PSP Chapter 37: Tomb

Shen Qingcheng finally realized that something was wrong; why did he keep en-ing? He looked at the condescending man dumbfoundedly, "What’s with you?"

His appearance was very traditionally beautiful¹, with a pair of long eyebrows that were neither thick nor sparse, and his eyes were particularly attractive.

Double eyelids, slender eyes that tilted upwards, a smile like starlight, an affectionate appearance even when unsmiling--he seemed clean and transparent, his outgoing personality only emphasizing it.

Lu Qi's handsomeness was different from his. Lu Qi had high browbones and deep eye sockets, and was deeply, masculinely handsome². Therefore, when he stared at a person silently, with his eyes downcast, it gave off a great sense of oppression.

There was a smile lingering on the corners of his slightly raised lips. Lu Qi's eyes fell on the upward curve, and his Adam's apple bobbed up and down.

"Shen Meiren," he spit out in a hoarse voice.

Shen Qingcheng leaned forward, his intonation rising, and asked suspiciously, "En?"

The two had gotten closer as a result, but Lu Qi took a step back. He looked away and stepped to the side, his tone returning to normal, "Sit properly."

Shen Qingcheng looked down at himself: his butt was indeed sitting on the bed, his legs were indeed hanging by the side of the bed. He wasn’t sitting on the ground, nor was he dirtying the quilt.

So he raised his head and said, "I'm seated!"

Lu Qi clasped Shen Qingcheng's shoulders to straighten his body, then put his hands back on his lap, and repeated, "Sit properly."

Shen Qingcheng, who was now sitting with his hands on his knees like a primary school student, said, "Lu Qi, your taste is really strange."

Lu Qi was silent.

This primary school student posture was really uncomfortable. Shen Qingcheng couldn't even hold on for a minute, so he gave up and fell back, spreading his whole body on the bed.

"I was just talking to you about the fourth NPC, don't change the subject." He realized after speaking why Lu Qi hadn’t been surprised at all, and he swept his gaze sharply towards him, "You already knew that the fourth NPC was a rabbit?"

Lu Qi: "En."

Shen Qingcheng sat up and returned to his original posture, "Since when?"

Lu Qi: "When I knew that his surname was Tu, I was just guessing, and I was sure when I found the white hair in the hole."

"You didn't tell me!" he complained.

Lu Qi: "You like to think for yourself."

Shen Qingcheng denied, "No, I like it when you directly tell me the answers. It was you who told me to highlight the key points!"

The absent-minded man raised his eyebrows, "En?"

Shen Qingcheng laughed and said seriously, "Because what other people say is not credible, it can easily be misleading."

Shen Qingcheng felt very happy for a moment, but Lu Qi remained silent. He lifted the packed suitcase beside the bed, "Let's go."

There was no one else in the hallway, and it was unclear if they had long since packed up and moved to the appropriate rooms.

Shen Qingcheng didn't understand this point, and after returning to his room, he queried, "What’s the point of making all players live in the red masked players’ room?"

Lu Qi closed the door, unpacked his clothes from the suitcase, and hung them in the closet next to the clothes that were already there. He turned around and asked, "Red masked and white masked, what's the difference between these two players' rooms?"

Shen Qingcheng: "One has holes and the other doesn't. What are they planning to do with these holes?"

"En," Lu Qi nodded and put his white mask on the bedside table, "Your mask?"

Shen Qingcheng bent down and took a red mask out of the drawer under the cabinet.

The two masks were placed side by side, one with a white mark on a red background, and one with a red mark on a white background.

Shen Qingcheng: "They look like they match very well."

Lu Qi told himself to get used to ignoring Shen Meiren's coquettish words, and he looked at the two masks thoughtfully.

Red mask, white mask.

A room with holes, a room without holes.

Wei Tian and Xiao Liu died in two different ways.

There were two types of paintings in the rooms.

These distinctions should point in two different directions.

For example, why were these animals targeting humans?

Shen Qingcheng was very bored in his room. Fortunately, he could play games on the mountain, although he couldn't connect to the Internet. He opened his terminal and watched some videos before closing the terminal without hesitation.

The window of the room was small and high. Lu Qi looked at the sky outside the window: a thick layer of gray clouds had accumulated above them. There was no snow or wind, so it wasn’t too cold. "Let’s go out?"

Hearing that, Shen Qingcheng rubbed his stomach. He wasn’t very hungry yet, but he was bored in the room, so he might as well go out for a walk.

The other players huddled together and stayed in their rooms, anxious or fearful and alert to the "not-so-good things" that the little girl had mentioned, but Shen Qingcheng and Lu Qi changed into their clothes and shoes and left the castle.

On the way, Shen Qingcheng thought it was too quiet not to talk, and said, "Lu Qi, let's chat~"

Lu Qi must be very bored too!

Lu Qi, who was thinking about why the animals were against the humans, glanced sideways. "What do you want to ask?"

Shen Qingcheng's eyes lit up. Lu-dage really understood him! "Let's talk about the real world, how long have you been in this game?"

Lu Qi thought back and said, "About 3 years."

3 years! He actually had to measure his time in years!

Shen Qingcheng was amazed, "I heard Chen Ge say that the game will drop a real-world coupon, which allows players to return to the real world. Have you gone back this year?"

Lu Qi: "I don't remember."

Shen Qingcheng: "Ang³?"

Lu Qi glanced at the person beside him, and explained, "The game does drop the real-world coupon, but never in my rewards."

Shen Qingcheng thought for a while before he understood what the other party meant.

If you never had a coupon, you could just say that you haven't gone back. Why would you need to say that you don't remember?

The meaning of Lu Qi's words was that it was impossible for him to have passed his copies this year without getting the coupon, but he had no memory of using it.

Indeed, not receiving a single coupon in an entire year, how black⁴ would that be?

Alas, saying it simply wasn’t enough, he just had to make him think about it.

Shen Qingcheng: "Then do you remember how you got into the game?" Did he enter the game alive or dead?

Lu Qi: "En, I was training."

"I came in because I was fighting with someone!" With Li Gui⁵, the final result was that Li Gui's spirit was scattered and he himself died, and it could be said that both sides had lost. Shen Qingcheng shook his head, heart full of sorrow.

He almost fell. As Lu Qi helped him up, he saw his expression, "You lost?"

"I didn't lose, but I didn't win either," Shen Qingcheng said indifferently. "Speaking of which, what is going on in this game? What is the basis for its selection?"

Lu Qi: "Unclear."

Just talking and walking, the two of them arrived at their destination before they knew it.

They went to the barren tombstones that Hong Ganglie had mentioned.

The weather was bleak, and thin crows were circling the old trees with dead vines on them. In the distance where the plants had withered, black and gray tombstones stood in the vast white snow. Some were exposed, and some had only showed a little of their black and gray tops.

"You stand here," Lu Qi warned.

Shen Qingcheng nodded. He was self-aware, and knew that his balance wasn’t very good, so he just watched as Lu Qi lifted his foot and stepped into the group of tombstones.

His leather boots made a crunching sound as he trod on the snow. Lu Qi walked steadily to a nearby tombstone with his long legs and brushed off the obscuring snow on the tombstone.

Family Progenitor.

He took another step, continuing on to the next stone.

Beloved Wife.

Lu Qi looked at five tombstones in a row. Some of the inscriptions on the monuments were very new, and some of them had much of their paint peeling off. They were the progenitor, the beloved wife, the father, and the parents. The last stele was for the beloved son.

But the last one couldn’t have been erected by the hostess, because he did not find a "Beloved Daughter" monument next to it.

The hostess had two children, one male and one female, so it was impossible to erect a gravestone for one child alone.

He raised his eyes and looked around. There was no way to see the edge of the vast white snow, nor could he see the end of the black-gray monuments at a glance.

Lu Qi kept searching and searching aimlessly. His purpose in coming here wasn’t to verify whether the hostess had erected a monument for her child.

He turned his head to look at the man waiting outside the group of tombstones, glancing eagerly at the man inside, and then patted off the snow that had fallen on him and walked back.

Shen Qingcheng got closer and quickly asked, "What is it?"

Lu Qi: "Indeed, the monuments really aren’t from the same time period."

Shen Qingcheng: "And?"

Lu Qi mutely looked at him.

Shen Qingcheng looked very innocent, "I was just asking casually. So why are we here?"

His eyebrows pinching together, Lu Qi said, "The monument here should have been erected by the four NPCs."

Shen Qingcheng: "En? I’d only guessed that those four NPCs were not the ones bought by the master, but had already been here for a long time."

First of all, bears were non-tradable animals. Even if the master had bought and skinned animals for the novel, it was impossible to even think about buying a bear.

Also, the skin that the little girl threw away.

They hadn't seen the human skin with eyeballs and hair, but presumably they’d found the group of tombstones.

Since the human skin really existed, the colorful eyeballs and hair on it also existed.

Disregarding the black-haired and dark-eyed players and the castle owner's family of four, those colorful eyes and hair could only have been obtained by the little girl from others.

Therefore, these four refined animals must have been there long ago, and they would not have been bought by the male owner.

"Correct," Lu Qi affirmed Shen Qingcheng's guess, "Let's not talk about whether the previous owners of the castle were killed by these four NPCs yet. If it was any random person, would they bury their family here after discovering a group of tombstones here?"

Buried where? In a group of tombstones, a mass grave.

It would make more sense if the tombstone group had not been found, but how could anything be buried here if it hadn’t been discovered?

Shen Qingcheng said, "If it were me, I would choose not to buy it."

Who would want to buy an old house with a mass grave nearby?

The result was obvious. Normal people wouldn’t bury their family members in such a place, similar to a mass grave, so only the NPCs could have erected the stones.

Reasonable and wellfounded--Shen Qingcheng was immediately persuaded, and then his next question emerged, "Why were they erecting these monuments?"

Anyway, there was no way it would be a discovery of conscience.

Lu Qi turned back and looked at the large group of tombstones, his eyebrows drawn together slightly, and he did not answer.

It turned out that he had heard some voices coming from the ground.

After their delay, it was getting late, and the sky was getting darker and darker. Snowflakes gradually began to float across the sky, blown around by the wind.

After dinner, the two had enough of a snowfowl⁶ to save for breakfast in the morning, and they went back to the castle. It was already dark.

Just like the night of the first day of the copy, it was still Lu Qi who led Shen Qingcheng towards the castle. They stood in the dark, and there was a little gleam of light in the castle.

The two walked into the hall in the dark. The hall was very quiet, the fire in the fireplace already out because no one was maintaining it, and an ember was flickering under the ashes.

The thicker the ash was, the better it would be for beggar’s chicken⁷!

Shen Qingcheng kept this menu in mind, and followed Lu Qi upstairs. As soon as he stepped on the second floor, he heard a familiar sound.

He looked at the red humanoid creature at the end of the corridor, and silently hid himself behind the other man.

This time, it was real.

TLN:

¹ “Fresh and beautiful” (清隽), originating from the book 宋书·礼志一.

² Lit. “handsome with a deep silhouette” (轮廓深邃的英俊), meaning a sort of sharp/strong-featured appearance that is considered attractive in men.

³ Lit. “expensive (昂), used here as an imitative word.

⁴ Lit. “black” (黑), means unlucky.

⁵ Lit. “severe ghost” (厉鬼), Li Gui is mentioned in Chapter 1 as the ghost that Shen Qingcheng was trained to kill.

⁶ There are 5 species of snowfowl in the genusTetraogallus, 3 of which are endemic to China. They are ground-nesting birds in the pheasant family that live at high altitudes, and are similar to quail and partridges.

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⁷ A Chinese dish of a chicken that is stuffed, wrapped in lotus leaves and coated in clay, then baked at low heat for a long time. Commonly, it is buried in the embers of a fire, sort of like barbacoa.

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Chinese tombstones are fairly unique in that they often have inbuilt spaces for incense burning or offerings of food/flowers/paper money.

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