Fu Songcheng closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the pungent smell of blood and the damp cold of the mountain forest were gone. He was back in the system’s settlement space.
[Congratulations, player Fu Songcheng, on successfully clearing the D-rank (Mental Contamination) instance: Ya’nan Village.]
[Main Mission: Survive one month (Completed).]
[Instance settlement in progress…]
[Killed mini-boss Li Guoping; turned female NPCs; escaped Ya’nan Village…]
[Player performance extremely outstanding; core instance plot drastically altered.]
[Comprehensive Instance Rating: SSS!]
[Basic clear rewards and SSS-rank bonus obtained: 5,000 points awarded.]
Accompanied by the mechanical voice’s announcement, a sphere of light radiating a dark red glow slowly drifted down into Fu Songcheng’s palm.
The light dispersed, revealing a worn, dark red cloth curtain stained with dried, blackened blood.
[Special Item Obtained: Torn Cloth Curtain.]
[Item Description: Tear away the final layer of shame—silence, or a fight to the death? The choice isn’t yours or mine.]
[Usage Rules: Forced-binding conceptual item. After locking onto a target and using it, all rules are ignored, forcibly pulling both parties into an independent space for an absolutely fair life-or-death duel. If and only if one party dies is the space dissolved.]
Fu Songcheng lowered his eyes to the cloth curtain in his hand—light as a feather, yet seemingly soaked in curses.
The curtain with the hole torn in it, from the volunteer teachers’ temporary dormitory, had ultimately ended up in his hands, becoming an item to initiate a duel.
…
At the other end of Ya’nan Village.
Not every player could see through the man-eating nature of these mountains, and not everyone had the ability to face that bottomless malice head-on.
Especially for the male players—this mountain was little more than a hardship-laden wilderness survival exercise.
But instances were always fair. This had never been an ordinary survival instance—Ya’nan Village’s “assimilation” was a silent, invisible erosion.
Those male players who stayed in the village, enduring the month through compromise, forbearance, even submission to the village’s rules, ultimately met the instance’s merciless backlash.
Fang Ruiyang huddled in the temporary dormitory, his whole body trembling violently.
His eyes were filled with eerie red bloodshot veins, his pupils completely unfocused.
There was no one around him, yet he could still sense the nauseating stench of rot in the air and some strange, overlapping whisperings.
“Stay. Stay and marry a wife…”
“Didn’t you think this place was pretty good? Don’t stick your nose into other people’s business…”
In the darkness, countless twisted women’s faces and men’s faces intertwined, transforming into pairs of invisible gray-white arms that clutched dead at Fang Ruiyang’s ankles, arms, and neck.
His sanity was being frantically torn apart and devoured.
In the second before being completely swallowed, Fang Ruiyang’s face gradually took on the same ignorant, numb, greedy smile as the villagers of Ya’nan Village.
[Player Fang Ruiyang, mental threshold reduced to zero; assimilated by the instance. Deemed dead.]
And Lü Jia, teaching in the classroom, was experiencing the same living death.
At this moment, he was in a wretched state.
Gritting his teeth, his vision blurred, he was surrounded by seven or eight distorted “figures.”
No—those couldn’t be called people anymore. They were vengeful spirits nourished by this land of sin.
“Get away! All of you, get away!” Lü Jia swung his chalk like a madman, trying to buy time.
He had already heard the ticking of the main mission countdown ending in the system space, but the black miasma around him was growing thicker and heavier, threatening to grind his entire body to pieces.
Just as a withered, emaciated claw reeking of rot was about to pierce his heart, a blinding golden light suddenly erupted from Lü Jia’s chest.
[Item: Death Substitute Straw Doll.]
With a muffled bang, the golden light exploded. The powerful shockwave forcibly drove the surrounding vengeful spirits back three meters.
Lü Jia’s body instantly turned incorporeal in midair. A straw doll tied with red thread was torn to shreds by the vengeful spirits in the spot where he had been.
[Countdown ended. Surviving players begin teleportation.]
In that moment, Lü Jia felt his soul wrenched violently out of his body.
Standing in the system settlement space, he fell into confusion.
Was he the player Lü Jia?
Or the volunteer teacher Lü Jia?
For this past month, who had been in this body?
…
The light of the system space dissipated completely, and Fu Songcheng returned to his rest room.
Fu Songcheng leaned heavily against the sofa, gasping for breath.
The instance settlement had repaired some of the damage, but his depleted muscles, the fine abrasions, and the mental exhaustion from prolonged high tension still clung to him, all too real.
He was now like a bowstring drawn to its absolute limit, on the verge of snapping.
Just then, a flippant voice rang out abruptly in the empty room.
“Congratulations—SSS-rank clear. Looks like you’re not completely useless after all.”
Fu Songcheng’s eyes snapped open, his right hand instinctively reaching for his waist—but grasping empty air. The weapon had been returned to the system backpack the instant he entered the rest room.
But he quickly relaxed his taut nerves, because he’d recognized who was sitting on the single sofa opposite.
Yu Huaiting.
He wore a casual black windbreaker, his long legs crossed, his white medium-length hair casually tied in a small bun. He even held a steaming cup of black coffee in his hand, lounging like he owned the place.
“Barging in uninvited again?”
Fu Songcheng rubbed his temples, nursing a massive headache over how to deal with this “lover” with no sense of boundaries.
Yu Huaiting let out a soft laugh and casually flipped his wrist.
A small glass bottle filled with deep blue liquid traced a clean arc through the air and landed steadily in Fu Songcheng’s direction.
Fu Songcheng caught it by reflex.
[High-Grade Recovery Liquid.]
He flicked off the stopper with his thumb and tipped his head back, downing the deep blue liquid in one gulp.
The cool liquid slid down his throat, rapidly transforming into a warm current that swept through his limbs and every bone in his body.
His aching muscles instantly soothed, and his exhausted mind seemed washed clean by a spring, renewed with vitality.
Even his breathing grew steady and deep.
Watching Fu Songcheng’s Adam’s apple bob, Yu Huaiting raised an eyebrow, the smile at the corner of his lips deepening.
He set down his coffee and stood up, his eyes—hidden beneath his messy fringe—fixed on Fu Songcheng’s face.
“I was actually thinking about whether I’d need to go collect your corpse from the instance,”
Yu Huaiting walked slowly up to Fu Songcheng, looking down at him. “But since you’re this capable—perfect timing.”
Fu Songcheng lifted his head, his deep, dark eyes meeting Yu Huaiting’s. “Say what you mean.”
Yu Huaiting bent down, bracing both hands on the armrests on either side of the sofa, enclosing Fu Songcheng entirely within his range.
He lowered his voice, his tone carrying a bewitching quality, inviting Fu Songcheng to plunge into another abyss together:
“I have one day left before I enter my next instance,”
Yu Huaiting paused. “You coming with me?”
Leave a Reply