Chapter 101
Chapter 101
“Bang! Bang! Bang!”
The moment the hour hand reached nine, a violent pounding erupted against the door.
The silence of Aledi Village seemed to catch fire from a lit fuse. Through the crack beneath the door, they could vaguely make out the flare of fireworks outside.
Firecrackers crackled throughout Aledi Village. Xiao Huai raised his eyes and merely glanced toward the door.
He lifted his teacup, set it down again, and drew a very soft, deep breath.
As though he had caught a certain scent, he rose and walked to the entrance.
Women’s voices began calling continuously from outside. “Do you have any rooms left? Please, take us in.”
“Do you have any rooms left? Please! Open the door and let us in!”
The voices grew increasingly frantic, faint laughter threading through their pleas.
It sounded like mockery, or perhaps a group fooling around.
Xiao Huai reached out. The instant his fingers touched the door, a wary shout came from behind him.
“What are you trying to do?” Sun Xingye stared at Xiao Huai with wide eyes. He had only come out to see how far the witches’ nightly roaming had progressed.
He had never expected to find someone already in the lobby.
Still less had he expected Xiao Huai… to try to open the door.
“A-Zhuolang, are you insane? You know the witches are roaming right now! Are you trying to open that door and get us all killed?”
Xiao Huai lowered his head. After a moment, he said very quietly,
“No.”
“Huh? What’s not?” Sun Xingye’s brows drew tightly together. He had waited all that time only to get an answer like that?
One after another, the braver players opened their doors. Sun Xingye’s shout had, after all, stirred up plenty of curiosity.
Xiao Huai turned to face Sun Xingye. Five or six players who had just emerged from their rooms were already standing beside him.
An invisible boundary seemed to divide the space between them.
Xiao Huai stood on one side, and the players stood on the other.
Xiao Huai said, “This isn’t the witches’ nightly roaming.”
As the last word fell, he gave the door a gentle push.
Everyone’s eyes widened at once. Terror surged through them like a tide. They wanted to flee back to their rooms, but their legs shook beyond their control, leaving them unable to take a single step. In their panic, they squeezed their eyes shut.
But…
The horror they imagined never came.
Outside the door… there was nothingness.
True nothingness.
They had never imagined they would see the void with their own eyes.
Everything beyond the door was dark, and time itself seemed frozen there.
No wind. No shadow. No sand. No light.
No building was visible. Nothing was visible at all.
And yet sounds came again and again from every direction.
Women laughing and cheering, footsteps fleeing, voices begging for mercy.
“Ahhh! Fuck, what the hell is this place?”
The players began shrieking in fright. “Can you close the door? Hurry up and close it!”
One more step, and Xiao Huai would vanish completely into the empty darkness.
In the dim lobby, the players aimed their flashlights at him. Yet he looked like an image made of light and shadow, something that would linger there for only a moment.
Visible, but impossible to touch.
Xiao Huai turned slightly. His gaze passed through the crowd and settled on the door to the room he shared with Lu Yuanshi.
Lu Yuanshi was not among them.
Perhaps he was asleep.
Why was Xiao Huai thinking about him?
How boring.
Xiao Huai slowly drew back his gaze. Light fell into his eyes and dissolved into the glow of sunset.
He said quietly, “Why are you afraid? They’re all gone already, aren’t they?”
Those sounds were all fake.
These ghosts within the void could not truly harm them. What could they do besides frighten the players?
As Xiao Huai stepped through the doorway, every player’s heart leaped into their throat.
They watched him disappear into the darkness.
Sun Xingye’s expression turned ghastly. He could vaguely sense that an important clue had to be waiting outside.
But his cautious instincts kept him from moving forward. Faced with that unknown darkness, he did not dare move at all.
While everyone remained frozen in a daze, a tall, slender figure slipped through the crowd. Before anyone could react, he had followed Xiao Huai and vanished from sight.
That person was Lu Yuanshi.
Lu Zhi, who had been hiding nearby, could no longer restrain himself either. Face flushed, he ran out the door and disappeared into the endless void.
In less than a minute, two players had followed the NPC outside.
Anxiety covered Cheng Shan’s face. “I don’t care anymore. I have to take a look. We have far too few clues for the collective mission. At this rate, we might not find them before every last one of us gets punished… If everyone’s morale collapses, that’s when the real nightmare will begin.”
He strode forward. Sun Xingye’s face darkened as he cursed under his breath.
“Damn rookie… Ah, forget it!” He clicked his tongue, but followed anyway.
Since he had made a promise to the guild leader, Sun Xingye would always find some way to fulfill it.
No matter what the process involved.
Keeping their word… was Foxslayer’s one and only rule.
* * *
Inside the void, every step Xiao Huai took brought the sensation of countless people passing him. Some of those “people” even reached out and touched his skin.
Their hands invariably passed through his body, unable to make true contact.
Xiao Huai wandered onward without a destination. The crack of explosions grew louder, and the weeping swelled around him.
But in truth, he knew those were not firecrackers.
The gunpowder he smelled carried a scent unique to the battlefield.
What they had mistaken for fireworks and firecrackers were nothing of the kind. They heralded the destruction that came before war.
Why had the desert kingdom disappeared?
Why had the illusion shown to him by the soulbug spoken those words–“Survive. You have to survive…”
“So beautiful–”
“Here… we never grow up.”
“Here… they never grow up.”
He lowered his head and repeated the words aloud.
Why could they never grow up? Because war had denied them any chance to survive. They could not live long enough.
So beautiful? Why had they called it beautiful?
Because the children had never seen war. They did not understand what those things falling from the sky meant.
They did not know they were weapons that could take their lives.
They did not know, because they had only ever seen the beauty in the world.
They did not know… that people in this world could surrender their humanity so easily for the sake of profit.
There were no windows in the bedrooms of Aledi Inn. Every bed had protective rails, and a space for survival had been built underground. Why?
The answer was simple.
Aledi Inn had never been an inn to begin with. It was a shelter.
The children could sleep in beds enclosed by rails while the adults stood guard outside. As long as the children survived, there would still be hope.
But war was merciless. It harvested every life with equal cruelty.
In the end, this place could not escape its doomed fate. Everything collapsed, leaving behind nothing but ruins.
And those glowing soulbugs.
But why had the soulbugs appeared?
He lifted his eyes and looked into the distance.
The answer to all of this was most likely connected to the witches.