Chapter 105
Chapter 105
Everyone looked at one another, brows knitted as they shook their heads and muttered quietly.
“Don’t know him. There are so many people here. How would any of us know which one is Chen Kai?”
Sun Xingye swept his gaze over them. “Simple. We can just check the rooms.”
His ratlike eyes narrowed. “Don’t tell me none of you heard a thing when it happened.”
Panic flickered through everyone’s eyes.
They… had heard it, of course.
And it had not exactly been quiet.
The problem was… they had heard a witch’s voice. Naturally, no one had dared act rashly. What if the witch was still inside that room?
What if they brought disaster down on themselves?
Sun Xingye was no fool. He grabbed the person who looked the most timid, menace in his eyes.
“Where?”
The man shuddered when Sun Xingye seized his collar. Lips trembling, he pointed to one of the inner rooms. “I… I-I heard something in that room.”
“You go in.” Sun Xingye shoved him toward the door.
The man shook his head frantically, misery covering his face. “I can’t. I heard a witch in there. I don’t dare go inside.”
“Oh?” Sun Xingye raised an eyebrow. “What did you hear?”
Even now, fireworks, firecrackers, and women’s laughter could still be heard throughout the inn. Yet the man was certain the voice had belonged to a witch.
He could only be so sure if he had heard some distinctive phrase that established beyond doubt that a witch was inside.
The man shook under Sun Xingye’s stare and said in a trembling voice,
“S-she said she was going to punish them.”
“Them.”
Plural.
Two people.
Sun Xingye was still wondering how to force someone else into the room when a figure swept past him, reached the door, and opened it without the slightest hesitation.
“Hm?” Sun Xingye’s eyes widened, and he froze for a moment.
By the time he recovered, Xiao Huai had already entered the room.
The stench of blood struck them in the face. The others frowned and narrowed their eyes against it, yet curiosity still made them crane their necks to peer inside.
There was only one person in the room. More precisely, there was only one corpse.
The man’s eye sockets were empty, his eyeballs nowhere to be found. The remnants of ocular tissue that had not been removed completely lay exposed to the air.
When a flashlight shone across him, the players with weaker stomachs began retching involuntarily.
As more people gagged, even those who merely heard the noise could not bear it and turned their heads away.
Xiao Huai crouched beside the body. “The eyes weren’t the fatal wound.”
Cheng Shan’s face was ashen. “Both his eyes were gouged out, and that wasn’t fatal?”
Xiao Huai looked up at Cheng Shan. “I know a hundred ways to remove one of your organs without killing you. Would you like to try one?”
His voice did not waver. Its chill seemed capable of freezing the entire room.
Even the players who had been retching instinctively bit their lips and kept quiet.
They were terrified Xiao Huai might genuinely demonstrate in the next second.
Xiao Huai lowered his gaze and unzipped the dead man’s black coat.
The moment everyone saw what lay beneath it, they were stunned.
His white undershirt was soaked entirely red, and all the blood had come from the area over his heart.
But why was the man’s chest… caved in there?
Lu Zhi’s pupils widened slightly. He came to Xiao Huai’s side and used a small knife to cut open the clothing over the corpse’s chest.
Sure enough–
There was nothing inside.
His heart was gone.
It had been dug straight out of his chest.
A human might survive without eyes, but the heart was different.
Without a heart, no one could live.
“H-how could it be…” Lu Zhi lowered his head, shock written across his face, and let his hands fall to his sides. “It was JOKER. They did it again!” They had stolen another player’s heart.
Murder. A life taken.
Sun Xingye’s brows snapped together when he heard the name JOKER.
“JOKER” was a toxic name among horror-game players.
“Huh? What did he say, Joe Kerr? Who’s that?” Some players had no idea what Lu Zhi was talking about.
Sun Xingye glanced at them, his gaze dark. “JOKER. As in a clown.”
“What is that?” The true newcomers still did not understand. They did not dare question Sun Xingye, so they looked pleadingly at Lu Zhi instead.
Lu Zhi looked like a newcomer too, yet he seemed to know far more than they did.
This time, even Sun Xingye’s eyes widened slightly. He studied Lu Zhi with open scrutiny.
Ordinary people knew nothing about the circles formed by guilds and organizations. Most people in a third-floor instance were novices just beginning the game, still less likely to know any of this.
Lu Zhi realized he might have let something slip. He had not wanted to reveal just how much intelligence he possessed.
But when he raised his head and saw the curiosity in Xiao Huai’s expression, he seemed to take courage from it and began to speak.
“Then… I’ll tell you what I know. Knowing this stuff won’t actually help much inside an instance anyway.”
Lu Zhi said, “Put simply, the JOKER organization is evil. Its members answer directly to an evil god and do some truly insane things. I… I have a friend who knows a great deal about the game world, including some things about JOKER.
“I’ve heard they’ve been killing their teammates frequently of late. Every dead player’s corpse is missing its heart, and there will also be a mark right here.”
He wiped the blood away from the area near the dead man’s heart, revealing a red heart symbol on the left side of his chest, close to the armpit.
“Anyway, that friend of mine was hurt by people from the JOKER organization. They’re… they’re all rotten bastards!” Rare anger entered Lu Zhi’s eyes. He clenched his fists, his face taut with resentment.
Sun Xingye raised a brow. “Interesting. Your friend knows an awful lot of detailed intelligence. He has a supernatural ability, doesn’t he?”
Lu Zhi frowned and did not answer.
Sun Xingye understood. “He’s right. JOKER is a genuine cancer. Foxslayer despises cockroaches like them more than anyone. But the bastard who did this is probably just one of their rookies. If we’d encountered a real madman, I doubt any of us would have survived the first day.”
For some reason, Sun Xingye did not quite dare look at Xiao Huai after saying that. At first, he had thought Xiao Huai was a madman.
Only this madman was much better than he had imagined. At the very least, Xiao Huai had never killed anyone in front of them.
One player asked quietly, confusion in his voice, “Then… what happened to his eyes?”
More and more people had gathered around the room.
Before anyone could answer, a scream suddenly came from the doorway.
“Ah! Sixth Brother! What happened to you?”
A slightly chubby man shoved through the crowd and squeezed his way to the corpse.
The others were surprised to see that he knew the dead man and moved aside to let him pass.
Xiao Huai rose. No longer interested in what came next, he left the crowd.
There was nothing worth staying to hear. The truth of the story was simple.
What had happened in this room resembled what had happened between Xiaoxue and Li Yao.
The witch began the punishment, and the weak betrayed the others first.