PSP Chapter 39: Dissatisfied

On the sixth night in the copy, the lighting in the hall was dim.

In front of the fireplace, a little girl in a colorful dress sat on a high chair, her dangling legs swaying rhythmically with the tune she was humming. The corners of her mouth tipped up in a smile as she patiently waited for 11 humans to walk down the stairs.

Behind her stood a man named Da Xiong, who didn't speak much.

The long table in the hall was gone, and servants stood on both sides with candles.

The surroundings were very quiet, and the players walked towards the empty space one after another, not knowing what the little girl was going to do.

"Da Xiong!" the little girl called out, and she jumped off the high chair with the help of Da Xiong.

Holding a candlestick, she walked briskly to a group of players, then stopped and approached a tall male player to sniff.

Hong Ganglie resisted his impulse to retch and took a step back, looking at her vigilantly.

The little girl did not continue. With a satisfied smile on her face, she stepped away to sniff the next player.

One by one, the quick-minded players realized that the little girl was smelling the people with red masks.

The players with white masks were relieved, and the player with red masks felt their hearts inexplicably jump.

The little girl sniffed 6 people with red masks in a row, and finally she came to Shen Qingcheng.

She raised her head and said to Shen Qingcheng with a smile: "Out of all the humans, I like you the most, do you know why?"

Shen Qingcheng responded with a smile, "Because my skin is the best looking."

The little girl was excited, "Correct!"

Shen Qingcheng: "Thank you, I also think my skin is super nice~"

The little girl's expression froze, "Hmph, sooner or later it will be mine!"

After she finished speaking, she ignored him and leaned in to smell Shen Qingcheng's body.

Next to him, Lu Qi moved, but Shen Qingcheng stopped him.

"Huh?" The little girl came closer again with a puzzled look on her face.

"It’s not here!" she screamed, startling the sleepy and yawning players in the hall, "Why isn’t it here!"

The little girl was so angry she jumped around the hall several times, candlestick still in her hand, then finally returned to Shen Qingcheng and Lu Qi, staring at them fiercely, "There will be one last meeting tonight!"

What type of meeting was happening for the last time, the little girl did not explain.

It was the night of the sixth day of the copy, and the next day would be time for the dance, but the players still had no clues about the story line, nor could they guess what would happen tomorrow.

As they went upstairs, some players shouted with agitated emotions, with Hong Ganglie as a representative, and there were also players who cried in despair.

After returning to the room, Shen Qingcheng recollected the strange situation just then, and said, "Their emotions have been affected."

Lu Qi: "En."

Shen Qingcheng turned around and looked at the man, "Guess what I'm thinking now?"

Lu Qi: "Pregnancy."

"You guessed it." After yawning, Shen Qingcheng was suddenly horrified, "I won't have it too, will I?"

Although he knew that the pregnancy was mostly an illusion created by the rabbit fur last night, insomnia, retching, and mood swings would also be very uncomfortable!

"..." Lu Qi looked down at his flat belly, "No."

Shen Qingcheng: "I couldn’t fool you." He spoke softly, walked to the bed and sat down.

Shen Qingcheng couldn't be more clear about whether his body condition was abnormal or not.

"The purpose of the four NPCs is obvious," he said while sitting on the bed. "They peeled the skin, roasted the meat, made new clothes from the skin, and fed the meat to the piglets. What’s left to do after killing them?"

The little girl used to sing those lyrics, and now it seems they could find the answer in them.

What to do after slaughtering? Breeding.

The little girl sang about raising pigs more than once, and later they found out that piglets meant players, but they didn't think about breeding.

Thinking about it, there were hints of everything, as suggested by the pictures of pregnant animals in the room.

Raising piglets corresponded to the players eating well and drinking well, as well as getting reasonable exercise.

When the piglets grew up, they went through estrus, which corresponded to the animals’ sensual cries and the abnormal reactions of the players after soaking in the hot spring.

Matching and breeding corresponded to the selection of dance partners and how players could not leave the room all day and night.

This process was extremely minimized on the player.

According to this order, should the player give birth to a piglet next?

A rough man like Hong Ganglie with a big belly and a motherly face?

A rough man like Hong Ganglie with a big belly--so disgusted that he would want to die?

Shen Qingcheng really couldn't accept this mental picture. He shuddered, goosebumps all over his body, and he felt chills.

He shook his head to shake the image out of his mind.

"I think these four NPCs may have gone to the human school for advanced studies, and they even know about sustainable development," Shen Qingcheng said. "By the way, you said that you went to other players' rooms in the morning to see the situation. The paintings in their rooms were also of pregnant animals?"

Lu Qi: "I saw it earlier. The animals are either pregnant or have bright fur."

Shen Qingcheng: "Then why do they do all this? In terms of the fur, it can be understood that some humans like to wear fur, so they are not angry that their own kind is killed and skinned. How do you explain pregnancy?"

Lu Qi reminded, "Rabbits breed very quickly and are often bred for food."

"!" Shen Qingcheng suddenly realized and he hit himself on the head. Why didn't he turn that last corner? The piglets were fed meat, it was meat!

But it turned out rabbits reproduced very quickly? He thought it was the mice that multiplied faster.

So far they had figured out the main storyline.

Four shrewd animals hated humans because they bred animals for food and skin. They occupied this castle and killed everyone who came to the castle.

He Wei and Gao Shulin failed the mission because the family of four in the castle did die to those animals in human skins, but that was only a small part of it.

In the masquerade, the mask referred to the outermost layer of human skin that the four NPCs that looked like humans wore.

Sure enough, as Lu Qi had said, the storyline of a high-difficulty copy was generally very simple, and they had complicated it themselves.

Shen Qingcheng: "Lu Qi, the main storyline is revealed."

Lu Qi: "En."

Shen Qingcheng: "When will you submit the mission?"

Lu Qi made a gesture to touch his terminal; Shen Qingcheng rushed over to restrain him, and when the man looked over, elongating each word, he shouted, "Lu-dage~"

Lu Qi: "En."

He began to act, "Why do you want me to be alone in the copy? I can't walk (in the snow), I can't cook, and if there's no food in the castle, I'll starve to death!"

Lu Qi: "You can choose to leave the copy immediately."

Shen Qingcheng: "But I only get one day to rest when I go back. After the rest, I have to go to the next copy. I'm so tired."

I'm just a kitty who just wants to stay on vacation after retirement! I don't want to work all day¹.

Lu Qi turned his head, "What do you want to say?"

Caught²!

Shen Qingcheng stopped the show, "Can you not leave the copy immediately after submitting the task?"

Lu Qi lowered his eyes and pondered, then raised his head after a moment, "Give me a reason to stay."

"Hmm." Shen Qingcheng took back his hand from where he was pressing on the man's arm; it was over, there didn’t seem to be any reason to leave it behind? Lu Qi didn’t lacks anything.

He touched his chin and thought seriously, "Relax after completing the task? A reminder for the future not to eat human flesh? If there is another rabbit incident, take measures to prevent pregnancy?"

Hey, what kind of tiger and wolf words³ were these?

Lu Qi: "..."

He silently put away the terminal.

Shen Qingcheng: "Aren't you going to submit the mission?"

Lu Qi: "There are still some points of doubt, and I will submit it when I figure them out."

Shen Qingcheng: "..."

Also, in just a few more hours it would be the next day, and they didn’t know what was going to happen at the dance? But from the beginning, Lu Qi wasn’t preparing to hand in the mission right then, and he scared him!

That night, the two of them lay on the bed, neither of them sleeping. Before nightfall, they put out the small fire that had blocked the entrance of the cave. In the middle of the night, there was a familiar rustling sound.

Shen Qingcheng sat upright and silently felt the subtle changes in the air. His face was no longer as playful as usual, his eyebrows slightly raised and his expression very serious.

These rabbits had been killed by Lu Qi before they approached him the previous night. The rabbit fur in his body could not have been from these rabbits. Where had the hairs come from?

If he still had his yinyang eyes, the abnormalities could be seen at a glance. At this time, Shen Qingcheng somewhat missed his yinyang eyes.

But without them, it was still just a bit of a hassle.

The sounds from the hole became more and more obvious. The rabbits seemed to have climbed to the entrance of the hole. Shen Qingcheng suddenly turned his gaze to the drawer of the cabinet next to him.

Seeing this, Lu Qi got out of bed and lit several small fires with a candle.

The rustling sounds disappeared, replaced by the gugugu sounds of the rabbits finding themselves blocked again, but there was a fire at the mouth of the hole, and they couldn't get out again no matter how angry they were.

Lu Qi slid the candle back into the candlestick, turned around and walked to the bedside, bending over and opening the drawer.

Inside were two masks.

He picked up the red mask, "Is it this?"

"En," Shen Qingcheng nodded. There was an evil spirit attached to the mask, not big, and usually not visible, but its fluctuations became obvious as soon as the rabbit approached. "Those rabbits should be distinguishing players based on this."

Lu Qi asked him, "How can we handle it?"

Shen Qingcheng was silent. It seemed that all he could bring out was his own blood? So he took out a silver needle and give himself a prick, and smeared the blood on the mask.

Garbage game, why can't players make their own props? The peach wood furniture in my game space is already pent up⁴!

In the second half of the night, the two of them slept peacefully.

The next day. It had snowed all day the day before, and although it had stopped that day, it was colder because of all the melting snow.

When Shen Qingcheng was awakened by the sound of the servant knocking on the door, he hadn't fully woken up yet. He buried his head in the warm bed and pretended to be dead.

He reached to the side, and found the place next to him was empty.

Lu Qi went out again?

He stuck his head out of the quilt, and his eyes met Lu Qi, who had just come out of the bathroom.

Lu Qi said: "It will probably be very noisy later."

Calculating the time, some players' stomachs should be getting bigger at this very moment, and if they were then woken up by the servants, Shen Qingcheng would be unlikely to be able to fall asleep even if he wanted to continue sleeping.

Sure enough, in the next second, Shen Qingcheng heard the screams from Hong Ganglie next door, like a pig being killed.

"Motherfucker⁵!"

When Shen Qingcheng and Lu Qi arrived in the hall, the players in the hall looked all "normal", if they ignored that half of them were wearing extra thick clothes today and their stomachs were slightly bulging.

The expressions of these players were somewhat unnatural. Shen Qingcheng deliberately observed Hong Ganglie. This tall and sturdy man had an uncontrollable irritability on his face, as if he was going to hurt someone in the next second.

Seeing that Shen Qingcheng was looking at him, he turned his head and gave Shen Qingcheng a vicious look, and then he didn't know what happened, but his expression suddenly turned strange.

Shen Qingcheng noticed that he wanted to touch his stomach but restrained himself, suspecting that his stomach was moving.

Tsk tsk, a belly of rabbit fur.

"Shen Meiren! Shen Meiren!"

At this time, the little girl in the colorful dress floated into the hall excitedly. After she came in, she went straight to Shen Qingcheng, sniffing with her nose.

En?

She frowned and sniffed again.

"Why isn’t it there! Still not there!"

The little girl looked at the man next to Shen Qingcheng angrily, "Lu Qi, why are you so useless?!"

TLN:

¹ Lit. “spin around” (连轴转), means to work around the clock/non-stop.

² Lit. “on road” (上道).

³ Lit. “tiger wolf words” (虎狼之词). Means vulgar words/dirty jokes.

⁴ Lit. “hungry and thirsty”(饥渴难耐), means pent-up/overcome.

⁵ Not literally “motherfucker”, but rather a homophone (艹尼玛) of “fuck your mother” commonly used online to dodge censors.

It's my birthday this week! A bonus chapter will be posted in a few minutes.