Under the thick, ink-black night sky, Yang Yundong and Allen walked one behind the other along a dusty dirt road, slowly making their way toward the western edge of the village.
Going out at night undoubtedly meant danger, but some things still had to be done.
The system had said that the truth was hidden in the villagers' words. The sooner they found it, the fewer people would be harmed later.
The villagers only came out at night. If they wanted to question them, they had to venture out after dark.
In the silence, Allen finally couldn't hold back and asked, "Yang, can you tell me what this Eerie Game is all about?"
"No one knows what it is. Maybe it's some kind of rule, maybe a large-scale paranormal event, or maybe an experiment conducted by a higher-dimensional civilization." Yang Yundong didn't look back. His voice was calm and even. "The result is that some people are chosen by chance and dragged into an instance."
"Cool!" Allen cried excitedly, then realized that was inappropriate and quickly corrected himself. "So is this a good thing or a bad thing? I heard that voice say it could grant any wish I made..."
"It's not a good thing." Yang Yundong stopped and turned to look at him. "Most people die in the game. Even if you survive, you might not be human anymore..."
"My God, is it really that scary?"
The moon hung high overhead. In the utter silence, even the cicadas were quiet. Time itself seemed to freeze, waiting with the world for death.
Low houses stood in clusters like burial mounds, crowding around a sprawling single-story building. The slogan painted on it—"Work hard and strive to get ahead"—had long since faded. It looked more like grime carelessly splashed across the wall, running downward.
Allen disliked silence, so he tried to make conversation. "I've never been to the countryside in Dragon County. I'll just treat this as a free trip. But that old woman's story was terrifying. Someone starved to death in every room. Now I'm afraid to go inside... Uh..."
As if in answer to his words, hunger struck without warning, surging over him like a landslide and swallowing him whole.
Cramping pain spread from his stomach through his chest and across his body, bringing an intense weakness. He trembled and crouched down, his limbs moving against his will as he dug at the dirt.
Yang Yundong crouched too, his expression grim. The sudden hunger had clearly caught him off guard as well.
Keeping his composure, he pulled two pieces of God Meat from his pocket with trembling hands. He took one and handed the other to Allen.
The two wolfed down the God Meat. Allen wiped his hands, smeared with dirt and mucus, on his clothes. The ease he'd shown earlier was gone.
No one believed danger could be so close until they'd experienced a brush with death firsthand.
For the first time, Allen realized this strange experience was nothing like the outdoor adventures and extreme sports he'd taken part in before...
His blind optimism had been punctured. He opened his mouth to say something, but Yang Yundong suddenly raised a finger to his lips, signaling for silence.
Allen shuddered and looked up. In the darkness ahead, faint green lights flickered in and out, like ghosts or will-o'-the-wisps...
Zhu Dafu lay in bed, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling.
He was seventy-eight years old. He'd farmed all his life and never even left town. When he had free time, he'd only ever watched short videos.
He'd never been to school, read a survival-game novel, or played a horror game.
Three days ago, he'd been hauling his cart to the market in town when he ran into Public Security Bureau officers arresting a criminal. The criminal was shot dead on the spot. Zhu Dafu happened to be passing by and saw a black metal card fly out of the pool of blood and sink into his body.
And just like that, he'd blundered into the Eerie Game.
He'd stumbled through the first instance alive. Points, TE or NE—he couldn't make heads or tails of any of it. All he knew was that, from then on, every three days he'd have to encounter a ghost. All sorts of strange ghosts.
At his age, even a little worry was enough to keep him awake.
He thought back over the past few days, growing more alert with every passing moment.
This time is nice, he thought. The village, the houses, the people—all familiar. Nothing like last time, with all that "genetics" and "cloning" stuff. I couldn't understand a word.
He could make sense of quite a bit of what Granny Su had said, too. He'd lived through those years himself. First his grandfather had starved to death, then his younger sister. They'd prayed to the gods, too, but why had no kind-hearted god ever come to save them?
Zhu Dafu turned over and found himself looking at his young roommate's face.
Everything's good this time, except that everyone with me is so young. There's even a girl still in college, younger than my granddaughter.
I'm old. If I die, I die. What do those damned ghosts want with these kids?
As he lay there, lost in his thoughts, he watched the moon rise higher and higher outside the window. Its cold, white light passed through the lattice and fell across his face.
His stomach suddenly began to cramp. A hunger he hadn't felt in years rose up, impossible to endure through willpower. Every inch of his flesh cried out for food.
It was as if he'd been dragged back to the era seventy years ago, when death's shadow loomed over everything. Once more, he saw the parched earth, smelled the stench of decay, and remembered swollen faces and yellow-white pus...
The memories of the past overlapped with what he was experiencing now. He began to tremble uncontrollably...
A rooster crowed loudly in the distance, and the eastern sky began to brighten.
Qi Si climbed out of bed and hurried to the door. He stepped outside, his gaze landing on the person lying sprawled in the middle of the courtyard.
The unlucky man was the gaunt one who'd shared a room with the Tattooed Woman. Qi Si remembered his name was Lu Keliang, a volunteer math teacher.
The man looked long dead. He might as well have had the words "I'm beyond saving" written on his face.
Qi Si used his foot to turn the man's corpse onto its back. He glanced down at the dirt smeared across the man's nose and mouth and his grotesquely swollen belly.
Even at a glance, it was clear that the man had either choked to death or eaten himself to death.
It seemed that if players didn't eat the God Meat in time, they would be possessed by a Nightmare and, under the Eerie Game's control, forced to stuff themselves with all sorts of things they shouldn't eat until they died.
That was an ugly way to die. In an instant, Qi Si became determined to survive this instance.
He subconsciously felt the cloth-wrapped God Meat in his pocket.
One whole piece of God Meat was enough to get someone through a bout of hunger, and Granny Su had given the players only eleven pieces in total the day before.
Every extra piece someone took meant that one more person might fail to endure the hunger and die miserably.
In a strict sense, everyone who took extra God Meat was a murderer.
With that in mind, Qi Si tucked the cloth bundle deeper into his pocket. He didn't feel the slightest guilt, but he also didn't want anyone to catch him in the act and use it as an excuse to moralize and pressure him.
A creak came from the entrance to the courtyard. The wooden gate was pushed open from outside.
Qi Si quickly pulled his hand from his pocket and put on a grief-stricken expression, his brows and eyes filled with the sorrow of mourning a fellow sufferer.
"What happened?" Yang Yundong came in from outside. Seeing the corpse, he frowned. "What happened last night?"
Allen followed him in and nearly jumped when he saw the dead man. "Fuck! Someone died on the very first night? This is intense!"
Qi Si pressed down the corners of his mouth and, in a heavy voice, briefly recounted what he'd seen, making sure to emphasize the Tattooed Woman's role in it.
Yang Yundong's expression darkened as he listened. He instinctively reached into his pocket, but found nothing.
He lowered his rough hand to his side and asked, "Is everyone else all right?"
Probably not at all, Qi Si replied inwardly. He lowered his eyes and stayed silent.
By then, the other players were waking up one after another. They opened their doors and came into the courtyard.
Zhu Ling and Zhou Yilin were the first to appear.
The moment she saw the corpse, Zhou Yilin went deathly pale and nearly screamed. Fortunately, Zhu Ling kept her composure, quickly stepped in front of her, and gently comforted her.
Zhang Licai and Zhao Feng followed close behind. They'd already cleared an instance once, so although their faces were grim, they didn't lose their composure.
Zhao Feng clearly hadn't slept well. Dark circles hollowed out his eyes, making him look almost like a ghost at first glance.
When he saw Yang Yundong, he stepped forward. "Brother Yang, after you left yesterday, I went to find that little ghost. It said it doesn't eat God Meat..."
He gritted his teeth. "Where am I supposed to find other meat for it?"
Yang Yundong waved a hand, his face showing the exhaustion of a sleepless night. "We still have the whole day. We'll take things one at a time."
Zhao Feng seemed unhappy, but after seeing the looks the other players gave him, he finally shut up, sheepish.
Just then, the Tattooed Woman came out of her room too.
Noticing everyone's eyes on her, she spat mucus onto the ground and pointed angrily at the corpse. "That bastard didn't take any God Meat himself, so he set his sights on my share. I'm not someone to mess with..."
No one intended to speak up for the dead man, even though quite a few of them remembered that the previous evening, she'd clearly been the one shouting that the meat was "bad luck" and refusing to touch it.
The Tattooed Woman cursed and ranted for a while longer. She only stopped berating the dead after Yang Yundong snapped, "Shut up." Then she folded her arms and stood off to one side, chin raised.
"Wu Heng and Zhu Dafu haven't come out," Yang Yundong said.
He went straight to the last closed door and pounded on it twice with his palm. When there was no answer, he kicked the door open.
Inside, two twisted figures lay crumpled on the floor, confirming what they'd expected.
Wu Heng—the bespectacled young man—had been dead for some time. His cracked glasses hung crookedly on his face, and flecks of wood were stuck to the corner of his mouth.
Zhu Dafu, with his graying hair, lay by the threshold, one arm stretched out and his mouth wide open, as if trying to grab something—or leave a few last words.
In the dead silence, Yang Yundong slowly crouched and reached out to close Zhu Dafu's eyes. His expression was unreadable.
A moment later, he stood and looked around at the people behind him. "As you can see, three people died on the first day. Unless we figure out the rules of this world, we'll be stuck here for four more days."
That was enough to make the players understand what was at stake.
The Minimum Death Quota was unknown, and no one could be sure they were among the lucky few who would survive. If they wanted to give themselves the best chance of staying alive, their only option was to actively gather clues and figure out the rules of this world.
"Last night, Allen and I went to investigate the village. Fog covered every place marked on the map. We tried going there, but ended up back where we started. Looks like we'll have to explore those places during the day."
As he spoke, Yang Yundong pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket. It was a map torn out of the Travel Guide.
He pointed at the landmarks with his rough fingers and explained slowly, "After that, we wandered around places without fog, mainly in the western part of the village. We saw a lot of villagers out working there. Most of the time, they seemed no different from ordinary people. But when they saw us, they all crowded around asking for meat. We only managed to get away by pretending to agree."
At that, Yang Yundong looked at Zhao Feng. "Allen, you, and I are all facing the same predicament. We can't solve it for now, so we'll have to set it aside and think of something after we've explored more..."
That clearly explained why he'd told Zhao Feng earlier that they would take things one at a time.
Zhao Feng still seemed dissatisfied and muttered under his breath, "I have to find meat for that little ghost today. What if I can't? If I really can't think of a solution, I'll have no choice but to..."
His gaze passed over the corpses on the ground, but he didn't finish. The thought would seem too deranged to anyone uninvolved, and he didn't know whether it might bring other risks.
Yang Yundong's lips quivered as if he wanted to say something, but in the end, he stayed silent.
He turned and left, with Allen trotting along behind him. Whatever the white young man had gone through, after just one night he was already completely obedient to Yang Yundong and looked up to him with deep admiration.
Qi Si kept himself tucked into a corner, his eyes narrowed as he took in every player's expression. As he'd hoped, he saw the ruthlessness and hesitation in Zhao Feng's eyes.
After being snatched out of an orderly reality and thrown into the Eerie Game, few people could transform their worldview in a short time and abandon the habits of obedience they'd developed in human society.
Even antisocial personalities and serial killers, arriving for the first time in a paradise where Sin ran rampant, would instinctively hide in the shadows out of sheer habit.
"You don't believe in morality, yet you instinctively uphold the rules everyone takes for granted, binding yourself with the standards of human society. How are you any different from fools like Yang Yundong?"
Qi Si smiled to himself, then stepped halfway forward to stand beside Zhao Feng. In a voice only the two of them could hear, he said, "You should understand that there's no public authority or law here. The only thing you need to fear and obey is the Eerie Rules on the system screen."
"Humans are animals, too. Human flesh is meat, isn't it?"
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