Chapter 34: Human Skin

Lu Qi: "Peach wood antiques?"

Shen Qingcheng: "Yes, yes! Peach wood antiques would definitely work!"

Lu Qi hadn’t paid attention to what kind of wood the furniture in his space was made of, just directly buying what was pleasing to the eye.

And he hadn’t ever switched his furniture. He didn’t pay much attention to such things, so he was still using the set he bought when he first visited the mall.

But he did remember that there had been a large carved bed¹ of peach wood² in the shopping mall's life category.

He broke eye contact with Shen Meiren. "Don’t have any."

"I’m not taking it for no reason! You provide the materials and I'll do the work, so it’s half-half, okay? We both give the same amount!" Shen Qingcheng continued to lobby him.

If it was produced by Shen-tianshi, it would be high quality.

Lu Qi: "No."

"Oh, that's such a pity," he said as he secretly glanced at his expression. Seeing that he was unmoved, "I originally wanted to gift the first finished product to Lu-dage when I was done carving."

Lu Qi's eyes flashed, but he didn't say anything.

Shen Qingcheng gave up completely--if he didn't have it, then so be it. Anyway, the furniture he had just replaced had not been used up yet, and when he was done, he’d have the survival points for better wood!

He cheered up again, humming the little girl’s brainwashing tune, and continued to carve slowly with his head down, "Raising pigs, raising pigs, pigs that are white and fat~ Peel the skin, roast the meat, and make new clothes from the skin~ "

His voice was clear and soft, and his low humming was much better than the little girl's broken gong of a voice. Without listening carefully to the lyrics, it almost sounded like someone whispering coquettishly in your ear.

The players, including Lu Qi, were at a loss for words. Lu Qi's forehead twitched and he was speechless.

If he had to sing, couldn’t he have chosen a different song? The players didn’t dare to speak out: the other party had seen through the facade of the "roasted suckling pig" from the very beginning. Maybe he was a hidden boss, how could they dare to offend him?

Shen Qingcheng spent the whole afternoon practicing. When he got stiff, he stood up, shook himself out and jumped once or twice to warm up, while Lu Qi went to go find some parallel bars for physical training after having stayed seated for so long.

The palm-sized peach wood sword gradually took shape under Shen Qingcheng’s hands, and he blew the excess sawdust off. Different talismans were engraved on the front and back of the small sword, and it was small and exquisite, with two taijitu³ engraved on the handle.

A smile spread across his face and he raised his head, calling out to the man who was still doing fitness training, "Lu Qi, I'm done! Hiss!"

He’d cut himself with the last stroke of the knife, a consequence of getting overexcited.

The dark blood beaded up and dripped from his fingertips onto the sword. Shen Qingcheng felt distressed--his blood was very precious, okay!

Pressing the wound to the body of the small sword to stem the bleeding, he raised it and smiled at the man who approached: "I'm done!"

Because of the exercise, Lu Qi had taken off his coat and was wearing only a thin black shirt, radiating waves of heat from his body. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. "You’re injured?"

Shen Qingcheng said indifferently, "It's nothing, just a small wound."

Lu Qi was a little surprised. He’d expected that the other party would raise his finger pitifully and call out in pain, and then beg him to blow⁴ on it.

He was so calm this time?

For this reason, he even glanced over at Shen Meiren again.

Shen Qingcheng mistakenly thought that Lu Qi was looking at his finished product, so when he saw that his finger had stopped bleeding, he handed him the small sword.

The small sword’s body was light yellow. In addition to its own natural texture, it was also engraved with many strange patterns. Regardless of some splinters that hadn’t been sanded away and were still a little prickly, it was indeed a unique handicraft.

Shen Qingcheng: "How about it, doesn’t it look good?"

Lu Qi: "En."

Shen Qingcheng: "Then I'll gift it to you."

Lu Qi hesitated for two seconds. He knew that Shen Meiren would not give up easily if he failed to achieve his goal, so he put his coat back on and stowed the sword in his pocket.

Shen Qingcheng retracted his gaze with satisfaction--what a waste it would’ve been to throw away something that was stained with his blood.

Noticing that most of the players had already tired of exercise and were starting to sit and rest, Shen Qingcheng said, "They still know how to raise animals scientifically, with a reasonable mix of diet and exercise, tsk tsk tsk."

Lu Qi glanced at the players scattered on the field, and said calmly, "People are lazy. For them, this place is safer than the room where they rest at night."

The fact was that there was a possibility of encountering a faceless ghost who could take their lives while in their room, but there have been no accidents in the field so far.

So those players were unwittingly relaxing there, without even realizing it.

Shen Qingcheng evaluated himself: "I'm relaxed too." His little wooden sword was proof.

But Lu Qi said, "You are different from them, this doesn’t count as dangerous to you."

"That's right, after all, I have Lu-dage, but they don't!" He blew a rainbow fart.

Lu Qi’s head hurt.

It darkened early during the winter. When the sky had begun dimming, it was already approaching night.

The servants who were standing guard outside the field withdrew one after another, indicating that the event time had elapsed.

Shen Qingcheng looked in the direction the servants had disappeared to, and bumped the arm of the person beside him, "Are they going to prepare dinner?"

Lu Qi: "Maybe."

Shen Qingcheng: "Let's go and see?" He wanted to see how the food was made.

The two followed the group of servants from a distance.

The servants' destination seemed to be the kitchen. After they left the field, they walked straight to it, but Shen Qingcheng and Lu Qi both knew that it was just an empty shell.

When the last servant had turned the corner, the two sped up, but were startled by the scene they were met with.

The servants were gone.

Just a few seconds was not enough time for these people to have completely disappeared from their sight, but they had indeed vanished.

At the threshold of a small door in the distance were two legs in white stockings and black leather shoes, lying on the ground and peeking out of the doorway. At that moment, they were being dragged away, disappearing little by little.

The legs were shriveled and sunken in. The flesh under the skin seemed to be missing, leaving only two empty skins.

The small door was connected to the kitchen. When they got close, they heard a few wuwuwu calls.

A human skin wearing black and white clothes was crumpled, abandoned, on the ground. Its face retained all of its facial features⁵, and its eyes were staring straight at the roof.

There was a row of hooks for hanging knives on the wall next to it. Those hooks were full of human skins, uniformly dressed in black and white.

No, there was still one empty, the one that belonged to the human skin on the ground, which had not had enough time to be hung up.

The roof was just an ordinary roof. Shen Qingcheng looked at the space, which, except for the row of human skins, was no different from the last time he had come here. "So this is actually a cloakroom?"

A cloakroom for those unknown animals to change "clothes" in.

What was hidden under their human skins?

When the two returned to the lobby, dinner had already been served on the long table, and the players who had been fairly relaxed in the afternoon were sitting at the table with ugly expressions.

Behind them, eleven servants in black and white clothes stood quietly, with expressionless faces and dull eyes.

Shen Qingcheng asked in a low voice, "If we went back to the kitchen now, do you think the “clothes” inside would still be there?"

Lu Qi: "They wouldn’t be."

"Alas." Shen Qingcheng sighed. After all, he had been just a step behind, and he had missed the opportunity to reveal the true faces of the servants.

However, this incident also allowed Shen Qingcheng to realize that the "mask" in "Masquerade⁶" did not only refer to the four main NPCs.

He was silent for a long time. Lu Qi theorized, "The faceless ghost may now be controlled by the NPC named Tu⁷."

"A NPC is instructing the faceless ghost to kill the players? Also, among the animals that have appeared, except for the powerful big bear, none of them seem to show any killing strength."

Shen Qingcheng stopped regretting immediately, and said with great interest, "Then shall we stay up tonight and wait for the rabbit⁸?"

Last night, a player had heard the sound of their window being pried open, and the red faceless ghost was very likely to appear again that night.

It wasn’t a big deal if it didn’t show up--that would just prove that you wouldn’t necessarily die after hearing the window being broken into.

Lu Qi nodded, "Okay."

For that night’s action, Shen Qingcheng, who was worried about oversleeping, simply stayed awake and waited, exploring his room to pass the time.

He had done a cursory inspection last time and hadn’t paid much attention after finding out that the room didn’t have any "dirty things" and that it had no furniture. This time, he was bored and began rummaging around, and he found something strange.

There were holes the size of a baby's fist in the room, behind the wardrobe, under the bed, and under the sink in the bathroom.

The edges of the hole were irregular, and there was soil and gravel scattered on the ground, which showed that the holes had been added after the castle had been built.

He used his terminal to tell Lu Qi the news. After searching his own room, Lu Qi replied that there were none in his room.

This made Shen Qingcheng feel very strange. Could it be a coincidence?

"There are no coincidences in horror games," Lu Qi said when the two met in the corridor in the middle of the night.

Shen Qingcheng's focus was not on that. He looked around: the corridor was deep and quiet, only the wall lamp overhead giving off a dim lighting.

He approached the man and lowered his voice, "Don’t you think it looks like we’re having an affair⁹?"

This action brought their two bodies very close together, and the shadows on the ground touched shoulders and heads, like they were stuck together.

Shen Qingcheng’s eyes widened when he realized this. Now it looked even more like it!

He was staring at the ground eagerly, but the shadow belonging to Lu Qi suddenly took two steps back, and the head-to-head shadows separated.

Shen Qingcheng raised his head in confusion, only to see Lu Qi's indifferent profile.

Lu Qi said: "There are no other players here, don't talk nonsense."

Shen Qingcheng thought to himself: How can I talk nonsense? I said it looked like it, not that it was! And what does what I say have to do with whether there are other players around?

He was about to retort--

Chi--

Chi--

The familiar tooth-throbbing sound of metal rubbing against the floor rang in the depths of the hallway, where the light couldn't reach it.

Shen Qingcheng and Lu Qi stopped their conversation and hid to the side, waiting for the red faceless ghost at the other end of the corridor to appear.

Chi--

Chi--

The first thing that appeared was a shadow that was two meters high. The shadow was cast on the wall, narrow at the top and wide at the bottom, with loose hair and a long hook that was dragging on the ground.

Both of them were puzzled: the shadow didn't match the faceless ghost they had seen in the low building.

At that time, the whole body of the faceless ghost had been stripped clean, and there was no hair at all.

And why did the wide thing at the bottom look like a skirt?

The faceless ghost in the depths of the corridor was getting closer and closer, and gradually came to the area under the light. It dragged its long hook and moved into Shen Qingcheng and Lu Qi’s sight.

Long hair and green eyes, a colorful dress, half the original height… wasn’t this “faceless ghost” just the little girl named Ying Ying?

She had a weird smile on her face. Chi--chi--

Step by step, she walked to Shen Qingcheng and Lu Qi’s hiding place, tilted her head, and turned her dark green eyes towards Shen Qingcheng:

“Why were you disobedient?”

TLN:

¹ A carved bed (雕花大床) is a classical canopy bed made of wood.

Source

² Peach wood (桃木) is used more or less interchangeably with mahogany.

³ Taijitu (太极图) is the symbol/diagram that represents taiji, a Chinese philosophy about the state of the universe and the interaction of matter and space/body and mind. While the yinyang symbol is technically only one version of the second of five parts that constitute the full diagram, it is also sometimes referred to simply as the taijitu. The bagua (mentioned in Chapter 13) is a version of the fourth section.

Source

⁴ Remember, in China, instead of kissing an injury better, they blow on it.

⁵ Literally “five organs” (五官). Said organs are the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and tongue (or alternately, skin).

⁶ “Masquerade” (假面舞会) can be decomposed into “false face” or “mask” (假面) and “dance event” or “ball” (舞会).

⁷ Literally “painted” (涂).

⁸ Inexact homophone to the above word. Tú (涂) and tù (兔) have slightly varying pronunciation.

⁹ Literally “stealing love” (偷情).