Carnivore (4): Entering the Residence

The old woman called herself "Granny Su." As the oldest person in Su Village, she was considered a figure of great prestige and virtue.

While leading the players into the courtyard, she gave a rough overview of the village's situation.

Su Village had no village chief or other officials; all affairs were managed by Granny Su and her grandson, A-Xi, and all travelers were received by their family. This old woman, who looked as if she might fall apart at any moment, was effectively the master of the village.

After hearing Granny Su's introduction, Yang Yundong furrowed his brows and asked the question Qi Si had already posed earlier: "Where are the other people in your village?"

Granny Su smiled and replied, "It's broad daylight, so they're all resting. Once the sun goes down, they'll crawl out to get to work."

The way she phrased that sounded strange no matter how one listened to it. Zhang Licai lowered his voice and muttered, "Oh my god, don't tell me everyone else in this village is a ghost?"

No one paid him any mind.

Zhu Ling looked at Granny Su, who seemed no different from a living person, and a faint smile suddenly bloomed on her lips: "Granny Su, your grandson is so cute, though he is a bit too thin. Boys really should eat more meat to grow strong."

She intentionally or unintentionally steered the topic toward "meat," which was the very thing the players cared about most.

Granny Su's expression collapsed instantly, and her tone turned sour: "No eating meat. If you eat meat, something bad will happen."

These words pointed directly to the key of the instance, and several players couldn't help but step past Zhu Ling to press her for answers.

"What kind of bad things happen if we eat meat? Why would something happen?"

"Your grandson said your village had an incident, and no one has come to visit for a long time. What was that about?"

"Why must someone be left to look after the ancestral hall? Is there some sort of taboo?"

A pile of questions came crashing down all at once, a chaotic and noisy barrage.

Granny Su said coldly, "That is our village's business and has nothing to do with you outsiders. You just need to stay here for five days and then leave."

She turned around with somewhat sluggish movements and began to walk ahead, swaying as she went.

The eleven players dared not delay and followed in silence, soon standing within the courtyard.

The courtyard before them had little in the way of furnishings. A well in the corner was sealed off for some reason, its edges broken and long since abandoned.

A massive round table sat in the center of the courtyard. Though no food had been served yet, it inexplicably added a touch of humanity to this desolate residence.

The woodshed to the west was piled with crooked, tangled firewood, with tools like wood axes and hoes leaning against the side.

To the north was the main house. A vibrant, inverted "Fu" character was pasted on the door, but because the dusty, gray background was so heavy, this splash of bright red didn't add much of a festive feeling; instead, it looked jarring.

To the east was a row of small, partitioned rooms. The roof tiles were scattered, the doors were tightly shut, and they were plastered with tattered yellow talismans, making one inexplicably think of hauntings.

Zhu Ling pointed at the talismans on the doors and whispered, "These are the most common talismans for warding off ghosts and seeking peace, but they've already lost their effect. They should be clues."

Zhou Yilin sniffed and analyzed in a low voice, "I suspect that even before the villagers turned into ghosts, the village was... already haunted."

Yang Yundong said, "It could also be that these villagers have ghosts in their own hearts. If you don't do anything shameful, you don't fear a knock at the door."

"Comrades, I've seen these talismans before. After a great disaster where people died, every household would paste them up to ward off bad luck," an old man interjected with an accent.

His name was Zhu Dafu. He wore a washed-out blue cloth shirt and had a head of white hair, looking every bit like an honest, simple-minded old farmer.

Seeing the players look over, he unnaturally rubbed his own rough arms with his rough hands and said somewhat awkwardly, "My family used to have a courtyard like this, where several families lived together. I don't know how many empty rooms there are here, or if there's enough for us to stay."

Hearing this, Granny Su grinned: "There are six rooms in total. The people are all dead, so they're all empty now."

She pointed at the rooms one by one and counted them off: "This one used to be home to Stone's mother. She hid a handful of wheat in her pant leg instead of handing it over, and she was beaten to death after the commune found out."

"That one housed a family of six. They boiled grass roots and elm bark to eat, but they couldn't pass it, their bellies swelled up like balloons, and they all died."

"The one at the very end—that old man had bad legs and couldn't get out of bed. When they found him dead, he was so starved there was only a layer of skin left..."

According to Granny Su, every room had seen someone die, and the methods of death were all different, yet without exception, they were all miserable.

The players' expressions were far from pleasant.

In reality, hearing about others' suffering might serve as a topic of conversation or a chance to shed a few tears of sympathy; but in the instance, they knew for a fact that the dead could truly turn into ghosts to claim their lives.

Zhang Licai's face turned pale as he stammered, "Do we really have to stay here? Can't we go somewhere else?"

Hearing his words, Granny Su sneered, "Our village only has these six empty rooms, and each room can hold at most two people. You are all acquaintances who came together, so discuss it amongst yourselves."

It seemed there was no room for negotiation.

A short-haired woman with a green dragon tattooed on her shoulder walked a few steps to Zhou Yilin's side, pressed down on her shoulder, and said in a tone that brooked no argument, "Little sister, I'm rooming with you."

Among the eleven, there were three women and eight men. Following the traditional gender-segregated approach, there was a high probability that one woman would be left alone.

The tattooed woman clearly didn't want to be the one left out. Weak as Zhou Yilin was, she at least counted as a person; if something happened, she would make a decent scapegoat.

Zhou Yilin was startled and was about to say something when she heard Zhu Ling say from the side, "I suggest that a veteran player who has entered the instance for the third time should pair with a newcomer. That way, if any special situation is triggered, we can respond in time."

The tattooed woman refused to back down: "So what if you've cleared it a few times? Who knows if you just clung to someone else's coattails to get through..."

Listening to the players bickering, Qi Si quietly drifted a few steps toward the edge.

Seeing that no one was paying attention to this side, he simply walked toward Granny Su, who was standing to the side.

The old woman, who couldn't be any older, was stretching out her bloated fingers to play a game of "lifting the baby" with the skeletal A-Xi. Seeing Qi Si approach, she stopped and looked the man up and down.

Qi Si met her gaze, appearing to weigh his words: "Granny Su, you should know that we tourists all came from thousands of miles away after hearing the legend of the 'God Meat'."

He paused, a trace of suspicion in his eyes: "It's just that this legend has been passed around and has become more and more confused... Given your age, you must have been around back then. Can you tell me what this 'God Meat' is really all about?"

"'God Meat,' eh? Back then, we all dreamed of the immortals..."

Granny Su began her tale, a look of reminiscence appearing on her face. Beneath her wrinkled eyelids, her turbid pupils slowly shifted, as if looking past Qi Si's shoulder toward the distance, and further still, into that bizarre and convoluted stretch of years.

"Back then, we were starving. We had nothing to eat, so hungry we couldn't even sleep at night. But that night, we all fell asleep, and we all had the same dream. We dreamt of a deity whose face we couldn't see, telling us that His body had fallen into our village. As long as we agreed to worship Him, we could eat His flesh."

"The next morning, we woke up at the same time and went together to the place the deity had told us about. The deity was truly beautiful. He didn't breathe, nor did He move; it was as if He were just sleeping. We knew it was the body of a deity, but even though the deity pitied us and allowed us to eat His flesh, we didn't dare..."

"We left Him there, but He began to emit the aroma of meat. In all our lives, had we ever smelled anything so delicious?"

As Granny Su spoke, she began to swallow, making a sticky, guttural sound like a snore. She licked her lips, greed overflowing in her eyes, as if she were savoring the delicacies she had tasted back then.

Qi Si always felt that Granny Su's gaze began to linger on him intentionally or otherwise, conveying a message of wanting to take a bite to taste him. This feeling made him very uncomfortable.

He turned slightly, dodging Granny Su's line of sight: "And then?"

"And then, our old village chief took the lead in cutting off a piece of meat for us to cook and eat. That meat was truly delicious; it was, after all, deity flesh..." Granny Su chuckled, continuing unhurriedly. "Not long after, we discovered that the places where the meat had been cut from the deity's body had grown back, without a trace of it ever having been cut. No wonder the deity was willing to let us eat His flesh; no matter how we ate, He suffered not the slightest harm."

"All of us survived. Later, when we had a harvest, we stopped eating the deity's flesh. We built an ancestral hall and enshrined Him inside. But we were poor, so the deity dreamt of us again, telling us we could let outsiders come to our village to eat His flesh and pay us money..."

Listening to Granny Su's account, Qi Si asked abruptly: "What about your old village chief?"

Granny Su had previously said that Su Village had no village chief; yet, this character of an "old village chief" had appeared in her story, which was truly suspicious.

Granny Su said: "The village chief? He went with the deity to become a deity himself."

Qi Si's heart stirred, and he raised an eyebrow slightly: "Can you tell me more about how that happened?"

"Becoming a deity is just becoming a deity, what more is there to say?" Granny Su muttered, her tone carrying obvious impatience.

He could not continue asking.

Qi Si knew well the need to gauge the situation, so he smiled, said his goodbyes, and retreated back into the crowd.

By now, the players had already assigned their rooms. The tattooed woman had lost out in a dispute with Zhu Ling and could only shout, "What kind of formalities are there in the Eerie Game?" before dragging a skinny, stick-like man to form a team.

Qi Si, having been briefly absent, naturally became the odd one out and was assigned the room closest to the main house.

He didn't care about this; or rather, after entering the instance, he had intentionally marginalized himself, hoping for exactly this result.

In a famine year, people eat people. Although he wasn't sure if this instance would involve such things, Qi Si still felt that, given his combat power, it was safer to be alone.

The others didn't show much reaction, but Zhu Ling walked over, a look of concern on her face: "Chang Xu, if you encounter any danger, just shout loudly. I'm staying next door to you; if I hear you, I'll definitely be able to arrive in time."

She appeared deeply worried, as if she truly cared for a companion she had only just met.

Qi Si couldn't be bothered to distinguish whether she was sincere or feigning, so he just smiled politely and thanked her.

Zhu Ling sensed his self-isolating attitude and raised an eyebrow in regret, but she didn't pay much attention to it, turning back to Zhou Yilin's side to give her careful instructions.

Granny Su hadn't distributed any keys, so the doors to the side rooms were naturally unlocked, merely left ajar.

Qi Si pushed the door open. What met his eyes was a wooden bed about 1.5 meters wide, covered with floral bedding that had a distinct rustic charm, though it had faded severely. From a distance, it was mottled with gray stains, as if it had been tainted by something dirty.

Beside the bed was a rectangular wooden table, its edges scattered with signs of wear, though it was unclear where it had been bumped. On the table lay a crudely made travel brochure, which was clearly just a piece of cardstock folded in half with a few lines of text scribbled on it.

The dust on the table was too thick, and Qi Si didn't want to touch it directly.

He walked over and lowered his eyes to scan the unfolded travel brochure.

On the title page, a poem was written in vague, cryptic language:

[The granaries are empty of grain, how can one soothe a starving gut?]

[For a hundred miles, all eat soil; wood and stone pierce the belly, leading to death.]