Infinity Flow: The Man Assigned by the Game Cannot Be Wanted! - Chapter 6

Snores echoed intermittently inside the old woman’s house. After settling the three of them in, she had returned to her own room without saying another word.

Lin Chubai and Song Siyun, sharing the same roof, clearly had no intention of sleeping. Song Siyun stared nervously out the window, while Lin Chubai practiced his skills against the edge of the bed.

Fortunately, after barely half an hour, a tall figure appeared outside the window, clutching a piece of yellow paper in hand.

When Ye Zhou tiptoed into the room, he pressed a slender finger to his lips, signaling them to remain silent.

The yellowed paper looked as though it had weathered the baptism of years; the characters on it were blurry and indistinct, though one could vaguely make out that rules were written at the very top, but it seemed they had arrived too late.

The clues obtained so far were only this much. The three of them had no idea what would happen during these seven days, nor did they know what to do. After discussing for a long time, they decided to scout around the village tomorrow.

The silence of the night is often the most potent sleeping pill. The cicadas and nightingales outside the window played a lullaby. Whether due to the game’s mechanics or the fact that the three of them had gone without sleep for nearly thirty hours, they drifted into a deep slumber within this dangerous and unknown environment.

Lin Chubai, who had not slept so soundly in a long time, unexpectedly had a dream.

He dreamed of a frantic woman whose loose, disheveled hair blended with the blood-red sky, with animal bones strung together by thin cords hanging from her head.

Her body was wrapped in a robe resembling that of an ancient shaman, and her face was covered in numerous gashes, as if bitten by teeth or carved by knives. Her mouth was sewn shut with a red thread, and where her eyeballs should have been, they were gone, with only thick streams of black water flowing from her eye sockets.

She pounded furiously against the door of a villager’s home, but that family seemed to have anticipated it, pasting yellow talismans on the door. Every time the woman touched the door, flames would burst forth.

Suddenly, five or six villagers appeared from nowhere, holding identical yellow talismans and pressing them onto the woman.

The woman let out a piercing, miserable scream, after which her once-soft hair transformed into sharp spikes that viciously pierced through the chests of several people, forcefully gouging out their hearts.

Instantly, those individuals vomited black blood, their bodies turning into black smoke that was sucked into the woman’s body. Following that, more and more hair emerged from the ground, nearly covering the entire floor.

The woman’s frenzy seemed to be over. No, that was the calm before the storm! An unknown energy gathered behind her like a black hole, and the spiritual pressure radiating from her entire body distorted space itself along with the air.

In a fraction of a second, the smooth and straight hair transformed into black water, artificially creating a flood right before their eyes!

Those energies and black water gradually submerged Lin Chubai. He began to struggle wildly, his hands grabbing about uncontrollably, but his breath was blocked, making him experience a suffocation-like despair as his limbs grew weak.

Just as the feeling of suffocation reached its peak, Lin Chubai sat straight up from the bed, gasping heavily for air. It took him a long while to snap back to reality, only to discover that the village chief was standing beside him, looking down at him with a stern expression.

Behind the chief stood a crowd of villagers, some holding hemp ropes and others wielding machetes, yet the two people beside him remained fast asleep.

Chubai reached out to push the people on both sides, but they remained as motionless as corpses, even the rise and fall of their breathing having vanished.

With Lin Chubai’s movements, the expression on the village chief’s face grew increasingly gloomy. He raised his hand and waved, and the villagers behind him rushed forward with hemp ropes to loop around his body.

Lin Chubai focused his strength into his palms, trying to summon vines to hold them back, but for some reason, his skills had failed!

The villagers seized the moment to grab his hands, wrapping the rope around him tightly to bind him securely. Lin Chubai immediately raised his foot to kick straight at the nearest villager’s face, but the villager’s face behaved like a rubber ball, denting inward and then bouncing right back without a single scratch.

In barely three seconds, his hands and feet were completely bound. He lost all ability to resist, and like a fish on a chopping block waiting to be slaughtered, he was shoved into a coffin adorned with red flowers beside the bed.

As the coffin lid gradually closed, he plunged into darkness. In the darkness, all five senses were magnified to the extreme; faintly, he smelled the scent of blood, and it seemed someone was calling out to him.

Chubai. Chubai. The voice seemed to come from boundless darkness, drawing closer and closer.

Lin Chubai slowly opened his eyes once more as his vision gradually focused. Entering his sight was the palm of Song Siyun waving right in front of him, while Ye Zhou watched quietly from the side, worry stained deep within his eyes.

“What is wrong with you? Just now, as you were talking in your sleep, you started having a nosebleed, and no matter how much we called you, you would not wake up. We almost thought you had dropped dead from overwork.”

Hearing Song Siyun speak, Lin Chubai seemed to finally snap back to reality. He raised a hand to wipe the nosebleed that was about to reach the corner of his mouth, took a few heavy breaths, and said, “It is nothing. I had a double dream, which must have had something to do with the game.”

Before he could finish his sentence, he was interrupted by the old woman who suddenly walked in through the door.

“The village chief is looking for you. He is probably going to send you off now. Come with me.” The old woman wore a bizarre smile on her face, showing no reaction whatsoever to the red streak hanging from Lin Chubai’s nose.

“Please wait five minutes,” Song Siyun said to the old woman, knowing that Lin Chubai was not in a good state.

With those words, the corners of the old woman’s smiling mouth gradually drooped down, looking rather terrifying at first glance: “The village chief has already been waiting for a long time.”

“Then let us go. We cannot keep the village chief waiting,” Lin Chubai said, supporting himself as he stood up from the bed. After steadying his emotions, he smiled gently at the old woman and cast a meaningful glance at the other two.

The three of them followed the old woman as she walked along the narrow path of He Village. The houses along the way looked as though they had been abandoned for a long time, thick with layers of dust. It was only as they approached the center of the village that things began to liven up.

Yet, rather than calling it lively, it was more like a gathering of lifeless, hollow, and dull-witted people.

Along the way, Lin Chubai constantly felt an inexplicable sense of familiarity. The closer they got to the village center, the stronger that familiarity became, until he finally spotted the yellow talismans from his dream plastered on the wooden door panels of the village chief’s house.

Was this the very door the woman in the dream had pounded on? Why was it the village chief’s house?

Song Siyun also noticed that slip of talisman paper and instinctively reached out to touch it, but the village chief materialized out of nowhere and grabbed his hand, his expression darkening as if it were about to drip water: “Do not touch it.”

“My younger brother is ignorant and meant no offense,” Ye Zhou said, resting one hand on the village chief’s forearm and applying a subtle amount of force.

“Do not go around touching things you should not.” The village chief acted as though he had noticed nothing at all, letting go of his hand once he spoke.

With the speed of a Sichuan opera face-changer, he whipped up a kind-hearted smile: “I am truly sorry. The road out of the village has collapsed, so we might have to wait a few days before we can send you out.”

The three of them showed no reaction, merely sensing that something was bound to happen, but the village chief paid them no mind: “I have already spoken with Xiao Lan. These next few days, you will stay at her place, the very house you are currently staying in.”

After the village chief’s earlier face-changing performance, none of them dared to utter a sound, quietly listening to his words.

“There is a rule in our village: nobody is allowed to go outside after twelve midnight.” The village chief performed yet another Beijing opera face-change, staring straight at them.

Ye Zhou clenched his fists tightly, his fingertips turning slightly pale as he remained constantly alert to his surroundings, though his expression betrayed nothing.

Fortunately, the village chief made no further moves. After finishing the last drop of tea, he spoke: “Very well, I still have work to attend to. You may return now.”

The three of them left without saying a word, but instead of walking back toward the old woman’s house, they sought out an isolated spot where no one else was around to discuss the dreams of the previous night.

As the sun gradually climbed to the center of the sky, the three of them reached a conclusion, and the game interface popped up right before their eyes.

Congratulations to players for triggering the hidden task: Investigate He Village, Progress: 25 percent.

PS: You can still make it out alive even if you do not finish it.

The three of them exchanged glances before turning and walking away in three different directions.