Chapter 141 The sound of suona horns brings joy and sorrow to the mountain, resulting in the host and the boss...

Zhuo Yi leaned out, crossed the carriage, and groped his way into the fog, but he couldn't find the front of the train.

"Is this car only half-built? Did he know I was going to steal it?"

He Yang probed the fog. In his supernatural perception, space was like his world, with distinct sections and clear boundaries.

His expression changed: "The border restrictions are still in place."

"I knew this system should have been phased out long ago. I wonder if it'll lag?"

The other teams were in the same situation. The Five Poisons' wooden boat was also half stuck outside the border, and the travel agency's spinning teacups couldn't get in. They couldn't get out and were anxiously spinning around in place.

There is a totem in the west that is still causing the problem. After it is activated, the golden totem rotates, but it cannot send a signal. Huang Haitao tapped the rocks next to the totem like an old television set, but he still could not receive the "signal".

"Crude and shoddy," he muttered as he restarted the totem. A few drops of cold snow fell on his cheeks and hands. He looked up; it was snowing.

The snowflakes were light and small, so there should have been no danger, but when I looked up, the snowflakes were falling from the sky like shooting stars, so I couldn't help but want to avoid them.

From the earth's perspective, rain and snow are like attacks from the sky.

The mountain was already cold, but it was even colder with the snow. Huang Haitao huddled in his clothes, sensing something was wrong. He brought up the player panel to check the dungeon information, and the "Main Quest" was grayed out.

Yellow indicates to be completed, green indicates completed, and gray indicates failed.

He clearly remembered that after preventing Xiangping from being buried, the main quest turned green.

Not only that, a red line also popped up in the taskbar of the panel.

The hidden boss battle is marked in red.

[Dungeon Boss: Jiang Ming]

After confirming the mission status, Naga in the north closed her eyes. Her little snake was still wrapped around Xiangping's neck, but Xiangping was already in the ground.

when?

Xiangping wasn't in the sedan chair; she was all alone buried in the ground. The black snake pushed its way through the cracks in the soil, rising upwards until it emerged from the earth. The surrounding area was a deep red, almost black, which was inside the bridal sedan chair.

Two paper figures, covered in dirt and shrunken, sat side by side in the sedan chair, holding snow shovels. They leaned close, their painted smiling eyes wrinkled as they stared at it, waiting for a long time.

The paper figures were the two paper figures that were knocked down, and the snow shovel was the tool that Chen's parents left inside.

After the souls of the cloth-wrapped men A and B left the paper figures, the Chen couple stuffed other people's hair into the paper figures.

The paper figure, possessed once again, dug upwards in the tomb, breaking through the bottom of the bridal sedan chair, and pulled Xiangping down with it.

Many paper figures suddenly appeared halfway through the wedding and funeral processions, secretly controlling the entire process of the wedding and funeral and their every move.

But how come she didn't notice when her snake fell down with Xiangping?

And not a single player noticed?

To prevent the Red and White Disciples from taking advantage of the chaos, capable players have imposed restrictions on the bridal sedan chair or Xiangping... Isn't this a complete annihilation?

"Never mind that, the system has already determined that the main quest is complete, and the dungeon boundaries are gradually opening, which means there are no problems with the verification. How can it be reversed?" On the west side, Huang Haitao was tearing his hair in despair. "Impossible! Who did this? How many red and white disciples... have left?!"

To the north, Xu Feiying sat cross-legged on a tree trunk, squinting at the snow outside the cave. He was certain that Xue Chao had done it.

Xue Chao couldn't have acted on a whim, and a ten-minute countdown wasn't enough time to plan. He had been preparing to unleash the boss since the wedding and funeral were happening simultaneously, and the players were completing the main quest.

Therefore, what Xue Chao is looking for is related to that person. Whether it's in that person's hands or that person has clues, Xue Chao needs the hidden boss to reveal himself.

When did the hidden boss awaken? What were the results of their various actions to stop weddings and funerals? Could they have just been illusions?

"Half true, half false." Lü Lianshan was the quickest to accept it, somewhat realizing, "Oh, so that's how it is." He had already jumped off the train and was walking back. "Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to fool everyone."

Every time they dream of the ancestral hall, they are breaking the seal of the evil god, who has long since infiltrated Baitou Village.

Zhuo Yi stared around, feeling for the first time unable to distinguish between reality and illusion; everything seemed suspicious: "But the panel and the system..."

He fell silent. Right, that one was different from the other bosses.

Other bosses are part of the instance, which is the boss's territory and also the entire world.

For players and hosts, the boss is more like a "character" in a dungeon, only one that is destructive.

But the one who can travel between different instances and has countless believers outside the mountain of joy and sorrow is a player and host.

That person, like them, knew of the system's existence at the game level.

Other bosses can't create the illusion of a "system notification"... but this one can.

Zhuo Yi hugged his cold arm and quickly caught up: "But what if the dungeon boundary is open? We haven't even left Baitou Village yet, we're still in the illusion?"

“We are indeed on the edge of the secret realm,” He Yang said.

Every space is different, just as no two leaves in the world are the same.

If they were still in White Head Village, but the illusion made them think they had arrived at the secret realm, there must be a "scaling" problem with two spaces of different sizes superimposed on each other, and he would not have failed to notice it.

But he didn't seem so confident when he said that.

Having experienced it twice, he realized that although he maintained the utmost vigilance towards that being, such vigilance was still too arrogant for the "most evil god".

"What I said was only half true and half false."

To release illusions so quietly and indirectly, it's certain that the God of Joy and Death was still sealed away at that time.

They weren't just for show; at that moment, the player was genuinely stopped from attending the funeral, and the notification to complete the main quest was real.

It is precisely when they relax that illusions take hold.

Then Xiangping fell back into the tomb, failed the system's verification, and the main quest failed. However, they were already in the illusion and received a notification that "the dungeon boundary has been opened," so they left Baitou Village.

As for why he could leave the dungeon without completing the task, Lü Lianshan had a vague guess.

Sometimes an awkward situation arises where the main quest fails too early, and the hidden boss battle is still just out of reach, leaving players without a clear objective.

In order to continue the game, the system will tend to encourage the appearance of hidden bosses.

Opening the dungeon boundaries might prevent hidden bosses from appearing inside the dungeon, since the essence of guild dungeons is "exploration," and there is space outside the dungeon (secret realms), offering more freedom on the ground.

The secret realm is the boss's territory; exile them out and wait for the boss to fully reveal itself.

The reason we can't leave now is because the boss has successfully revealed itself, and the hidden boss battle has been triggered.

“The keeper of the secret…” He Yang realized, “it was him who did it.”

"Huh?" Zhuo Yi understood too. "Damn, I thought there were still some Red and White disciples who were missed, but it turns out the host and the boss are in cahoots??"

He Yang didn't speak; he knew in his heart that this was the flaw in their thinking.

They didn't just feel betrayed because they trusted the host; they completely distrusted the host.

Therefore, the host hiding in the shadows, waiting for players to charge into battle, create buzz, and end the instance, is the host's expected behavior that is easiest for them to understand.

No one could have imagined that the host, who only needed to hide until the players could clear the game, would not allow them to do so. Not only that, but he also released a boss that posed a great threat to him.

With differing interests and paths, the players, the host, and the boss all see each other as "outsiders."

"He can't control that guy either. This time he's really hiding in the shadows, letting us go to our deaths first. Damn it!"

They were wrong. Xue Chao arrived at Baitou Village first because he never went out.

He twirled the red mahjong tile in his hand. The number of dice given in the instance corresponded to the number of players. The host couldn't get any, but later he signed a life-or-death contract with the system and created the mahjong dice system. Since there was a rule that "the host can also be a player," he certainly wouldn't be too harsh on himself.

He is his own keeper of secrets.

Having gone through the first instance, the split consciousness was no longer so painful for him. His burden lay in using the split consciousness to perform possession checks on many paper figures and manipulate them into weddings and funerals.

The player gets lost in the fog, and the paper figures go from house to house trying to unlock the locks, because while searching for the keys, he discovers that the locks hanging in the ancestral hall come from the various households in the village.

But there weren't enough paper figures. They also had to find their way in the fog and avoid the players, so only half of them were destroyed.

The paper figures had already dug another passage next to the tomb. When the system issued a notification, the paper figures containing the props exploded, breaking through the soil and pulling Xiangping down.

His original intention was simply to obstruct the main quest and advance the hidden boss battle.

Unexpectedly, that thing cooperated perfectly, so he kept it to himself.

Now all the paper figures suddenly burst into flames, their consciousness forced back into place, and he knew that the ghostly thing had successfully rolled out.

When the dizzying darkness dissipated, the village had changed, or rather, revealed its true form, which had been obscured by illusion.

Baitou Village has become an empty village, without any villagers, but everywhere there is blood that is not worth thinking about. Blood is on the bright red candles and the double happiness character, and blood is also on the funeral cloth and paper money.

The scene was a complete mess, but that's all in the past now.

The blood had long since dried, and the blood on the ground had sunk into the snow. Xue Chao recalled the matchmaker's death and realized that the villagers who had vanished into thin air had probably all "returned to the land."

The village chief's house, the house in front of the west gate, the matchmaker's house, the temple of the God of Wealth, and other places with clues were burned to ruins.

Xue Chao pondered for a long time how the evil god forced the system to open the dungeon's boundaries, and now he understood: He caused the dungeon to collapse.

For example, if all NPCs die and all anomalies are erased, the story will fall apart, and neither the main quest nor the side quests can be carried out.

This is equivalent to the copy not being created.

In that instant, Jiang Ming not only cast illusions on them but also destroyed the instance.

To continue, the boss must be awakened.

However, since the story of the instance has been destroyed, to awaken the boss, one must not summon the God of Mourning in White Head Village, but rather the Mountain God in Joy and Sorrow Mountain.

Xue Chao walked through the village where the embers had all cooled. He hadn't left nothing behind; in every household, there was an extra pair of memorial tablets, one red and one white, inscribed with the names "A-Yun" and "Xiang-Ping," like two inviolable demons under the command of an evil god.

As for the "divine tablets" that the villagers offered themselves, they were all broken on the ground, and the evil god statue seemed to be saying, "I'm not picky either."

The snow fell slowly, blanketing the bricks and tiles, leaving the village covered in white.

The bloodstains were covered up, as if to bury this village that had come uninvited and was not favored by the gods.

Xue Chao, who was walking in the snow, suddenly stopped.

He turned around, and a perfectly intact bridal sedan chair was just a few steps away from him.

A gentle breeze lifted a corner of the sedan curtain, revealing a pair of embroidered shoes. The curtain then fell back down, as if brushing against his heart, an attempt to conceal the truth only to reveal it more clearly.

Xue Chao stepped forward and lifted the sedan chair curtain. The sedan chair was empty except for a pair of embroidered shoes.

Behind him! Just as he was about to turn around, he was pushed into the sedan chair, which tilted backward and fell to the ground, becoming a coffin.

"You know that if you let me out, I'll do whatever I want with you, right?"