Chapter 63: Your Obsession Disturbs the Dead

Chapter 63: Your Obsession Has Disturbed the Dead

"Choosing to let you live was only because Fang Xiujie and I had already been assimilated by that malevolent spirit. If there had been even a sliver of hope for us, would we have willingly sacrificed our lives to save someone else?" Ning Yan's voice trembled slightly, but her wide eyes remained dry.

"From the moment we were chosen to enter the nightmare world, I knew I would die in one of the games. Fang Xiujie knew it too. So back then, we didn’t even think about how things had happened. We woke you up and let you escape alive simply because we knew we couldn’t survive, but you still had a chance to live. That’s all!"

Before Lan Xingchen could respond, Ning Yan’s expression suddenly contorted in pain.

"My head... it hurts."

Not only Ning Yan, but even Fang Xiujie, who had been standing steadily, stumbled weakly and collapsed against the wall.

Sister Yao tried to support him despite her own pain, but her hands passed right through his body.

Something strange was occurring—Ning Yan and Fang Xiujie had suddenly turned semi-transparent. Other players rushed to help, but they could no longer touch either of them.

The anomaly didn’t stop there.

As the ghosts Su Bai and Feng Ling had stacked by the entrance as kindling dissipated into black mist, the flames gradually died down. The score for the ghost faction on the hall’s wall began to decrease bit by bit. Especially compared to the player faction's remaining 80 points, the ghost faction’s points were rapidly diminishing as the flames died out.

When the human faction’s score drops, reanimated ghosts attack humans.

So what would happen if the ghost faction’s score reached zero?

The ghost faction’s score quickly fell to single digits. Su Bai watched as the lights in the hall flickered several times before going out completely. The nightmare world has no daytime or sunlight, so without the lights and flames, if not for the glow of the red moon above, the entire world would be shrouded in darkness.

The sudden disappearance of light left everyone’s eyes struggling to adjust for a moment.

It wasn’t until Feng Ling conjured an orange flame in her hand that everyone recovered from the brief momentary blindness.

But when the orange flame illuminated their surroundings, they realized the place they were in was completely different from the first-floor hall they had been in earlier! The once pristine white walls were now stained and crumbling, and the hall floor, which had remained intact even during the ghost attacks, was now pockmarked and fractured. One moment they were in a bright, clean residential building; the next, they found themselves in an unfamiliar ruin.

Perhaps, just like the players who had been covered in false memories, this "Blissful Community" itself was an illusion.

Under the glow of the orange flame, the already crumbling walls continued to crack and fissure. Then, the broken walls and ceiling gradually crumbled into dust before their eyes, much like the dead ghosts. It was as if even the ruins they stood in would soon disappear.

In the firelight, Ning Yan and Fang Xiujie’s already semi-transparent forms appeared even more ethereal.

While everyone, including Feng Ling, was stunned by the sudden environmental changes—some even beginning to panic—Su Bai remained calm. Not for any particular reason, but because when Su Bai borrowed the power of the ghost umbrella, his left eye’s bloody socket allowed him to see things ordinary players couldn’t.

Just like back on the fourth floor, Su Bai could see the grimy walls and doors that looked exactly like tombstones, even engraved with the residents’ names. The tombstones were neatly arranged floor by floor, a sight one would only expect in a graveyard.

So no matter how drastically their surroundings changed, Su Bai wouldn’t be surprised. He knew all too well that the bright, clean facade of Blissful Community had been nothing but an illusory facade from start to finish.

What puzzled Su Bai more was the state of Ning Yan and Fang Xiujie. Two "wraiths" who had died three years ago appearing in Blissful Community through some sinister coincidence, right in front of old acquaintances like Lan Xingchen and Sister Yao, was strange enough. But now, not only were they in a liminal state between human and spirit, they also seemed to be in extreme pain, leaving everyone wondering what they were going through.

"How did this happen?"

Unable to touch Fang Xiujie and Ning Yan, Sister Yao could do nothing to help them in their suffering.

Moments later, the continuously weathering walls and ceiling finally dissolved into sand and vanished under the red moon’s glow. Not long ago, there had been seven or eight floors above the players; now, even the first-floor ceiling had turned to sand and disappeared.

The nightmare world’s unique extreme cold seeped into everyone. This kind of "cold" was different from winter in the real world—no matter how freezing it got, it didn’t make anyone want to put on more clothes. Instead, the chill felt like it seeped into one's very being, lingering relentlessly.

Looking around, the other residential buildings and green belts of Blissful Community had completely vanished. As far as the eye could see, there was only an endless expanse of...

"It’s a graveyard," Su Bai said, his expression still unchanged as he took in the endless rows of neat yet varied tombstones surrounding them.

Now, aside from the empty ground where Su Bai and the other players stood, the surrounding residential buildings and green belts had all been replaced by countless tombstones. The red moon’s light shone directly on the rows of graves, their stretching shadows merging like the layers of a multi-level apartment complex.

"So we were in a graveyard from the very beginning? Then those apartments we were in before were..." Qiu Lei, the younger sister with a relatively low presence, was cut off when her sister covered her mouth.

Everyone present had already realized what those apartments represented—there was no need for anyone to say it aloud again.

Among the rows of tombstones, numerous ghosts roamed. These ghosts might have been lingering in the greenbelts or other residential buildings earlier, so Su Bai and Feng Ling hadn’t gotten around to dealing with them.

There was also the coughing ghost that had repeatedly appeared before Su Bai and the others. At that moment, it was coughing while filling a pit beside a tombstone not far from them. Just like when Feng Ling had encountered the coughing ghost before, a pale hand was struggling in the pit. But the coughing ghost merely knocked the ghost’s hand away and continued filling the pit.

Once the ghost in the pit stopped moving, the coughing ghost acted as if it didn't even see Su Bai and the others, picking up its shovel and walking off in another direction.

Su Bai watched the coughing ghost’s retreating figure and noticed it was heading toward the edge of the graveyard. There stood a fence that seemed incapable of blocking anything, a broken gate that couldn't keep anything out, and a low, dilapidated wooden shed.

At that moment, Su Bai suddenly understood the coughing ghost’s identity. The reason it kept digging pits and burying ghosts was likely because it lived in the broken wooden shed by the graveyard’s entrance. It was probably the graveyard’s "caretaker"!

"I remember now," Ning Yan’s trembling voice sounded beside them.

"I remember why we're here." Even though Ning Yan’s form had turned translucent, and the red moonlight now passed through her body, those around her could still see the distress on her face.

"Because we never actually left!" Ning Yan’s expression, which had remained steadfast even when facing countless ghosts, now looked utterly broken. She stared painfully at the confused Lan Xingchen. "Fang Xiujie and I are clearly already dead, but there was a voice constantly whispering in our ears. That voice kept saying it was a sinner, that everything it did was to atone for us!"

"It’s you, Lan Xingchen!"

"We did what we had to do! We protected our teammates, we ensured those who could survive would live on! We chose death and should have rested in peace! But you, day and night, kept going on about making it up to us, as if your self-torment was our fault!" Ning Yan closed her eyes in despair.

The sharp drop in the ghost faction’s points and the fading of the "Happy Community’s" disguise seemed to have stripped away the last layer of false memories, restoring the truest recollections to Ning Yan and Fang Xiujie.

"Your obsession has disturbed the dead," Fang Xiujie added helplessly, rubbing his forehead. "It has bound us, who should be resting peacefully, like ghosts near you. You couldn’t see us, and we couldn’t approach you or escape you."

"You’ve tormented yourself until you’re neither human nor ghost, but every time you’ve battered yourself bloody and bruised, you’d say it was all to atone for us, and then you’d drift right off to sleep!" Ning Yan’s expression grew even more pained. "And we're stuck here! We’re the ones who can’t rest day in and day out, disturbed by your obsession, trapped by your obsession, with no peace and no freedom, Lan Xingchen—!"

Lan Xingchen stood there, mouth hanging open, stunned by what Ning Yan and Fang Xiujie had said.

None of this was anything like he'd imagined.