A stretch of asphalt road and a roadside shelter. Before Ding Shi could get a clear look at his surroundings, a man's voice reached him: "Someone else is here."
Ding Shi looked toward the voice. The first thing he saw was a man in thin gold-rimmed glasses, tall and slender, with the manner of a refined scholar. Two people stood beside him, a man and a woman. The woman was around thirty, pretty, though not remarkably so. The man was in his twenties, with a crew cut.
The crew-cut man said, "Brother, your side is a spawn point. Don't crowd people."
Ding Shi stepped into the shelter. "What are we supposed to do?"
"No idea," the woman answered. She had arrived only ten seconds ahead of him.
The Yita World had given everyone twenty hours of rest. It had settled their nerves effectively, giving them time to prepare themselves so that nobody would walk into an instance completely wound up. In that respect, the Yita World was being fairly friendly.
At 7:59, a tall, lean man spawned in. He steadied himself and looked at the group. "Hello, everyone. Is this an instance with randomly matched teammates?"
Before anyone answered, the man with glasses said, "There's a minibus."
A minibus appeared around the bend in the road and headed for the shelter. A sign on the passenger seat read: Taoyuan County — Taoyuan Village.
"Taoyuan Village must be where we're going, right?" the lean man said.
"Probably," the crew-cut man replied.
The lean man asked, "Any guesses whether the driver and the ticket collector will be some terrifying corpses?"
Everyone froze. The lean man asked in return, "Haven't you read horror novels? Players might have to survive being hunted by ghosts and spirits, by things so revolting they'd make your skin crawl. Judging by the setup, my guess is Taoyuan Village has already been wiped out and is a ghost village now, but the villagers don't know it. We'll be staying in the homes of villagers with rotting bodies, and we'll have to guard against being killed by the ghost villagers at any moment. We can only clear the place and leave Taoyuan Village after surviving a certain length of time, or after solving the main quest."
The group exchanged glances. The lean man studied them a while, and seeing their bewildered expressions, said, "Remember a few rules: don't eat any meat dishes, don't stay out overnight, and don't casually agree to anything the villagers ask of you."
The minibus pulled up at the shelter and the door opened. After what the lean man had said, nobody could make their legs move. He was in no hurry either; by the conventions of the genre, someone who didn't take him seriously would step up and test the ground.
Ding Shi went first. He stepped onto the footboard and climbed into the minibus. Only the driver was aboard, a cigarette in his mouth, gazing leisurely at the road ahead. He lifted his head at Ding Shi by way of greeting. Ding Shi pointed at the passenger seat. "Can I sit here?"
"Go ahead," the driver said.
Ding Shi sat down, and the rest of them boarded. The driver glanced at the shelter, saw no one else, and drove off.
Ding Shi noted that it was a diesel minibus in good shape, about seventy percent new, with a manual transmission. If his memory served, it was a typical township minibus from the late 1980s or early 1990s. Add the rough asphalt road and the sign at the mountain pass declaring the whole mountain closed, and he could be fairly sure the instance's timeline sat somewhere around the nineties.
Once the minibus was moving, the lean man looked left and right and spoke up. "Meeting like this means we're fated to know each other. Let's introduce ourselves. I'm Li Si."
Li Si looked at the man with glasses. He seemed startled for a moment. "Then can I be Zhang San?"
Li Si realized he'd been misunderstood and was about to explain when Ding Shi said, "Hello, everyone. I'm Wang Wu."
Was this some rule here? The crew-cut man picked up the thread. "Hello, everyone. I'm Zhao Liu."
The woman said, "Hello, everyone. My name is Sun Qi."
Li Si still wanted to explain, but Sun Qi said, "Brother Li Si, what's a player? And what's an instance? Can you explain it to us?"
Seeing all those eager, curious eyes, Li Si got right into the spirit of it. Drawing on his experience from browsing a hundred horror novels, he said, "We're players. As for instances, they come in all shapes and sizes, but there's always one boss. Take our destination being a village, for instance—nine times out of ten Taoyuan Village is some isolated village deep in the mountains. One type is a reflection of reality: the village holds a lot of trafficked women, or a lot of murdered baby girls. Another type is the eerie horror kind, like what I described earlier, where everyone in the village is already dead. Another type is a sacrifice, where the villagers offer us up as sacrifices to some evil god. Another type—"
Ding Shi listened in for the first part, but once Li Si got to Taoyuan Village being an isolated village deep in the mountains, he stopped paying attention to the nonsense and turned to chat with the driver.
Even if this asphalt road had been laid crudely, its whole surface paved in asphalt that would melt in the summer heat, it already showed that Taoyuan Village was not isolated.
The front and rear seats of the minibus were far enough apart that the conversations didn't interfere. The driver wasn't talkative and answered only now and then, and from that Ding Shi formed a basic picture of Taoyuan Village.
Taoyuan Village had more than a hundred households. It backed onto the mountains and faced the plain, and its people mainly grew rice and tobacco. Its economy was at least as good as that of the surrounding villages, and nearly everyone you saw riding a Jialing motorcycle on the road was from Taoyuan Village.
Li Si had gotten one thing right, though: seven days from now, Taoyuan Village would hold a sacrifice. The driver didn't know the particulars, because the villagers of Taoyuan never discussed the sacrifice with outsiders. All he knew was that the village sealed itself off for one day on the day of the sacrifice.
...
Half an hour later, the minibus eased to a stop at the entrance of Taoyuan Village.
The group got off one after another. Beside the spot where they alighted stood a roughly built waiting shelter with several people standing and sitting inside.
An old man of about sixty, dressed in blue, leaning on a cane with one hand, came to meet them. When they had lined up in front of him, he introduced himself. "I'm the village chief of Taoyuan Village. You're students from Yita University, aren't you?"
At the chief's words, a system message arrived for each of them: You are a folklore major at Yita University, and you have come to Taoyuan Village to attend the sacrifice in order to complete your graduation thesis.
Main task: attend the sacrifice.
Method of leaving the instance: at eight in the morning on the eighth day, board the minibus and leave.
Danger level: extremely low.
Main quest: obtain an identity.
Ding Shi was the first to answer. "Yes."
The chief nodded, then began by welcoming them on the village's behalf to this year's sacrifice. Outsiders were originally not permitted to attend the sacrifice, but the folklore professor was his younger cousin, and he also wanted the outside world to learn about Taoyuan Village, so he had overridden the objections of others and agreed to let the students take part. The rules could not be broken, however, so Ding Shi and the others must first hold an identity within the village before they could attend the sacrifice.
The waiting shelter was large, and quite a few people were seated inside. The chief motioned for the group to look to the left. A woman in red was sitting there, her head turned to watch the children playing in the bamboo grove outside the shelter.
The chief called out, "Haitang."
"Coming!" The woman in red, Haitang, turned her head, and Ding Shi was struck dumb by the sight of her: eighteen years old, bright eyes and white teeth, innocent and lovely.
In the modern metropolis one sees nothing but pampered peonies. This wild chrysanthemum of the countryside left everyone present dazed for an instant. Haitang gave them a sweet smile and tilted her head with a touch of shyness, turning away from their stares.
Chapter 3