Chapter 514: 514: The Old Woman

The rain outside keeps falling without pause.

Du Lai puts on the hood to his jacket, an inconspicuous gray outfit, and races forward through the rainy night.

A plaintive woman’s voice comes and goes, weeping and lamenting, piercing the lingering, chilly autumn rain with a biting cold.

Following the sound, he runs to the wall of someone’s courtyard. Sensing that the voice is close by, he deliberately slows his pace, silently searching for the woman singing the opera.

But the night is truly too dark.

It’s raining and there are no lights nearby. The entire village is pitch black and it’s even hard to see the road.n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

As he hesitates, he suddenly feels that the voice is much closer!

As if it’s right behind him!

A scared Du Lai hurries to hide behind a nearby stack of straw bales!

Just after squatting down, he hears the squeaking sound of a cart wheel–

An emaciated old woman, pushing a wooden cart, slowly comes around the corner of a house!

Du Lai’s nerves go taut and he ducks lower, his eyes unblinkingly fixed on the old woman.

In the dimness of the rainy night, he can’t make out the woman’s face, only sensing that she is very old, extremely old… stooped and bone-thin, with disheveled white hair over her shoulders, her stiff and faltering gait makes her seem less than human.

The wooden cart, too, looks old and weather-beaten, soaked through and splattered by mud, as though it was dug out from the earth.

On the cart, covered by a thoroughly wet straw mat, is a faintly discernable skeleton.

—There is a woman named Li, carrying a corpse from the east of the village to the west, and again from west to east, day after day, without rest—

If we combine Fu Miaoxue’s explanation of the opera’s plot with what’s happening, then this old woman pushing the cart is Li, and the corpse on the cart is Li’s husband.

Du Lai holds his breath as he watches the old woman push the cart past him.

As she walks, she sings. Her voice is plaintive and hoarse; it’s hard to imagine that such a sound could carry so far, from the village all the way to the annex of the old scholar’s mansion.

However, in a game like this, nothing out of the ordinary is actually out of the ordinary.

Du Lai stays in place for a while, making sure the sound is far enough away before silently rising up, then quickly returning to the old scholar’s mansion.

…

While Du Lai was away, Fu Miaoxue stayed with Shen Mo and Bai Youwei. She didn’t mind being the third wheel. It was certainly better than sitting alone in her room.

Bai Youwei curiously asks her, “You technically died once, why are you still so afraid of ghosts?”

“I may have died once, but I didn’t become a ghost.” Fu Miaoxue says disdainfully, “I just became a doll, that’s all!”

“You turned into a doll huh… so you lost the game?” Bai Youwei asks, “Did you enter the game with your boyfriend?”

“No,” Fu Miaoxue shakes her head and speaks indifferently, “I entered the game alone. I wasn’t as lucky as you all, I entered a test game.”

“Test game, I’ve heard of it… I’ve heard that there isn’t a single person who has survived a test game,” Bai Youwei continues slowly.

She thinks about something the Rabbit-headed person said.

It said that test games are full of bugs, making it practically impossible to complete. Even if a player was able to complete it, they could never come out alive.

—Just like throwing a group of rabbits into an unfinished experimental cabin. Even if a rabbit survived the experiment, does it deserve to live?

Thinking about it now, the Rabbit-headed person seemed to be more than willing to tell them about the game system, while other Inspectors would either bashfully dodge the topic or not mention it at all–

Why does it act this way? Does it have special privileges, or… does it have an ulterior motive?