Volume 7: Days of Stargazing at the Inn
Man-Eating Mud
I’m back!!!?
No one present had lost their phone, so this phone could only belong to someone who wasn’t here, or someone who had already disappeared.
The NPCs left in large groups, heading down the mountain in droves. In the blink of an eye, the hall became empty.
They had experienced a lot today, and the three of them were all injured to some extent. It was clearly no longer suitable for them to go out exploring again.
Lou Jingmo’s wrist had five small, deep marks pinched into it by that thing in the mud. When cleaning it, Shen Maomao watched as blood mixed with water flowed down, and it took several packs of tissues to stop the bleeding. Her heart ached so much she wanted to cry.
Coincidentally, the first-aid kit that Hong-jie had lent to Xi Tian that morning was still on the table. She took over that table, opened the first-aid kit, found alcohol swabs, and carefully disinfected Lou Jingmo’s wound.
The alcohol touched the wound, causing Lou Jingmo’s body to tense for a moment, but she didn’t make a sound.
“Does it hurt…?” Shen Maomao carefully wiped around her wound with an alcohol swab, feeling both upset and angry.
She was upset that someone as strong as Lou-jie could actually get hurt, or rather, had gotten used to being hurt, which was why she didn’t make a sound while cleaning the wound. She was angry at herself for being so useless1 and unable to help at critical moments.
Seeing her expression so serious, Lou Jingmo inexplicably felt a little like laughing.
She had escorted many clients2 and been injured many times, but this was the first time someone cared whether she was in pain, rather than focusing on whether she could still lead them out of the instance after being injured.
She looked at Shen Maomao’s expression, her heart warming, and really wanted to tease her. She opened her mouth and said, “Why the long face3? I’m not dead yet.”
Who knew that it would have been better if she hadn’t spoken? The moment she did, it was like opening a floodgate. Shen Maomao’s tears streamed down, drip, drip, dripping onto Lou Jingmo’s arm.
“Why are you crying now?” The tears were clearly cold, yet Lou Jingmo felt as if she’d been scalded and wanted to pull her hand back.
Shen Maomao held her down and glared at her with red eyes, “Don’t move!”
The overwhelming4 sadness struck her down in an instant. She sniffled and said seriously, “I’m so melodramatic.”
Lou Jingmo was speechless. “You know that too?”
Shen Maomao glared at her again. “Shut your mouth!”
Lou Jingmo: “…” Why did she feel like her status had dropped quite a bit? If this were before, would Shen Maomao dare to yell at her like this?
Shen Maomao sobbed as she wrapped gauze around her arm. “If I’m ever soft-hearted again, just slap me across the face so hard I won’t even know which way is north.”
Lou Jingmo: “…Okay, but there’s no need.”
If Shen Maomao were as cold and selfish as them, she wouldn’t have… noticed her, and then there wouldn’t have been the subsequent binding and teaming up.
She genuinely felt that Shen Maomao was fine just the way she was now—soft-hearted, but not inappropriately so; kind, but not without limits. After struggling in the mire for so long, even the slightest bit of kindness seemed extremely precious, and it made her willing to protect it.
Shen Maomao sobbed her heart out. Lou Jingmo wanted to comfort her several times but didn’t know where to start.
In the end, after she had cried enough, she simply wiped her eyes, returned the first-aid kit to the front desk, and then went to the kitchen to look for food, making Lou Jingmo so angry she really wanted to give her a couple of slaps.
Before long, groups of players returned. Hong-jie also came downstairs for dinner. She counted on her fingers and realized someone was missing. She quickly asked, “Where is everyone? How come one person is gone?”
Everyone looked at each other, then consciously stood with their roommates, only to find that it seemed no one was missing.
Hong-jie thought for a moment, then slapped her forehead. “What about Ranran’s roommate?!”
Everyone said they hadn’t seen them.
Hong-jie was so angry she paced around the middle of the tables. “I told you it was dangerous on the mountain, but you insisted on going! Don’t tell me that girl was swept away by a mudslide! You guys just keep causing trouble for me day after day! From now on, nobody leaves this door! Our activity is ending early. We’re heading down the mountain first thing tomorrow morning!”
Hearing this, Shen Maomao, with chopsticks dangling from her mouth, curiously asked Lou Jingmo, “Lou-jie, can we leave this place?”
Lou Jingmo swallowed the food in her mouth. “Where would we go? Anyone who leaves will have to come back.”
As if to confirm her words, after dark, the hotel’s main door was suddenly pulled open. A group of people with luggage returned to the hotel, looking dejected5. They all went to the front desk to rebook rooms and then slumped into chairs as if exhausted.
Hong-jie didn’t know about the haunting incident in the afternoon, nor why so many people had left. She quickly went over and asked, “What happened to you all? If you left, why did you come back?”
A young girl said, “That mudslide, it eats people!!”
Hong-jie looked completely puzzled. “How can a mudslide eat people? Girl, don’t kid me…”
The girl said anxiously, “I’m not kidding! Ask them if you don’t believe me! The mudslide really ate people!”
A middle-aged man next to her drank some hot water to calm his nerves, then explained, “We all wanted to go down the mountain, so we traveled together. We finally reached the foot of the mountain, but the road was blocked by a large pool of muddy water that had rushed down from the summit. A young lad, over 1.8 meters tall, wanted to wade through. He had only taken two steps forward when, ‘plop,’ he disappeared! A few of us searched around the edges with small sticks… but couldn’t find where the young man went. And that muddy water wasn’t even calf-deep. How could a person just vanish like that?”
The old traditional Chinese medicine doctor nervously tapped his cane and said, “It must be that the person in the muddy water turned into a vengeful ghost and came to claim our lives!!”
In short, this group of people didn’t dare to try again. Seeing that it was getting late, they could only turn back6 and return dejectedly.
The receptionist, playing with her nails, said mockingly, “Well? I told you not to go, but you insisted. What a waste of effort.”
She spoke as if she knew something, immediately attracting everyone’s attention. “What do you mean? What do you know? Are these things related to you?”
The receptionist rolled her eyes. “I said the mudslide would block the road. As for how the mudslide eats people, I wouldn’t know.”
Because these people returned so late and looked so wretched, the kitchen made an exception and prepared an extra dinner for them.
The NPCs ate, and the players also sat downstairs chatting, their peripheral vision constantly fixed on these few people.
This dinner was definitely the one with the most people present. Counting the remaining 9 players, and excluding the hotel staff and Xi Tian and Qu Jing who hadn’t come down from upstairs, there were a total of 25 people seated.
A large amount of food was brought to the tables. The few NPCs who had returned later began to eat. The only child, Xiaobao, bounced his rubber ball, happily weaving between the tables, completely unaware of the adults’ worries.
The little rubber ball rolled back and forth, and Shen Maomao’s eyes followed it. She was always afraid that the ball would, at some unknown moment, turn into Xiaobao’s mom’s head, fly up, and bite them.
Xiaobao played by himself for a while, then suddenly picked up his ball and ran straight to their table.
Shen Maomao’s heart skipped a beat; she had a feeling he was coming for her.
Sure enough, Xiaobao ended up standing in front of her, looking up at her. “Big sister, do you want to play with the ball too?”
Shen Maomao swallowed. “Although big sister really wants to play, big sister bumped her leg earlier, and now it hurts a lot. I can’t kick the ball.”
Xiaobao said, “Then let’s play catch! I’ll stand over there, and big sister, you throw it to me. Let me catch it. If I can’t catch it, I’ll bark like a puppy…”
Shen Maomao looked troubled. “…But there are many things here. What if we hit someone or break something? Then the money for your snacks would have to be given to the hotel people.”
Xiaobao’s eyes widened, and he hugged the ball tightly. “No way! I’m not playing with the ball anymore!” After saying that, he hugged the ball and pattered back to his mom’s side, not returning for a long time.
Golden Retriever silently gave Shen Maomao a thumbs-up.
“Ahhh—!!”
Everyone was eating when a bloodcurdling scream suddenly came from the back kitchen, startling everyone to their feet. They looked towards the source of the sound with expressions of shock and uncertainty.
The girl who had been serving them food stumbled out of the kitchen, her face pale, speaking incoherently, “Help… body… dead person… someone’s dead!”
Lou Jingmo frowned and rushed over immediately. Several other braver people quickly followed.
As soon as the door was pushed open, a smell of meat and cooked vegetables wafted out, but there was no smell of blood.
A man in a chef’s uniform was facing away from them, bent over with his rear in the air, leaning motionless on a chopping board. In front of him, a large pot was simmering with something, bubbling and emitting white steam, filling the entire kitchen with a hazy mist.
But when they got closer, they discovered that what was cooking in the pot was none other than the slightly chubby chef’s head!
He had been cooking for who knows how long. The skin on his face looked like it had been boiled soft, drooping downwards due to gravity. And the meaty aroma filling the air was actually the smell of his cooked head…
Shen Maomao nearly threw up after just one glance and averted her gaze, refusing to look in that direction again no matter what.
This soup looked so familiar, almost identical to the one that had just been served.
Several NPCs who had just finished dinner saw this and rushed straight to the bathroom.
The serving NPC tremblingly took out her phone. “We… we should call the police… someone’s dead…”
Then she discovered there was no signal at all on her phone and immediately broke down crying, “What do we do? Why is there no signal?”
Lou Jingmo said in a low voice, “Step back. Don’t disturb the crime scene.”
Even if she hadn’t said it, no one wanted to stay there any longer. The young NPC girl, trembling, pulled the circuit breaker for the kitchen, stopping the water in the pot from bubbling. She returned to the hall with the players, shaking like a leaf.
The old traditional Chinese medicine doctor, leaning on his cane, was at the back of the crowd. Seeing this, he tapped his cane on the ground, drawing everyone’s attention. Only then did he say, “Now we’re all trapped here, and something like this has happened. The chef’s cause of death is still uncertain; we don’t know if it was an accident or murder. Everyone present is a suspect… I should be the oldest among us, so I’ll speak about this…”
He walked to the front desk and asked, “How many people are staying in the hotel?”
The receptionist didn’t even lift her eyelids. “No comment.”
The old TCM doctor was made to lose face by her. His eyebrows shot up. “At a time like this, what’s the use of you hiding this information? If it really is murder, and none of us can leave, no one will be at ease until the killer is found!”
The author has something to say:
Exams are over! I’m not feeling confident about one subject. Praying to Lasswell7 and Schramm8! Your humble servant9 is willing to be vegetarian and pray to Buddha10 for a week, begging to pass Communication Studies!!
Thank you, my little cuties, for not abandoning me. I haven’t updated for a week. For the next week, double… double updates are impossible. For the next week, I’ll give out red envelopes to the first fifty comments every day!! If money can solve it, let’s not solve it with extra chapters!!!
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