Chapter 147: Linjiang Village Countdown (Patreon)

Outside the guesthouse, the sky hung low and grim.

The sun, which moments ago had still managed a thin sliver of light, vanished behind black clouds that came pouring in from every direction.

Within seconds all of Linjiang Village went dark, as if morning had skipped straight to dusk.

The ground under their feet began to tremble.

They watched, appalled, as black water welled up out of the distant fields, out of the village road, even up through the foundations of the houses.

The water was rising faster than it had last night. Much faster.

"Run!" Shido Makoto's shout cut through the gloom, and he broke into a sprint, leading them toward the abandoned ancestral hall on the highest ground in the village.

There wasn't much time left to them.

They ran flat out, splashing through water already over their ankles, and reached the stone steps up to the hall just before it swallowed their knees.

They kicked the ancestral hall's door open.

What waited inside hit them all like a thunderbolt.

Granny Liu hung from the roof beam, head down and feet up in a posture no living body should hold, her hair spilling loose to cover most of her face.

At the noise from the doorway she lifted her head and stretched her mouth into a stiff smile.

Her body had changed. The skin was ashen and dead, the limbs bent at wrong angles.

Worst of all was the tongue.

Grotesquely swollen, it dragged out of her grinning mouth and hung down until it nearly touched the floor.

Dense black water weeds grew thick across the whole length of it, and they were squirming.

The sight crawled across the scalp.

Lin Yan cried out and backed up a step before she could stop herself.

Shirogane Kei and Drunkard had gone white too, palms slick with cold sweat around their weapons.

Shido Makoto didn't give ground to the horror-movie tableau in front of him. He snatched up a length of wood from beside the door and lunged.

Granny Liu was still wearing that malicious smile when he drove the stick straight through the tongue trailing on the floor and pinned it there.

Exorcism by brute force. He was not a man who wasted words.

"Hrgh… hrgaaah!" The pain tore a garbled shriek out of the hanging woman.

Her limbs thrashed wildly, but the pinned tongue held her fast.

Shido Makoto stood over her, looking down. "Who is the ghost?"

With death right there in front of her, a thread of clarity finally surfaced in eyes that malice had owned completely.

She stared up at him as though she were looking at something more frightening than any ghost.

"It's… it's Zhou… Butcher Zhou…"

The last piece of the puzzle, spat out at last.

"Back then… back then it was me… I started it… I said Butcher Zhou's wife… said she was carrying on with a man outside…" Granny Liu confessed it in broken pieces between her screams.

"I was jealous, she was young… jealous that her man could earn…"

"That woman… she had a hard, proud temper… she couldn't stand the whole village pointing and whispering… so she… she put on a pair of red embroidered shoes and hanged herself in her own house…"

"Auntie Zhou… Auntie Zhou hated me… hated every last soul in this village… hated our rotten, gossiping mouths…"

"The night of the flood… she saw it… she saw Mr. Chen drown trying to save people… and she saw the rest of us thinking of nothing but our own skins…"

"She died in that house… holding her grandson, a month old… with her daughter-in-law's body beside her…"

"She wants every one of us who ever told that lie… to die badly…"

Every mystery came apart in that moment.

The dungeon's vengeful Spirit had finally shown its true face.

A pitiable woman whose family had been destroyed by rumor, who had watched the best and the ugliest of human nature on the same night, and who had chosen the most extreme revenge available to her.

Shido Makoto was drawing breath to ask how it could be broken when Granny Liu's body changed again.

It swelled like a balloon, visibly, fast, the veins beneath her skin bulging out one by one.

Her last scream came out shrill. "She's coming… she's coming to collect!"

The words had barely left her.

There was a deafening wet crack.

Granny Liu's body burst apart in front of their horrified eyes.

Reeking black mudwater sprayed across the whole hall.

Her death was a signal. The ground beneath all of Linjiang Village began to shake in earnest.

A deep, grinding rumble rolled up out of the earth.

Tiles rattled down from the ancestral hall's beams, and the bluestone floor split into cracks under their feet.

The next second, countless jet-black columns of water erupted from underground.

"This is bad!" Drunkard yelled.

In the space of a few seconds, all of Linjiang Village became a churning black ocean.

An end-of-the-world set piece out of a disaster film, playing out live in front of every one of them.

The ancestral hall stood on the village's highest point, so it hadn't gone completely under yet, but it was an island now, alone in all that water.

At the center of the black water, over the place where the village square had once been, the surface began to turn, opening into an enormous whirlpool.

Something rose slowly out of the middle of it: a horrifying amalgam of tangled dead men's hair, black water, and spirit money.

Countless twisted human faces surfaced and sank within it, wailing.

At the same moment, the black phones buzzed.

[Survival Countdown: 00:30:00]

[Notice: All surviving players must cross the stone bridge and reach the old schoolhouse before dungeon time expires. Anyone who fails to arrive within the designated time will be judged to have failed the clear.]

The old schoolhouse!

They all remembered at once: the place where Chen Jingwen had come to teach.

They were standing in the ancestral hall, and somewhere along the road to the schoolhouse, at some point none of them had seen, an open stone bridge had risen out of the flood.

Beneath that bridge churned a black abyss packed with water ghosts and bones.

"Run!" Shido Makoto roared, and he was first out of the collapsing hall and onto the bridge, which was already breaking apart beneath him.

Time was life itself.

The others tore after him, running like their lives depended on every stride, because they did.

The instant they hit the bridge, the amalgam in the distance seemed to notice the few living things out there, and let out a piercing shriek.

Black hair came shooting out of the water on every side, whipping wildly at everyone on the bridge.

"Look out!"

Xu Ye moved fast and clean, throwing herself into a sideways roll and clearing a bundle of hair aimed at her face by inches.

None of the rest were rookies either. Their bodies had been strengthened by dungeon runs, and every one of them had ways to fend it off.

The bridge kept giving way underfoot. Each step they took, another stretch of deck behind them crumbled and dropped into the black abyss.

It was a footrace against death.

The schoolhouse gate was less than twenty meters ahead.

Then the span beneath them broke clean through in the middle.

Lin Yan and Lin Dong, running at the back, stepped into empty air and lost their balance in the same instant.

Xu Ye's hand snapped out and caught Lin Yan. Lin Dong, already gravely wounded, was half a beat slow, and his whole body dropped toward the break.

A length of broken rebar, bent upward in the collapse, caught him through the thigh, and he hung there upside down at the lip of the shattered bridge.

Below him, in the rolling black water, thousands of water ghosts raised their heads at once like sharks scenting blood, mouths gaping, a dense forest of arms stretching up, waiting for the meal to drop.

"Lin Dong!"

Shido Makoto looked back, saw him swinging there at the edge, and was already reaching out, already turning to run back for him.

The far side of the gap was less than five meters off. Fast enough, and there might still be a chance.

"Forget me! Go!" Lin Dong shouted the moment he saw Shido Makoto start to turn.

He knew exactly where he stood. His chest was torn open, his leg was ruined, his strength had been spent long ago. Even if they hauled him back up now, he would never cover those last dozen meters.

Going back for him would only bury Fang Si alongside him.

So he didn't beg for help. Instead his face split into a savage grin.

With the foot that wasn't pinned he kicked hard off the stone facing beside him, using the force to swing his body up.

His free hand groped toward a railing post nearby, snapped down to a jagged spike in the collapse.

He wrenched the spike loose and closed his fist around it.

Then, with everyone watching, without a moment's hesitation, he drove it into the great artery of his own thigh.

There was a wet, punching sound.

Blood went up like a fountain.

The thick reek of it pulled the hatred of every water ghost below and every strand of flying hair above onto a single point.

The first wave of hair and grasping arms abandoned Shido Makoto and the others on the bridge entirely and surged toward the delicious bait that was Lin Dong.

With his own flesh and blood, Lin Dong bought the rest of them precious time.

"Live!"

He was looking toward Shido Makoto, and the laugh that came out of him was the last wild laugh of his life.

"Clear it… for me!"

The next second, the laughter cut off.

Black hair and ghost hands swallowed him whole.

Another one of their own, dead in front of their eyes.

Their eyes burned, close to splitting, and not one of them stopped running.

Lin Dong had sacrificed himself so they could live. Wasting the time he had paid for with his life would be the only real insult to him.

"Go!"

Jaw clenched, Shido Makoto used the opening, launched himself off the broken end of the bridge to the other side, and ran for the schoolhouse door without looking back.

Xu Ye, Drunkard, Shirogane Kei and Lin Yan came right behind him, spending the last of what they had, and hit the steps leading up into the schoolhouse.

The amalgam shrieked.

It had not expected these tiny insects to slip out of a net that covered heaven and earth.

Now it was in a fury.

The whole black ocean boiled with it, heaving up a wave more than ten meters high that came down on the schoolhouse steps like a hammer.

Ten steps left to the closed wooden door of the schoolhouse.

But the wave blotted out the sky and sealed off every route they had.

The pressure of the water and the shrieking wind ground their progress to nothing, and the thrashing hair lashed them like whips, leaving welts of blood across their bodies.

Every one of them was at the absolute end of their strength.

"Faster! Just a little faster!" Xu Ye shouted from behind, shoving Lin Yan, the weakest of them, forward.

Mid-stride, the stone step under Shirogane Kei's foot could not take the force of the wave and shattered.

A corpse-white hand came up through the crack and locked around her ankle.

Enormous strength pulled from below, dragging her down into the depths of the fissure.