Infinite weird games

The sky gradually brightened, and the mist was steaming. The morning light, as thin as a silk ribbon, shone through the window lattice and splashed into the room on the second floor of the mansion.

Tang Yu and Lin Chen woke up in bed at the same time.

Last night, they entered the same room as the old lady requested, and not long after, the door was locked from the outside.

With the experience of the first night, they quickly completed the division of beds and work.

Lin Chen slept on the bed near the door, guarding the two lanterns to prevent them from falling over.

Tang Yu sat on the bed near the window, holding various weapons and props, guarding the window to prevent the ghosts outside from breaking in.

When it was almost midnight, the pile of corpses outside the window burst into screams, and the smoke condensed by ghosts and monsters rushed around.

Fortunately, the players' props reserves were sufficient, and the terrain of the mansion was easy to defend and difficult to attack. The two finally resisted the ghosts outside the mansion and waited for the sound of "midnight".

The ghosts retreated like a tide, and the two people in the house fell into a deep sleep under the effect of the dungeon mechanism. When they opened their eyes again, it was already daytime.

Lin Chen contacted Qi Si through the soul leaf as soon as possible: "Brother Qi, are you okay? Didn't anything happen last night?"

Two seconds later, Qi Si's weak voice sounded faintly: "I'm still alive, and I have made a big discovery. Let's talk about it when we meet. You wait a moment. If no one opens the door after fifteen minutes, I will open it for you."

Lin Chen breathed a sigh of relief and said, "We are not in a hurry here. We waited for half an hour yesterday before the door opened."

"Well, then you wait."

...

On the empty and deserted avenue of Yanghua Town, Qi Si carried the gong and walked slowly towards the direction of the mansion.

It only takes fifteen minutes at most to get to the mansion from his location.

According to the situation yesterday morning, it can be judged that the old man who manages the mansion will take at least half an hour to open the door for the locked players.

He didn't have to worry about returning late and being discovered by Lin Chen and the others that he was not in the house, thus exposing his identity as a ghost.

What Qi Si was more concerned about was the discovery last night.

At the moment when the midnight bell rang louder, he entered the Mohun Long Scroll as planned, and was carried by the black shadow ghost summoned by the black umbrella, shuttling between wooden buildings, courtyards and alleys.

The specific details were vague, he only remembered that the originally dark night sky faded at a certain moment, and the white light rising from the east spread in all directions with the refraction of the fog, and the whole Yanghua Town was covered with a layer of milky white glaze belonging to the early morning in just a few seconds.

It was dawn.

When time passed the midnight hour, the night was extremely dense, and the moment when the living beings fell into a deep sleep, the day came without any warning or transition.

The townspeople who were lying on the beds, stone slabs and other corners like corpses turned into white-faced and red-cheeked scarecrows at a certain moment, and then returned to normal in an instant, stood up staggeringly, walked out of the door, and gathered on the street.

Qi Si remembered that Qiu Xin had fainted on the street at midnight last night, but woke up the next day safe and sound. He thought that this group of townspeople should not be able to see the existence of the player.

He ordered the black shadow ghost to carry the ink soul scroll back to the ground and stand in the middle of the crowd. As expected, he did not attract any attention.

All sights passed through him as if they were penetrating nothing. The townspeople who came and went stepped over his body, and all the touch did not occur, as if he was completely isolated from the world, belonging to another layer that would never intersect with the townspeople.

He stood for a while, and suddenly felt something in his heart, so he did what he wanted and raised his hand to knock on the gong.

"Bang——"

The clear bangzi sound exploded in the crowd, and all the townspeople turned their heads and looked in the direction of the sound.

"Did you hear it? It's the sound of a clapper!"

"But isn't it daytime? How can there be a clapper sound?"

"I heard it, the clapper sound came from there! But why is there nothing there?"

"Damn it, I always feel that there might be someone there that we can't see..."

The voices were noisy and gradually became unclear.

The effective time of the Mohun Scroll ended, and Qi Si fell heavily to the ground.

When he woke up again, the time on the fate pocket watch showed six o'clock in the morning.

...

At six-fifteen, Qi Si arrived at the residence on time and went up to the second floor.

It was almost the same as he expected. The person who managed the residence had not arrived yet, and the iron lock on the wooden door of the room where Tang Yu and Lin Chen lived was still tightly hung.

He directly pulled out the wire from the bracelet, reached into the keyhole, and pried the lock open.

In the room, Lin Chen and Tang Yu sat on the bed, facing each other in silence.

Hearing the sound of the door opening, the two stood up almost at the same time and greeted the door.

Tang Yu asked first: "Lin Wen, how is it? Have you found anything?"

Qisi took out a stack of photographic negatives from his sleeve and handed them to Lin Chen behind him.

Lin Chen took the photos and, following Qisi's instructions, placed them on the wooden bed near the window, lined up in a row.

Under the misty morning light, the black photos reflected the broken light and slowly showed color in the swaying light and shadow.

The first two photos showed the scarecrows sleeping in the house.

These were probably two poor families. Seven or eight scarecrows were crowded in the cramped little house, covered with quilts like living people, some lying on their sides, and some sleeping on their backs.

Without exception, they didn't look like humans, with big heads and wide bodies. Although they were sloppy, you could still see the shape of a tiger made of straw!

"It turns out that the scarecrows were really made into the shape of a tiger. No wonder the shadows of the townspeople were all tiger shadows. Is this to ward off evil or scare people?"

Tang Yu complained, then looked at the photo again, and marveled: "What kind of prop is this? If we take it out earlier and take photos in all directions, we might not even have to go to the east of the town to know the true form of the townspeople."

"This is the photographic negative of Mr. Luo and his team. I asked them to send it over last night." Qi Si chuckled, "Before realizing that the townspeople might be scarecrows, no one would think of wasting props to take landscape photos in the dungeon, right?"

He lowered his head and reached out to fiddle with the photos, dividing them into several sections in groups of two.

Tang Yu moved closer, pinched a photo with two fingers and looked at it: "Mr. Luo and his team can send things over, which means that props can travel between different spaces?"

"It seems so. Sound, props, text, and many other things can be anchor points shared by two spaces."

Qis said vaguely, raised his hand and pointed to the middle group of photos, motioning Tang Yu to look.

It was a set of photos that could be called horrifying. They were all dyed midnight-like gray and black, but a closer look revealed that it was not the original color.

Every corner of the photos was filled with distorted gray faces. It was after this superposition that could trigger people's intensive phobia that the color of the picture was as dark as ink under the visual effect.

Looking carefully, you can also find that the faces were distorted because they were moving at high speed.

After clarifying this point, you can then glimpse the trajectory of their movement from the deeper contours-

In several parallel arcs like dragons and rainbows, they emerged from the scarecrows piled up like corpses on the ground, rushed in the same direction, broke through the edge of the photo, and no one knew where the end was.

Qi Si waited for Tang Yu and Lin Chen to finish looking at this set of photos, silently pushed them aside, and pushed a new set of photos in front of the two.

This set of photos was also obscured by the crowded faces, and the moving trajectory was similar in shape to the first set of photos, but in the opposite direction.

They came from outside the picture, and poured into the tiger-shaped scarecrow on the ground with great momentum.

In the latest set of photos, the cast scarecrows stood up and bathed in the morning light.

Time turned from night to day in an instant!

"In this way, the mechanism of this copy is clear." Lin Chen murmured and concluded, "At midnight, the ghosts in all the scarecrow shells change together, some leave, and some go in.

"They may not have so much time to choose a specific scarecrow, or they have no memory and consciousness to choose, so they are basically randomly possessed.

"The same ghost may have to change a shell every day, and the identity and memory are inherent in the shell. So from our perspective, the identities of the townspeople change back and forth."

Qi Si nodded, and simply told the experience of last night half-truthfully, erasing the existence of hatred, and focusing on the situation of Yanghua Town ushering in daylight after midnight.

He looked around at the two of them and said calmly, "I don't know if you still remember that the night before yesterday, near midnight, the ghosts outside the mansion turned into black smoke and wreaked havoc. The next day, we found the same mountain of corpses behind the mansion in the east of the town.

"I suspect that the ghosts lingering on the corpses are the source of the ghosts possessed on the scarecrow. The ghosts in the west of the town become townspeople after midnight, while the ghosts in the east of the town are active before midnight.

"At midnight, the original ghosts on the scarecrow flew to the east of the town and lived in the mountain of corpses in the east of the town; the ghosts in the west of the town ran out of the mountain of corpses, possessed the scarecrow, and lived like a living person, enjoying their daytime.

He lowered his eyes and stroked his fingers: "From this, it seems that all the townspeople are ghosts, and they have to use the scarecrow as a body to pretend to be a living person. All it takes is a fire, and it's easy to burn them all clean."

Tang Yu frowned and asked, "Those ghosts want to live like living people, so they possess the scarecrow, which is understandable. But why do we have to divide into two groups to take turns possessing? Can't we just make a few more scarecrows? "

"Not enough space." Qi Si raised his eyelids and looked at the ceiling, "Whether before or after midnight, the townspeople's activity space is in the west of the town, and the east of the town belongs to Xiyi's mirror space.

"And the number of townspeople is just as much as the number of people, and they can occupy the entire Yanghua Town. Since half of the town has been allocated to others, they can only make a fuss and live in batches."

Tang Yu: "The urban planning of this town is really thoughtful."

Lin Chen thought for a moment and asked: "Xiyi is silent and colorless, and generally does not interfere with other existences. Why are they arranged alone in the east of the town?"

"Who knows? Maybe someone is afraid of Xiyi..."

Qis said casually and changed the subject: "There is another thing that can be made clear: this copy is shrouded in a huge illusion. Not only can we not see the real world, with ruins as a prosperous town; those townspeople are also confused by illusions and cannot see what a certain existence does not want them to see.

"They can't see the corpse behind the mansion, and they can't see the scene of the other half of the day; after midnight last night, the group of townspeople who were newly possessed by the scarecrow could not see my existence.

"Why do you think this is?"

"For stability." Lin Chen blurted out.

He paused for a moment and then whispered, "I remember it was written in the Tao Te Ching: 'The ancients who were good at practicing Taoism did not do so to enlighten the people, but to make them ignorant. The people are difficult to govern because they are too smart.' The less the truth the people know, the easier it is to manage them, and there will be less chaos."

He paused and looked at Qisi: "By the way, Brother Lin, the sentence 'Seeing and not seeing is called Yi, hearing and not being known is called Xi'. This sentence also comes from the Tao Te Ching. I wonder if there is any difference between the two. There will be a correlation.

“But now I have a stronger and stronger feeling that this copy seems to be based on the ideas of the Taoist Tao Te Ching to build a peach blossom garden hidden in the world.

"Ghosts, monsters, and foreigners can all exist and enjoy themselves without interfering with each other. The highly respected Master Meng has not appeared for a long time and lives a simple life, governed by inaction. The identities of ghosts and monsters are randomly swapped every day and let nature take its course.

"But many clues are contradictory. In the letters we found on the first day, whether it was the belief in resisting foreigners or the subsequent decision-making to strengthen the wall and clear the country, they are all Confucian ideas. To escape the war and join the tiger's attack is in line with the concept of harsh government and fierce rule. Yu Hu's purpose..."

Lin Chen said everything that came to his mind like a bamboo tube pouring beans, which earned him a look of awe from Tang Yu next to him.

"You know a lot. How did you do it? Even if you prepared outside the dungeon and immersed it in the designated dungeon, it's not that exaggerated, right?"

Lin Chen smiled sheepishly: "Maybe it's because I'm still a college student. The school library has relatively complete information, so I just memorize it when I have nothing to do. In fact, I don't know much, and I haven't memorized many things yet..."

"...Are you sure you are a college student and not a high school student? I remember when I was in college, I even gave back my high school knowledge to the teacher."

"Haha, isn't this just for a weird game..."

While the two were arguing, Qisi put away the photos scattered on the wooden bed, turned around and walked out of the room.

He walked downstairs unhurriedly and walked towards the front door of the residence. He saw an old man in black raincoat and a scholar in green walking in one after the other.

The old man was carrying a bunch of keys. It seemed that he had come to manage the mansion after the little old lady who died, and there was a high probability that he would not survive the night.

The scholar has an unfamiliar face, but looks familiar to the players.

He carried a jar of wine and put it on the table in his residence. He smiled at Qisi and said, "My lord, Li Yi, Master Meng asked me to deliver good wine to some martyrs. I will lead some of them there later." Find the tiger demon's lair."

He undoubtedly has the memories of the first two scholars, but his personality is different.

Qisi gave him a friendly smile, walked past him and walked out of the mansion door, looking to the east.

Not long after, a figure wearing a purple skirt appeared at the intersection, holding a lantern and walking towards the residence.

Qiu Xin, who had been away from the team for nearly two days, arrived on time as agreed with Qis last night. (End of chapter)