Chapter Thirty-Two: Eating Meat (Part Four) Entering the Residence

The old woman introduced herself as "Granny Su," the oldest resident of Su Village, and held a position of considerable respect.

As she led the players into the courtyard, she gave a brief overview of the village.

Su Village had no village chief nor any other officials; all matters were handled by Granny Su and her grandson, Axi, and all travelers were received by their family. This old woman, who looked as though she might fall apart at any moment, was practically the ruler of the village.

Frowning at her introduction, Yang Yundong asked the question Qi Si had already posed earlier, "Where are the rest of the villagers?"

Granny Su smiled and replied, "In broad daylight, they are all resting. Once the sun goes down, they will crawl out to work."

No matter how one heard it, the phrasing sounded bizarre. Zhang Lichai muttered under his breath, "Oh goodness, I hope the rest of the villagers aren't all ghosts."

No one paid him any attention.

Looking at Granny Su, who was indistinguishable from a living person, Zhu Ling's lips suddenly bloomed with a radiant smile. "Granny Su, your grandson is so cute, though a bit too thin. Boys should eat more meat."

Intentionally or unintentionally, she steered the topic toward "meat," the very thing the players cared about most.

Granny Su's expression instantly fell, her tone turning unkind. "No eating meat. Eat meat again, and something bad will happen."

This remark went straight to the core of the instance. Several players could not help but step past Zhu Ling to press further.

"What will happen if we eat meat again? Why would something happen?"

"Your grandson said something happened in your village and no one came here for tourism for a long time. What was that about?"

"Why do people need to stay and tend to the ancestral hall? Is there any specific reason?"

A barrage of questions came down all at once, overlapping and chaotic.

Granny Su said coldly, "This is our village's business and has nothing to do with outsiders like you. Just stay here for five days and leave."

Seeing that the NPC was visibly angered, Zhu Ling hurriedly offered a flattering smile to smooth things over. "It was our abruptness; please don't mind it. Since you don't wish to talk about it, we won't ask anymore. How does that sound?"

"You're a sensible young lady." Granny Su's toothless mouth exposed a pitch-black smile, her face wrinkling up like a chrysanthemum.

With a slightly sluggish motion, she turned around and began walking ahead with a swaying gait.

Qi Si followed behind her, rubbing his chin in deep thought.

Judging from the boy's remarks, part of the instance's background lore had to be extracted from Granny Su, but right now, she clearly had no intention of telling the truth.

How could he pry her mouth open?

The eleven players followed Granny Su in silence and soon stood together inside the residential courtyard.

The courtyard before them lacked decorations. For some reason, a well in the corner of the yard was sealed off, its crumbling edges long abandoned.

A huge round table was placed in the center of the courtyard. Although no food had been served yet, it inexplicably added a touch of human warmth to this desolate compound.

In the woodshed on the west side, crooked firewood was piled up, with tools like hatchets and hoes propped up nearby.

To the north was the main house, on whose door a bright, inverted "fortune" character was pasted. However, because the greyish background color was too heavy, this splash of bright red failed to add much festive cheer, appearing discordant instead.

To the east was a row of small partitioned guest rooms. Their roof tiles were scattered and their doors tightly closed, plastered all over with battered yellow paper talismans that involuntarily brought associations of haunting to mind.

Pointing at the talismans on the doors, Zhu Ling lowered her voice to explain, "These are the most common talismans for warding off ghosts and praying for peace, but they've already lost their effect. They must be clues."

Sniffling slightly, Zhou Yilin whispered her analysis, "I guess that even before the villagers turned into ghosts, the village... well, it was already haunted."

Yang Yundong remarked, "Or perhaps these villagers had ghosts in their hearts. Do no wrong, and you won't fear a knock on the door."

"Comrade, I've seen this kind of talisman before. After a major disaster where people died, every household would paste them up to sweep away bad luck," an elderly man chimed in with an accent.

Named "Zhu Dafu," he wore a washed-out blue cloth tunic and had a head of white hair, looking precisely like an honest and dutiful old farmer.

Noticing that the players were all looking his way, he awkwardly rubbed his equally rough arm with his rough hand and said somewhat nervously, "My family used to have a courtyard like this too. Several households had to live in one big yard. I wonder if there are empty rooms here and if there's enough space for us to live in."

Hearing this, Granny Su cracked a smile and said, "There are six rooms in total. Everyone died, so they're all empty now."

Pointing at the rooms one by one, she counted them off: "This one used to house Stone's mother. She hid a handful of wheat in her trouser legs without turning it in, and the commune cadres found out and beat her to death."

"That one housed a family of six. They ate boiled grass roots and elm tree bark, couldn't pass it, and their bellies swelled up like balloons until they all died."

"The one at the very end—that old man had bad legs and couldn't get out of bed. When he was found dead, he had starved down to just a layer of skin..."

According to Granny Su, people had died in every single room. Their causes of death varied, but without exception, they were utterly tragic.

The players did not look well.

In reality, hearing about the suffering of others might serve as a conversational novelty or elicit a few tears of sympathy; but inside the instance, they knew all too well that the dead genuinely had the potential to turn into vengeful ghosts demanding their lives.

With a pale face, Zhang Lichai stammered in a low voice, "Do we really have to stay here? Can't we change places?"

Hearing his words, Granny Su sneered and said, "Our village only has these six empty rooms, and each room can hold at most two people. You're acquaintances who came together, so figure it out yourselves."

It seemed there was no room for negotiation.

A short-haired woman with a green dragon tattooed on her shoulder strode over to Zhou Yilin, pressed down on her shoulders, and said tyrannically, "Little sister, older sister is sharing a room with you."

Among the eleven people, there were three women and eight men. According to the traditional separation of men and women, one woman would most likely be left alone.

The tattooed woman undoubtedly did not want to be the left-out one. Weak as Zhou Yilin was, she at least counted as a human head, making her a decent scapegoat if something went wrong.

Startled, Zhou Yilin was about to say something when Zhu Ling's voice chimed in from the side, "I suggest that a veteran player who has entered the instance for the third time should pair up with a newcomer. That way, if any special situation is triggered, we can respond in time."

The tattooed woman was not about to back down. "So what if you've cleared it many times? Who knows if you just hugged someone's thigh to coast through..."

Listening to the bickering among the players, Qi Si felt a vein throb at his temple and grew only annoyed.

He quietly retreated a few steps toward the edge and, seeing that no one was paying attention to him, simply walked over to Granny Su, who was standing to the side.

The impossibly aged old woman was stretching out her bloated fingers, playing "carrying the little girl" with the skeletal Axi. Seeing Qi Si approach, she stopped and looked him up and down.

Meeting her gaze, Qi Si put on a hesitant expression and deliberated his words. "Granny Su, you should know that we tourists all came from afar after hearing the legend of the 'Divine Meat.'"

He paused, a hint of suspicion entering his gaze. "It's just that this legend keeps spreading and getting more chaotic... Given your age, you must have lived through that era. Can you tell me what this 'Divine Meat' is really all about?"

"The 'Divine Meat'... Ah, back then, we all dreamed of immortals..."

Granny Su began her narration, a reminiscent look appearing on her face. Beneath her wrinkled eyelids, her turbid pupils slowly shifted, as if looking past Qi Si's shoulder into the distance, and thereby seeing those bizarre and tortuous years of the past.

"We were starving back then, with nothing to eat. We were so hungry we couldn't sleep at night. But that night, we all fell asleep and had the exact same dream. We dreamed of an immortal whose face we couldn't clearly see, telling us that His body had fallen right into our village, and as long as we agreed to worship Him, we could eat His meat."

"The next morning, we all woke up at the same time and went together to the place the immortal had told us about. The immortal was truly beautiful, without breath, not moving, just like He was sleeping. We knew that was the immortal's body, but even though the immortal pitied us and allowed us to eat His meat, we didn't dare..."

"So we left Him there, but then He started giving off the fragrance of meat. When in our lives had we ever smelled anything that good?"

As she spoke, Granny Su swallowed her saliva, making a sticky, almost snoring sound. She licked her lips, greed overflowing in her eyes, as if she were reminiscing about some delicacy she had tasted years ago.

Qi Si had a persistent feeling that Granny Su's gaze was beginning to linger on him intentionally or unintentionally, conveying the message of wanting to take a bite to taste him. This sensation made him deeply uncomfortable.

He turned slightly to evade Granny Su's line of sight and pressed on, "And then?"

"And then, our old village head took the lead and went to cut off a piece of meat to boil for us to eat. That meat was truly delicious; after all, it was immortal meat..." Granny Su chuckled and continued at a leisurely pace. "Not long after, we found that the place on the immortal's body where the meat had been cut off grew right back, without the slightest trace of it ever being cut. No wonder the immortal was willing to let us eat His meat—no matter how we ate it, He wouldn't suffer the slightest harm."

"All of us survived. Later on, when there were harvests, we stopped eating the immortal's meat. We built an ancestral hall and enshrined Him inside. But we were poor, so the immortal came to us in another dream, saying we could let outsiders come to our village too, eat His meat, and give us money..."

Listening to Granny Su's account, Qi Si asked out of the blue, "What about your old village head?"

He remembered that Granny Su had previously stated Su Village had no village chief. Yet the character of the "old village head" had appeared in her narrative, which was clearly problematic.

Granny Su answered, "The village head? He went away with the immortal and went to become an immortal himself."

A thought stirred in Qi Si's mind, and he raised an eyebrow slightly. "Can you tell me more about how that happened specifically?"

"Becoming an immortal is just becoming an immortal, what's there to explain?" Granny Su muttered, her tone carrying obvious impatience.

He could not continue questioning her.

Knowing the limits of propriety, Qi Si smiled, bid farewell, and stepped back into the crowd.

By now, the players had already assigned their rooms. The tattooed woman had lost the contest against Zhu Ling and could only mutter, "What kind of strict rules are there in a bizarre game anyway?" as she stubbornly dragged a skinny, pole-like man to form a team.

Naturally, Qi Si's brief absence made him the odd one out, and he was assigned to the room closest to the main house.

He did not care about this—or rather, ever since entering the instance, he had deliberately marginalized himself, hoping for precisely this outcome.

In times of famine, people ate each other. Although it was uncertain whether this instance would touch upon that aspect, Qi Si still felt that, given his own combat strength, staying alone was much safer.

He certainly couldn't swallow his pride and ask to share a room with Zhou Yilin.

The others had no particular reaction, but Zhu Ling walked over, a look of worry on her face. "Chang Xu, if you run into any danger, just shout out loud. I'm staying right next door to you, and if I hear it, I'll definitely be able to rush over in time."

She looked genuinely concerned, as if she truly cared about a companion she had only met by chance.

Qi Si could not be bothered to figure out whether she was sincere or feigning it, so he merely offered a polite smile and expressed his thanks.

Noticing his self-isolating attitude, Zhu Ling raised an eyebrow with a hint of regret, though she didn't dwell on it. She turned and went back to Zhou Yilin's side, earnestly offering her admonitions.

Granny Su had not handed out any keys, and naturally, the doors to the guest rooms were unlocked, merely pulled shut.

Qi Si pulled the door open. Entering his view was a wooden bed roughly five feet wide, covered in floral bedding with a distinct rural aesthetic. Unfortunately, it was severely faded, mottled from a distance with grey patches that looked like stains of grime.

Beside the bed was a rectangular wooden table with a few chips scattered along its edges, likely from being bumped somewhere. On the table lay a crudely made travel guidebook, which was essentially just a sheet of thick paper folded in half with a few lines of writing hastily scrawled on it.

The dust on the table was too thick, and Qi Si had no desire to touch it directly.

He walked over and lowered his gaze to scan the unfolded travel guide.

Right on the title page was an ambiguous poem:

[The granaries are completely empty, how to comfort the hungry gut?]

[All within a hundred miles eat earth, wood and stone pierce the belly in death.]