Chapter 132: [Harboring a Ghostly Secret] Hello, Village Chief
Jin Qiao felt a pang of regret the moment she left the group.
What’s more, she had walked straight into the village.
The people in this village were far too strange.
Every single one of them barely looked alive.
Though it was very possible they truly weren’t living human beings.
Jin Qiao wanted to head back, but the bullet chat caught on to her hesitation and started hurling abuse at her again.
She kept telling herself not to be swayed by the bullet chat, yet she couldn’t resist checking it.
Du Wen was right: she simply loved watching live streams.
Three whole years into the game, she had nothing left in the real world.
She had abandoned everything in reality to move into the game permanently.
Yet it was far too boring here—just one tiny town, after all.
So she started watching live streams of other players.
She hadn’t intended to become a keyboard warrior at first, but during one stream, she realized that under the influence of the bullet chat, a player actually went straight to their death.
Having stayed in the game for so long, she was used to seeing dead bodies; bloody scenes no longer instilled fear in her.
Instead, a sense of thrill welled up inside.
Look, I can control your life and death right through the screen.
This offered a bizarre sort of comfort to her mind, which had become desolate and perpetually terrified from losing everything in the game.
Jin Qiao had also joined a guild where everyone shared the exact same disposition.
Sometimes, they would gather to watch streams just to see how pathetically miserable the players inside were.
Her luck had always been decent; usually, she could find a player to team up with inside an instance.
She possessed only a single exclusive skill, called Loyalty to the Death.
As long as she could find a player to group with her—regardless of whether the other party was sincere or fake toward her—she could cast this skill on them.
The target would then lay down their life for her, making the ultimate self-sacrifice.
At first, she would seek out female players, but gradually she discovered that women possessed terrible combat capability, and some were exceptionally good at seduction.
Thus, her hatred for female players grew stronger and stronger.
Take those two sisters today, for instance.
Particularly that elder sister—her very presence stole everyone’s attention.
The more Jin Qiao thought about it, the angrier she grew. By the time she snapped out of her rage upon hearing the system prompt for 50% quest progress, she found herself standing at the village entrance.
Knitting her brows, she turned around and walked back toward the village interior.
A stream ran straight through the side of the village.
As she passed by it, Jin Qiao caught sight of a pair of hands.
The hands bore a greenish-gray hue, with blood-red fingernails, swaying gently in the water as if beckoning her over.
The stream looked rather filthy, its surface covered in floating debris.
In truth, nothing could be seen clearly—everything was an indistinct blur, except for those hands, which remained vivid and crystal clear.
Jin Qiao could hear her own heart thumping wildly against her ribs.
She let out a scream and began to run.
Yet the faster she ran, the closer she drew toward the stream. She tried desperately to head in the opposite direction, yet a gravitational force seemed to pull her in regardless.
One of her feet stepped onto the damp, muddy earth.
A hand gently clamped around her ankle, then yanked backward with sudden, violent force.
Jin Qiao shrieked once more, entirely forgetting that she actually possessed a vast array of life-saving items.
The players stepped out of the courtyard.
The moisture in the air outside remained exceptionally heavy—so heavy that every breath felt like inhaling mouthfuls of liquid.
Yet staying inside was out of the question; the stench in the room was far too foul.
Xu Sheng-sheng and a few other players had already thrown up. Had their stomachs not been largely empty to begin with, the room would have been rendered completely uninhabitable.
The group planned to conduct a walk-through investigation inside the village.
The villagers seemed to have returned to their respective homes by now; looking down the paths, everything appeared empty, with only the red lanterns hanging under the eaves of every household swaying gently in the wind.
However…
Bai Cha paid close attention to those lanterns.
Despite such heavy atmospheric moisture, the flames inside the red lanterns burned bright and strong.
Even the paper wrapped around the outside of the lanterns wasn’t damp in the slightest.
Noticing the direction of her gaze, Du Wen glanced at the red lanterns as well.
“Those lanterns… must be made of some special material…”
Though he said as much, no one dared step up to inspect them closely.
Bai Cha continuously observed the terrain and residences within the village.
Say what you will, the village chief’s residence ought to look somewhat better than the rest.
A village official was still an official, after all.
Sure enough, one household possessed a noticeably larger courtyard.
Bai Cha walked over and knocked on the door.
The other players gathered around as well.
After knocking for a long time, zero response came from inside.
Just as Bai Cha was contemplating whether to climb straight over the wall, the door creaked open.
It opened merely a crack, however, revealing an old man standing behind the door frame, peering out at them.
“What do you want?”
Bai Cha offered a gentle smile, pointing toward the players behind her, all of whom bore non-negligible injuries.
Though everyone had been bandaged and faced no immediate danger, they still looked quite miserable.
“Hello, are you the village chief? May I ask if the village has a health clinic? My classmates were injured, and with the weather being so damp, we’re worried about bacterial infections. We’d like to drop by to get some medicine and bandages.”
Hearing this, the old man swept his gaze over them.
“There is no health clinic.”
His tone sounded bizarre, laced with cold indifference that kept people at a distance, alongside a hidden malice.
“In that case, you must be the village chief. Seeing as your courtyard is quite spacious, would you mind letting us rest inside for a moment? A snake just crawled into our courtyard earlier, so we really don’t dare stay there anymore.”
Seeing that he didn’t deny her first assumption, Bai Cha took full advantage to push further.
The old man cast a cold glare at her and immediately made to shut the door.
Bai Cha shoved a knife horizontally into the gap, jamming the door open while the tip of the blade pointed straight at the center of the old man’s brow.
A sweet, gentle smile remained fixed on her face.
“Just for a brief moment. We have a few questions to ask you—would that be convenient for you?”
[Ah, this…]
[Village Chief: Do I look like I dare to say it’s inconvenient?]
A stiff expression squeezed onto the old man’s face—likely a blend of reluctance coupled with a trace of fear, utterly rigid.
The door finally swung open.
A wave of decaying stench rushed out from inside the courtyard, hitting them square in the face.
The players filed inside.
Overgrown with weeds, the courtyard looked completely devoid of long-term human habitation.
With his hands tucked behind his back, the old man led the way forward.
Upon reaching the living room, a middle-aged man stepped out from an adjacent room.
“Dad, why did these people come to our place?”
The moment the middle-aged man caught sight of them, he glared at them with a gaze brimming with resentment.
The old man uttered not a word, merely casting a glance at the butcher knife in Bai Cha’s hand.
The middle-aged man caught sight of it as well. Unafraid, he appeared somewhat enraged instead, the muscles on his face equally rigid.
“You brought a knife into our house?! What kind of trash are you? You little bitch, you women are all stepping out of line…”
Before the final words could leave his mouth, the knife in Bai Cha’s hand went flying out. With dodder vines coiled around its hilt, the butcher knife spun a full circle mid-air, sweeping right above the middle-aged man’s head.
A patch of his hair tumbled to the ground instantly, shaving off a chunk of scalp along with it, yet not a single drop of blood welled out.
“Oops, my apologies! It’s my first time using it like this, so I’m not quite practiced yet. My aim was off and I accidentally injured you—I originally just wanted to give you a haircut.”
Bai Cha looked at him with a beaming smile, her expression as pure and innocent as a little white flower blooming in spring.
Clutching his head, the middle-aged man retreated into his room in utter terror.
Bai Cha’s smile vanished in an instant, her eyes narrowing slightly.
These villagers… held anomalies as expected, looking as if they were already dead too.
Fixing her gaze back onto the village chief, she flashed an obedient smile once more.
