently, there was no room for negotiation.
A short-haired woman with a blue dragon tattoo on her shoulder strode over to Zhou Yilin, gripped her shoulder, and said without giving her a choice, "Little sister, you're rooming with me."
Of the eleven players, three were women and eight were men. Under the traditional rule of separating men and women, one woman would most likely be left without a roommate.
The Tattooed Woman clearly didn't want to be the one left alone. Zhou Yilin might be weak, but at least she counted as another person. If anything happened, she could serve as a scapegoat.
Zhou Yilin jumped in fright and was about to say something when Zhu Ling spoke from beside her. "I suggest pairing an experienced player who's entered an instance for the third time with a newcomer. That way, if anything unusual happens, they can respond in time."
The Tattooed Woman refused to back down. "So what if you've cleared more instances? Who knows if you just latched onto someone powerful and got carried through..."
As Qi Si listened to the players bickering, he quietly edged toward the side.
Seeing that no one was paying attention to him, he simply walked over to Granny Su, who was standing nearby.
The old woman, impossibly ancient, was holding out her swollen fingers and playing "lifting the little girl" with A-Xi, who looked like a skeleton. When she noticed Qi Si approaching, she stopped and looked him up and down.
Meeting her gaze, Qi Si pretended to choose his words carefully. "Granny Su, you probably know that we visitors came here from all over, traveling thousands of miles, because we heard the legend of the 'God Meat.'"
He paused, a hint of suspicion in his eyes. "But the story's been passed around so many times that it's become muddled... Given your age, you must have been here back then. Could you tell me what this 'God Meat' is all about?"
"The 'God Meat'? Well, back then, we all dreamed of a deity..."
Granny Su began her story, a look of recollection crossing her face. Beneath her wrinkled eyelids, her cloudy eyes slowly turned, as if she could see the distant past over Qi Si's shoulder—the strange, winding years that had long since passed.
"We were hungry then. There was nothing to eat, and we were so hungry we couldn't even sleep at night. But that night, we all fell asleep and had the same dream. We dreamed of a deity whose face we couldn't make out. The deity told us that Their body had fallen in our village. If we agreed to worship Them, we could eat Their flesh."
"The next morning, we all woke up at the same time and went together to the place the deity had told us about. The deity was truly beautiful. They weren't breathing or moving, just like They were asleep. We knew it was the deity's body, but even though the deity pitied us and allowed us to eat Their flesh, we didn't dare..."
"We left Them there, but They started giving off the smell of meat. When had we ever smelled anything so delicious?"
As Granny Su spoke, she swallowed, making a sticky, almost purring sound. She licked her lips, greed shining in her eyes, as if savoring the delicacy she had once tasted.
Qi Si had the uneasy feeling that Granny Su's gaze was lingering on him, as if she wanted to take a bite and see how he tasted. It made him deeply uncomfortable.
He shifted to the side, moving out of Granny Su's line of sight. "And then?"
"Then our old village chief took the lead and cut off a piece of meat to cook for us. It was so delicious. It was the flesh of a deity..." Granny Su chuckled and continued unhurriedly. "Not long afterward, we found that the place where we'd cut the meat had grown back. You couldn't tell it had ever been cut. No wonder the deity was willing to let us eat Their flesh. No matter how much we ate, They weren't hurt at all."
"We all survived. Later, when we had a harvest, we stopped eating the deity's flesh. We built an Ancestral Hall and enshrined Them inside. But we were poor, so the deity appeared in another dream and told us we could bring outsiders to our village to eat Their flesh, and charge them for it..."
As Qi Si listened to Granny Su's story, he abruptly asked, "What happened to your old village chief?"
Granny Su had said earlier that Su Village had no village chief, yet her story featured an "old village chief." It was suspicious.
Granny Su said, "The village chief went with the deity. He went off to become a deity, too."
Qi Si's thoughts stirred, and he raised an eyebrow. "Could you tell me exactly what happened?"
"To become a deity means to become a deity. What else is there to it?" Granny Su muttered, clearly impatient.
He couldn't ask any more.
Qi Si knew where to draw the line. He smiled, said goodbye, and returned to the others.
By then, the players had finished dividing up the rooms. The Tattooed Woman had lost out to Zhu Ling in the argument, so she could only grumble, "There aren't that many rules in the Eerie Game," before dragging a thin, sticklike man into a room with her.
Qi Si, who had been absent for a short while, was naturally the one left alone. He was assigned the room closest to the main house.
He didn't mind. In fact, after entering the instance, he had deliberately kept to the sidelines, hoping for exactly this outcome.
It was a famine. People had resorted to cannibalism. Though he wasn't sure whether the instance would touch on that, Qi Si still felt that, given his combat skills, he would be safer alone.
The others didn't comment, but Zhu Ling walked over with worry on her face. "Chang Xu, if you run into any danger, shout as loud as you can. I'm right next door, so I'll come as soon as I hear you."
She looked deeply concerned, as if she truly cared about a companion she'd just met.
Qi Si couldn't be bothered to figure out whether she meant it or not. He simply smiled politely and thanked her.
Zhu Ling noticed his deliberate self-isolation and raised an eyebrow in disappointment. But she didn't dwell on it. She turned back to Zhou Yilin and began giving her careful instructions.
Granny Su hadn't handed out any keys, and the side-room doors weren't locked. They were only pulled shut.
Qi Si opened the door. Inside was a wooden bed about five feet wide, covered with a quilt in a distinctly rustic floral pattern. Unfortunately, the colors had faded badly. From a distance, several gray patches made it look as if something dirty had stained it.
Beside the bed stood a rectangular wooden table, its edges dotted with a few scuffed spots. It was impossible to tell what they had been scraped against. A crudely made Travel Guide lay on the table. It was clearly just a piece of card folded in half, with a few lines hastily written on it.
The layer of dust on the table was too thick. Qi Si didn't want to touch it with his bare hands.
He walked over and glanced down at the open Travel Guide.
On the title page, he saw a cryptic poem:
[With the granaries bare, what can ease our hunger?]
[For a hundred miles, all ate dirt; wood and stone pierced their bellies, and they died.]
Before you continue