A Glimpse of What Lay Beneath

Judging by Master's expression, he had been waiting for the male corpse to spring up.

The moment it did, Master gave it a plain, unadorned shove.

Thunder burst from his mouth!

His expression was utterly grave!

"Lie back down!"

Nothing supernatural seemed to happen, yet Master truly forced the corpse back onto the bed!

Then he shouted, "Come help me!"

Xu Feng had no time to worry about anything else. He snatched up the torch again and knocked a black cat flying, heedless of where it landed.

He turned and ran toward Master!

Something seized his calf. Xu Feng looked back and flung his last packet of incense ash behind him.

But whatever held his leg still refused to let go!

At that very moment, Xu Feng heard it again: "Benefactor, go!"

As for the "protection" around him and his Protective Talisman, he had no idea how much harm they had absorbed for him through all this!

Xu Feng felt countless hands appear behind him and shove him forward with all their might.

They freed him from the grip around his leg!

Without looking back, Xu Feng scrambled and stumbled toward Master, making a thoroughly undignified dash to his side!

"Hold him down! Hold him down!"

Master shouted at Xu Feng. Xu Feng wasted no time. He thrust the torch to one side and immediately pinned the "male corpse" down! Once it was flat, Master raised the Large Needle and began stitching right before Xu Feng's eyes.

"Master, there's no thread! No thread!"

"Shut up! I know what I'm doing!"

Master was clearly anxious too.

As he stitched, Xu Feng saw another head "grow" from Master's shoulder!

The head had a Dreadful Face, terrifying and hideous, yet strangely vacant. Once it appeared, it fixed Xu Feng with a chilling stare!

Then another pair of arms grew from Master! They pressed down on the corpse before them too.

At the sight of it,

Xu Feng felt an itch across his own back.

It felt as though a head was about to grow there too.

With his new arms holding the corpse down, Master found a wooden tablet from somewhere and tossed it to Xu Feng. "All right, let go, let go!

Sketch the face you saw. Draw it and put the drawing inside this corpse!

Quick! Quick!"

Xu Feng hesitated no longer. He picked up the wooden tablet. A small brush lay beside it.

Without being particular about it, he bent over the table where the corpse lay and began to draw!

Xu Feng's skill at meticulous painting was an utter mess.

Strangely, though, drawing that face was not difficult!

In fact, it was remarkably easy!

But as he drew, Xu Feng saw what looked like a shadowy "bamboo grove" within Master's shadow, cast by the firelight.

He could not see the face he was drawing inside that shadow, yet he knew it was there! It was within the shadow, and that shadow was a place that truly existed!

For no reason he could name, one glance at the "shadow" gave Xu Feng a sense of "communion."

In other words, the well-known phenomenon of "synesthesia."

Or, to use a more formal term, "Communing with Ghosts and Spirits."

The moment Xu Feng saw the shadow, he thought of the "Desolate Village beneath the Memorial Arch Tower." There was no reason for it. The thought simply came, and he shuddered!

He had never gone to the Desolate Village near dusk.

Even on the occasion he had died latest, it had been before three in the afternoon.

Yet the sight of that shadow brought a strange scene into Xu Feng's mind—he was looking at the Desolate Village from an unnatural position.

Within the village, in the row of crumbling houses that stretched along the mountainside like a centipede,

stood an old woman.

She was hunched over, yet her head tilted upward in a bizarre way—how to describe it? Her neck seemed three inches longer than a normal person's, bending into a great U as she stared at Xu Feng.

The entire Desolate Village seemed veiled in a layer of coarse gauze.

It was probably dusk.

But an unmistakably unnatural atmosphere hung over the whole village.

And at that moment, Xu Feng, who had already shuddered once, shuddered again!

Because he suddenly realized what position he was viewing the Desolate Village from.

—He was hanging beneath the Memorial Arch Tower, staring at that village!

In the game, once midnight had passed and dawn approached, it was all over.

"Phew!"

The moment Xu Feng left the game, he collapsed onto his bed.

Sweat had soaked his back!

"I survived again," Xu Feng said.

Just as at the end of the first act, every time an incident ended in this game, Xu Feng felt as though he had cleared a stage!

Or rather, fought his way through one.

Each pass was hard to cross, yet somehow he crossed them all.

Weary, he opened his eyes and pressed the stopwatch beside him to check the time.

Then he lay on the bed, staring blankly at the ceiling beyond his gaze.

[Main Story, Act Two: Master Qian's Troubles] was complete.

Xu Feng had saved and quit before the Land God's shrine inside the Earth God Shrine.

He glanced at the time. Sure enough, it was exactly as he had expected: no matter how many days passed in the game, only one minute passed outside it.

Xu Feng let out a long breath, downed a mouthful of soda, and sat up in bed.

He reviewed the conditions for clearing the second act once more.

It was like a wife cake with no wife in it.

Master Qian's Troubles involved Master Qian, but completing the task ultimately had little to do with his household.

Of course, little was not the same as nothing. If he had not sent the corpse over, the crisis in the Earth God Shrine would not have grown so severe.

And all of it had happened in a single night.

Three tasks.

Complete the Corpse Stitching.

Handle the strange incident.

Stitch the Demon Corpse.

Xu Feng had done them all.

But what he needed to do now was quietly review everything. He would turn over every detail from the last game—everything he had seen, including what he had noticed but failed to remember—and savor it carefully!

What stayed with him most vividly

was the final "melee."

The chaos had mostly been on Xu Feng's side. Master had remained steady throughout, so Xu Feng felt he must have seen many details without paying attention to them at the time.

Now he could recall them slowly.

It took a great deal of mental effort.

Fortunately, Xu Feng had a technique.

Just as when he had returned after the game's first chapter, Xu Feng was someone forged by relentless competition. Before it killed him from overwork, he had learned a thing or two about it.

After all, being driven to compete might sound unpleasant.

But being able to keep up was a skill in itself.

Xu Feng did not know whether the techniques he had learned in his previous life would still work now.

He had to try.

He grabbed an incense diffuser, went into the adjoining storage room, sat cross-legged, and lit it.

He let its fragrance fill the space around him.

This was Xu Feng's "meditative recall method."

The first step was to leave his living space and keep it separate from the place where he meditated.

Then he had to relax his mind completely.

Finally, by controlling his breathing, he entered meditation.

Xu Feng gradually recalled the scene of the fight.

While he had been stitching the corpse, Master had walked around the West Room and planted several sticks of incense in the floor.