Chapter 31: Eating Meat (Part 3) Couplets

As everyone stepped past the stone stele at the village entrance bearing the carved characters "Su Clan Village," a crisp children's nursery rhyme rang out in the air:

[Famine in the fields, harvest in despair, without rice or flour, how shall we disasters bear?]
[Outside the ancestral hall, by the locust tree, set up a giant pot to cook meat for all to see.]

Qi Si followed the direction of the voice and saw a gaunt, steep-branched dead tree upon which sat a boy with a skeleton-like frame and a hugely distended belly.

The boy's skeletal body supported a hydrocephalic-looking head, with blue veins and blood vessels bulging beneath paper-thin skin. His entire form was as blackened as if he had rolled in the mud, save for a pair of eyes whose whites were alarmingly stark.

As he chanted the rhyme, he kept swinging his little feet, causing the bells tied to his ankles to tinkle rhythmically.

Seeing the players approach, the boy hopped down from the tree, tilted his head to inspect them, and giggled, "Are you the guests Grandma talked about? I've been waiting for you for a long time."

He pressed his branch-like hands against his belly, his pupil-less eyeballs staring straight ahead as he muttered, "I'm so hungry, I'm so hungry, which of you has meat to feed me?"

The boy's gaze drifted back and forth across the players, greedy and covetous, as though he might lunge forward at any moment to tear into them and feed.

Nobody would feel comfortable being stared at with such a gaze; Yang Yundong's brows knitted into tight vertical lines, and Zhu Ling's expression grew considerably uglier.

The first to break under the tension was the sloppy-looking, hot-tempered man. He strode forward a few paces and delivered a sharp slap across the boy's face. The loud crack sounded particularly startling in the silent village.

Qi Si noticed that the man's palm was bound with a black cord in the shape of a cross, which emitted a blinding flash of white light the moment it made contact with the boy.

This was likely a prop he had acquired in his first instance, clearly intended for dealing with ghosts and specters. His sudden outburst was not without reason.

"I'll beat you to death! I'll beat you to death!" the man cursed continuously while raining slaps on the boy, seemingly to pump up his own courage or perhaps to put on a show for the others.

The two newcomers looked on with a sense of awe, while the other veteran players showed no intention of interfering.

Rashly attacking a ghostly NPC could either mean courting death or presenting an opportunity to raise one's evaluation rating and unlock achievements.

It was all for the better if someone bold enough was willing to test the waters through trial and error; the players understood all too well the wisdom of dropping the savior complex and respecting others' destinies.

The boy did not retaliate, nor did he show any reaction at all. As the man's slaps continued to fall, his head tilted further and further to the side until, just as it reached nearly ninety degrees, it dropped to the ground with a soft thud.

The man was startled into taking a step back, only to watch the severed head roll about before taking a firm bite into his trouser leg.

The boy's emaciated body stood rigidly beside it, a hollow voice rumbling from his abdominal cavity: "Are you willing to give me meat to eat?"

The system prompt sounded right on cue.

[Rules have been refreshed]
[1. The ghosts of Su Clan Village cannot be killed by forces originating from outside the village. They hold grudges, but sometimes they are also forgetful; as long as you are willing to give them meat, they are willing to be your friends.]

The sloppy man, whose name was Zhao Feng, saw the newly refreshed rules on his system interface, and all the previous fierceness vanished from his face, replaced by a pale shade of terror.

The others muttered words like "indestructible" and "he's finished," looking at him as if he were already a dead man.

Qi Si squinted at the newly appeared rules, a brow twitching upward.

He hadn't expected this to be another rule-bound horror instance, but compared to the previous one, the rules here were hidden much deeper. They weren't handed directly to the players; instead, players were forced to test the waters through acts of courting death.

Since it couldn't be killed by outside forces, did that mean they had to enlist forces from within the village? What kind of forces would those be?

"I'm so hungry, I'm so hungry, give me meat to eat..." Bloodshot veins seeped across the eyeballs of the severed head as its mouth split open to reveal densely packed, rows of teeth.

Whether it was Qi Si's imagination or not, he could have sworn those teeth were stained with mucus and stray fibers of meat, utterly repulsive.

An inexplicable irritation welled up from the bottom of his heart. If he still retained a shred of rationality, he feared he might have followed in Zhao Feng's footsteps, trying to drive a blade straight into the boy's throat.

"Agree to him," Yang Yundong suddenly said in a deep voice.

Zhao Feng kicked wildly at his leg, trying to shake the head off, while shouting at the top of his lungs, "How am I supposed to agree to him? Where am I supposed to get meat to feed him?"

Yang Yundong raised his voice. "If you don't want to die right now, agree to him!"

Zhao Feng was stunned into a stiff silence.

Seeing the expression on the severed head grow increasingly ferocious, he glared and shouted, "I agree! I'll give you meat to eat!"

The head released its grip, tilted its face upward, and stared fixedly into Zhao Feng's eyes.

Yang Yundong instructed, "Tell him you don't have meat to feed him right now, and that he'll have to wait a few days."

Zhao Feng lowered his head, locking gazes with the head on the ground. "I don't have meat to feed you right now. You'll have to wait a few days."

With those words, he held his breath and waited for a response.

After an unknown length of time, the boy's body bent down, scooped up the head rolling on the ground, and matter-of-factly snapped it back onto his bare neck.

"It's a deal. Tomorrow, tomorrow I want to eat meat."

With that, he twisted his head and smiled at the players as if nothing had happened. "Are you the guests Grandma talked about? My name is Ah Xi. Follow me to my house; we just love guests."

The boy called "Ah Xi" turned around, ignoring the players, and skipped ahead to lead the way.

At this point, everyone let out a silent sigh of relief. It seemed the first fatal trap had been muddled through successfully.

Still led by Yang Yundong, the players followed along one after another.

Zhao Feng cursed bitterly under his breath, then sidled up to Yang Yundong and asked, "Brother Yang, what do I do tomorrow? Where am I supposed to find meat for him?"

Yang Yundong replied without looking back, "Figure it out yourself. You went out of your way to provoke these freaks for no reason; you deserve it."

Zhao Feng hit a brick wall, the muscles on his face twitching with profound resentment. "If it weren't for these damn rules, I would have sent it flying to the netherworld in a split second! Now it's over—I can't kill it, and it's riding roughshod over me..."

Zhu Ling, standing nearby, hurriedly offered words of comfort. "You don't need to be afraid. There are ways to deal with all kinds of ghosts. Worst case scenario, you can always find some meat within a day."

Zhao Feng glanced at her and fell silent.

The paths within Su Clan Village were narrow and rugged, flanked by dilapidated residential houses crammed tightly together, creating a sense of oppressive confinement.

The couplets pasted outside the doors of the residences had long since turned pale and tattered, clawing at the doors like festering scars, their characters blurred and indistinct.

Green moss and ferns grew wantonly on the eaves, dangling downward and swaying slightly in the breeze.

Looking all the way down the lane, the windows were pitch black, devoid of a single human silhouette.

Where had everyone gone? Even if a village that attracted tourists wasn't lined with bustling shops, it shouldn't be this desolate and deserted...

Qi Si waited for a long time, and seeing that no other players were asking questions, he simply adopted a casual, conversational tone. "Ah Xi, why are there so few people in your village? Did they all move away?"

"Not at all," the boy leading the way replied with a smile. "When nighttime comes, everyone will come out."

Qi Si raised an eyebrow, feigning curiosity. "Why don't they come out during the day? I would think your tourism industry is doing quite well; setting up stalls during the day would clearly be more profitable, wouldn't it?"

He was talking absolute nonsense with his eyes wide open. No matter how one looked at it, Su Clan Village was thoroughly dilapidated and bore no resemblance to a place with a thriving tourism industry.

However, tall tales often provoked the urge in others to correct them, thereby yielding more information.

The boy took the bait and retorted, "You're lying! Grandma said that ever since 'that incident' happened, nobody has come to our village for tourism in a long time."

Qi Si pressed further. "What incident?"

The boy shook his head repeatedly. "You'll have to ask Grandma. Grandma won't let me talk about it."

"Fine. But since nobody comes for tourism, why do you all still stay here?" Qi Si pretended to disbelieve him. "I don't see anyone farming here either; staying in the village brings no income, you'd be better off finding jobs in the city."

The boy replied in an exaggerated tone, "Grandma told me someone has to stay behind in the village, otherwise the ancestral hall won't be tended to, and something terrible will happen!"

Qi Si wanted to follow up with "What terrible thing will happen?", but he saw the boy point far ahead to a courtyard and announce, "Look, that's my house right up there!"

The courtyard featured traditional flying eaves and upturned corners, with two faded red lanterns hanging beneath the roof, looking identical to any ordinary rural residence.

Two "Fu" characters for fortune were pasted on the doors, and the doorposts bore couplets: on the right, "Year after year, burning incense to eradicate karmic obstacles," and on the left, "Year after year, eating vegetarian to wash away sins."

The couplets had faded, but the characters were still legible, indicating they hadn't been pasted up very long ago—at least less than a year.

Qi Si's gaze lingered on the words "eating vegetarian" in the couplets. If he remembered correctly, the title of this instance was "Eating Meat"...

Before he had time to dwell on it, a long, creaking groan echoed as the door was pushed open from the inside, revealing an elderly woman dressed in a patterned tunic of alternating red and yellow.

Her hair was completely white and coiled at the nape of her neck. Her wrinkled face resembled a crumpled tissue, blackened as though smeared with soot. She wore small black cloth shoes on her feet, trembling as she stood, looking as though a gust of wind could easily knock her over.

Compared to the overtly bizarre boy, her expression could be considered amiable and kind; her face and physique showed no anomalies, making her look remarkably like a living human being.

Upon seeing the old woman, the boy trotted over gleefully, hugged her leg, and tilted his head back to look at the players.

Leaning against the doorframe, the old woman split her toothless mouth in a cheerful smile. "The guests have arrived. Come, let's assign the rooms. Only after the rooms are assigned can we distribute the meat..."