Feng Bujue continued to move forward. The scary encounter from before did not affect him at all; he powered on like usual, feeling no extra pressure. It did not take him long to reach the end of the tunnel, to a cramped and damp underground cellar.
There was a jail door inside the cellar, which was nothing surprising. In olden times, the cellars of these types of large houses were normally used as a jail, and now it was used as a place to store a coffin before its burial. The floor and walls were carefully covered with a copper layer. The iron jail door was surprisingly heavy. As it swung open, the chain would create a sharp creaking sound. There was a coffin sitting in the middle of the room. Standing a few steps away from it, he shone his flashlight on it. The coffin lid was not nailed shut. In fact, the coffin was not even fully closed.
Feng Bujue walked through the door, but he did not hurry to open the coffin. Instead, he used his flashlight to shine around the room. He did come up with something. On one of the walls, he found another stanza to The Haunted Palace, and this time, it was written in blood.
But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch’s high estate;
Ah, let us mourn! For never morrow
Shall dawn upon him, desolate!
And round about his home, the glory
That blushed and bloomed
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old time entombed.
“Hmm… It’s the fifth stanza, it seems,” Feng Bujue mumbled after reading it.
The system audio came soon after, “Side quest updated.”
And the quest detail became “Find all six The Haunted Palace. Current Progress: 3/6”.
Feng Bujue walked over to the coffin. Holding the flashlight in one hand and his other gripping into a fist, like knocking on a door, he tapped on the coffin lid three times. “Hey, Miss Madeline, are you there?”
It was unclear where the man had gotten that name.
…
As time moved on, Invincible Champion’s Terror Points grew to fifteen percent and stabilized around that number. The reason for his panic was not because he ran into an actual monster but because, after searching around for a while, he could not find a way to leave the second floor.
Each corridor, each room, the paintings, lamps, and decorations looked so unfamiliar yet familiar at the same time.
The building showed spatial anomalies because it was much bigger inside compared to how it looked from the outside. The length of the corridor seemed to change at any minute as well. When he went down the corridor, counting the number of the doors, he would get a different result every time. So far, Invincible Champion had not reached the end of any corridors. Whenever he thought that he had reached the end, there would be a new corner or a junction.
The exhaustion to Stamina Points when walking was negligible. Only when the player was walking for a long time would the deduction be noticeable. This was different from real life. If you had someone walk barefooted for just twenty minutes, he would feel tired already; forty minutes, and his legs would feel pain; more than one hour, and he would have to pause and rest. Of course, in this case, the person used as an example was a normal man, not a professional athlete.
This kind of tiredness was accumulative, and the longer it gathered, the more obvious it became. Corroded by fear, the reaction became conspicuous in Invincible Champion. When he saw his Stamina Points lowering at an observable speed, he did not stop to think calmly but chose to increase his speed.
He was not exploring but running. There was a feeling that if he did not do something soon, he would not only be trapped there, but also once his Stamina had lowered to a certain point, something in the dark would catch up to him.
“Huh… Huh…” Invincible Champion’s breathing became heavy. He looked at the game menu. He still had one thousand Stamina Points, and he was not running but speed walking; his body should not have reacted that way. He stopped moving and placed his hands on his knees to stop the heavy breathing. He swallowed. At that moment, he suddenly realized that there was something off with his stomach, but he had a hard time telling what it was.
“What’s going on?” Invincible Champion mumbled softly to himself. Having a monologue could help lower the sense of fear and help one to focus.
Suddenly, he caught something out of the corner of his eye. He turned around and was shocked to realize that there was a mirror next to him, a rectangular mirror that was two meters tall and embedded into the wall. The mirror had a carved wooden frame, which was simple but exquisite.
“This is weird. Was this thing here earlier?” He could not help but ask, and confusion colored his face.
By then, Invincible Champion had been focusing his eyes on the way forward, his eyes targeting the end of the corridor. He stopped counting the doors on the side and naturally would not pay attention to decorations like paintings, lamps, and statues. But the corridor he was in was not wide, and this was the first time that something like a mirror had shown up, a large one at that. There was no reason for him to miss it.
When Invincible Champion noticed the mirror, he was facing it from his side. Currently, he was bent over with his hands on his knees. However, once he shifted his focus to the mirror, he stood up straight and turned to face it. Once he did, he also collapsed from the shock.
The reflection in the mirror looked like the real Invincible Champion, but the reflection had his stomach exposed to the wind. There was no shirt or skin covering that part of his body, and he saw a mess of intestines instead.
Invincible Champion sucked in a cold breath, and his face was blanched. He staggered backward, and his back knocked into the other wall. His eyes widened, and his breath stopped for almost ten seconds.
“Illu… This has to be an illusion…” After he regained some semblance of calmness, he gritted his teeth and walked back to stand before the window. “Who is it trying to scare? It’s just an X-ray so to speak.”
Even though he said that, the Terror Points would not lie. He was still afraid, but people reacted differently to fear, and one such reaction was anger.
Invincible Champion’s gaze moved involuntarily to his stomach. He could see that his intestines were moving, but once he looked closer, he caught some strange details.
The more he looked at those intestines, the stranger he felt. They looked… like many intersecting corridors!
His neck was frozen solid, and two seconds later, he howled angrily as a kick landed on the mirror, shattering it into pieces. Then, he turned and walked away.
But once he turned around, he was greeted by many identical mirrors down the corridor. All the room doors had disappeared, and in their places were the mirrors.
“Ahhh!” Brother Invincible screamed and blindly charged forward. He had no idea whether he was hallucinating or had triggered an actual change to the house, but the fear and danger that he felt were real. He did not want to stay inside this corridor one second longer.
With a crash, a human shape broke through the glass window and careened down from the second floor of the building.
The moment he tumbled through the wind, Invincible Champion was fully unprepared. One second earlier, he had still been running down the corridor. He remembered that the road ahead was still long, but the next second came the acute pain of glass shards cutting through his skin. He rammed through something, and the next thing he knew, the ground underneath his feet disappeared.
The short second before death claimed him, he caught sight of the house from outside.
Moss grew all over the stone walls, the dead trees that surrounded the house, and the large and rippling black reflection in the water. The air of danger and death seeped out of the water, walls, and deep within the house. Darkness consumed the space between the material and spirit worlds.
In the shapeless silence, the champion fell into the pond by the house. The heavy water swallowed him fully. Air bubbles escaped from his throat, but it nary made a ripple. The large house was like a silent observer, spectating the loss of another young life.
The last thing that was reflected in the eyes of this professional player… was the blood moon that was wearily sinking behind the horizon.
…
“Team Message: Invincible Champion has died. A plot item has been transferred.”
When the system audio appeared, both Wang Tanzhi and Long Aomin were stunned.
“What the hell? A level fifteen professional player died just like that‽” Wang Tanzhi gasped. He opened the game menu to double check the information. As the system stated, the player name for Invincible Champion was grayed out, and the original ’Surviving’ status had changed to ’Dead’.
By then, the two had looked through many rooms, but they could not find any concrete evidence. Other than the few times when they came across weak points in the floor and traps, they had nothing.
“If we split up, we would have died from the traps that we encountered,” Long Aomin said before adding, “I wonder if Brother Feng will run into any danger since he’s working alone.”
“If it’s Brother Jue… you don’t need to worry. Since he suggested we split up, he will have considered the risk already,” Wang Tanzhi said. “By the way, I glanced through the game manual when I was waiting for Brother Jue to come online, and it said that should a player die in game, then the items that he possessed will randomly appear next to one of his teammates.”
Long Aomin had some experience in Team Mode, so he concurred. “Yes, I know that. Let’s look around us then.”
The two-started searching, but although they did not find the letter, they did find a new stanza of the poem on the floor, covered by a pile of trash.
Wanderers in that happy valley,
Through two luminous windows, saw
Spirits moving musically
To a lute’s well-tunèd law,
Round about a throne where, sitting,
Porphyrogene!
In state his glory well befitting,
The ruler of the realm was seen.
“Side quest updated. Find all six The Haunted Palace. Current Progress: 4/6”