Seeing that Kong Xuyang was about to lose his mind due to anger again, Yang Zhi quickly changed the subject: "Brother Kong, we still have the advantage. We have already figured out how to collect clues for the true end line in the last round of the game."

Kong Xuyang, with red eyes, forced himself to concentrate and exhaled: "The almanac of Yinshan Village, the incomplete parts on the mural are all in the almanac of the village. As long as we find the almanac from a hundred years ago, we can complete the background story of this Taoist zombie."

"We can then find its weakness." Yang Zhi patted Kong Xuyang's shoulders to make him relax. "Last time in the game, a player found a page of the almanac. Brother Kong, do you remember where that player found it?"

Kong Xuyang's sight slowly moved outwards. He looked at the hilltop and the weir hidden in the darkness, and said word by word: "The mass grave behind the weir."

In the tomb passage.

The entrance to the tomb passage, which had been getting narrower and narrower, was torn open by brute force, and the walls were covered with the sharp claw marks of zombies.

Bai Liu held up the candlestick and shone it over: "These should be what the zombie grabbed in order to get out."

"...This strength is too terrifying." Mu Sicheng stretched out his hand to compare the claw mark. It was twice larger than his hand and deep enough to see the wall. Mu Sicheng's scalp was numb when he saw it. "If this zombie goes crazy, it will kill us without any effort."

"So we have to finish this game before then," Bai Liu said.

Bai Liu walked to the entrance where they climbed into the tomb, stepped on Mu Sicheng's shoulders to gain leverage and jumped out. After Bai Liu got out, he pulled Mu Sicheng up with his backhand.

The entrance to the tomb was under a bed. Just as Mu Sicheng was about to crawl out from under the bed, Bai Liu grabbed his shoulders.

Bai Liu looked outside the bed and said calmly, "There is light, there are people outside."

Mu Sicheng then noticed that there was a flickering silvery, grayish-black light on the ground under the bed, accompanied by a faint noise, like the sound of poor electrical contact, and the intermittent voices of many people talking.

The voices were sometimes rough and sometimes delicate, but there seemed to be something separating them from the real people speaking.

"...These ghosts want to freeze us to death, kill us, and starve us to death, but as long as we are still alive, we must defend this place and prevent outsiders from taking it away..."

"But the men have all left, leaving behind a village of old, weak and sick people. How can we defend the village? We can't defend it..."

"When the men come back, the wives will go to the bridge at the entrance of the village to have a look! Remember to bring an umbrella so you don't get wet. It's almost Qingming Festival and it's been raining a lot recently..."

Bai Liu and Mu Sicheng looked at each other, and they understood where the sound came from.

"The sound of the TV." Mu Sicheng pointed outside and said softly, "Someone is watching TV."

Bai Liu gestured that he would go out first, then nimbly moved away from the bed and knelt on one knee in the shadow at the foot of the bed which was not illuminated by the TV light. He looked ahead quietly, as if confirming something.

Then Bai Liu was sure. He lowered his head and made a [huh] gesture to Mu Sicheng who was still hiding under the bed, asking Mu Sicheng to come out quietly.

Mu Sicheng heaved a sigh of relief when he saw this. He thought it was safe outside, so he leaned out from under the bed with one hand and tried to stand up. However, when he turned around, he gasped and quickly shrank next to Bai Liu, mouthing with horror, "What's going on?!"

There was a mahogany bench next to the bed at the entrance, on which sat two gray-haired old men with their backs to Bai Liu and the others.

The old man was facing an old wooden cabinet with rotten edges. Inside the cabinet was an old-fashioned FM TV that looked no more than twelve or thirteen inches square.

The picture on the TV was in black and white, and was shaking and blurry from time to time, but the two old men seemed to be watching it very intently, with their necks stretched forward and their backs straight, as if they were stiff, sitting there staring at the TV screen without moving.

The light from the screen shone dimly on the faces of the two elderly men. Brown spots appeared around their cloudy eyeballs, and something seemed to be wriggling in their mouths and noses, trying to crawl out. White spots like worms could be seen stretching and retracting in their ears.

They had wooden smiles on their faces and their mouths were moving rapidly, as if they were saying something.

Mu Sicheng held his breath and paid attention, but he did not hear any sound coming from the throats of the two old men. However, he soon realized where the voices of the two old men's conversation came from.

The mouth movements of these two old men are synchronized with the voices of the people on TV.

Bai Liu looked at the TV: "They are dubbing the people on TV."

The shaky black and white picture on the TV was like an old videotape from some historical material. Several women dressed in simple and old-fashioned clothes were sitting at the gate of Yinshan Village, wearing small boots and funeral clothes. They were kneeling beside coffins, waving white handkerchiefs and covering their faces and crying, with an unopened white umbrella beside them.

Mu Sicheng asked quietly: "This is the attire of the ghosts who died on the bridge. Are these women living ghosts who died on the bridge?"

Bai Liu looked at the TV screen and nodded slightly: "Probably."

The two old men with strange faces opened and closed their mouths, and the voice came out from the TV:

"All the men are dead. There are too many of them. There is no room for them in the graves..."

"...They were torn to pieces by those ghost things and could not be buried in the ancestral tomb. How could they face their ancestors when they went down..."

"Put them in coffins and take them to the hills on the other side of the bridge for burial. Let them rest in peace."

"My enemy! You died so tragically! How can I live on with you?"

The women sobbed and lay on the coffin, refusing to let go. They were about to faint from crying, but in the end they followed the people carrying the coffin, walked across the pond and stepped onto the bridge.

They were crying numbly, their faces were covered with undried tear marks, and they held umbrellas in their hands to cool the coffins to prevent the mutilated bodies and souls in the coffins from being damaged by the sun.

But at the moment of crossing the bridge, these women who had lost their husbands looked at the long rows of coffins falling into the mountains. When they were carrying the coffins down the bridge with umbrellas, they suddenly put away their umbrellas, held the umbrellas without hesitation, and jumped off the bridge.

There was a shallow stream under the bridge, and the women crashed into the bridge piers, their heads bleeding.

They held umbrellas and looked at the coffins on the bridge with their eyes wide open, with extremely sad and miserable expressions on their faces.

The moment the coffin left their sight, they slowly closed their eyes and fell into the water, motionless. The blood seeping from their bodies dyed their shrouds, umbrellas and the clear stream water red.

This scene made Mu Sicheng sweat on his back, but Bai Liu was so absorbed in it, as if he was looking for someone.

This searching look made Mu Sicheng even more nervous: "Who are you looking for, Bai Liu? There can't be anyone you know here, right?"

"Maybe." Bai Liu replied without looking away.

Mu Sicheng was startled, then quickly came to his senses: "That's not right, Bai Liu, you have no memory. These are the only people you know. I, Kong Xuyang, and Yang Zhi, I know them all. They are not in this picture."

Bai Liu looked at Mu Sicheng calmly: "I'm looking for someone outside the picture."

"Outside the screen..." Mu Sicheng was stunned, "What do you mean?"

Bai Liu replied calmly: "It's true that neither you nor I know the person in this picture, but there is another person outside the picture who might look familiar to you and me."

Mu Sicheng was getting more and more confused: "This happened a hundred years ago, who can I recognize?"

"You missed a person, the one who took this picture." Bai Liu stared at the picture. "If I'm not mistaken, you'll know what's going on the first time you look at this person."

Curiosity overwhelmed fear. Mu Sicheng crossed his arms, frowned, and began to stare at the edge of the screen seriously, trying to see the person who was holding the camera and filming.

Soon, Mu Sicheng saw that the person filming was adjusting the camera to allow his face to enter the scene.

As soon as the photographer's face appeared in the camera, Mu Sicheng turned around in shock and looked at Bai Liu: "Why does he look like this?!"

Bai Liu remained calm: "What else? What do you think he will look like?"

Mu Sicheng pointed at the photographer who flashed by in the picture, and was so anxious that he almost jumped up: "He looks like me!"

The cameraman on the black and white TV was wearing something both old and trendy, a three-piece vest suit and a pair of leather shoes, a mourning hat on his head, tear marks on his face, and he was adjusting the film reel with his head down while writing something on a calendar with a brush.

Bai Liu looked at the man and said, "He should be the village master Huang Li."

The village calendar master is the person who records fortune and misfortune, as well as all major and minor events in the village. He is also the person who records the missing piece of information on the mural.

"How do you know he will look like me?!" Mu Sicheng was as curious as a cat scratching its heart, and he went up to Bai Liu to ask.

Bai Liu glanced at Mu Sicheng and the camera hanging around his neck that had been recording, and began to explain:

"I'm just guessing. We know that we are in a game and we are participating in four role-playing games. These four characters are all descendants of Yinshan Village."

"Based on the props and missions obtained, the four characters are a grave robber, a good warlock, a bad warlock, and a photographer."

Bai Liu raised his eyes and looked at Mu Sicheng: "Don't you think it would be more reasonable to push this setting forward a hundred years?"

Mu Sicheng suddenly realized, as if he was about to understand: "So you think that we are not playing the role of the present, but the role of a hundred years."

"To be precise, we are playing the role of the descendants of four characters." Bai Liu stretched out his finger and tapped the ground eight times, then connected every two dots. "If this is a role-playing game with strict logic, you are a photographer, a recorder of supernatural events, and now there is also a photographer in front of us, who uses the almanac to record good and bad luck. The overlap of the roles and tasks is as high as 80%. I personally think that you are most likely his descendant."

"If I were the one designing the game, I would make your appearances consistent to remind you of this."

Mu Sicheng suddenly realized: "So you said he looks like me!"