Chapter 130: [Harboring a Ghostly Secret] A Slap Across the Face
Xu Shengsheng took half a step backward and looked at the other people in the room. Although she didn’t say a word, everyone instantly understood.
The two sisters definitely had a secret method to verify each other’s identity.
So the person outside wasn’t Bai Cha.
Knock, knock—
Two more soft taps resonated on the door.
“Shengsheng, open the door.”
Xu Shengsheng backed up further, huddling together with Xia Mei.
Drip…
Water began to drop from the rafters.
Everyone looked up.
Several black water snakes were coiled around the wooden beams above, water dripping off their sleek bodies.
Seeing that they had been noticed, the water snakes flicked their tongues and dove straight down from the ceiling.
Outside the door, Bai Cha frowned.
It was far too quiet inside; not a single sound could be heard.
Her clothes were completely soaked through by now.
Ji Xiaolan had chased her back. On her way, she had even spotted Ji Xiaolan’s maternal grandmother standing at the entrance of the neighboring courtyard, staring at her with murder in her eyes.
In the end, Ji Xiaolan had dragged the old woman away.
Only then did Bai Cha enter the courtyard, but after knocking, there was no reaction from within. The wooden door remained tightly shut, without a peep from inside.
After a moment’s thought, Bai Cha delivered a sharp kick directly to the wooden door in front of her.
Even if an aging wooden door couldn’t be broken in a single kick, it should at least rattle. Yet this door stood firmly in place, completely unmoving.
Bai Cha simply released a strand of Dodder vine, sliding it through the gap beneath the door.
However, the moment it slipped inside, she felt the vine get severed.
Hmm…
Bai Cha looked thoughtful.
It seemed the people inside were in a bad spot.
Bai Cha didn’t insist on breaking through the front door. In this style of rural architecture, the living room and bedrooms were all connected.
She found an adjacent bedroom and forcefully broke open the window.
This window wasn’t nearly as difficult to open as the main entrance.
Climbing into the bedroom, she opened the interior door, which led directly to the living room.
And the first thing that greeted her eyes was a lump of mush—flesh and blood mixed together into something unrecognizable.
Gao Wei’s fully intact head was still visible in the pile.
Looking over at the remaining players, each of them had their eyes closed, their bodies twitching occasionally as they inflicted cuts on themselves.
Bai Cha checked on Xu Shengsheng first and found that she was completely unharmed.
She was sitting all by herself in a corner, eyes closed, chuckling with a silly smile and clapping her hands from time to time.
Bai Cha: “…”
She walked up to her silly cousin first and patted her face.
“Have you finished your Five-Three workbook? Your aunt is asking you!”
Xu Shengsheng shivered and instinctively snapped her eyes open.
She stared intently at Bai Cha’s magnified face right in front of her. It took her a long moment to process reality before her face melted into another silly giggle.
“Hehe… Sister… Hehe, look, a movie! Thomas the Tank Engine is spinning on the floor…”
Bai Cha: “…………”
She rubbed the girl’s head aggressively.
Only then did she turn her attention to the other players.
When it came to waking these people up, she didn’t possess nearly as much patience.
Wang Jiangtao, who was closest, received a barrage of slaps right across his face until he snapped out of it. Still dazed, he reflexively held his weapon out in front of his chest.
Bai Cha used the exact same method to wake the rest of the players, making an exception only for Xia Mei by being slightly gentler—she simply pressed the cold flat of her blade against her cheek instead.
Wang Jiangtao, who was the first to wake and realize what was happening: “…”
He had quite a few self-inflicted wounds on his body. He had seen snakes crawling all over him in the vision, so he had started hacking away at them.
Though the cuts hurt, his face throbbed even worse.
Beside them, Xu Shengsheng clapped her hands again and let out a loud laugh.
“Big Bad Wolf getting beat up by Bighead Carpentry! Hehehe…”
Wang Jiangtao: “?”
He looked over at Xu Shengsheng.
Come to think of it, while they were trapped in the illusion earlier, Xu Shengsheng seemed to have used a skill on herself.
Afterward, she just sat there giggling helplessly. Snakes had crawled all over her body and even slithered into her open mouth, but she had been completely oblivious to it, scaring him half to death.
He had originally intended to lend her a hand, but there were too many snakes for him to cope with his own situation. By the time he finally freed up a hand, he had been slapped square across the face and woken up from the illusion.
Now that he thought about it, it was a good thing he hadn’t stepped in.
But was Xu Shengsheng’s skill state still going on?
What kind of ghost-cursed skill was this—did using it make a person turn stupid?
Fortunately, three minutes wasn’t that long.
Xu Shengsheng pointed at the bloody lump nearby with a giggle, remarking on whose watermelon had burst all over the ground, claiming that the village flood was entirely made of watermelon juice, and that the neighbor selling oranges would be green with envy.
As she rambled, her consciousness gradually cleared.
Then her smile froze.
All the foul, metallic stench she had ignored due to “Careless and Sloppy”—along with the horrifying memory of those snakes in the illusion—came flooding back into her mind all at once.
Xu Shengsheng frantically felt around her body to confirm there were no snakes. She then looked up at the returned Bai Cha and burst into loud wails.
“Sister! It was so scary!”
The heavily injured players: “…”
Sigh, having a relative enter the game together really is nice.
At least you have someone you can genuinely trust.
Though it was hard to say for sure—there were plenty of stories about siblings turning on each other floating around on the forums too.
“What happened?” Bai Cha asked as she awkwardly wrapped an arm around Xu Shengsheng, who was half a head taller than her.
The players recounted what they had seen earlier. Naturally, they knew now that it was an illusion, but dying in the illusion meant dying for real in the real world.
Gao Wei was living—or rather, dead—proof.
“I have no idea when we fell for it.”
Lingering fear weighed heavily on everyone’s hearts.
The illusion was clearly tailored to each person’s specific fears. Take Xu Shengsheng, for instance—when she went to open the door, she recalled her dream where the person outside wasn’t Bai Cha, which caused her location map to misrepresent reality.
If Bai Cha had returned even a moment later, there would definitely be a few more corpses lying here.
Speaking of which, everyone couldn’t help but turn their gaze toward Bai Cha.
“What did Ji Xiaolan say to you that bumped our progress straight up to 50%?”
Even though they didn’t really expect Bai Cha to answer.
“She didn’t tell me much. She just told me to run. I tested her a little by asking if she was already dead, and she almost turned into a fierce ghost,” Bai Cha answered candidly.
Her response left the players stunned.
“You asked her directly?”
Asking the subject outright if they were already dead—what ghost could possibly take that well?
After all, becoming a fierce ghost usually stemmed from suffering extreme agony before death.
Bai Cha spread her hands.
“That’s why the moisture in the air suddenly spiked. But she genuinely showed no intention of hurting us. However, her tone implied that once her wedding day comes, she might no longer be able to control herself.”
Ji Xiaolan seemed to possess impressive mental restraint.
At the very least, even though she wanted to attack at that moment, she held back in the end. She had continued to urge Bai Cha to leave as quickly as possible.
“Hiss, that’s weird…”
The brief info Bai Cha provided actually held a massive amount of hidden context.
For example, Ji Xiaolan was already dead right now.
Anyone who had played a few games knew that key NPCs were essentially fierce ghosts themselves. In storyline-focused instances, as long as you didn’t expose their true identity, they wouldn’t actively reveal themselves either, because they had to act out their roles.
NPCs were required to play out the story of their past lives.
Only when the plot reached the point of the NPC’s actual death would they transform into a fierce ghost.
Before that point, they would dutifully remain immersed in the story of their life.
For Bai Cha to ask directly whether she was dead or not would normally be a deadly taboo, but the NPC wouldn’t expose her ghost form because, within the narrative framework, she wasn’t supposed to be dead yet.
Some NPCs with good acting skills—or those who enjoyed acting—would play dumb and counter with “What are you talking about?”
Ji Xiaolan’s reaction proved that by the time their story started, she was already dead.
Yet, the key figure, Ji Xiaolan, harbored no murderous intent toward them.
