Was It Safe Now?

It looked like a carefree laugh.

In truth, Xu Feng was out of ideas.

When Xu Feng opened the game, he remembered the prompts he had seen at the very beginning.

"Don't watch the ads. Look at the results."

What mattered was not what the game said, but what it could do.

He had already traveled to another world. A few more strange things happening would hardly be surprising.

What bothered Xu Feng was that everything either happened all at once or not at all. When it came, it came in a rush.

He had lived peacefully here for years without seeing anything supernatural. Then, after all that quiet...

Before he could prepare himself, he encountered the Corpse-Sewing Game.

The game had burst through the television and dragged him inside. He opened his eyes to a beheading, then had to sew the corpse. Everything he saw and felt was real.

The whole ordeal had given Xu Feng no time to prepare himself.

Even thinking back on it made Xu Feng's hands go numb. He knew it had only been an appetizer. Watching the beheading and sewing the corpse had both been nothing more than tests of courage.

He had yet to touch the real "arts."

With that, he lay down on the bed.

With no way around it, Xu Feng found himself oddly ready to let the broken jar shatter.

He no longer planned to throw away the console and cartridge.

Perhaps this world had technology capable of sending him through time and space and into a game that felt so real.

Or perhaps it held some other supernatural force, something ghostly or divine, that could likewise send him through time and space.

Either way, it was beyond his power to fight.

Human strength had its limits.

At this point, he might as well sleep!

The game was not necessarily a dead end. Its impact and sense of immersion were just overwhelming. If he had to go back in, he could prepare himself mentally first.

As long as the world did not explode tomorrow, he still had to go to work.

As for whether he would enter the game again, that depended on the game itself. If it did not force Xu Feng inside, he would avoid it if he could.

"I don't want to beg, so I'll just have to endure."

Xu Feng sang the line offhandedly, drew the curtains, and closed his eyes to sleep.

But he had barely closed them when, before he could even have a nightmare, his eyes flew open and he sat bolt upright.

His earlier thoughts had yet to fade when something else occurred to him.

How he defined this world was, in fact, extremely important.

He had classified it before, but he had lacked information then. If this was a world governed by technology, what was the deal with that game console?

It was a mass-market game console!

And if this was a world of the supernatural...

Xu Feng glanced at his character panel again.

He sprang out of bed, switched on the light, and stood before the map of Yunjia Mountain.

Everyone knew that in a supernatural world, an isolated mountain forest ranger's cabin like his...

...was where incidents tended to happen.

And then there was—

Xu Feng studied his patrol route, tracing it across the map with a finger.

Starting from the cabin, his route took him about an hour to reach Ancient People's Tomb on Yunjia Mountain.

From there, he checked in and headed to the Dragon-Locking Temple.

Then he climbed to the highest point he could reach, Cloudframe Mountain Heaven Gate.

He descended from Heaven Gate to Liu Family Village.

Then he passed beneath the Liu Family Village Archway Tower.

He had never thought much of those names before. Now he could not help reading into them.

His journey between worlds might have been a single piece of evidence, but with the game appearing too, it no longer stood alone.

Xu Feng looked at Ancient People's Tomb.

He pressed a finger against the tomb on the map.

The word "tomb" was interesting.

Literally, it meant a mound of earth heaped over something. Something was likely buried beneath it, but not necessarily a person.

Mounds, burial tumuli, imperial tombs, graves, and mausoleums could all be burial sites. Xu Feng had once wondered whether anything lay beneath Ancient People's Tomb.

But according to the local county gazetteer, the tomb on the mountain held nothing at all. It had merely been a sort of memorial park structure, later abandoned.

As for the Dragon-Locking Temple, there were no temple buildings to be seen. It was an utterly desolate stretch of wasteland. Xu Feng had gone in during his patrols and found nothing there.

Well—not quite nothing. There were snakes.

Now, though, Xu Feng was no longer sure.

Once a man suspected his neighbor of stealing his axe, everything the neighbor did looked suspicious.

Once the seed of doubt had taken root, everything looked wrong.

Looking at those names now, he felt that each place on Yunjia Mountain sounded more sinister than the last.

Xu Feng lay back down, set an alarm, and forced himself to "shut down" on schedule for tomorrow.

Early the next morning, he packed his things, climbed aboard his beloved little three-wheeler, and sped toward the distant village.

He only had to check in every day; there was no fixed time for it.

Xu Feng reached the village outside the mountain in just under an hour. He went straight to the corner shop and bought some incense.

Then he puttered back up the mountain.

Back at the cabin, he got everything ready and set out on his mountain patrol!

As a veteran of the work-yourself-to-the-bone grind, he knew that once a thorn of doubt lodged in a person's mind, it would eat away at them.

That kind of inner torment had no end.

To stop it, he could either vent his feelings or crush the doubt.

Xu Feng chose the second option.

He would face his suspicions and settle them.

The most dangerous wild animals on Yunjia Mountain at present were the mountain monkeys.

After them came the "spicy sticks"—snakes.

Wild boars also seemed to have appeared in the mountains recently, but Xu Feng had only seen their tracks, never the animals themselves. They came out late at night, when he was not on patrol.

An hour later, Xu Feng reached Ancient People's Tomb!

Few people came this way anymore.

Occasionally, Xu Feng saw hikers, cyclists, or solitary climbers here.

The stretch from the cabin to Ancient People's Tomb was a paved road. Xu Feng now stood outside the tomb.

The tomb itself was not on the main road. Once there, a narrow stairway on the left led farther up to an archway.

Beyond the archway lay the raised mound.

Xu Feng stood outside the archway. He did not need to enter to check in; doing so at the entrance was enough.

After checking in, Xu Feng planted three sticks of incense before the archway!

He had seen the archway many times. Couplets had been carved into its two sides, though they were strange: their tones did not match, and much of the writing had been worn away by the elements.

Only the four characters above the archway still stood out clearly.

They read, "The Threshold of Life and Death."

The three incense sticks caught fire. Mass-produced incense from the village shop slowly burned before the tomb, and Xu Feng, standing off to one side, could hardly say what he felt.

Did he want to see something happen, or not?

As he watched with mixed feelings, the three sticks burned, and the wind carried their smoke into the archway.

The incense behaved entirely according to scientific principles.

Xu Feng let out a breath of relief.

He turned and left.