The truth

"...What? Are you serious?"

After what had happened before, the group was not particularly inclined to believe Song Qingzhang. They turned to Li Xian instead.

Li Xian nodded. "That's right."

Coming from Li Xian, the claim became considerably more credible. Even so, they still struggled to accept it. Qian Xin asked Song Qingzhang, "Then how did you find out? Did he tell you?"

Song Qingzhang explained, "Didn't I mention that the Bride was around a hundred and seventy-something centimeters tall? And incredibly strong."

Zhao Fengyi nodded. "You did. At the time, we concluded that the instance had designed him that way to give us clues without letting us capture the Bride outright and clear it."

"I thought the Bride's height and strength were important clues in their own right. We shouldn't just dismiss them as part of the instance's design..."

"Back then, he took off his veil and wrapped it around half his face. I kept thinking the eyes he left exposed looked like someone I'd seen before, but when I went through all the women in the instance...including Xu Yao among us, none of their eyes matched."

"When I found the wig in the Wedding Dress just now, it suddenly occurred to me...could the Bride be a man? If so, that would explain his height and strength."

As Song Qingzhang walked them through his reasoning, the three beside him slowly looked more and more astonished. Qian Xin blurted out, "So you really weren't spouting nonsense back then?! Why did you go on about that Cross-Dressing Master crap, then?!"

Song Qingzhang hurriedly glanced back at Li Xian and explained, "I wasn't trying to convince you back then...I said that on purpose."

"Once I started thinking the Bride might be a man, I compared the eyes of the men I'd overlooked before with those of the Bride I'd seen. Then I realized..."

"Whether it was his eyes or his height...the Bride was a lot like Li Xian. Even the size of this Wedding Dress fit him best. On any of the other players or villagers, it would be either too big or too small. The dress also has a fitted waist, and with a waist this narrow...hardly anyone could wear it without it being tight."

Xu Yao thought back. The Wedding Dress really did have a fitted waist.

"You really pay attention to the details..."

Song Qingzhang scratched his head sheepishly.

"But...how could the villagers fail to recognize someone from their own village?" Qian Xin raised another question.

Something occurred to Xu Yao. "How many people in this village have clean faces? With a change of clothes and an apparent change of gender, the villagers really might not recognize him."

[This rookie's pretty good...he'd already figured it out?]

[You know, a veteran player really wouldn't think of an explanation like that...at least I wouldn't.]

This was the first instance for both Song Qingzhang and Xu Yao. Without the ingrained thinking of veteran players, their unconventional ideas had brought them surprisingly close to the truth. By contrast, Zhao Fengyi and Qian Xin, the two veterans, had their brows tightly knitted, as if still processing this shocking revelation.

After Song Qingzhang finished explaining, Li Xian summed things up.

"Since Zhou Shan is dead, handing me over now won't save you from dying either, so..."

"Let's clear the true ending."

Qian Xin swallowed.

The man before him was a complete rookie. Where had he found the courage to talk about clearing the true ending?

"I'm sticking with Li Xian!" Song Qingzhang was the first to take a stand.

Xu Yao's gaze moved among the four of them before she raised her hand. "Me too."

"Do...do you have any idea how difficult the true ending is?! That's..." Qian Xin was halfway through his protest when Zhao Fengyi patted his shoulder.

"Let's do as he says."

"Not you too..."

"Have the two of us veterans contributed more than he has?"

That pointed question left Qian Xin speechless.

"And you've already got an idea, haven't you?"

Zhao Fengyi looked at Li Xian, who nodded under his gaze.

"Did you get the Notebook?"

"Yes. I've kept it with me the whole time."

At that, Song Qingzhang took out the Notebook and pressed it into Li Xian's hands.

Li Xian scanned the names line by line, then snapped it shut.

"Did you find something?" Xu Yao asked quietly.

"Shen Xiaomei, Li Xiaojuan, and Zhou Shan weren't originally from this village."

Song Qingzhang asked, "They weren't from the village? But didn't they all grow up here? Shen Xiaomei and Zhou Shan even have parents..."

"Don't you think the age gap is too large?" Li Xian explained. "The Village Chief looks old enough to be Zhou Shan's grandfather, but Zhou Shan is his son."

"That's true...but what about Aunt Wang? Couldn't she have had her daughter late in life?"

"Did you see the other notebook in the drawer? The one kept with this register."

Song Qingzhang nodded. "I didn't dare stay too long, so I only glanced through it."

Li Xian said, "It says no one in the village is related to Shen Xiaomei by blood."

"As for Li Xiaojuan, she's an orphan, and my character introduction never mentioned her parents either."

"If none of these young people are the villagers' biological children...where do you think they came from?"

Song Qingzhang's eyes widened. "Could they have been...trafficked? Then the other names in that notebook..."

"Were probably trafficked children too."

"But we've never seen those people."

"How do you know you haven't?"

Li Xian's question first caught Song Qingzhang off guard. Then a chill welled up in his chest.

"You mean..."

Li Xian brushed his fingertips over the Notebook's yellowed pages. "We don't know the name of a single older villager."

"They could very well be children who were brought here by traffickers and grew up in the village."

Silence settled over the room. After a long while, Zhao Fengyi asked, "If things really are as you say, what's the purpose of doing this? And the numbers...don't seem to add up either."

Zhao Fengyi had a point. Although the Notebook was small, it contained at least a hundred names, far more than the village's population.

But Li Xian seemed to have worked out the answer long ago. "Because the children had different 'uses.'"

Uses?

Following Li Xian's gesture, Zhao Fengyi looked at the Notebook.

Li Xian traced a circle on the paper with his fingertip. "Only a few names are circled, and Shen Xiaomei, Zhou Shan, and Li Xiaojuan are all among them."

"It's very possible that only these children were raised to adulthood. As for the ones marked with crosses..."

Li Xian did not finish, but everyone understood what he meant.

They had either died or been sold.

The children who remained were like "seeds" selected after the autumn harvest, kept to ensure the village continued to thrive.

[Holy shit, I'm breaking out in a cold sweat.]

[The village was hiding something like this?]

[No wonder previous players got such low completion rates when they cleared this instance. This was buried way too deep!]

[I'm actually starting to believe the streamer can get the true ending.]

Qian Xin had remained silent throughout Li Xian's explanation. Only when he came back to himself did he realize that his back had somehow become soaked in cold sweat.

His voice unconsciously softened as he asked, "But what does any of this have to do with the clearing objective?"

All that explaining had left Li Xian's voice slightly hoarse. He paused to recover before continuing.

"I have a feeling this village won't let us put Shen Xiaomei's body in the Coffin so easily. To clear the instance, we need something that can keep the villagers in check."

Song Qingzhang understood. "Those dead children?"

Xu Yao was puzzled. "But what exactly are we supposed to do?"

Li Xian glanced toward the window. The sky was gradually darkening, and sunset was not far off.

"Remember the River God the villagers mentioned?"

They all recalled the villagers' panicked expressions when it rained, and the "River God" they had kept muttering about.

"The Village Chief was the first to bring that up. After Shen Xiaomei disappeared, before her body had even been found, he claimed it was the River God's doing."

"Logically, shouldn't he have suspected a person first? Even if the Village Chief killed Shen Xiaomei and wanted an excuse, he shouldn't have used one that flimsy."

"Unless everyone in this village already believed the River God existed."

Song Qingzhang nodded. "That's true. When we mentioned the River God, even Aunt Wang said the village had been peaceful for years, as though the River God...really existed."

"So the River God definitely isn't some imaginary belief or abstract concept. He's something that makes them genuinely afraid."

"And there's only one thing that fits."

"Those dead children."

Li Xian's words were like puzzle pieces, gradually piecing together the underlying story of the instance.

Now only the most crucial pieces remained.

He stood and pushed open the door under everyone's gaze.

"We need to see what's really inside the Square Well at the Riverside."

Although Zhou Shan had insisted that there was nothing inside the Square Well, Li Xian still wanted to check it himself.

No matter how he looked at it, that well was far too strange.

The closer they got to the Riverside, the more they felt a damp chill. The well stood extremely close to the water, and every step toward it brought a powerful sense of unease.

The river surged as though trying to swallow the newcomers, but lacked the strength to do so and could only churn unwillingly.

"Don't stare at the river," Li Xian warned.

Song Qingzhang hurriedly looked away. In the end, he obediently fixed his gaze on Li Xian's back and followed close behind.

Qian Xin rubbed his arms. "This river's seriously creepy. It feels a lot colder just walking beside it..."

They reached the well. Its masonry formed a neat square, and a wooden board covered it tightly. On top of the board sat a stone almost as large as the opening, which looked difficult to move.

Song Qingzhang swallowed and asked for confirmation. "Then I'll push it off?"

They all knew that opening this well meant breaking the village's rules. There would be no turning back.

"Do it."

Only Li Xian answered Song Qingzhang.

Song Qingzhang rolled up his sleeves and started pushing. The stone looked large and felt even heavier. Zhao Fengyi and Qian Xin joined in one after the other, and only then did they barely manage to shift it.

The stone fell onto the muddy ground with a dull thud beside the silent river.

After pushing it off, the three stepped back. Without hesitation, Li Xian reached out and lifted the wooden board covering the well.

Li Xian stood beside the well and frowned. When he said nothing, the others hesitantly leaned forward to peer inside.

It was a dry well, dug very shallow, only two or three meters deep. In the evening light, before darkness had fully fallen, they could see straight to the bottom.

There was nothing inside.

Yet just as everyone's eyes turned toward the bottom of the well, a sound suddenly reached their ears.

"Waa-waa-"

The sound was faint but chaotic, like a crowd of babies crying in the distance. The instant it began, everyone covered their ears in pain. Yet that did nothing to block the crying, which continued to echo.

"Waa-waa-"

[Warning! Exposed to unknown contamination! Mental Value decreasing!]

[Mental Value -5!]

[Mental Value -5!]

Everyone's Mental Value dropped by ten points in an instant, and the notification sound cut off abruptly after the second alert.

The babies' cries vanished with it.

They lowered their hands from their ears, only to realize they had somehow ended up sitting on the ground.

"What happened..."

Qian Xin rubbed his head and tried to stand, but the dizziness had not fully faded, and he collapsed back onto the ground.

"What the hell did you do..."

It took him a long while to clear his vision. When he looked up again, the wooden board was back over the well, and Li Xian was bracing a hand against it, panting heavily.

[Oh no, the streamer's Mental Value has dropped quite a bit.]

[The others are okay since this is their first Mental Value drop, but the streamer already lost some Mental Value when he drank at the wedding feast, then lost even more when he secretly watched the Village Chief dump the body. He's probably feeling pretty awful right now.]

That was indeed the case. Even after the others gradually regained their clarity, Li Xian could still hear cries lingering around his ears, almost like a low hum.

Like tinnitus, they refused to fade.

He shook his head, trying his best to ignore the discomfort inside it. But before he could fully recover, everyone's expressions suddenly darkened.

Besides the crying, he could faintly hear another sound.

It sounded as though someone was shouting something.

"Zhou Shan-"