Spirit Realm Walker

In Zhang Yuanqing’s experience, the worst thing one could do in a survival-type dungeon was run around like a headless fly, wandering around, poking about, until danger suddenly jumped you and slung you back out of the Spirit Realm. 

These weren’t the tidy dungeons that told you straight up what to do and what to find. The first thing he needed was to know what dangers the dungeon held. Once he understood that, everything would be simpler. 

There was no rush to hunt down Wang Xiao’er yet. He would ask the Cat King what it knew first. 

Standing outside beyond the gate of the old man’s house, Zhang Yuanqing dug the dainty little Cat King Speaker out of his trouser pocket.

”You’ve been here right? Anything you want to tell me? Any information?” he asked.

Silence answered him.

This thing’s never happy unless it gets smacked. He raised a hand and delivered two big open palm slaps. ”Think harder!”

The battered Cat King Speaker crackled with a burst of static, and a second later, audio blared out across the whole area.

”Aaah, aaah… Lord Demon Lord, gentler, please…”

Along with the voice came the slapping sounds of flesh being struck.

Zhang Yuanqing’s mouth twitched. He quietly set the speaker down by his foot, pulled out the Bloodthirsty Blade with its chipped and notched edge, and laid the point against the speaker’s casing.

”So those are your last words, huh. Perfect. I’ll send you off to meet your ex right now.”

His wrist moved ever so slightly, and the tip scored a small mark into the speaker’s black metal shell.

The seductive moaning cut off, replaced by static. The Cat King Speaker had folded. It was queueing up the next clip.

Zhang Yuanqing held the threatening pose and let out a breath. 

Honestly I’m kind of dying to know who the leading lady is this time, he complained inwardly. Also, going by the audio, Demon Lord, you were playing the man behind the mistress again.

He’d heard enough of these to know the pattern.

Then, from the speaker’s grille came a little girl’s voice, thin and hollow, singing a tune.

”Clap once with me, clap once with you, play the game before the sky goes dark.

”Clap twice with me, clap twice with you, touch your tongue and touch your ears.

”Clap three with me, clap three with you, add the shadow and that makes three.”

There was a flat, droning rhythm to the song, and the longer it went the more it sent shivers crawling up his spine.

It was innocent, yet horrifying.

What the hell? Which underworld did this nursery rhyme crawl out of? Zhang Yuanqing listened through it, confirmed that there was nothing else after that, then tucked the speaker back into his pocket and pondered over the rhyme.

Play the game before dark. That’s a clear tip. There’s danger after dark, and playing the game is how you dodge it. But play what game…? Uh, if I remember right, this song is a game. Like ”drop the handkerchief.” So I have to play the ”clap once with you” thing? 

The second line seems easy enough. Touch your tongue and touch your ears. The third line, ”add the shadow and that makes three.” That’s the number of players needed for the game.

He sucked in a breath. Something struck him as wrong. ”Add the shadow and that makes three” was a nasty line. How did a shadow play a game? And if the shadow actually joined in… then it turned into a horror game.

The way he read it, the third line was a warning. Fail to round up three people, and the shadow would slot itself into the game. The shadow was probably the danger itself.

Me plus the yin corpse counts as two. Little Goofball’s a spirit body and can’t talk, so he probably can’t be a participant. This means I need one more person to play with me.

Got it.

Zhang Yuanqing looked back at the house made of rammed earth. Wasn’t there a perfectly good old man sitting right there?

But something nagged at him. He worked the yin corpse back into the house and, ignoring the old man’s struggling, pried his mouth open.

There was no tongue inside. It had been cut out.

He groaned inwardly. I figured it wouldn’t be simple. ”Touch your tongue and touch your ears.” This path is a dead end. No, wait. It’s telling me what to do next.

Find the tongue. Or rather, get the old man’s tongue back.

I’ll chase that thread and see if my reasoning holds. In dungeons with no clear prompts, I’ll have to feel my way through one thing at a time, learn from it and slowly add things up, and dig out a way to live.

It’s not like I’ve got a choice. Pull on the wrong thread, and I’ll have to go toe-to-toe with whatever’s haunting this village.

He looked up at the sky. The thin layer of clouds still sat over the ruined village, obscuring the sun. This sort of daylight made it easy to lose track of time.

There’s danger after dark, so I don’t have much time. Whatever went wrong here started with Wang Xiao’er. If I’m hunting for a tongue, finding him is the first step.

His mind was crystal clear. The village wasn’t big, but it wasn’t considered small either. Finding Wang Xiao’er’s place wouldn’t be easy, and that was plainly the point. A time-waster put there by the dungeon to burn up his clock and crank up the difficulty. If he wasted too much time on it, he wouldn’t find the tongue before dark. Then he’d have to face whatever the danger was head-on.

But how would he find Wang Xiao’er fast? After a moment’s thought, the answer came.

Thud.

Corpse No. 1 hopped back over the wall made of rammed earth, the old man slung struggling over its shoulder, and returned to its master’s side.

”Aah, aah,” The old man howled furiously, hammering his fists against the corpse.

He looked plenty angry about it. After all, this fellow had literally said goodbye to him just a while ago but in a blink had come back to kidnap him.

”Grandpa, you’re taking us to Wang Xiao’er.” Zhang Yuanqing said.

The old man ignored him and thrashed harder, but Zhang Yuanqing had already cracked the correct way to handle the old man from their last chat. He set the edge of the Bloodthirsty Blade against the wrinkled neck. 

Sure enough, the howling stopped.Two men and one yin corpse set off toward the west end of the village in full agreement.

They walked through the lonely, desolate village. There were no dogs barking, no birdsong, just that pervasive gloom pressing down on them from all sides.

He quietly summoned Little Goofball and had him drift at random into the roadside houses to scout. Every house had villagers in it, hiding inside with faces scared stiff, their eyes flicking again and again to the windows and the doors, as though they were afraid of something.

It was all rather strange. Why were the people in this village all still alive? Of course, that meant Wang Xiao’er was most likely alive as well. Still, it felt unsettling and all wrong. What were they all so scared of? It was a pity none of them could talk, so there’s no information to be pried loose.

And where was that ghostly woman? He couldn’t pick up a whiff of a vengeful spirit anywhere.

About ten minutes on, the old man draped over Corpse No. 1’s shoulder let out a sudden pair of ”aah, aah” sounds.

They stopped outside a small courtyard at the village’s western edge, its wall built from irregular stones laid one on another. The gate wasn’t completely shut, just pulled closed.

Zhang Yuanqing lifted the Bloodthirsty Blade. ”Is this it?”

The old man nodded warily.

Zhang Yuanqing split his consciousness into two, leaving one part in his own body, as the other slipped into the yin corpse. He made Corpse No. 1 set the old man down, then walked the yin corpse to the gate alone and pushed it open. 

The gate let out a long creak. The yin corpse had barely stepped into the yard when a fit of coughing came from the stone house, then a voice thick with phlegm.

”Who’s there?”

He can talk! 

The corpse raised an eyebrow and answered in the same phlegm-choked rasp, ”Are you Wang Xiao’er? I’m an outsider. I heard about what happened in the village, so I came to have a look.”

He picked his words with care, terrified that one wrong word might trip some hidden danger. As a result, he steered clear of mentioning the tomb and the ghostly woman, and didn’t so much as mention what had actually happened here.

Still, the moment the man inside spoke, Zhang Yuanqing knew his read on things was right. This Wang Xiao’er was a key figure in the dungeon. Every other villager was a dead end when it came to talking to them, but Wang Xiao’er wasn’t.

The man inside went quiet for a few seconds, then asked, ”What is it you want to know?”

”Why can’t anyone in the village talk?” Zhang Yuanqing probed gently.

”A while back, I ran into a wandering daoist. He said the mountain behind the village had excellent fengshui, and that there was bound to be a big tomb up there. He was right. Ever since I was a small boy, I’d heard the village elders speaking about a grave on the mountain from the Ming Dynasty. Supposedly, a commandery princess of high birth was buried there, with heaps of burial goods, only nobody had ever been able to find where the tomb was. 

”That daoist gave me a string of coins and said he needed someone who knew the mountain paths to act as a guide, so I said yes. We went up at noon, wound our way around the mountain the whole day, and by the time it was dark, we actually found the tomb.”

That Daoist could divine the location of grave sites too? Which sect did this guy come from? Zhang Yuanqing thought snarkily to himself.

Wang Xiao’er went on, ”The daoist told me he wouldn’t take a single copper of the burial goods. All of it would be mine. All he wanted were the old books in the tomb, if there were any. So the next day, I got my tools ready, and some food and water. UIt took a full day and night, but together with the daoist, I dug the old tomb open.”

At this point in the story, Zhang Yuanqing cut in, ”Old books? What old books were he after?”

The voice, still thick with phlegm, answered, ”The daoist said the princess had been a cultivator in life, and lived two full sixty-year cycles. That particular imperial house had scoured the realm for secret arts, and plenty of it had been written down in ancient texts. Thus, there had to be manuals of secret arts among her burial goods. His own life was reaching its end, so he wanted to gamble on whatever he could find in the tomb. What a fool. If the princess knew the way to eternal life, why would she be dead? Old books, secret arts, none of it’s as solid as gold and silver.”

Another one chasing eternal life, Zhang Yuanqing thought. Those Ming Dynasty cultivators… every last one of them seemed to want it. 

”What then?” he asked. ”What’s any of this got to do with the whole village losing the ability to speak?”

”Everything, of course.” Wang Xiao’er said from inside the stone house. ”I’m not well. Speaking across this kind of distance is hard on me. Come in. Come in and I’ll tell you.”

***

In the arena, Yin Ji, her face covered with a black veil, caught the talk among the sect members beside her, and her brows drew together. 

”Mute Village…”

The name rang a bell.

A few seconds later, she remembered where she’d heard it.

Yin Ji turned toward the snow-white figure of Fu Qingyang and said softly, ”Mute Village is dangerous.”

Fu Qingyang turned to look at her, his gaze deep and level. ”How would you know?”

”I remember Demon Lord mentioning it,” Yin Ji said. ”Mute Village was the only dungeon in his whole Transcendent tier journey that nearly cost him his life. He came out badly mauled. Every S-rank dungeon he’d cleared before Mute Village never left him in such a sorry state.”

Her tone was easy and open as she spoke of Demon Lord, as if that doomed affair was nothing to hide. To her, it seemed, it was just a bright, clear stretch of her past, the kind of thing you could bring up and speak openly about.

At that, the row of elders turned back around.

Elder Teddy’s button eyes cracked open, and he demanded in a loud voice, ”What makes you say that?”