Translator-Rhapsodite
Editor-Pierce, Proofreader-adjective
Until now, Nan Zhou had a simple summary of the nature of the four games.
The One-legged Tin Soldier level was a chess game.
The Wild Swan Level was an escape room game.
The Big Bad Wolf level was a live-action, role-playing game.
Currently, the game they were playing was more like a highly interactive adventure RPG game.
If coupled with a text option, the aspect of the game would be even more distinct.
Select your preferred choice: Eat the pastries prepared by the siblings? [Yes] [No]
Select your preferred choice: Save the father from being eaten? [Yes] [No]
Select your preferred choice: See the bird’s “feather”? [Yes] [No]
Select your preferred choice: Shadow after the imminent-forsaken siblings, or seek the help of the bird? [Shadow] [Seek]
Within this level, they faced numerous arduous and agonizing choices.
The choice of each step was related to the time they spent at each door.
Once you went off on a tangent, it would only take longer and longer to get through the level.
At that time, it would be distressing to say whether it was more terrible to be alive but agonizing from intense hunger or more deplorable to fall into the madness of morbid gorging, assaulting, and cannibalizing among teammates or thoroughly subject oneself to slavery in the candy house.
Just like now, it was a risky approach for them to go against the main NPC and look for new ideas to pass the customs.
But they finally chose to return to the cabin.
It was the only place to get normal food among the three locations specified in the game.
It was also the home that the two siblings were determined to return to.
The cabin was more dilapidated than when they last came.
The fallen leaves in front of the door were left unswept for a long time. Brittle and withered foliage was encrusted with scorched markings and a yellowish hue, forming a natural barrier to their dwelling. If someone approached, they would be bound to trample on the leaves and cause crushing noises.
The chicken coop outside was full of filthy chicken droppings.
The cage was empty, without a living thing in sight.
There was a dog bowl outside, and the edges were already covered with dust and dirt.
There were a few strands of dark yellow dog “hair” in the dirt.
This used to be the Eden in the dreams of both brother and sister.
But not anymore.
A thin woman was hunkered down on the spinning wheel in the living room, her face full of impatience.
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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Dfmjerf bo rajgnjalbc, tfg rxlc kjr vgs jcv rjiibk, j mbclm rxeii jaajmtfv ab atf jcuifv mtlc jcv qgbagevlcu mtffxybcfr, jcv tfg ojmf kjr j qlmaegf bo j rlmxis, rqlafoei kbwjc.
She didn’t look like an actual person, but more like a puppet with the ferocious face of a wanted villain.
Nan Zhou and the others had previously explored the wooden house and its surroundings.
The cabin was small, and there was no door for them to conveniently sneak in.
In any case, to get in, they had to go through the living room.
Li Yinhang was troubled, “What should we do?”
Jiang Fang shrugged nonchalantly, “We can’t go through the side door, so we can just unabashedly go in.”
As he said that, he straightened his clothes, stepped on the fallen leaves, walked to the small wooden house with the sound of leaves crunching, and politely knocked on the deteriorating wooden door.
“Hello.” Jiang Fang’s attitude was amicable, “We are passing guests. We are very hungry… Can we have some food?”
Jiang Fang’s appearance was quite elegant and precious.
If he was adorned with a medieval aristocratic costume, he could wholly play the role of a prince.
Combined with the Wild Swan level, Nan Zhou silently revised his assessment.
——A princess was actually fine too.
But as a textbook-based, low-level villain, the stepmother possessed the same crudity that her character archetype usually had.
She jumped up, swatted at them with the spindle, “Fuck off! Beg in another place! You won’t even get a bite of the bran to feed the pigs!”
Jiang Fang calmly added the next sentence, “We will pay you.”
The stepmother’s face froze when she heard this sentence, then a warm smile seamlessly emerged on her face.
She said in a shrill voice, “Oh, that’s ok, but ah, we have nothing for you to eat. We only have half a piece of brown bread left, which my husband and I saved for our stomachs. It’s our life-saving meal. How much can you pay for the food?”
Jiang Fang gracefully raised his right hand: “This.”
The stepmother’s eyes flashed with greed: “Five…”
Before the words could leave her mouth, Jiang Fang stood before her and struck her with a karate chop to the neck, knocking her unconscious to the ground in a dignified manner.
Catching the stepmother, who smoothly fell, with a courteous hand, Jiang Fang situated her on a stool, where half of its leg was missing on one side, not forgetting to apologize, “Apologies, Madam.”
This smooth operation caused Li Yinhang’s jaw to drop and nostrils to flare.
——He really went in very magnanimously.
However, after searching the cabin, they found no food.
Their family had indeed reached the point of running out of ammunition and food.
T/N- Chinese idiom, pinyin is dàn jìn liáng jué, when the ammunition runs out during the battle, the food is also cut off. Refers to a dangerous situation where it is impossible to continue fighting.
The stepmother’s box still had some shoddy silver jewelry, but it was lying coldly in the jewelry box, and she would never sell it easily just to feed the children from her new husband.
There were only baskets of oak leaves in the kitchen, easily consumable..
Even the “half a piece of brown bread” that the stepmother spoke of was missing.
“… Was taken away.”
Nan Zhou promptly thought of the whereabouts of the bread, “When the woodcutter took away the two children, he asked them to take the last ration of the family.”
The stepmother obviously wasn’t aware of it yet.
And now, the piece of brown bread, which could have been invaluable, was turned into crumbs and swept away by a flock of birds competing for food.
The bread was gone.
The more they searched to no avail, the more anxious Li Yinhang became.
Hunger was indeed a physiological experience that could intuitively affect human emotions.
The starving stomach of Li Yinhang stirred cold, her heart was on fire, and her throat was ablaze.
She didn’t have the time to think deeply about anything; multiple fleeting ideas popped into her mind.
Could it be that they chose the wrong way?
Should they have followed the two siblings?
Once she started to have doubts about the current choice, the more she felt that their return to the cabin was completely wrong.
She bit her lip forcibly, suppressing her anxiety and restlessness, and suggested, “Let’s…let’s go back?”
“That woodcutter with the two children must not have gone far yet. We may still make it in time…”
But at the thought of the price they would pay if they went the wrong way, her eyes turned red, and she wanted to cry.
Under normal circumstances, Li Yinhang would never be like this, worried about these gains and losses.
But she was so hungry now that she panicked.
Because of the rampant surge in the secretion of gastric juices, the accumulated acid in her stomach caused her to suffer from an overwhelming, excruciating, and burning sensation.
She even suspected that she was turning into the fairy-tale Inger, whose innards had been so hungry that they devoured each other.
She repeated in a low, anxious voice, “Let’s go… Let’s go.”
However, Nan Zhou stood still in front of a door for a long time.
The door handle of this threshold broke, so a wooden door handle was tied with a sponge, nesting over the original broken part.
Immediately, he crouched down and revealed a corner of the area covered by the yellow sponge.
Their goal of the game has never been just to make a deal with the bird played by Inger.
Facing the “naked” and “exposed” doorknob, Nan Zhou aimed at the old dust accumulating on it and blew on it lightly—
Amidst the dissipating dust, the silhouette of the door handle of the copy, which they were familiar with and belonged to the [Brain Invasion], was exposed.
Nan Zhou pressed the door handle.
When pushing the door open, a line of dust slowly breezed from the crack of the door above.
What caught his eye was an empty, semi-sunken cellar with mottled cobwebs growing in the corners.
——Wasn’t it a forest?
For a moment, Nan Zhou began to wonder if he had made the wrong choice.
But when he took a step forward and fell back into the familiar feeling of being engulfed by the vortex of time and space, he was sure he had found the right path.
When he opened his eyes again, he was alone, standing in a clean and tidy cellar.
His nostrils were filled with the thick and unique sweet smell of fermented yeast.
There were seven or eight baked baguettes, stored in a dry place for winter.
——He didn’t return to the forest full of life choices and forks.
He returned to one of the warmest moments in the memory of the two siblings.
A memory palace for them.
It was a dinner their family shared in a particular month of a definite year.
A father, a mother, a brother, and a sister.
It was a portrait of a genuine family.
The hungry Nan Zhou leaned against the doorway, smelled the fragrant scent of the food, and heard the carefree laughter from outside the cellar.
The din of noise inside was mixed with the crisp sounds of chickens clucking and pecking at food, as well as the snorting sounds of a dog weaving between legs to look for fallen bones.
Melding in the delighted and hearty laughter of the two children and the simple and honest giggle of the woodcutter was the occasional slight coughing of a young woman.
At that time, no one expected and realized that they would experience something tragic and that this would be the source of their impending hardships.
They were still talking and laughing clamorously.
The sister sneezed because she was laughing too loudly, and a small cranberry, which she had just eaten, popped out of her nose. Her brother slapped the table and laughed so ecstatically that her sister became annoyed and went to slap his shoulder with a red face.
Nan Zhou wondered, how could it be so lively when a family eats together?
In his memory, it seemed that some noise and excitement that had nothing to do with him was once experienced.
He seemed to have also crossed his legs, watching earnestly and curiously at the few fuzzy faces boisterously arguing and joking amid the warm aroma of food.
Beside him, a man handed him an apple.
When he took it, he touched the man’s finger and took the initiative to hook it, causing static electricity, which made his fingertips numb.
The man’s fingertips quickly retracted, leaving Nan Zhou’s hands empty and hanging in the air.
Nan Zhou, who had woken up from a brief and unprovoked memory, looked down at his hands and felt that his palms were empty.
As an outsider, he knew he probably shouldn’t interfere with anything.
But he still gripped the door handle of the cellar from the inside and pressed down in the same way—
When he pushed it forward, what appeared before him wasn’t a blissful image.
It was the ruined house, the half-woven linen, the unconscious stepmother, and Jiang Fang and Li Yinhang.
Thanks for the update!
Wow, so interesting
Thank you for your translation 🤍🤍🤍
Thank you for the chapter!