The winter ground was frozen rock-hard, and Huang Facai had only provided the three of them with a few shovels.
A single strike of the shovel could barely chip away some black soil mixed with ice shards.
In the end, having no other choice, Zhou Hui suggested gathering some straw and dry firewood to light a fire over the grave site. Once the soil was roasted soft, they could finally start digging.
Even so, the three of them didn't dare to take a single breath of rest, digging for an entire day before barely completing the quest.
Many people had a misconception that digging a hole wasn't difficult.
But in reality, even an experienced old farmer would spit blood from exhaustion when digging soil in the winter.
It wasn't an exaggeration; it really could exhaust someone to death.
Seeing that it was about to get dark, the three of them finally rushed back to the western side room, covered in dirt and soot.
Zhou Hui and Ouyang Qiu supported each other, tears streaming down their faces as they walked. It was pure exhaustion, a purely physiological crying.
Lin Hao also felt his arms aching terribly, so weak he could barely lift them.
Yet the moment they arrived at the ancestral hall, they saw a cotton quilt thrown messily on the steps of the western side room, along with the luggage of the three of them.
The weather was freezing, and more than half of the quilt had fallen into the slushy snow, frozen flat.
Meanwhile, the wooden door of the western side room was tightly shut, bolted securely from the inside like a wall deliberately drawn to divide them.
Through the thin wooden panels, the three of them could clearly hear the suppressed sound of breathing inside.
“What are you doing?”
Zhou Hui's anger instantly flared to the top of her head.
She rushed over in a few quick strides, raising her fist to pound heavily on the door until her knuckles turned red.
“Open the door! Old Wang, Xiao Zhao, what are you doing? What is the meaning of throwing our things out? The quilt is soaked like this, how are we supposed to sleep?!”
No one answered from inside.
“Don't play dead!” Zhou Hui banged on the door twice more. “What on earth do you want? Open the door and explain yourselves!”
After a few more seconds of silence, the muffled voices of the remaining five players finally came from inside, sounding a bit guilty:
“Explain what? There's nothing to explain! Anyway, you can't come in!”
“Why can't we come in?”
Ouyang Qiu was also furious. “Is this ancestral hall yours? We moved in here through our own efforts. What right do you have to kick us out?!”
“What right? Just because you've been contaminated by something dirty!”
A player's disgusted voice slipped through the crack of the door, making no attempt to hide the malice in their tone:
“The three of you are growing rat hair. If we let you in, what if you infect us?”
“Exactly!”
“Who knows if this strange disease is contagious? You brought this on yourselves by touching the corpse, so don't drag us down with you!”
“You just had to go do some stupid quest. Now you look like neither humans nor ghosts. Don't come here to harm us!”
“Yeah! Besides, we don't have any clues, but aren't we still living perfectly fine?”
Every sentence was spoken with self-righteous selfishness.
“Are you even listening to yourselves?” Zhou Hui's lips trembled.
“We did quests to get clues so everyone could leave earlier. You guys have been hiding the whole time, and now you're turning around and biting us?”
“Then share the clues. We'll only let you in if you share the clues.”
The player's voice came out muffled:
“Don't think we don't know what Lin Hao is up to, constantly threatening us with clues to make us do quests—what if you guys finish the quests and leave, what are we supposed to do then?”
Lin Hao grit his teeth, his expression frighteningly dark.
Zhou Hui and Ouyang Qiu even felt a sudden wave of relief that they hadn't told the others about the Clay Sculpture Ghost Shop.
Teammates who had been huddling together for warmth and taking care of each other just yesterday could turn around and act so ruthlessly out of a little suspicion and fear.
The coldness of human nature was magnified to the absolute extreme in this ghostly place.
Lin Hao's gaze grew darker and darker.
He had long known this group of people was unreliable, but he hadn't expected them to be this stupid.
They still hadn't figured out where the rat transformation came from or if it was contagious, yet this group of people was already eager to push them out.
They even used kicking them out of the western side room as a threat.
A bunch of fools.
Trying to reason with them was a complete waste of breath.
“Stop knocking.”
Lin Hao took a few steps forward, picked up the quilt from the ground, and patted the snow off it. “The eastern side room is empty. Let's make do and stay there.”
“The eastern side room?”
Zhou Hui and Ouyang Qiu were stunned, obviously thinking of the bizarre human-headed rat nest in the ancestral hall and the massive hole in the eastern side room at the same time.
What was the difference between living there and sleeping in a rat's nest?
“It's still better than sleeping out in the open.”
Lin Hao glanced at his teammates hiding behind the door and lowered his voice, his lips barely moving: “Don't forget, we have items in our hands.”
“Saying they're afraid of infection, yet they still kept our quilt. Bah! They clearly just wanted to find an excuse to kick us out.”
Zhou Hui glanced at the tightly shut door. Unable to swallow her anger, she kicked it hard. The door rattled, shaking down a shower of dust.
The dark night pressed down heavily as the three of them quickly walked toward the eastern side room.
Lin Hao walked at the very back.
His gaze fell outside the threshold, where there was a sparse line of quicklime.
It looked freshly scattered, drawn in a crooked circle around the threshold and windows.
The people inside the room seemed to treat this as their lifeline, sleeping soundly and peacefully inside.
Lin Hao paused his steps.
He raised his foot, the tip of his shoe seemingly casually brushing across the quicklime line.
The frozen crust of snow was kicked apart, and the quicklime paste, mixed with melted snow, flowed down the crevices of the bricks, revealing a few blue bricks underneath.
The originally complete quicklime defense line was silently broken by a half-foot-wide gap.
Without crouching down to look closely, it was completely unnoticeable.
Lin Hao walked forward without a change in expression, not feeling the slightest bit of guilt in his heart.
He wanted to see if these teammates would really turn into human-headed rats.
...
The door to the eastern side room was open. There was no bolt inside, and the kang was covered in damp straw. The door panels couldn't close properly either; whenever they tried to shut it, a gap about two fingers wide would always remain.
The corners of the room were piled high with clutter:
A missing-legged offering table leaned crookedly against the wall, and rotten wooden chairs were piled into a small hill.
Stacked, worn-out paper dolls leaned in the corner, the rouge on their faces faded and pale, looking like hanged corpses.
There were also several tangled clumps of thick hemp rope, baskets of incense and candles covered in dust, and a half-man-tall empty clay vat. In short, the entire room was packed haphazardly.
The most eye-catching thing was the monstrously huge rat hole at the base of the wall.
“Nothing will crawl out of there at night, right?”
Zhou Hui's face was pale. Just thinking about a human-headed rat crawling into her blanket while she slept gave her goosebumps all over.
“We have quicklime.”
Ouyang Qiu endured the aching in her body and pushed the rotten offering table over to block the rat hole. “If we kept staying in the western side room, there's no telling if those people would have killed us in our sleep one of these nights. It's better to stay far away.”
The rat hole was simply too large; even with something blocking it, it couldn't be completely covered.
But at the very least, it provided a significant boost to their sense of security.
All three of them had been exhausted from a full day's work. Right now, they were drenched in sweat, and as the cold wind blew over them, a deep chill seeped into the marrow of their bones.
Outside, it was already completely dark.
High and low cat meows began to echo from all directions.
There was no brazier in the eastern side room, and the sleeping area only had a thin layer of dry straw.
The three of them could only squeeze together under a single thin quilt, shoulder to shoulder and back to back, huddling for warmth.
Any notions of gender boundaries or propriety were as thin as paper in the face of life, death, and bitter cold.
Zhou Hui kept her eyes closed, but her ears were perked high.
Only the two gold ingots tucked against her chest could give her some peace of mind.
Around the third watch of the night, a howling gale suddenly picked up outside.
Yet the ancestral hall was terrifyingly quiet. Even the usual cat meows in the distance had vanished, leaving only a dead silence.
...
Ouyang Qiu was too exhausted, and she didn't even know when she drifted off to sleep.
Just as she was about to fall into a deep slumber, Zhou Hui suddenly nudged her arm gently.
“Don't sleep.”
Zhou Hui's voice was pressed extremely low, her whispered breath trembling violently: “Listen... there's a sound.”
Ouyang Qiu shuddered, instantly snapping awake.
She held her breath and listened intently.
“Shasha... shashasha...”
“Susu... susu...”
It was very faint, sounding like many tiny claws crawling on the ground.
“Zhi—zhiga—”
Then came the sound of the offering table being pushed.
The sound was completely undisguised, sounding exceptionally grating in the quiet environment.
Lin Hao was also awake.
He sat up soundlessly, prepared to flee at any moment.
In the darkness, he could only faintly make out the outline of the base of the wall and the holes blocked by wooden boards.
Behind the wooden boards, something had pushed aside the offering table.
“Clack...”
Then came a very soft sound.
The old wooden board blocking the innermost, fist-sized rat hole was gently nudged open from the inside, leaving a small crack.
Immediately after, with another "clack," the offering table tipped over onto the ground, making a dull thud.
The pitch-black hole was completely exposed.
In the darkness, a head poked out first.
A human head.
It was a plump, chubby face, pale and bluish, with dark purple lips. The corners of the mouth were curled up, wearing a stiff and eerie smile.
It was Huang Facai's face.
His eyes were closed, his eye slits very narrow.
He looked as if he were asleep, yet also like an animal, deliberately sniffing the scent of living humans in the air.
The head poked out and paused for two or three seconds, turning slightly to tilt toward the direction where the three were hiding.
It was as if it could precisely sense their location.
The three of them stopped breathing entirely.
Rate on N.U.
