Chapter 148: 【Linjiang Village】 Rollback (Patreon)

A ghost hand had clamped around Shirogane Kei's ankle, and the strength in it was appalling.

The pull came all at once. She cried out, lost her balance in a heartbeat, and half her body was hauled bodily down into the abyss.

"Shirogane!"

Shido Makoto, at the head of the group, whipped around and shouted.

"Damn it!"

Xu Ye and Drunkard saw it too, and the color went out of both their faces.

Every survival instinct they had screamed at them to keep running. But watching a teammate get dragged down into that black pit hit too hard, and their feet stopped dead.

Xu Ye barely thought about it. Breaking every rule of escape she knew, she wrenched herself around and ran back toward Shirogane Kei.

Drunkard swore and charged back after her.

In the end, they were a step too slow.

Just as Xu Ye's fingers were about to close on Shirogane Kei, the towering wall of black water finally came down.

More than ten meters of it crashed with a roar, and through it writhed countless strands of long black hair.

The wave swallowed Xu Ye, Drunkard, and the falling Shirogane Kei whole.

It happened so fast that his teammates were dead before Shido Makoto could do a single thing about it.

The next moment, a thick column of black water shot out from the center of the amalgam.

Too fast. There was no dodging it.

It felt like a heavy truck slamming into his chest.

Then a strand of black hair as thick as a spear punched through his ribcage without the slightest resistance.

Agony, and the wild, gushing loss of everything that kept him alive. The hair pinned him to the wall at his back.

A wet, tearing cough burst out of him, then two more.

Shido Makoto brought up great mouthfuls of blood, shredded pieces of his own organs mixed in.

His strength was draining out of him. His vision blurred.

He saw Lin Yan, the last one left, seized by a dozen ghost hands and dragged down beneath the black water.

Wiped out… every last one of them.

Not one survivor.

So this was the difficulty of a Waning Moon-class dungeon that wasn't the puzzle-solving kind?

Shido Makoto's head sagged. What remained of his life was going fast.

In the fog of his fading mind, his body grew colder and colder.

Three seconds before he lost consciousness entirely—

His gaze happened to fall through the base of the offering table ahead of him, smashed to splinters by the wave.

The wood had broken open, exposing an unremarkable hollow beneath the base.

A hidden compartment.

And in that gap, a faint glimmer caught the last of his attention.

The source of that light seemed to be a ruler. A schoolmaster's disciplinary ruler.

Chen Jingwen… the schoolteacher… the disciplinary ruler!

It was this dungeon's ghost item. It had been hidden under the ancestral hall's offering table the whole time!

It changed nothing now. His heart beat one last time, and Shido Makoto died.

A violent weightlessness. The world spinning end over end.

The next second—

"Hoo! Hah!"

Shido Makoto's eyes flew open, his chest heaving with one deep breath after another.

His hand went to his chest without thinking. Whole. No wound punched through it.

He looked around. This was… the doorway of the guesthouse.

Shido Makoto dug the black phone out of his trouser pocket.

[Survival Countdown: 00:41:13]

Time had… gone back forty minutes.

Back to the exact moment they'd finished squeezing the truth out of the survivor Wang Erniu and walked out of the guesthouse.

He turned at once to look beside him.

Shirogane Kei stood at his shoulder. She'd noticed something off about him and was watching with a puzzled frown.

"Senior, what's wrong? You look terrible."

Not far off stood Xu Ye, Drunkard and Lin Yan, and the wounded Lin Dong too. The man who in the last timeline had driven debris through his own artery without a moment's hesitation to buy them time, and been devoured for it.

Right now, he was alive.

All of them were alive. Not one of them missing.

"All right, let's stop wasting time." Xu Ye straightened up.

"Going by what Wang Erniu said, Granny Liu was the source of the rumors back then. It's almost dark, and the black water could surge again any minute. We need to get to the ancestral hall and find her, now."

"Agreed." Drunkard stood as well.

"She's the only lead we've got. Human or ghost, we pry something out of that mouth of hers."

Nobody objected.

They were about to set off toward the ancestral hall, on the highest ground in the village.

"Wait!"

The voice cut across them.

Every one of them stopped and turned toward it, startled.

Shido Makoto had stepped forward, planting himself in front of them all.

Xu Ye and Drunkard stood closest to him, two Veterans who had walked out of more than one dungeon alive, and even they were rocked by the pressure suddenly radiating off him.

They gave half a step of ground before they knew they were doing it.

What was this? This young man…

Xu Ye's brows drew tight. The Shido Makoto standing in front of her seemed like a completely different person from the one of a few minutes ago.

"Fang Si, what's this supposed to mean?" Xu Ye forced down her alarm and demanded coldly.

"This isn't the time for jokes. We don't have a second to waste."

"I'm not joking," Shido Makoto said. "The ancestral hall is a dead end."

"What?" Lin Yan's eyes went wide.

"The way out is the old schoolhouse." He gave them no chance to ask anything, throwing out a far more staggering conclusion instead.

"And the dungeon's vengeful Spirit isn't Chen Jingwen. It isn't Granny Liu either."

"It's Auntie Zhou. Butcher Zhou's mother, the one whose daughter-in-law was driven to her death by Granny Liu's rumors, who died in the flood holding her grandson and her daughter-in-law's corpse."

They were all left blank. Auntie Zhou? Where had that conclusion come from?

"What are you basing that on?" Xu Ye's gaze sharpened to a razor edge. "Every clue we've turned up points to Granny Liu. That's a guess with nothing behind it!"

"Nothing behind it?" Shido Makoto's mouth twisted.

He looked at her and said, "Granny Liu was jealous of how much money the Zhou household made, jealous that his wife was young and pretty. So she put it around that the wife was sleeping with someone else."

"That woman had a hard, proud streak. She couldn't bear the gossip, so she hanged herself in a pair of red embroidered shoes. After that, Auntie Zhou hated Granny Liu. Hated every wagging tongue in this village."

"The night the flood came, she watched with her own eyes as Chen Jingwen drowned plugging the breach. She watched the villagers leave him to die and run for their own lives. In her despair, she took her grandson, a month old, and her daughter-in-law's body, and died with them there in that house."

"Her resentment, and her hatred of every liar in this place, is what turned her into this dungeon's vengeful Spirit."

"The drowning, the swollen tongues. Every rule in here comes from that."

In one breath, Shido Makoto had laid out, word for word, every core secret he had forced out of Granny Liu in the previous timeline.

Every person there, Xu Ye included, felt their scalp crawl.

They were looking at him the way you look at a monster.

How could he know all of it in that kind of detail? It was as if… he'd lived through it himself.

"Any more questions?" Shido Makoto asked.

When nobody spoke, he pointed toward the old schoolhouse.

"Now. Xu Ye, Lin Yan, Drunkard, Shirogane. The four of you take Lin Dong and get to the schoolhouse door and wait for me there."

"Remember, move as fast as you physically can. One second late and you die."

Xu Ye set her teeth and was the first to commit. "Go!"

She pulled Lin Dong up, waved the others on, and turned to start the retreat toward the old schoolhouse.

Drunkard and Lin Yan followed close behind.

Shirogane Kei stayed rooted where she was, looking from the retreating backs of the others to Shido Makoto, who hadn't moved and showed no sign at all of following. She shouted at him:

"Senior, what about you?!"

"I'm going to fetch something."