The place for disposing of bodies was on the back hill.
Fang Yuan went to the linen room and fetched a clean bedsheet, carefully wrapping Yu Nan’s body in it. The group divided into two teams and took turns carrying the corpse toward the hill behind the guesthouse.
The back hill was a barren slope. Before they even reached it, a nauseating smell of decay hit them. Flies and mosquitoes swarmed through the air, making their scalps prickle.
The pungent stench made everyone frown. Even Lu Jin could not help covering his nose and mouth.
The Chinese government did not permit ordinary burials, so bodies were sent to crematoriums and reduced to handfuls of ash, leaving no smell behind. The stench of this hill made Lu Jin feel as though he had returned to some bygone era—one suffering a great famine, with corpses strewn everywhere.
“Just find somewhere and dump him,” Xie Zhi said in disgust.
Fang Yuan hesitated. “That doesn’t feel right. People say the dead should rest in the earth. There’s no crematorium here, so at the very least we should dig a hole and bury him.”
Jiang Heng glanced around. “This is how everyone handles it.”
The players followed his gaze. The hill was muddy, the sky had darkened, and moonlight filtered through broken shadows cast by the trees. Everywhere they looked, there were corpses.
Their skin was coated in dirt, and their dried blood had long since turned black. At first glance, the bodies nearly blended into the ground beneath them.
Xu Moyang shuddered. “How many bodies are there here?!”
Too many to count.
But every corpse wore the same staff uniform. Some were so damaged that their original appearance was impossible to make out, while others looked relatively fresh and had clearly died only recently.
Jiang Sui pointed to a maggot-covered body lying in a hollow ahead. “That looks like Zhao Kuan.”
Zhao Kuan’s pale intestines were exposed and coated in dirt, with a black layer of writhing maggots crawling over them. Without looking carefully, no one would have recognized him.
Xu Moyang’s stomach churned violently. He grabbed a nearby tree and dry-heaved. His stomach was empty, and he nearly vomited up stomach acid. But when he lowered his head, he discovered another corpse lying beneath the tree!
Its eyes had already been eaten away by maggots, leaving only two dark holes that “stared” blankly at Xu Moyang.
Xu Moyang: “!!!”
His soul nearly fled his body. He immediately snatched his hand back and hid behind Lu Jin.
“Let’s go,” Lu Jin said.
There were at least fifty corpses here, if not a hundred. Even if they buried Yu Nan, they could not bury everyone else.
To Lu Jin, once a person died, the body was nothing but earth waiting to return to earth. Whether it became rotting flesh or dry bone made little difference.
“…Wait!”
Fang Yuan suddenly stopped everyone. His footsteps paused, and he slowly walked toward the place where Xu Moyang had just been retching.
Xu Moyang: “…”
The nausea he had barely suppressed surged back up again.
Fang Yuan crouched beside the corpse, took out a fresh tissue, and gently wiped away the writhing maggots little by little.
Jiang Sui asked, “You know him?”
Fang Yuan nodded with difficulty, his voice choking. “He was my… senior.”
They had studied under the same academic supervisor. His senior was two years older than Fang Yuan, and during Fang Yuan’s postgraduate studies, it had always been this senior who guided him. Two months ago, after Fang Yuan completed his thesis defense and graduated, he turned down the high-paying job offers in his hands and went to the city where his senior lived.
He had wanted to try, perhaps. After so many years of feelings, Fang Yuan did not believe his senior could truly have been unaware.
But his senior refused to meet him and never replied to his messages. After that, the two lost contact as if they had never known each other at all.
At the time, Fang Yuan had thought his senior discovered those shameful feelings and never wanted to see him again.
“I didn’t expect he entered the game too.”
And remained in the game forever.
Fang Yuan wanted to bury his senior, but after thinking about it, what meaning would that have? Older generations might care deeply about where their bodies rested after death, but people their age were different. Fang Yuan had already signed an agreement to donate his body after death.
Once a person was gone, what did the body matter? Staying here to bury corpses would only waste time, and they did not have much left.
Having thought it through, Fang Yuan pulled himself together and turned toward Lu Jin. “Brother Lu, you completed Mission One, right? What was the clue?”
—Fang Yuan was actually older than Lu Jin, but Lu Jin’s presence was too strong. Fang Yuan simply could not bring himself to call him “Little Lu,” so he followed Xu Moyang’s example and called him “Brother Lu.”
Only then did the other players remember.
Right, the clue! They had been too shocked when they entered the executive suite, and afterward they had been busy moving the body. They had completely forgotten about it!
Lu Jin did not hide anything. He pulled the DNA test report from his pocket.
“It’s a paternity test for Boss Huang and his son. The report says they aren’t biologically related.”
Xie Zhi slapped his thigh. “No wonder Mission Two is asking us to find the adulterer!”
Jiang Heng continued, “Then as long as we find the boss’s wife, we can learn who she was having an affair with?”
Lu Jin said nothing and merely glanced at Xie Zhi and Jiang Heng.
The players earnestly discussed their next steps as if the senior’s corpse had never appeared. The center of the mystery shifted from Boss Huang to his wife.
Clearly, Boss Huang’s resentment was so intense because he had been cuckolded.
“To put it plainly, if his wife hadn’t betrayed him, none of us would be suffering like this.”
“Forget it. There’s no point talking about that now. We should hurry up and find the man…”
Everyone talked over one another. No one noticed that beneath the moonlight, a human-shaped silhouette was silently approaching.
There were corpses everywhere. No one would notice if one more “person” suddenly appeared.
Without warning, a head fell from the branch above and landed in Xu Moyang’s arms with a dull thud. It rolled twice against his chest, its round eyes staring directly at him.
Xu Moyang: “?”
Xu Moyang: “!!!”
He nearly lost his mind. Screaming at the top of his lungs, he flung the head away without thinking!
The woman’s head traced a bizarre arc through the air. Just before it hit the ground, it abruptly turned ninety degrees and floated in another direction.
A moment later, the head drifted toward the opposite side, where a headless body stood waiting. Head and body remained out of alignment, one in front and one behind, moving with mechanical steps.
Players: “…”
The sight was far too bizarre!
Fang Yuan recognized her first. “The boss’s wife! She’s the woman from the family photo!”
Compared with the gently smiling woman in the family portrait at reception, the boss’s wife now looked like the female lead of a horror movie.
Bruises of different sizes covered her body. Blackened burn marks from a curling iron marred her skin. Many of her bones were broken, and she walked with a limp, her movements mechanical and unnatural.
Beside her, even the manager looked normal.
“That’s her!” Xie Zhi gritted his teeth. “If she hadn’t betrayed Boss Huang, this instance wouldn’t exist at all!”
Because her neck was broken, the boss’s wife spoke in a hoarse voice like a skipping tape. “I… I didn’t.”
“How can a DNA report be fake?!” Xie Zhi cursed.
A trace of grievance appeared in the woman’s eyes, but her vocabulary seemed limited. She kept repeating the same few words.
“Then who is the child’s father?” Fang Yuan quickly asked. “Or who else did you have a relationship with?”
The boss’s wife looked at Fang Yuan, her gaze hollow. “…No one.”
Jiang Heng’s tone was cold and mocking. “No one, or so many that even you don’t remember which one it was?”
The woman suddenly froze. For two seconds, she stared blankly. Then she began to smile in a grotesque way. Her mouth stretched wider and wider, revealing rows of sharp teeth, until the skin of her cheeks split from the exaggerated grin and began bleeding.
“I! DID! NOT!”
Her head shot toward Jiang Heng. Her split mouth opened into a bloody maw and bit viciously toward his throat!
She was too fast. Jiang Heng had no time to react. The impact knocked him heavily to the ground, and the woman’s head was already positioned over his neck!
At the critical moment—
A violent tearing pain shot across the woman’s scalp, and she screamed in agony. Before she could bite Jiang Heng, someone behind her gave a savage yank, grabbing her by the hair and dragging her backward!
Lu Jin had seized the boss’s wife’s head!
She struggled wildly and tried to bite Lu Jin, but Lu Jin wrapped her hair once around his wrist and pulled it tight, locking her completely in place!
The headless body instinctively charged toward Lu Jin. It had barely taken two steps when a tremendous force struck its back. The body slammed to the ground with a bang, and Jiang Sui planted his foot firmly between its shoulder blades.
Now the boss’s wife could not move at all.
The surrounding players were stunned.
The title alone made it obvious that the boss’s wife was Boss Huang’s spouse, and Mission Two was closely related to her. By every reasonable assumption, she should have been a Boss-level NPC.
Yet she had been subdued just like that?
Xie Zhi thought blankly: So this NPC is actually weak?
Thinking back on Lu Jin’s movements, they had certainly been smooth and effortless… but in the end, all he had captured was the woman’s head.
How difficult could it be to deal with one head?
Besides, even though Lu Jin was holding it, reluctance was written all over his face. He looked as though he were gripping a burning-hot object he wanted to throw away immediately.
He was obviously afraid of the boss’s wife.
So the NPC had to be weak! Lu Jin was simply lucky again!
“Hurry up and ask.”
Lu Jin impatiently urged the other players. Although the woman could no longer attack anyone, he had the distinct feeling that her hair was rather oily, as if it had not been washed for several days.
He was a clean freak.
The players immediately crowded closer and began firing questions from every direction.
An unprecedented way of clearing an instance had appeared—directly interrogating the NPC.
“So who cuckolded the boss?”
“Who is the child’s biological father?”
“Why did you betray Boss Huang?”
“Where’s the adulterer?”
The woman continued struggling wildly, repeating over and over, “I didn’t! I didn’t!”
After questioning her for ages, they still got nothing.
“So you’re refusing to talk?” Xie Zhi rolled up his sleeves and pulled out his item. “Looks like you won’t confess until you suffer a little!”
The so-called item was actually half of a cigarette butt. But unlike an ordinary cigarette butt, this one could freely increase in size.
The half-burned cigarette, originally less than five centimeters long, landed in Xie Zhi’s hand and instantly expanded to half a meter, glowing with an eerie red light.
Lu Jin looked at the cigarette butt with interest.
“That thing actually works?”
Xie Zhi lifted his chin. “Of course! I only escaped that NPC guest earlier because of it!”
“This is a C-rank item—Little JJ’s Cigarette Butt. Anything it touches can be completely burned away!”
Lu Jin started coughing violently and nearly lost his grip on the boss’s wife’s head.
He turned and stared at Xie Zhi in disbelief. “What did you just say… whose cigarette butt is that?”
