Tang Cha fell silent.
Fang Rui cleared her throat and said, "Then let me tell you what we found."
Gathering information was no easy task.
Especially now that the villagers were already wary of them.
So when they asked about the owners of that house, the villagers all gave the same answer: the owners had been a couple who died young and left no children, so the house had been left vacant.
"We also found something else unusual."
As Fang Rui spoke, she added to the notebook where she kept her organized clues.
Question four: how did the villagers survive without farming?
Question five: all the elderly people in the village lived alone.
Tang Cha explained for her, "Pretty much all the elderly people in this village live alone, so Rui sent me to talk to them."
With his baby face and sweet tongue, Tang Cha had always been adored by elderly people in the real world, so he quickly earned their trust once he got to work.
"There are seven elderly people left in this village, and they all said their children had died." Tang Cha lowered his voice mysteriously, trying to create a spooky atmosphere. "But I saw the photos in their homes. The people in those photos were the villagers who turned into snakes and chased us at night!"
Ji Xun said, "Looking that pleased with yourself, you must have found out quite a bit more, right?"
Tang Cha had wanted to keep them in suspense a little longer, but chuckled when Ji Xun saw through him. "The moment I mentioned that house, every one of them remembered its owners."
The oldest of them was in his seventies. According to his recollection, a couple had moved into the village more than forty years ago.
The couple had worked in the provincial capital. The husband made a modest living doing business, while the wife was a teacher. They had moved back to the village where the husband had grown up so he could stay with his wife while she rested during her pregnancy.
After settling in the village, the husband learned farmwork from the villagers, while the wife taught the village children.
The old man had a very good impression of the couple. They had none of the arrogance of city people, and under the wife's guidance, even some of the mischievous children gradually began to behave themselves.
Then, one day, the couple vanished.
At the same time, the elderly villagers discovered that their children had died, then come "back to life."
"What does that mean?" Lu Jiancheng looked utterly baffled. What did they mean, their children had died and come back to life?
Tang Cha said, "The old man was working in the fields that day. When a villager called him home, he found his son's head covered in blood, and he wasn't breathing anymore. So he buried his son in the mountains behind the village. But the next day, his son came back, as if nothing had happened. And it wasn't just him. All the children the wife had taught had accidents, and every single one of them eventually crawled out of their graves and appeared back home."
Everyone sucked in a cold breath.
Ji Xun's gaze shifted slightly. "Tang Cha, go ask about Grandpa Jin too."
Only then did Tang Cha remember the shared side quest. He answered and jogged into a house, then came running back shortly afterward.
"Grandpa said the man we were talking about is called Mad Jin. His son A-Fei also disappeared more than forty years ago, but A-Fei never came home. Grandpa Jin went mad after that. Sometimes he'd say there were snakes in the village, and sometimes he'd say there were ghosts in the river."
At this point, with the clues so scattered, Ji Xun suggested that they pause and piece together the main storyline of this instance.
Fang Rui would lead the account, and the others would add details as needed.
This village was isolated from the outside world, and its villagers were simple and kind.
More than forty years ago, a couple returned from the provincial capital to settle in the village and had a child.
The couple got along well with the villagers. The wife taught the village children, and perhaps those children had even held the baby back then.
Then, one day, something happened, and the couple suddenly disappeared. Perhaps they had suffered an accident, or perhaps someone had murdered them.
But judging by what they had seen last night, the couple had suffered inhuman torture. The husband had been brutally murdered and sealed inside the heated brick bed, and even their young son had not been spared.
So Ji Xun leaned more toward the possibility that unidentified people had attacked the couple.
Combining this with what the elderly villagers had said, Ji Xun ventured a bold guess: these unidentified people might have then attacked the children and assumed their identities, reappearing in the village. Perhaps their appearances were flawless, but they could not fool the parents who had lived with them day in and day out.
That was why, to the elderly villagers, their children had died and then come "back to life."
The clues provided by the side quest were marbles and water stains.
Ji Xun felt that Grandpa Jin's clue had to be connected to that river, but earlier, when he had been by the river, he had sensed no fluctuations in energy at all.
Perhaps something would only change after nightfall.
Passing villagers looked at them with cold, sinister eyes, with a trace of desire mixed in.
Gone was the warmth they had shown when the group first entered the village.
"What's with those looks? They're really making me uncomfortable." Tang Cha frowned.
Ji Xun gave him a meaningful look. "The way you look at a roast suckling pig-that's how they're looking at you."
Tang Cha shuddered.
For the rest of the afternoon, considering that a tough fight might await them that night, they repaired the tools they had collected, then returned to "Ji Xun's" home for a brief rest.
Then they hurried to the couple's house before dark.
As much as they dreaded it, night fell right on schedule.
A sudden wave of drowsiness swept over them. Tang Cha slumped against Ji Xun, while Fang Rui staggered and collapsed onto a stool.
Lu Jiancheng was even less fortunate: he fell facedown on the floor.
Ji Xun hesitated, but still chose to wake them.
Although these humans were weak, their souls were among the rare clean ones he had encountered.
This was probably his new boss's doing too. Giving him a group like this as teammates really did make him less resistant to his new job.
If those escapees who had made a complete mess of his Black Pine Forest had been assigned as his teammates, just thinking about it made Ji Xun clench his fists.
He pinched Tang Cha's nose. Tang Cha, who was debating in his dream whether to attend Tsinghua University or Peking University, nearly suffocated.
"Cough, cough! Ji, what are you doing?" Tang Cha muttered as he opened his eyes, then stared wide-eyed, clearly badly startled. "How did I fall asleep? Why is this game forcing players offline?"
Lu Jiancheng said, "I thought Zhao and I were just too tired yesterday. Turns out it was the game's doing."
Zhao Fu looked agitated. "Is this game trying to get us killed?"
Without Ji Xun, all of them would fall asleep at night.
They could not find the villagers during the day, and at night they would fall uncontrollably into a deep sleep. Even if the snakes did not kill them in the end, who knew what punishment awaited them when the three days were up and they had failed to complete the main quest?
Fang Rui said, "Before the snakes gather here, let's hurry over to that river and take a look."
They divided up the tools, making sure everyone had something to defend themselves with.
Tang Cha said, "Ji, aren't you taking anything?"
Ji Xun patted his waist, as though there were something beneath his long coat. "I've got something."
Tang Cha said, "Oh," assuming he had already picked something up while Tang Cha was asleep.
Paper offerings fluttered in midair, ashes refused to disperse, and faint hissing drifted in and out of hearing.
They hardly dared breathe as they crept toward the river.
The snakes were not particularly intelligent. Most had gathered around "Ji Xun's" home, and the group deftly avoided the occasional one or two roaming nearby.
But everyone knew full well that this calm was only temporary.
The riverside was utterly quiet. Without the sounds of the snakes, there was not even the chirping of an insect nearby.
Moonlight fell on the river, and they discovered, to their surprise, that its water was as black as ink.
Tang Cha said, "The pollution here is seriously out of control!"
Everyone else: ...
How do you manage to ruin the atmosphere with a single sentence every time we're in a situation like this?
Before you continue