Chapter 29
Chapter 29
Yu Lingling didn’t think so. “The second floor or the top floor.”
Xiao Yi looked up at the ceiling. “There’s actually something I don’t understand.”
Yu Lingling felt that there were still pieces of the whole incident that had yet to connect. She casually asked, “What is it?”
“If it weren’t for the skill belonging to Brother B, anyone entering this instance would have to search the flower bed right from the start.” Xiao Yi couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off. “Otherwise, there’d be no way to find the bones.”
Yu Lingling considered his words. “I think there are clues on the top floor, or somewhere else, that we haven’t found yet.”
Xiao Yi had already learned quite a bit from Yu Lingling. “But the notebook hidden inside the stairs would also be extremely difficult to notice.”
“It’s not just that.” Yu Lingling pinched one of the stubby legs of the Teddy Bear Doll. “Without you, there are a lot of things we never could’ve learned. We might not even have connected the two of them as father and son.”
Once they knew the two were father and son and worked backward from that conclusion, they could see that there had been hints all along.
The Gaunt Old Man had been comfortable leaving his grandson home alone. He had also been comfortable letting his grandson visit the man in the West Unit on the Fourth Floor.
Meanwhile, the Man in the Fourth Unit on the Fourth Floor had been willing to give Chen Xiaofeng meat to eat. Even after Chen Xiaofeng discovered his crimes, he had not attacked the boy.
On top of that, they both loved eating human flesh.
As for whether the father and son looked alike, the face of Chen Xiaofeng had been distorted by so much fat that it was impossible to make out his features.
Yu Lingling suddenly sighed. “Turns out eating human flesh is addictive.”
That addiction was why eating the teenager hadn’t been enough. They had even dug up a corpse that had already been buried and eaten it.
Yu Lingling had made quite a leap in the conversation, but Xiao Yi followed her train of thought. “Don’t talk about something so disgusting.”
“Oh,” Yu Lingling replied.
Xiao Yi returned to his previous thought. “This doesn’t feel like the difficulty level of a newbie instance.”
The viewers across the two Livestream Room feeds began pondering the matter along with Xiao Yi and Yu Lingling.
“Could newbie instances have gotten harder?”
“No. I’ve watched other newbie instances. The difficulty hasn’t changed.”
“Then isn’t their instance way too difficult?”
“Could the instance really have evolved or mutated?”
Yu Lingling suddenly thought of something. She reached up and tugged one of the ears on the hood of her bear pajamas. “Is it possible that this instance only requires us to survive for three days?”
With Xiao Yi inhabiting that strange body, his expressions were nowhere near as animated as those of a living person. Yet at that moment, everyone could feel him stiffen.
“Damn, we were all led down the wrong path.”
“This is the most basic kind of survival instance. They don’t even need to actively search for a way to survive.”
Xiao Yi fell silent for a moment. “What were we just talking about?”
Yu Lingling looked at Xiao Yi and also went quiet for a beat. “Turns out eating human flesh is addictive.”
Xiao Yi met her gaze. “Don’t talk about something so disgusting.”
Yu Lingling nodded.
The two people who had made the instance harder for themselves by overthinking it simultaneously chose to forget the entire discussion.
“Was that a manual rollback?”
“You can do that?”
“The two of them are actually kind of cute and work pretty well together. After each becomes a Full-fledged Player, maybe they can team up.”
Xiao Yi looked at Yu Lingling. “If you run into danger, come to the fourth floor.”
Given the current state of Xiao Yi, he couldn’t leave this floor. He couldn’t even enter the Westernmost Unit. Yu Lingling would have to handle many things herself. Even a survival instance for newcomers came with dangers, so in some ways, he was holding her back.
Yu Lingling nodded, then padded toward the Westernmost Unit in her soft slippers. Piles of junk had been stacked where a wall should have been.
Yu Lingling had already cleared out the entire fourth floor, so there was no need for her to creep around as cautiously as the other players. She simply opened the door to the West Unit.
The woman in the apron emerged from inside and helped Yu Lingling move the clutter out of the way.
A simple wooden ladder had been propped against the wall. The woman in the apron set it in place, nodded to Yu Lingling and Xiao Yi, then began climbing.
With a long creak, the hatch that had been buried beneath clutter and left unopened for years was pushed up, sending dust billowing into the air.
Yu Lingling covered her nose and mouth with the Teddy Bear Doll.
The woman in the apron’s head twisted a full hundred and eighty degrees to face Yu Lingling and the others. Her slightly hideous face was filled with disgust.
Only after most of the dust had settled did the woman in the apron climb through the hatch.
Yu Lingling sensed the area for a moment, then returned the Teddy Bear Doll to the Dollhouse before climbing the ladder after her. Just as she was about to reach the top, a hand extended down toward her.
The instant Xiao Yi saw the hand, he abruptly spun his wheelchair and surged forward.
Yu Lingling first gestured for him to stop. Then, as naturally as could be, she took the pale pink towel embroidered with white rabbits out of her pocket and stuffed it into the waiting hand.
The hand visibly paused before withdrawing with the towel.
Xiao Yi hesitated in confusion, then wheeled himself into the empty room.
Brother Knife was unconscious inside, and only half of his shadow remained.
Xiao Yi looked at the crude contraption Yu Lingling had placed by the window at some point. Using its mirror, he could observe what was happening on the rooftop.
Yu Lingling climbed onto the roof and looked at the woman holding the towel. “I thought you’d left.”
This was the same woman from the West Unit who had previously given Yu Lingling the key. She was also the boy’s mother from the diary. She held the towel back out to Yu Lingling. “I mean you no harm.”
Yu Lingling replied matter-of-factly, “I’m suspicious by nature. My apologies.”
Despite her apology, Yu Lingling made no move to approach her.
She still remembered the saying that ghosts were full of lies. These beings might be called anomalies rather than ghosts, but as far as Yu Lingling was concerned, there wasn’t much difference. From the ghost stories she’d read, she’d drawn several conclusions. One of them was never to accept help from a ghost. Who knew whether accepting that help might count as entering some kind of agreement detrimental to her?
“Keep it,” Yu Lingling said. “Wipe away your tears.”
Hearing that, the boy’s mother put the towel away.
The woman in the apron stood beside Yu Lingling and silently mouthed something to her.
Yu Lingling’s gaze was involuntarily drawn to the sharp teeth in her mouth. She couldn’t help wondering exactly how many rows there were and how many teeth each row contained.
Only after the woman finished did Yu Lingling drag her wandering thoughts back on track. “I know. This is her territory.”
If this instance truly had a central figure, it wasn’t the Wheelchair-Bound Boy Brother B had suspected. It was the boy’s mother.
Yu Lingling took the initiative to ask, “How should I address you?”
The boy’s mother clearly hadn’t expected that question. “Zhao.”
“Ms. Zhao.” Yu Lingling looked at her. “My brother once told me that the more people lack something, the more they like to emphasize it. This instance is called Happy Family, and even the last line of Chen Xiaofeng’s diary stressed that they were a happy family. Am I right to assume that something went wrong with your family?”
There was nothing auspicious about Auspicious Village.
As for Happy Family, judging by everything she’d seen so far, there was nothing happy about it.