Infinite spooky game

After putting down the rice bowl, the old man went back to the counter to get the bowls. A total of twenty-two bowls were stacked into four piles and placed steadily on the table.

The players each took a wooden bowl, filled it with food, and sat down in a corner. Shuomeng came forward and chatted with the old man for a few words, and soon found out most of the information.

The old man is called Sangji, and he is the owner of this inn. He manages all matters by himself. It is hard to tell how much effort and years he has spent in this wooden building.

Shuo Meng said with a smile: "Judging from your age, you must have been managing this inn for fifty or sixty years, right?"

“No, no, no!” Sangji kept waving his hands, his face becoming panic-stricken, as if he knew that there would be ghosts and monsters, but he didn’t know when they would come. “There is no year, no month. The gods are watching over Shangri-La. It’s not good to say these things…”

He walked away mumbling, his steps unsteady, his trouser legs that did not reach his ankles swinging back and forth as he moved, so that his legs could not be seen.

Lu Li looked at Sang Ji's back and said, "In many superstitious places, asking the elderly about their age is a taboo. Legend has it that as long as a person does not let the gods know their exact age, they can cheat life and death and live forever; on the contrary, if their age is revealed and the deception is exposed, their life will be taken away."

"It's not that simple." Fu Jue said, "The name 'Sangji' means 'Buddha' in Tibetan. Buddha is invisible and desireless, without birth or death, and without time. The core elements of this instance are known to include reincarnation, time, life and death, etc., so we need to pay special attention to them."

"Not bad." Jiang Junjue agreed, "It really is worthy of being the final dungeon, it's complex and philosophical, and I don't even know the main quest yet.

"I suggest that we put aside any grudges we have and stop being so competitive. Let's work together to figure out what's going on first."

This is what most normal people think.

Lin Chen spoke at the right time: "We have never taken the initiative to provoke disputes. As long as you can manage your people well, we are happy to cooperate."

The chatterbox female player muttered quietly: "What do you mean, so weird..."

"Yu Su." Li Yunyang frowned and called her, "What's wrong with you? You don't seem to be in a good state right now."

"No way." Yu Su pursed her lips, "I think I'm fine, very good."

Being interrupted like this, the players lost the intention to have a deep conversation and just buried their heads in eating.

The boiling point is low in places with low air pressure. The rice in the bowl was half-cooked, hard and astringent. Qis put down his chopsticks after taking a few bites.

Yu Su shouted in dissatisfaction: "This rice is raw, how can people eat it?"

Her voice was not soft. Sangji, who was standing in the shadow behind the counter, turned his head and gave her a strange look.

A male player quickly tried to make up for it: "It's not too raw, you can eat it. You just haven't been hungry before..."

Sang Ji turned his head back, his hands trembling as he buried them behind the counter, not knowing what he was doing. The female player looked at him suspiciously and muttered quietly: "Anyway, this meal can't be eaten, half-cooked rice is for the dead..."

After she said that, the other players also lost their appetite. The material life in the 21st century was rich enough, and few of the people sitting here came from poor families. There was no need to eat such a bad and unlucky meal.

A quarter of an hour later, Sangji came over tremblingly, put eleven room keys on the table, and left with a full bowl of rice.

There are a total of twenty-two players and eleven rooms, just enough for two people to each room.

The number of people in both groups entering the dungeon is even, so there will be no awkward situation where strangers are forced to get together.

It was completely dark outside the window. The moon had risen, and its bloodshot surface cast scarlet beams of light. The cold wind blowing down from the mountain blew the windows and door leaves, and the dominoes hanging from the wind chimes made a crackling sound.

Qi Si grabbed a key at random, numbered "6", which was neither at the bottom of the corridor nor at the stairs.

Lin Chen looked around at everyone and said, "It's getting late, let's go upstairs and rest. Qi Si and I will share a room, and Xu Yao and Lu Li will share another."

Xu Yao picked through the remaining keys for a while, picked out a key numbered "9", squinted her eyes and smiled: "You go first, we'll sit for a while."

The most rational arrangement is for one team to go upstairs first to investigate, while another team stays behind to pay attention to the movements of other forces.

Lin Chen took the key from Qi Si, stood up and walked in front. Qi Si, as the vice president, followed him silently.

There is a long way to go from the hall to the staircase. The walls on both sides are hollowed out, forming a corridor that lets in air and light.

Both sides of the corridor are hung with white bone tablets with strange scriptures engraved on them. When the wind blows, they hit the wall with crackling sounds.

Amid the faint noises, Qis heard the light footsteps again. It was obvious that the footsteps belonged to the same person as the one he heard during the day. It was not an illusion caused by excessive nervousness, nor was it an unfounded delusion.

He turned his head to look in the direction where the voice came from. The believer wrapped in sackcloth had arrived outside the inn at some point and was kneeling down toward the corridor, muttering something.

The believer's head was facing Qis. From this angle, Qis could just see his face clearly in the scarlet moonlight - an empty mouth, rotten eye sockets full of maggots, a nose with only a hole left...

He looked like a corpse, one that had been decaying for a long time and was about to turn into a skeleton.

"Brother Qi, I think I understand..." Lin Chen also saw the believer's face, and his voice was a little hoarse, "There is no death here, so even if the believers die, they will live as zombies, mechanically repeating what they did before they died."

Yes, in the eyes of many people, death is the end of life, symbolizing nothingness and destruction, but it is actually the beginning of reincarnation.

The tired soul floats away, the decayed body returns to the soil, the rotten matter becomes nutrients to nourish new life, the tribe is able to continue in the cycle, and all things in the world are in order.

If the rules of the world are compared to a program, when the element of "death" is deleted without reason, countless errors and failures will arise.

The body decays and the soul dissipates, but there is no way to find relief in death, so one can only remain in the world as an empty shell.

Lin Chen observed the believers for a while, then asked thoughtfully: "Brother Qi, do you think our tools can still kill them?"

"You can give it a try. Maybe they will die too, but after death they can be resurrected by burying themselves in the snowy mountains for seven days." Qis said casually, looking back in the direction they came from.

The place where the hall should have been was replaced by a corridor, which stretched as far as the eye could see, as if this long road had no starting point and no end.

The sound of the scriptures lingering in my ears suddenly rang out, and together they sounded like a song, as if countless people were singing in unison from all directions:

"What is Kabala..."

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The singing became louder and louder, with a palpable sense of weirdness in the sacred and solemn tune, which quickly developed into a lush and eerie feeling, as if one was in a primeval forest where seeds sprouted as soon as they hit the ground, ancient shamans sang and danced with their scepters held high, and plants and insects thrived between bones.

The believer who was originally outside the corridor appeared in the corridor in the blink of an eye. His figure flashed not far in front of Qis, still maintaining the frequency of knocking with one step, and still facing Qis.

He got closer and closer, and the bug in his eye socket stretched its trunk, looking like it was about to fly out and drill into the player's body. Lin Chen raised the [Umbrella of Pain], ready to activate its effect at any time.

Although it is not known whether the ghosts in the Eternal Shangri-La can be killed, the one-minute summoning time is enough for the black shadow ghost to take the two away.

Lin Chen put his thumb on the umbrella opening mechanism and was about to press it, but saw Qi Si shook his head: "Wait a little longer, use disposable props sparingly."

Although he didn't know the reason behind it, Lin Chen still believed in Qi Si's decision. He put away his umbrella and cast a questioning look at Qi Si.

Qis remained silent, staring into the believer's eyes, and stepped back step by step, maintaining the same pace as the believer, keeping a distance of one meter from the latter from beginning to end.

The song of "What is Kabala" rang out over and over again. He vaguely heard electromagnetic noise from it. It sounded very familiar. It was exactly the broadcast effect of the "Ghost Driver's Recorder".

As a player who habitually records the songs he hears in dungeons and plays them back later, Qis is absolutely certain that the music playing at this moment is coming from the [Ghost Driver's Recorder].

The believers' attack could not be without reason, and this strange song in their ears was most likely the crux of the problem.

When he was a child, Zis heard the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin: a piper came to a town infested with rats, and used the sound of his flute to lure the rats one by one to jump into the river, but the townspeople did not pay him as agreed; late one night, the piper played the magic flute again, and all the children in the town followed him and never appeared again.

In myths of various countries, singing has always been a metaphor for guidance and temptation, and the extradition of ghosts is naturally among them.

What concerned Qis the most was that he had just exchanged the ticket with the [Ghost Driver's Recorder] on the bus, and this prop now appeared as a death point for him.

Will this copy have a mechanism where the consumed items will be converted into part of the copy and used against the players?

After all, everything in the world is the externalization of the ancestral gods, and so are the props. After being used, they are recycled by the ancestral gods, which fits the tone of doomsday and apocalypse and is reasonable.

The time of confrontation was stretched out. Qis and the believers stood opposite each other, following closely, like ferrymen leading the dead into reincarnation, patiently and calmly leading the believers towards the predetermined destination.

Lin Chen was originally standing by Qi Si's side holding the [Umbrella Filled with Pain], ready to activate the item's effect if there was any change. After walking beside him for a while, he gradually relaxed.

It seems that although the difficulty of the final copy has been increased, it still abides by the basic rules, and at least you won’t be in a life-threatening crisis on the first day.

I don’t know how long I walked, but a faint light appeared behind me. In addition to the original sounds of the wind, singing and footsteps, there was a new sound.

The rattling sound of the metal scroll shaking and the low friction sound mixed together, accompanied by the sound of chanting, forming a harmonious rhythm.

Sangji, who was supposed to be behind the counter, stood at the junction of the corridor and the hall at some point, holding a prayer wheel in one hand and holding the other hand together in front of him, muttering something.

His voice was so light and low that no specific words or tones could be heard. It sounded like the natural sound of some dead object, blending easily with the background tone of the environment.

Therefore, it is as pure as a snow-capped mountain and as vast as a grassland. It seems to come straight down from the nothingness without malice, desire and pain, blowing away all the filth and terror, and is particularly soothing to people's hearts.

The believer's steps stopped, like a sleepwalker about to wake up, trying to recall where he was in his confusion. The maggots in his eye sockets drooped weakly and crawled back into his head.

He slowly changed direction, his figure flashed twice, and two seconds later he appeared outside the corridor, heading in the opposite direction of the snow-capped mountains.

The ballad was still ringing in the corridor, but with the coordination of the chanting, all the weird feelings were eliminated and it became sacred, no different from the sound heard on the street during the day.

The believers staggered forward, away from the corridor where the singing was echoing, walking farther and farther away, until they turned into a dark gray shadow and disappeared into the dark night.

The crisis was resolved, Lin Chen breathed a sigh of relief, and habitually began to review whether he had missed any key clues. Otherwise, why did Qis know the solution to the death point, but he couldn't understand it.

Of course, Qis didn't actually expect that Sangji, an NPC of the inn, would suddenly come to the rescue. He originally planned to lead the believers back to the hall and drag Jiuzhou and Tingfeng into the water.

There are a total of 18 people in these two guilds. When encountering an emergency, it is impossible for them to reach a consensus in the first time. There will always be someone who can't help but take action, such as Yu Su, who was noisy and somehow was selected into the final copy.

In this way, others would also take action one after another out of a sense of responsibility and inertia of thinking, which would fulfill his wish.

He already had one of his items used against him by a copy, so he had to bring everyone to the same level to feel at ease.

As for now… Qi Si was a little disappointed, but not much.

There will definitely be more death points in the future, and there will be plenty of opportunities to morally blackmail the people of Jiuzhou, and the situation will be turned into a muddy water sooner or later.

Sangji shook his wrist, turned the prayer wheel in his hand continuously, and stared in the direction where the believer disappeared.

After a long silence, he turned to Qis and said in a hoarse voice: "What you just saw were sinners who failed to complete the purification. Although the Mother Goddess mercifully granted them eternal life, they still have to redeem their sins through actions. As night falls, the evil thoughts are too strong and they inevitably lose their minds.

"The hymns will be played here tonight. All the sinners in the holy city will gather here. I'm afraid they will hurt you. I'll take you back to your room. Remember, don't go out at night."

His voice was gentle, as kind as that of an old grandfather in the countryside who often sat under a tree and told stories to children, making people willing to believe his words from the bottom of their hearts.

Qi Si asked: "How can we atone for our sins? As the saying goes, 'When in Rome, do as the Romans do.' Do we, the travelers from outside, also need to atone for our sins?"

Sangji looked into his eyes and said with a smile: "Reciting scriptures and kneeling down to show your piety to the Mother Goddess. The Mother Goddess will forgive all the children who have gone astray and come back to the right path. If you want to stay and have eternal life like us, you must also atone your sins to the Mother Goddess and obtain Her permission."

Qi Si suddenly seemed to see a little silver light in Sangji's eyes, and couldn't help but wonder if it was the ancestor god who was giving him some inducement and hint again.

But the light only flashed by, and Sangji's eyes quickly became cloudy again. It seemed that what he had just seen was just an illusion caused by the interweaving of light and shadow.

Sangji held the prayer wheel in his hand and walked unsteadily in front, muttering to himself as he walked, as if he was walking on the road to the underworld, leading people to the afterlife.

The low sound of chanting naturally has the effect of calming the mind. The crisis that I encountered before was lightly turned over, as if it had sunk to the bottom of my memory and could not be recalled without deliberate efforts to salvage it.

Qi Si and Lin Chen followed Sangji through the corridor and went up to the second floor. In the dim light, the thangka paintings on the wall looked like people standing in the dark, with eyes replaced by gems watching everyone who passed by.

Lin Chen transmitted his voice through the soul leaf: "Brother Qi, these paintings are alive. Their eyes are always following us. The edges and faces facing us have never changed. It can't be caused by light and perspective."

"A very classic horror design." Qi Si looked away and commented calmly, "There is a soul sealed in each painting. It is also a very cliché horror novel setting."

Sangji couldn't hear the conversation between the two, but he still noticed Lin Chen's concern for the painting. He slowly turned his head towards him and said with a smile: "The thangka I made is the most beautiful in Shangri-La. There will be new thangkas tomorrow. You must remember to watch them..."

Lin Chen felt that this was a meaningful statement, and couldn't help but ask, "What if I miss the time or forget to watch it?"

"Time? No time..." Sangji muttered to himself, looking at him in confusion, "How can anyone not appreciate thangka? People in Shangri-La love thangka..." (End of this chapter)