Chapter 97
Chapter 97
In his panic, Liu Shuang switched on his phone’s flashlight and swept it quickly around him. Skeletons lay everywhere.
Just then, the force around his ankle suddenly loosened. The next second, a skeleton dropped from above like a spider and pounced onto him.
“Ah!” Liu Shuang’s scream echoed through the sealed mountain cave.
It was the first time in his life he’d ever been face-to-face with a skeleton. Way too intense!
Liu Shuang watched as the Skeleton Monster raised one hand, its target clearly his handsome face. With no time to think, he ripped the Crucifix from his neck and threw it at the Skeleton Monster.
The Crucifix burst with an instant flash of blinding light like a flashbang. Liu Shuang seized the chance to shove the Skeleton Monster away, then scrambled and rolled toward the cave entrance. But the Skeleton Monster immediately chased after him, crawling rapidly across the ground on all fours.
“Damn you!” Liu Shuang cursed in desperation.
He’d forgotten skeletons didn’t have eyes. What a waste of one Anomalous Artifact!
“Help!” Liu Shuang shrieked as he crawled out of the cave entrance.
“Brother Shuang, what happened?!” Xia Susu hurriedly asked from outside the cave.
Liu Shuang didn’t dare stop at all. Before he could answer, everyone saw the Skeleton Monster pursuing him relentlessly from behind.
The Skeleton Monster crawled forward through the snow, its movements agile. As it advanced at high speed, its bones rubbed together with a clack-clack-clack.
“Ah!” Xia Susu screamed.
Lin Xiaoxue became incoherent for a moment. “I… I think… that’s the thing I saw that day!!!”
“Run!”
Everyone turned and fled, but it was hard to move quickly through the accumulated snow.
In contrast, the Skeleton Monster refused to give up the chase. Crawling on all fours through the snow as if it belonged there, it soon began catching up to Xia Susu, who was at the very back.
“Split up!” Zhou Jie barked.
Crying, Xia Susu ran for her life in the same direction as Zhou Jie. He Xu went off alone in another direction, while Liu Shuang, who was at the very front, didn’t even look back as he charged straight toward a different path.
“Take Xiaoxue and run toward the village!” Guo Lan said solemnly to Huang Xinze.
“What about you?”
“Don’t worry about me. Just take care of Xiaoxue!” Guo Lan said, then ran off alone in another direction.
After everyone scattered, the Skeleton Monster did not hesitate in the slightest and continued chasing after Liu Shuang.
Guo Lan stopped, took the opportunity to turn back to the cave entrance, and had just been about to go in when a familiar voice came from behind her.
“You’ve got some guts. Aren’t you afraid there might be more monsters inside?” He Xu stood there with her arms crossed, smiling at Guo Lan.
“Aren’t you the same?”
Liu Shuang had gone off as bait to lure the tiger away from the mountain. If they didn’t go into the cave to look for clues now, when would they?
“Let’s go. We’ll take a look inside,” He Xu said, pulling out a dagger. It was clearly an Anomalous Artifact.
One after the other, the two of them switched on their phone flashlights and bent low as they entered the cave.
Although the entrance was narrow, the cave opened up into a whole different world inside. Jagged rocks jutted everywhere, and the space continued stretching inward.
But they didn’t need to go any deeper to see the horrific scene within.
From the entrance all the way into the depths of the cave, corpses lay scattered in every direction. Because the temperature was so low, none of the bodies had rotted; all of them were perfectly preserved.
What made their scalps go numb was this-every single corpse had been stripped of its facial skin!
And near the cave entrance lay a very familiar-looking body.
Guo Lan stepped forward and examined it carefully, then looked through all the photos she had secretly taken outside the inn on the first day to compare their clothing.
“It’s the woman who went missing on the first night,” Guo Lan said. “The bodies here are probably all Order Keeper participants who died inside the Instance.”
“With the Skeleton Monster’s combat power being that terrifying, Fatty’s probably done for.”
As He Xu spoke, she crouched down and, with obvious disgust, examined the dead person’s bloody, mangled face. “Their facial skin was torn straight off.”
For the moment, Guo Lan couldn’t figure out what use the Skeleton Monster had for so many people’s facial skin.
Time was tight. The two of them took photos of the corpses, then began searching the cave.
“Found it!” Guo Lan stopped in front of a stone wall. Written on the rock face above were words in blood, and below them, a bloodstained hand was still frozen in midair.
It was the clue this Order Keeper had left behind with their final breath before death!
…
On the snowy ground, Wei Sen, Xu You, and Chen Lin had been heading east through the forest for half an hour, but they still had not found the Snow Lotus the village doctor had mentioned.
“Do you think that old woman’s words can be trusted?” Chen Lin was doubtful. After all, the old woman had told them to run into the forest on Aurora Night. No matter how she looked at it, that did not sound very reliable.
And after walking for so long, they still had not seen any Snow Lotus. Maybe that old woman had been scheming to get them killed all along.
But Wei Sen said, “Most likely, yes.”
Chen Lin was confused. “Why?”
“The rules of the hot spring pool. If you accidentally drink the hot spring water, you can ask the village doctor for help. That proves the village doctor can save people. If what she told us just now was meant to harm us, then why would she save the people who drank the hot spring water?”
Hearing that, both Xu You and Chen Lin felt it made some sense.
“Careful. Something’s coming!” Xu You abruptly went on alert, having heard movement from within the forest.
Wei Sen and Chen Lin looked toward the woods. Two figures were running rapidly in their direction.
“Xiaoxue?” Xu You recognized them. It was Lin Xiaoxue and Huang Xinze.
“Sister You, Sister Sen, Sister Lin!” Although Lin Xiaoxue was gasping for breath, she still called out their names excitedly.
Huang Xinze slowed his steps and looked back.
They had been running for so long. If that Skeleton Monster was going to catch up, it should have caught up already, but there was no movement behind them now. It seemed they were safe for the time being.
“Xiaoxue, take a break. We’re fine now,” Huang Xinze said, hands on his hips.
At his words, Lin Xiaoxue collapsed to her knees in the snow from exhaustion.
Xu You stepped forward and helped her up. “How’d you end up running like that? Was there a ghost chasing you or something?”
“Wuwu, there really was a ghost.” Lin Xiaoxue was on the verge of tears.
With one hand supporting Lin Xiaoxue, Xu You took out her compass with the other and checked it. “It’s fine now. There’s nothing around anymore.”
Wei Sen stepped forward. “What happened? Where’s Guo Lan?”
Huang Xinze said, “We found a cave up ahead. Oh, and we ran into Susu and the others too. Liu Shuang was the first one to go check the cave, and he ended up bringing out a Skeleton Monster that chased us. Then we scattered and ran for our lives. Guo Lan didn’t go the same way as us.”
Wei Sen glanced in the direction of the cave.
Guo Lan was not with Huang Xinze and Xiaoxue, and the Skeleton Monster had gone after Liu Shuang. In that case, Guo Lan had most likely doubled back to the cave by now.
“Why did you come this way? And what’s going on with Xia Susu and the others?” Wei Sen continued asking.
“Susu and the others got a clue. As for us, we used Guo Lan’s Anomalous Artifact. Hidden inside that cave is a clue related to clearing the Instance.”
Xu You’s eyes lit up. “A clue? Then we have to go take a look, no matter what!”
Huang Xinze’s expression grew exaggerated. “You didn’t see how insane that Skeleton Monster was. It crawled on all fours across the ground, fast as hell! If there are more than one or two of those things inside that cave, with that body of yours, you probably wouldn’t last two minutes fighting it hand-to-hand.”
Wei Sen suddenly thought of something and opened the photo she had taken on the first night of the strange tracks in the forest. “When the Skeleton Monster you mentioned chased you, did it leave marks like these?”
“Yes!” Huang Xinze said with certainty. During their escape, he had looked back several times, and those tracks had indeed been left behind in the snow.
“So the unknown thing in the forest was this thing,” Xu You said.
Lin Xiaoxue was still badly shaken. “Yesterday, when we were looking for the hotel, this was the thing I saw! At the time, I thought I’d just seen wrong.”
Wei Sen lowered her eyes in thought. “This should be what killed that woman from Blue Team on the first night.”
Last night, after the woman outside her door died, the “thump, thump, thump” sound Wei Sen had heard had been the sound of white-boned limbs walking across the wooden floor!
“The full content of the second Guest Room Rules should be: after 11:00 p.m., the lights in the room must be turned off, to prevent the Skeleton Monster in the forest from following the light source and sneaking into the room through the balcony!”