Chapter 47: Carnivorous (Part 19) - Debate

As the hands of the Destiny Pocket Watch pointed to six o'clock, Qisi woke up naturally.

The morning sunlight slanted lazily into the room, casting a coat of pristine glaze over the surfaces of all the furnishings. Loke Liang's skeleton lay quietly in the courtyard, reflecting a faint morning light.

Qisi pushed the door open and walked straight to the side room where the tattooed woman was staying, knocking twice with moderate force.

"Coming! What's with all the urging so early in the morning?" The tattooed woman's voice rang out high-pitched, laced with a gurgling sound of phlegm shifting.

Strange, rustling noises came from inside the room, resembling a soft-bodied creature crawling tightly against the ground, drawing closer and closer until it stopped right by the door.

With a creak, the wooden door opened, though no figure was immediately visible—only a flesh-colored tentacle resting on the door handle.

Qisi lowered his gaze. The tattooed woman's impatient face was embedded in a pool of foul-smelling mucus, its irregular edges extending tentacles aimlessly.

Over the course of the night, she had completely mutated, turning into the exact same thing as the village chief.

Qisi lowered his eyes to meet hers and asked indifferently, "How are you feeling right now?"

"What do you mean, how am I feeling?" The tattooed woman's face wrinkled into a frown. "Just like that! I can't even sleep properly in this ghost of a place!"

Could it be that she was completely unaware of how wrong her condition was?

Qisi curved the corners of his lips, responding with a faint smile: "Yeah, what a terrible place. There isn't even a proper place to take a bath, and I didn't sleep well last night either."

Without leaving a trace, he took a few steps back and said casually, "Since you're awake, hurry up and come out. Everyone's just waiting for you to have breakfast."

"So early?" muttered the tattooed woman, though suspecting nothing, she allowed herself to be coaxed by Qisi, inching her way out the door.

Qisi sidestepped at the exact right moment, shifting the shadow that had been covering the tattooed woman. The milky-white sunlight slanted down, casting a harsh exposure over the mucus completely exposed to the open air.

As if boiling water had been poured over her or she had plunged into a sea of fire, the tattooed woman opened her mouth and let out a shrill, piercing scream. Within mere seconds, the cry grew as soft as a gnat's hum before falling completely silent.

The flesh-colored skin turned transparent, beneath which golden blood vessels throbbed in rhythmic pulses before suddenly vanishing into the white, gelatinous flesh—she had thoroughly transformed into a new batch of divine meat.

The reserve of divine meat was once again ample. Qisi hummed a nursery rhyme and walked away with carefree strides, claiming no credit yet leaving his mark.

He walked over to the dry well and smiled: "Respected Deity, the person you ate last night was driven down there by Yilena and me working together. Now that Yilena is dead, you can just settle the reward directly with me."

The well: "..."

The door to the firewood room opened, and Zhou Yilin walked out covered in dust.

Upon seeing Qisi, she burst into tears: "Wuuu... Sister Zhu wanted to eat me last night, so I had no choice but to run and sleep in the firewood room... It was so terrifying, wuuu..."

As if to corroborate her words, Zhu玲 pushed open the door of the side room, her expression carrying doubt and bewilderment.

Upon seeing Zhou Yilin, she trotted over with an apologetic look on her face: "Yilin, I'm so glad you're alright. I suddenly lost consciousness last night, and I can't remember anything that happened afterward... I am truly, truly sorry."

"Sister Zhu, I know this isn't your fault, wuuu... It's all because of this bizarre game... Wuuu, I want to go home..."

"Yilin, it was my misjudgment. Thank goodness you're okay, otherwise I would have regretted it for the rest of my life..."

Qisi stood off to the side, narrowing his eyes as he watched the heartwarming melodrama unfold with rapt interest.

Before long, two more doors opened. Zhao Feng and Zhang Licai emerged one after the other, and Zhao Feng walked straight over to Qisi's side.

"Holy crap! What on earth is that?" Zhang Licai caught sight of the large mass of divine meat and Loke Liang's skeleton in the center of the courtyard at a glance, blinking rapidly. "Wh... whose corpse is that?"

Qisi walked over and let out a heavy, sorrowful sigh: "It's Yilena and Loke Liang. They slept in the same room and triggered the crisis described in the pentameter poem.

"I didn't pay attention last night, but judging from the scene, Yilena likely ate Loke Liang, and then mutated herself due to her encounter at the village chief's house, turning into divine meat upon contact with sunlight."

He wasn't sure how many people had witnessed Loke Liang's method of death last night, but that didn't stop him from spreading misinformation to mislead the others' judgment.

Zhang Licai bought into Qisi's nonsense, slapping his own chubby face in dismay: "That thing ate him way too clean... Good thing I was smart last night and found an empty room to stay in by myself."

Yang Yundong's door was the last to open, and a pungent scent of blood rushed forth, painting everything in a crimson hue.

The man was covered in blood, his left arm seemingly ripped off forcefully from the shoulder, taking an entire sleeve of his military cotton-padded coat with it.

At the bloody, mangled stump, grim white bone was faintly visible.

"The night before last, I promised to give them meat, and last night they came." Yang Yundong's eye sockets were deeply sunken, yet his voice remained flat. "It's fine. Injuries in the instance can't be carried out. In another two or three days, it should all be over anyway."

Qisi observed his gruesome wound and said calmly, "Persistent pain and blood loss can both throw you into shock. Even if your willpower is strong enough, your thinking and judgment may still be impaired by endorphins. With injuries like yours, you won't live until the instance ends."

"I know." Resignation filled Yang Yundong's features. "This is my third instance. Surviving is a matter of good luck, and dying is only logical..."

He lowered his head to look at Yilena-turned-divine-meat and Loke Liang's skeleton on the ground, a distinct worry weaving across his face.

It was only the third day, and there were already only six players left. Furthermore, he was injured, making death a foregone conclusion...

Could this instance really require triggering a minimum death toll mechanism in order to clear it?

"Breakfast is ready, come and eat!" Granny Su's shouting broke the silence.

It was time for breakfast.

Once everyone was seated, Qisi looked at Granny Su and smiled with a chuckle: "Ah-Xi seems to really want to eat meat. Yesterday morning, he even ate a piece of meat from my companion... Could it be that you usually starve your own grandson?"

Granny Su's expression was exceedingly ugly.

She glanced at the scrawny boy beside her, exchanging some unspoken communication through their gazes before raising her eyes with absolute certainty: "Our Ah-Xi does not eat meat."

Qisi naturally knew Ah-Xi didn't eat meat. He and the other players had seen with their own eyes how Ah-Xi threw Zhao Feng's flesh into the well as a sacrifice to the deity in exchange for benefits.

He was spouting nonsense on purpose, simply to provoke Granny Su's instinct to refute, hoping best to extract the method of sacrificing to the deity—

He was still somewhat bothered by the fact that after Loke Liang's death, the well had produced nothing in return save for black smoke.

The corners of Qisi's mouth curved upward into a sarcastic, barbed smile: "Please don't deny it. If he doesn't eat meat, what was he doing taking it? Could it be that he used it to feed dogs?"

"I don't know, and it's none of your business." Granny Su's tone was hostile as she pulled Ah-Xi away from the table.

Learning early in the morning that two companions were lost, combined with the NPC's obvious anger, left the players with virtually no appetite. Each took a few bites of steamed buns before standing up one after another to leave.

Seeing the others leave their seats, Qisi lost any desire to continue eating and stood up to walk toward the door.

Yang Yundong stood alone by the door, silently gazing into the distance, pondering who knows what.

Qisi strolled leisurely over to him and smiled slightly: "Brother Yang, let's cooperate."

Though he couldn't comprehend why anyone would willingly play the thankless role of a good guy, in the absence of a conflict of interest, he didn't harbor any aversion toward characters like Yang Yundong.

He enjoyed probing the psychology of different human beings and took pleasure in observing the endings of all kinds of people—the evil, the righteous, the selfish, the selfless...

Among them, people with morals were precisely the ones most easily bound by moral constraints, and thus more readily utilized by him.

Meeting Yang Yundong's scrutinizing gaze, Qisi let out a long, wistful sigh: "You must have seen it too. Three days remain, and we are down to only six people. Some are most likely already plotting to kill off other players to trigger the minimum death toll mechanism.

"As the de facto leader, you will inevitably bear the brunt of it. Opportunists eager to create the chaos they desire will surely find a way to eliminate you—the one holding things together—first. And of course, there's someone like me whose background remains unclear.

"Both Zhu玲 and Zhou Yilin are clearly not simple. Zhu玲 is a veteran player entering an instance for the third time; faced with an eighty percent mortality rate, she's liable to take extreme measures. Brother Yang, I don't want to die..."

Resorting to parallel circumstances to evoke resonance and forge an atmosphere of utter isolation; a fraction of acknowledged facts mixed with appropriate exaggeration made it easy for people to be convinced.

Yang Yundong was silent for two seconds before asking in return: "I cooperate with you, and then what? First exclude the other players, and then you and Zhao Feng join forces to control me?"

Qisi beamed brightly: "As expected of Brother Yang. It seems you aren't completely clueless about conspiracies after all.

"But so what? Cooperating with me to end the instance early means at least four people can survive. Survival is always paramount—does the method really matter that much?"

Yang Yundong said in a deep voice: "I can't read you, but I can sense that you have no reverence for public morality, nor do you possess any baseline or self-awareness as a human being. For someone like you to survive poses a grave danger to other players."

Qisi didn't refute him, merely looking at him with a half-smile: "Brother Yang, let me ask you a question. If a young man across the ocean in Eagle County contracted a terminal illness and needed your entire set of organs to save him, would you be willing?"

"What do you mean?" Yang Yundong raised his eyes abruptly, locking his gaze onto Qisi's eyes with careful scrutiny.

The smile remained on Qisi's face: "If your answer is no, what ground do you have to demand that I abandon survival for the sake of some so-called baseline? If your answer is yes, why haven't you run off to die for me right this second?

"Or perhaps you're just a tedious utilitarian, measuring everyone's value by territory, age, education, health status, and other factors before deciding whether to make a sacrifice? Or are you cut from the same cloth as me, accustomed to deciding whether to save or kill people purely based on personal preference?"

Before undergoing targeted cognitive training, very few people could untangle a chaotic mess of issues and analyze specific problems one by one.

Logical traps such as the fallacy of presumption, ad hominem attacks, and false dilemmas proved effective time and time again in front of most people.

Qisi ticked off his fingers, speaking in the tone of someone balancing accounts: "Of course, I believe you have already adopted a preconceived bias placing me in an adversarial position, and you are unlikely to believe these facts I've stated. So, let me speak strictly on the merits and offer you a few viable choices.

"First, upholding the principle of ridding the people of an evil, you kill me, and then die for the procedural justice of collective judgment. Since Zhao Feng is my ally, he will inevitably be targeted for elimination next.

"Second, you trade your life for Zhu玲's in a one-for-one exchange; the outcome will be much the same, and I guarantee I will uproot her entire alliance. Among the remaining three people, if they're lucky everyone survives; if they're unlucky, I'm the one who makes it out.

"Third, you take out the most innocent Zhang Licai. That leaves precisely four people and two allied factions, achieving a Nash equilibrium so we all survive together."

Qisi tilted his head: "According to utilitarian principles, the third option yields the best economic efficiency—am I right or am I right?"

Yang Yundong said coldly: "Players who slaughter others for personal gain deserve to die."

"Slaughter-style" was a broad concept. Such players held anti-social tendencies and adhered to an absolute zero-sum mindset, preferring to murder other players for greater personal benefit rather than seek win-win cooperation.

Qisi knew well that such titles were merely human definitions: kill one man and you are a criminal, kill ten million and you become a god.

He smiled, his voice lifting slightly at the end: "Yet life is precious, isn't it? You are no god; what qualification do you have to judge the rightness, wrongness, good, or evil of behavioral choices?"

Yang Yundong stated: "Murderers ought to pay with their lives, and those who harm others deserve retribution. I saw it—it was you who lured Yilena out the door."

As if he hadn't heard, Qisi drew out his tone, asking syllable by syllable: "So, what is your choice?"