Courtyard instance world
The moment the door opened, the scene inside froze. No one dared look at who came in, in fear that it would be something they couldn’t defend themselves against. Zhai Xiaoyi didn’t move either, as he was still processing the situation in front of him.
Zhai Xiaoyi felt like he had seen enough, and closed the door behind himself.
The boys inside tensed as they listened to the nearing footsteps. They didn’t sound like those of an adult, but there wasn’t anyone missing, was there? Was it the ghost of the missing boy coming to get revenge on everyone alive? Right. The missing… Who?!
Shi Mingdu struck the table with his palm in excitement, completely startling the others. Zhai Xiaoyi reached the table in the meantime, and he put the stack of papers in his hands on the table. He looked at Shi Mingdu, ‘What’s up?’
‘Where were you?’ Tian Xihua finally realised what felt so wrong before.
‘I checked the fourth building for clues.’
‘I just realised something.’ Shi Mingdu didn’t pay attention to either of them. He was immersed in his thoughts, and the others looked at him.
‘What is it? Is it a clue?’ Jin Huai was the one to ask first. He hoped it was something that would help them finish the instance before he got killed.
Shi Mingdu shook his head lightly. ‘We approached this from the completely wrong direction. When you all woke up, what did you see in the room?’
This was the first time he waited for an answer from the others while evaluating, but all he got was embarrassed gazes.
A newcomer spoke, ‘We.. I was focused on being a child again. I didn’t look around.’
Shi Mingdu frowned. ‘It doesn’t matter, as long as at least some of you noticed. How many beds were there? And how many of us are here?’
‘That’s right, there was an empty bed!’ It was the boy with green hair who realised first.
‘Now the real question here is, was the bed a prop? Or do we just not remember whose bed it was?’
Tian Xihua spoke up. ‘Just now, I clearly felt that something was wrong, but I just couldn’t place the feeling. It went away when Xiaoyi came in. I think it is the instance playing with our memories.’
Jin Huai paled at that. ‘You mean, if someone disappears..’
‘There is no way of us knowing.’ Shi Mingdu’s expression was dark.
‘Wait, let’s think this through.’ It was Zhai Xiaoyi who tried to calm them down. ‘If the ghosts can just change our memories about everything, wouldn’t that make the instance impossible to pass?’
‘There must be restrictions.’ Somehow, Chu Anzhi still sounded calm. ‘Maybe it can only make us forget people, or maybe its power isn’t even real and it’s trying to trick us into thinking that it’s more powerful than it really is.’
The boy next to him chimed in, looking at Tian Xihua. ‘Right. Didn’t you say you still felt strange about it? I felt nothing when I looked at that bed this morning.’
‘But it’s right here, we can check easily. Just go and see, if anyone feels anything we’ll believe it, but as long as there is no evidence, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions.’
‘Let’s go and see then.’
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
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‘I went into the fourth room. I didn’t find much, but there were papers similar to what we found in the restricted house. I also found a book. I brought them over.’ He handed over the stack of papers from before.
Shi Mingdu looked at them and after verifying that he really couldn’t understand the contents, he handed the stack to Zhao Qi.
In truth, Zhao Qi didn’t understand much of it either, but he was reluctant to go back on his words, so he read the papers with an unreasonable amount of faith in himself.
It turned out that the documents really had to do with the houses, they were all about a transaction between the owners of the two. The courtyard they were living in had been leased to a man before, and the lessor was the owner of the luxurious house.
This was all Zhao Qi could understand, and Shi Mingdu patted him on the back with appreciation. ‘This should be a useful clue since it was in both houses. That’s good, we’re one step closer to solving the instance.’
‘Let’s go. I want to have a look at the bed.’ Chu Anzhi was already standing near the door as he listened, and he had already left the room by the time he finished the second part of his sentence.
No one was against leaving, and the only one who stayed in the room was Zhai Xiaoyi. He looked around, and saw that the plaque at the end of the table had all the changes Nan Zhi added to it back at the house. He stared back at the last bowl with a sense of longing, but still followed the others.
It was still early afternoon outside. Some gray clouds covered the sun, but the warmth was still in the air. The entire atmosphere was oppressing, just like the weather before rain.
Inside the room, the players stood around an empty bed. They stared at the bedsheets, touched the pillow and covers and Jin Huai even sat down at the foot of the bed.
‘Nothing?’ Cui Shenyu couldn’t wait to ask.
Jin Huai shook his head, and so did all the others in a row.
‘So it’s nothing. There is no twelfth person, and the power of the ghost is to deceive us.’ Chu Anzhi sighed as he sat down on his own bed.
‘Wait.’ Shi Mingdu wasn’t looking at the bed. He stared at the ceiling before he turned towards the door, just in time to lock eyes with the entering Zhai Xiaoyi.
He waved him closer, and pushed him towards the bed. ‘See if you can find anything. With your.. thing. Ability.’
Zhai Xiaoyi still wasn’t feeling well, and he was quite dazed when he was suddenly pushed. He lost his balance and fell on the bed, but strangely enough instead of the soft quilts, he fell to the dusty ground.
He looked up, but the boys all vanished from around him. He couldn’t even see the long house anymore.
Instead, he was lying on the ground in front of the gates, in the same place where his dream ended. The gates were opening, but that wasn’t what caught his attention. It was raining here, just like in the dream, but he wasn’t alone in front of the gates.
A small boy around ten years old was standing next to him, slightly shivering from the rain. He didn’t seem to notice Zhai Xiaoyi on the ground.
Zhai Xiaoyi pushed himself up, and stood up while looking around himself. He had regained his height and with that his original body, but his skin looked slightly transparent and the rain fell through his palm as he raised it. Did he turn into a ghost?
Or was this a memory instead? He looked at the other, but the boy was staring at the crack on the gate without blinking, and still didn’t notice him. He was frozen, even forgetting to shiver from the cold water.
It felt like thousands of needles pricking his skin through the soaked clothes, but he didn’t dare move. The eyes from the other side of the crack weren’t human, he could feel it. They stared at him without blinking, and even though he was half dead with fright, he still stared back without a second thought.
He felt that if he were to blink, inexplicable things would happen, so he didn’t dare move, and neither did that terrible thing on the other side. He felt like the gates took hours as they opened slowly, and he didn’t want to think about what the thing would do once it wasn’t restrained by the tall doors.
To him, it felt like hours had passed, but in reality it wasn’t more than a couple minutes. It was late at night, and the courtyard was covered in shadows. They moved with the wind as if they were alive, and the boy took a step backwards.
Two figures stood behind the doors, a tall, sickly looking man and a woman Zhai Xiaoyi recognised as the one who woke them up and led them to the field.
The woman quickly walked to the child, and draped a wide shawl she had been wearing on her shoulders around him. She held him, and looked down at the boy with concern as she walked back to the house with him, shielding him from the rain with her own body. The gates closed with a loud bang after them.
The boy was startled, and the man tried to soothe him. ‘It is only the thunder. there’s no need to be afraid.’
The woman took him into the dining hall, and placed a steaming bowl of food in front of the boy. ‘Take off your shirt.’ She instructed him, and looked at the man standing at the door, ‘You, bring him fresh clothes. There’s a set in the clean room.’
The man left, and the two of them sat at the table quietly. The boy had taken off the soaked shirt, and he held the warm shawl close to his skin.
‘Eat quickly, before it gets cold.’ The woman told him, her voice just as gentle and soft as before. It sounded like the warmth of a home, like the taste of honey.
The only source of light in the room was a small candle placed on the middle of the table, the orange glow providing a sense of comfort for the ones present. The man got back quickly, and handed a folded up stack to the boy. It wasn’t only clothes, but bedsheets too. He explained in a low voice.
‘You came all this way in this weather, the least we can give you is shelter for the night. You can sleep with the boys in the other room, there is an empty bed.’
The boy nodded gratefully, and ate quickly after changing his clothes.
‘You must be really scared. The things you saw aren’t for the eyes of such small children. Stay with us for some time, will you?’ The woman’s features looked soft in the candlelight, half of her face in shadows and half of it bright.
‘I.. How does aunt know that something happened?’
The woman realised that she said too much while trying to coax him, and her expression flashed ugly for a moment before returning to the kind smile she wore before. ‘I didn’t know. But child, you’ve run all the way here, how could nothing have happened?’
She pulled the half empty bowl from front of him, and helped him stand up. There was something wrong with his foot, he had tripped over it in fright when he ran out of the house. He hissed lightly, but didn’t dare say anything.
He was led away by the woman towards the bedroom, and the man left too.
Zhai Xiaoyi decided to follow him.
Not long before, in the bedroom.
All Shi Mingdu saw was that after he pushed the boy, Zhai Xiaoyi fell on the bed and fainted. He looked at him without even trying to conceal the interest in his gaze.
Jin Huai asked him, ‘What is going on? Did he fall asleep while falling? You shouldn’t have pushed him, he wasn’t feeling well just now. Maybe he fainted.’
‘He wasn’t feeling well? When was that exactly?’ Shi Mingdu didn’t seem like he felt guilty at all.
‘Just now, when we were coming back. His entire face was flushed, didn’t you see?’ Jin Huai scratched a dark freckle on his face. ‘I thought he went to lie down when he disappeared before lunch. I didn’t expect him to actually go looking for clues alone.’
Tian Xihua pulled his hand back after checking the boy’s temperature. He frowned, but didn’t say anything.
‘It must be his ability. You can’t get sick here, or at least I’ve never seen anything of the sort before.’ Shi Mingdu was still looking at the sleeping boy on the bed. He sighed with regret.
‘He must be dreaming about something important. I wish I could do that, you know? Sure, it might be uncomfortable at times, but something like this..’ His voice trailed off as he imagined it.
‘So the bed is in fact an important clue?’ Chu Anzi shook his head with disbelief. ‘The placement is too obvious. That must be why we didn’t notice it earlier.’
‘Didn’t that official say the instance was only upgraded into a D rate world after the system crashed? It shouldn’t be hard to get through.’ The green haired boy was thinking loudly as he sat down on his bed.
The rest of the group got comfortable quickly too. They all sat on their beds and talked, telling each other about their real lives and laughing at anecdotes. Only Tian Xihua didn’t leave Zhai Xiaoyi’s side.
Time appeared to be passing by quicker than in real life, and it was soon time to rest. There didn’t seem to be dinner, as the woman never came to call them over.
The oppressing air just got warmer since noon, and the boys could almost feel the air’s humidity on their skin. The sky gradually darkened, and a full, red moon appeared from time to time from behind the heavy clouds.
The room gradually quieted down, and soft snoring could be heard from the beds. The rain’s arrival was sudden, and the sound soothed the sleeping boys. It was a low rumbling, yet loud enough to make people feel dazed.
Jin Huai couldn’t sleep. He kept thinking about the death condition, and he seemed to hear footsteps from the rain several times.
The window was at an angle where he couldn’t see the outside world from his bed, but he couldn’t help feeling like someone was standing in the rain, staring at him.
He shuddered with fright, and pulled the covers over his head. Even though he couldn’t feel the warm breeze from outside anymore, he still couldn’t shake that strange feeling.
He peeked out from under the covers, but the moon was completely covered by the clouds at the moment, and the room sank into darkness. He shrunk back, trying to take up as little space as he could.
A simple thought, a terrible realisation hit him and his breathing picked up.
‘The darkness is where the lights burn out.’
Back at the house, he hadn’t understood what this meant, but now he knew too well. It was such a simple, such a crude way to tell them the time of his death.
He reflected on his odds. He didn’t know what the ghost wanted, what it looked like. He couldn’t defend himself at all. It was dark, and he knew he could die in the next moment, yet every minute he survived against the odds somehow added to the pressure he felt. He felt helpless, hopeless, and didn’t want to suffer at all.
A soft creak came from the door. His entire body tensed. Light footsteps sounded in the room, almost completely covered by the noise of the rain. It was two pairs of steps, and if Jin Huai’s mind was still reasonable, he could have picked up on the strangeness hidden in those soft sounds.
His thoughts were all over the place. In fact, Jin Huai never thought himself to be brave. For example, right now he was really afraid of the darkness. Not the creatures lurking in it, but pure, foggy darkness. He thought about his little sister at home, then he thought about what she was doing when he left for school that day.
The players talked about a lot of things, but most of them didn’t share their ages. Neither did Jin Huai. In reality, he wasn’t much older than his current body. One or two years, he thought. He imagined what it would be like, if he could still have a future. He almost smiled.
He would go to school, and he would make his parents proud. He would play with his sister whenever she wanted to. They would grow up, and he would get a job as a teacher, just like his mother. He would live happily, and he wouldn’t have bad dreams like this anymore.
The footsteps got closer, and his thoughts spun faster. In truth, he had somewhat accepted his fate. This day had been so long, this night had been so long, he didn’t really want to stay awake anymore. He wanted to sleep.
The footsteps were almost at his bed. Unexpectedly, they turned, and walked towards the other end of the room. Jin Huai was stunned frozen, the surprise enough for his breathing to hitch.
The steps stopped. Maybe it heard him? No, he was almost safe!
The pair seemed to have separated. The footsteps sounded again a while later. They softly left the room, not wanting to disturb the gentle snoring of the boys.
Jin Huai wasn’t dumb. His mind might have been a mess at the moment, but he could still feel that the number of footsteps leaving was less than what came in. It was waiting, waiting for him to expose himself.
He knew it, he knew everything, he remembered. But wasn’t it already too late? Little things like that, ones that don’t matter a bit, weren’t they always that way?
Thanks for the double update! ❤
Oohhh~~ SPOOKY 👻
Thanks for the chapter 🌸
nooo I hope Jin Huai survives
thanks for the chapter! <3
Thanks for the chapter!