Worship the Lady (19)

Bo Yi tapped his fingers lightly against his knee.

According to his deductions, the number of coffins in this cave should match the number of burial mounds outside.

Which raised a question-

Where had the arms on the "Lady" in the temple come from?

From the players? No... Bo Yi quickly shook his head, rejecting his own theory. Even if every single arm really had come from a dead player, the numbers still would have been nowhere close.

If they had come from neither the players nor the corpses, that left only one answer...

Just as he was lost in thought, he suddenly heard footsteps nearby.

Was Song Yunyi back?

Bo Yi was about to stand, but his ears twitched.

No, the direction was wrong. The footsteps weren't coming from near the opening he had fallen through overhead. They sounded more like... they were coming from behind the cave wall.

Had Song Yunyi found another entrance?

He walked toward the sound. But after only a few steps, he slowly stopped. No, those footsteps weren't right... The muffled footsteps were chaotic and noisy. They didn't sound like they belonged to just one person.

Unless Song Yunyi had brought over all the other players waiting outside... But even the heaviest among them shouldn't have made such heavy footsteps.

To be safe, Bo Yi began slowly backing away. He scanned the cave, searching for somewhere to hide. Unfortunately, the entire cave was exposed at a glance. Aside from the coffins, there was nothing to hide behind. With no other choice, he picked the coffin farthest from the approaching sounds, crouched down, and hid behind it.

Bo Yi had barely concealed himself when a rumble rang out, followed by the sounds of a mechanism activating and stone shifting. Then a bright yellow glow slowly spread through the cave.

Bo Yi quietly peeked over the coffin, exposing only his eyes.

Several figures slowly entered the cave. The person in front held a torch, its bright yellow flames slowly stretching the coffins' shadows. Those behind carried several black coffins wrapped in white cloth. Bo Yi understood at once: No wonder their footsteps were so heavy... They all wore white clothes and tall paper hats. The faint, flickering light illuminated their expressionless faces-they were the villagers.

Seeing that the torchlight was about to turn his way, Bo Yi ducked back down before he could see who else was at the rear of the procession.

Bo Yi leaned against the back of the coffin and listened to the villagers.

How were the three who stayed in the village doing...? After all, the villagers' presence here meant the plan to lure them away had already failed.

As he was thinking, one of the villagers spoke. "Those outsiders really are all so annoying!"

The villager seemed to be rustling around as he removed the white cloth from a coffin. "Apparently, they're students from some university..." he continued bitterly. "And yet they sneaked in and broke the seal on the well inside my house while I was out!"

"I warned them over and over when they moved in! And what happened? They only behaved themselves for a few days!"

"What's worse, they ran off the moment they saw me come back!"

"Same at my house!" another villager immediately chimed in. "They ran faster than rabbits!"

"If I hadn't been in a hurry to seal the well back up first, I'd have chased them down and killed them!"

Hearing this, Bo Yi let out a small sigh of relief. It seemed the three who had stayed behind hadn't been caught by the villagers.

"That's what outsiders are like. They have no sense of reverence at all..."

"If they're staying in our village, they should follow our rules."

"If you ask me, we shouldn't let outsiders in at all!"

"What good would keeping outsiders out do? We should seal off the whole village! Didn't they change after going away to study and then coming back to the village-"

"Shh!"

Bo Yi had been listening with keen interest when another villager sharply cut the speaker off. "Shut up! Do you have a death wish?! How dare you talk about that?!"

"Aren't you afraid they'll hear you?!"

Huh? "They"?

Bo Yi quietly pricked up his ears.

"What's there to be afraid of?!"

The scolded villager still sounded utterly unconcerned. "We've been hiding the coffins here for so long, and they still haven't found this place... That proves it's perfectly safe!"

Realization dawned on Bo Yi.

So that was how this cave graveyard had come about...

"Just shut your mouth already!"

The argument outside continued. "If you actually lure them here, we don't have another place to hide!"

"I..." The villager still seemed unconvinced and opened his mouth to say more, but the villager scolding him suddenly called into the distance, "Village chief!"

Slow footsteps were approaching the cave from afar.

"The village chief's here..."

"Village chief, did you catch those outsiders who damaged the wells?"

"Village chief, can we kill those outsiders?"

"Village chief, those outsiders opened up the well in my house. I'm a little scared... Tonight, will I run into..."

"There's no need to worry, everyone." The village chief's slow voice sounded through the cave. "The preparations are nearly complete..."

"Just bear with it a little longer. Soon, we can worship the Lady..."

"Once we've worshipped the Lady, she will protect us..."

The villagers began murmuring their agreement. "Yes, we must worship the Lady..."

"Worship the Lady..."

"Worship the Lady..."

"Once we've worshipped the Lady, she will protect us..."

"Once we've worshipped the Lady, she will protect us..."

Bo Yi couldn't help peeking out again.

The villagers had pressed their palms together before their chests. With their eyes closed and their foreheads resting against their fingertips, they bowed slightly, their lips opening and closing without pause. The same sentence rose and fell throughout the empty cave, like a speaker with built-in reverb playing on repeat right beside his ears. The buzzing made his head ache.

After an unknown stretch of time, the villagers finally stopped their eerie, broken-record chanting. They set the coffins, now stripped of their white cloth, in the cave's open space, then picked up the torches and prepared to leave.

Bo Yi leaned against the coffin and let out a sigh of relief.

The light in the cave began fading little by little. Just as the last sliver of light was about to vanish, Bo Yi suddenly heard footsteps overhead.

His brow twitched, and a terrible sense of foreboding suddenly came over him.

The next second, a head appeared at the opening.

"Bo Yi!"

Song Yunyi called out enthusiastically, "I finally found something long enough to get you out!"