Chapter 88 Peach Blossom Spring (7) (1st + 2nd update) [VIP]
Bai Jinshu laughed for no apparent reason, leaving the remaining three teammates confused.
Yu Miaojiao looked confused beside him: "What are you laughing at?"
Bai Jinshu looked away and put his fist to the corner of his mouth: "Hey, nothing."
He couldn't just say that he thought the evil spirit possessing an octopus was quite cute, right?
There is a subtle contrast.
The little octopus just looks unhappy.
His eyes moved around the sky and the ground for a few times, but he didn't look at the little octopus, and he tried hard to suppress the urge to laugh out loud in his heart.
The remaining three team members standing in place looked at each other and saw misunderstanding in each other's eyes.
No, why is Wu Zongzi laughing suddenly?
"Did you find anything?" Li Qian blinked blankly.
In the assessment space, if he hadn't discovered some important clues, why would he be smiling so happily?
"Well... sort of, I found a breakthrough point," Bai Jinshu curled his lips, trying not to laugh out loud, "Yu Miaojiao, can you give me the pendant on your backpack?"
"My backpack?" Yu Miaojiao turned around blankly and threw the bag on her back to the front. "Which pendant?"
There were many badges and various acrylic pendants on her backpack. Yu Miaojiao looked at the zipper of her backpack and asked, "Is this the little octopus?"
She picked up the little octopus and looked at Wu Zongzi.
"Yes, that's it." Wu Zongzi looked like he wanted to laugh, his eyes full of smiles.
He blinked. "Okay?"
"This is not a problem..." Yu Miaojiao was a little puzzled. "This should be the thing of Yu Miaojiao before, right? Is there something special about this little octopus? Is it related to this space?"
As she spoke, she unfastened the pendant from her zipper lock and handed it to Wu Zongzi: "Here."
Just as she took off the pendant, the little octopus's mouth seemed to move.
It must be an illusion, right?
Yu Miaojiao watched Wu Zongzi take the octopus and squeeze it a few times, then the smile on her face became even stronger: "Well...thank you."
He tilted his head and seemed to think about what to say for a while, then he said, "It has nothing to do with the exploration itself. Let's talk about it later."
Bai Jinshu had to think about which parts of the content about the evil god were necessary to tell others, and which parts could be properly artistically processed to hide from the audience who were most likely selecting reserve players.
In the previous conversations with the evil god, he only regarded Huaijiamu as a simple inhibitor to reduce the synchronization rate and never pulled him into the Foundation's exploration.
But this time, his main purpose was to get some clues from the evil god.
How to explain it to him clearly is also a problem.
Seeing that he understood the foundation's watch as a tribute, Bai Jinshu knew that he probably still knew nothing about the nature of the Foundation.
The evil god, whose power lies in replacing one's skin, probably doesn't even know why he changes his appearance every time he meets him.
Moreover, the loss of the evil god of the "First Hospital" space seems to be a very famous mistake among investors. Fortunately, he has replaced the identity of the explorer and is also one of the explorers in a sense.
"Let me record the buildings in the village first." Without explaining much to the remaining three people, Bai Jinshu suddenly turned around, unfolded the paper in his hand, drew a few strokes on it, and then looked up and looked forward. "Hmm... I remember there was no road in this place before."
The assessment space is still very important to him. Whether he can pass it determines whether he can touch the special space above the Foundation's advanced space. Although Wu Zongzi's fixed attributes enhance his success rate in exploration, if he knows certain information alone, he is likely to be led astray by his own inertial thinking and fall into the vicious circle of one-man rule that She Mochu had at the beginning of the project.
The reason why he discovered the connection between the hounds and the bugs only later was because the information about the Hound of Tindalos interfered with him from beginning to end.
Just like Night City, what you see may not be what you get, so it would be best to share the information you will get from Huai Jiamu so that everyone can think about it.
Any clues related to the rules need to be explored bit by bit.
If he comes up with a conclusion for no reason, he will inevitably need a meaningful and effective reasoning process to prove the credibility of this clue.
At the beginning, he had thought that Huai Jiamu would most likely replace one of the team members, so he would also represent one of the explorers, and there would be no need to explain what he saw, as it could all be attributed to fixed attributes or other things.
But now…he’s possessed by a small octopus.
Well...cute is indeed cute.
But how to put it...
"What about you guys?" He pinched the plush octopus and turned to look at the three people behind him.
For some reason, Yu Miaojiao felt that the deep feeling of "we are not familiar with each other" from Wu Zongzi seemed to have faded away all of a sudden. He seemed to have suddenly become very gentle, or in other words, more approachable?
Yu Miaojiao blinked and answered subconsciously: "I remember too... there was no road, right?"
"No." Li Qian shook his head.
"I also remember that this was not a road, it was a wall before." Zhang Ke thought for a moment and said affirmatively.
"Well... that's it." Bai Jinshu lowered his head and wrote down the changes in the village on a piece of white paper. The cotton tentacles of the plush octopus poked his palm, as if it wanted to say something.
Bai Jinshu pinched the octopus in his hand in the blind spot of everyone's vision.
"Sh ...
He hasn't figured out what to say yet, so he'll wait and see when he finds a reason.
The unhappy little octopus seemed even more unhappy.
"You can't blame me for this," Bai Jinshu lowered his voice and flicked the little octopus's cotton tentacles with one hand, "You didn't have to come."
It is really a case of taking advantage of others and still acting ungratefully.
Although I don’t know what the evil god Huaijiamu is thinking, every time he summoned Huaijiamu, he didn’t come.
However, this time, there seemed to be something wrong with the location where the evil god was summoned. There was no suitable skin nearby for him to possess, so he possessed the only stuffed toy that was barely usable.
Since the exploration team members cannot be possessed, does that mean they are no longer human?
Where does the physical fatigue and occasional feeling of suffocation come from?
Under normal circumstances, Bai Jinshu would really start thinking about this problem, but now... maybe he was really affected a little by Chao Yougan after the long period of 100% last time. After the synchronization rate with Wu Zongzi returned to zero, he just wanted to pinch the octopus a few more times.
It seems that the evil god is a little unhappy. Unsure, pinch it again.
Since he couldn't see the evil god's face, he became even bolder.
Bai Jinshu pinched the little octopus's tentacles and praised in a low voice: "Actually, the skin I chose this time is quite cute."
"Much more physically intimate than the previous ones." He praised objectively.
*
So after everyone had finished recording the distribution of the village's buildings, Wu Zongzi sat next to the table. In addition to the village distribution map he had just drawn, he also had a plush pendant in his hand.
Yun Guang integrated the distribution maps provided by the two parties and is comparing the differences between the two maps bit by bit.
Xu Zichen and several other people were looking through Yu Yiming's phone, trying to find some more clues from it. Bai Jinshu was pinching an octopus for a long time nearby. Finally, after everyone was preparing to go to the ancestral hall and inquire about other information, he found an opportunity to act alone.
Holding the unhappy-looking little octopus in his hand, Bai Jinshu found a place to sit down.
After he said "hush", the little octopus became silent. I wonder if the evil god was angry.
In the past, I could use my face or my body to comfort her, but now, well...
Bai Jinshu poked the octopus's cotton tentacles: "Are you angry?"
The little octopus didn't move.
"It was an accident just now," Bai Jinshu blinked, his tone very sincere, "You see, the previous identities encountered many obstacles. Now that I am attached to this pendant, I can stay with you all the time."
The little octopus seemed to stare at him with dead eyes.
"Really," Bai Jinshu curled his lips, "I like it very much."
What he said is true.
After all, it's hard to resist a plush little octopus.
The little octopus retracted its tentacles slightly uncomfortably.
So easy to coax.
"What did you want to say just now..." Bai Jinshu was about to ask him what he wanted to say just now, but halfway through, he suddenly realized a problem.
Wait, this little octopus doesn’t seem to have a mouth?
How can you make a sound without a mouth?
Just as he was thinking about whether the possessed body would affect the state of the evil god, he suddenly heard a voice in his ear: "You are dying."
It is the voice of the evil god.
His voice seemed to appear directly in his mind, just like the first time he was released from that space. This voice did not travel through the air as a medium, but appeared directly in his heart.
Bai Jinshu: "Hmm?"
He had many guesses about what Huai Jiamu would say, but he didn't expect that this would be what he said as soon as he opened his mouth.
"I'm dying?" He blinked in wonder. "What do I look like?"
"You are covered in wounds," the evil god's voice seemed to reveal a hint of confusion, "I thought you summoned me here so that I could replace your skin with another one."
Although death was nothing to him, and he had countless ways to prolong Bai Jinshu's life, but facing death, his first choice was to summon himself and then do nothing, which still made him feel vaguely confused.
In his eyes, a stuffed toy or a human body is just a different skin, and he has no idea what Bai Jinshu is laughing at.
But Bai Jin said he liked it very much.
For the first time, he felt a new feeling from him, like.
Something... something that seemed to make him happier than love.
Huai Jiamu moved inside this strange body, and his voice softened a little: "I sensed that you were about to die, so I came here."
Bai Jinshu stared at the back of his hand which had no wounds.
As the evil god uttered these words, a number of scratches and scabs seemed to appear faintly on the skin.
In the blink of an eye, it was gone again.
After the evil god pointed this out, his awareness of being "covered in bruises" seemed to have made him actually covered in bruises.
But due to the lack of other evidence, this trace only appeared vaguely for a moment.
He considered himself to be healthy, but in the eyes of the evil god, he was about to die.
Which one is real?
It is definitely not easy to make your wish come true.
"And then?" Bai Jinshu raised his head and continued to ask with a normal expression, as if he didn't see the wound.
"You don't have any useful skins here," the evil god moved his cotton tentacles slightly, and turned them around in his hands very vividly. After looking around the environment here, he said firmly, "There are many bones on the ground here. The living people are dying like you. There is no point in exchanging them."
The scene revealed in the evil god's words was completely different from what he saw.
"And your taste is still as poor as ever," Huai Jiamu's voice sounded very dissatisfied, "Why are you still the same ones from last time?"
The last few...
The only exploration team members Huai Jiamu had seen were Yun Guang, Guan Hongyan, and Lu Changfeng.
What about the rest of the people in the village?
It was as if he didn't see them at all.
Bai Jinshu stood up, walked to the edge of the village, and looked at the young men in the fields: "What about these people?"
"Hmm?" The evil god's voice was puzzled.
"Which ones?" he asked.
*
Bai Jinshu pushed open the door of the ancestral hall.
Yun Guang and a few others were flipping through the village history. The older woman, whom everyone called Grandma, was under the tree at the door and seemed to be talking to Xu Zichen.
Hearing the sound of him pushing the door, everyone looked up.
"Wu Zongzi, where have you been?" Guan Hongyan looked back at him, "How come you disappeared when I turned around?"
She was holding a book bound with cotton thread in her hand and was searching for something in it.
"You came just in time," Yun Guang put down the book in his hand, "We searched here for a while and found many records about outsiders in this village."
"Generally speaking, there are only two outcomes for these outsiders who enter the village. The first is to be like the fisherman in "Peach Blossom Spring", who stays here for a few days before leaving. According to records, these people were very weak. Some even fainted on the hillside when they entered here and were found by villagers." He pointed to the books on the left.
"The other type is people like Yu Yiming," Yun Guang said. "There was nothing unusual when they entered here. Usually, according to the records, these people eventually stayed in Taohuayuan and became part of this place."
"That is to say, there are probably two ways to enter the Peach Blossom Spring," Guan Hongyan continued, "We and Yu Yiming use two different methods. The way he entered may not be able to leave."
"Yu Yiming just told us. We compared the procedures for both of us to get here. We both ran down in the heavy rain, then suddenly fainted, and woke up on a grassy field."
"The problem now is most likely what happened after we fell into a coma," Guan Hongyan rubbed her hair in annoyance. "After all, so many years have passed, and the act of walking along the river has become something that can only be accomplished through coincidences in rainy weather. It's possible that something went wrong in the later stages."
Yun Guang nodded affirmatively: "So we couldn't pass the verification rules at the beginning, probably because there are two ways to enter here."
Xu Zichen pushed open the door and window from outside and came in: "I've finished asking questions."
At the door, the older woman called Granny by the villagers had already left. Xu Zichen unceremoniously dragged a chair over and sat down. He took out a pack of water from his bag and took a big sip. "Yun Guang just felt that Gan Yong's words were not right. This place doesn't look dangerous outside, and there won't be wild animals or outsiders. Why don't the villagers dare to let the children go out? I went out to ask."
"The grandmothers in the village said that there is unrest outside the village. Sometimes there are ghosts. I don't quite understand it," Xu Zichen thought for a while and said, "Anyway, it is this ghost. Sometimes it appears outside the village. So in order to prevent the children from getting into trouble, they are not allowed to go out."
“Are there ghost legends in both the village world and the normal world…” Yun Guang pondered.
Bai Jinshu stood at the door with a subtle look on his face. In his ears, he heard Huai Jiamu's voice: "Empty."
“There are only three people standing here.”
Time goes back to ten minutes ago.
Bai Jinshu stood at the edge of the village. Although most of the people in the farmland in front of him were working with their heads down, it was far from being impossible to see anyone.
In this situation, it is certain that what Huai Jiamu saw is definitely different from what he saw. Bai Jinshu narrowed his eyes and decided to play dumb to the end: "I should be in a village."
"No," the evil god said firmly, "there is no village."
"So where do you think this is?" Bai Jinshu asked.
"Cave." This time, Huai Jiamu's voice was more certain.
Cave...
Bai Jinshu looked around and asked, "Is there nothing nearby?"
"No, this is just an empty space," the evil god's voice sounded slightly puzzled, "What are you guys doing here? What strange place are you in this time?"
He seemed to have gotten used to Bai Jinshu often summoning him from strange places.
As for the description of a strange place, in the eyes of the evil god, it seems that there is only empty and lifeless matter here.
He couldn't see the villagers.
The village is not visible either.
The children who had taken them to the hut outside the village in the morning ran over laughing. The girl among them jumped over and said, "Brother! What are you doing? Grandma is back."
"Okay, brother will go there now." Bai Jinshu nodded and watched the children run away.
"Who are you talking to?" Huai Jiamu's voice and the little girl's "Goodbye, brother" sounded together.
He literally couldn't see the kids or hear them.
Bai Jinshu frowned, so there was something wrong with these villagers in Peach Blossom Spring.
Or rather, they were blinded by something.
*
Standing at the entrance of the ancestral hall, which seemed to Huai Jiamu to be a blank space, Bai Jinshu said in a normal tone: "Yun Guang, I have something to tell everyone."
After all the exploration team members arrived, Bai Jinshu spoke up: "We can't stay here for too long."
"Why?" Yun Guang put away all the comparison pictures and looked up at Wu Zongzi.
"According to our initial inference, assuming that Peach Blossom Spring is a space built in the real world, or independent of the real world," he stretched out his hand and drew a circle on the paper in front of him, "then there are two guesses about where we are now."
“Or outside the circle,” he drew another circle and drew a line in the middle, “This place has nothing to do with the real world. That hut, or that cave, is the passage into here, connecting the outside world and the village.”
"Or inside the circle," he drew a smaller circle inside the first circle and then put a dot in it, "This location overlaps with the real world. The hut we found is the anchor point of the entire village world."
Of these two guesses, everyone initially preferred guess one, because Yu Yiming said that if he walked down the lake, he would not reach the end.
But after discovering the cabin, everyone began to lean towards option two.
After all, the identical cabins in the two spaces really look like space anchors.
"Do you remember that under the Weibo post about Yu Yiming's disappearance, there was an account claiming to be a master of metaphysics, saying that Yu Yiming was possessed by a ghost."
"Remember." Xu Zichen nodded.
In their expedition team group, there was not much news about the missing explorer, and this screenshot of Weibo comments was one of them.
"One of the clues we found is that there may be some very subtle rules that make wishes come true and wells move when we accidentally find them, but they don't happen when we are conscious."
Everyone then nodded.
"The biggest difference between us and Yu Yiming is probably not the order in which we entered," Wu Zongzi said, "but our cognition."
"Before we entered, after seeing the villages above and below, the idea that flashed through everyone's mind was: this is really the Peach Blossom Spring, this is a region that is different from the normal world, and we have come to a new place."
What he said was met with nods of agreement from everyone.
"When Yu Yiming entered here, he described himself as thinking that a kind person had saved him, so he walked up the direction he remembered and saw a village. After entering the village, he even thought that a friend had bribed all the villagers in order to make a prank video."
"I understand what you want to say," Yun Guang understood, "We knew from the beginning that this place was fake, but Yu Yiming thought it was real from the beginning."
"Yes." Bai Jinshu nodded.
"So according to the law of wishing for something to happen..." Guan Hongyan continued slowly, "We thought the people here were fake, so we couldn't touch them, but Yu Yiming thought they were real, so he touched them."
"So the people recorded in the village annals who left were those who no longer felt this was a real village after entering, and those who stayed thought this was real from the beginning," Guan Hongyan pondered for a moment, "but how do we explain the departure of the fishermen and the changes in the village?"
"The changes in the village are easy to explain," Yun Guang thought for a moment. "If everything here is based on our subconscious, then the village is changing. It is very likely because our memory of the village is not very clear. Therefore, the village in our cognition keeps changing, and thus the village is really changing."
"And the subconscious is actually a collective subconscious, so Zongzi's clear memory alone cannot defeat the vague memories of all of us, so the village is still changing."
"Our understanding of this place determines its state," he said. "So how it is recorded in the Peach Blossom Spring is how it is."
"And the fishermen..." He thought for a moment and looked at Bai Jinshu, "Zongzi, since you are the one who proposed this, do you have any thoughts on this?"
"There is an idiom, 'to serve a tiger as its accomplice,'" Bai Jinshu answered quickly. "I don't know if you have heard of this story. People eaten by tigers will turn into accomplices, and accomplices will attract new people to be eaten by the tigers."
"It is very likely that people who enter here will be divided into two states. One is bewitched by the ghost and stays here, while the other leaves here and becomes a ghost. The fisherman who left here is already a ghost. He spreads the story and describes in detail how to enter here, which is actually luring new people in."
“And the people who enter here also have another idiom to describe them.”
"We are possessed by the devil," he said. "We are possessed by the devil."
"As I'm telling you right now, the reason why all of us are so tired and can't breathe is because we've lost too much blood and are hypothermic."
"And if we stay here any longer, everyone will die."
As he spoke, the ancestral hall in front of him began to collapse bit by bit.
As all the exploration team members had expressions of sudden enlightenment or deep thought, the world gradually collapsed, the figures slowly dissipated, and the bright ancestral hall in front of everyone's eyes faded away and turned into a dim cave.
Surrounded by mud and bones, they sat there with wounds all over their bodies, unaware that the bodies of their companions were next to them.
In Xu Zichen's left hand, which was holding Yu Yiming's mobile phone, there was only an empty power bank.
And high in the sky is the only exit of this pit which is dozens of meters deep.
The so-called Peach Blossom Spring... is where they rolled down under the heavy rain.
The author has something to say:
Metal's messy emotional expression is like the broken quantifiers when foreigners learn Chinese. Sooner or later, it will fool Jiamu brother...
It’s time for the weekly Sunday Rich Women Appreciation Conference again!
Thanks to the beautiful girl who voted for 526 moonstones on the 26th! The beautiful girl voted for 8264 moonstones on the 27th! The beautiful girl voted for 2582 moonstones on the 28th! The beautiful girl voted for 23 moonstones on the 30th! The beautiful girl voted for 10 moonstones on the 31st! The beautiful girl voted for 361 moonstones on the 1st!
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com
