Cheng Shuang noticed that the little boy's front teeth were normal, but some of his baby teeth on both sides were sharp like shark teeth, and some had fallen out and had not yet grown back.
"Are you still going to eat?" When she spoke, the little boy suddenly shuddered, as if he had forgotten the presence of outsiders. His fair face tightened, and he said to the boy, "You should eat her."
The boy replied, "If you eat her, you won't have any meat to eat."
Cheng Shuang: "Hey! Don't people with food reserves have human rights?" The little girl grinned, "There's still meat inside, go eat it! My food is only for those who don't eat me."
“We are not human,” the little one stubbornly retorted.
"Yes, you are not human!"
Little One: ...Something feels off...
The boy stared straight at Cheng Shuang. He realized that this young lady was very wicked; she was subtly insulting them.
"We are Zhu Jun, a sacred being," he repeated, somewhat unwilling to let this fragrant and warm-smelling young lady reject them.
"So?" Cheng Shuang raised an eyebrow. "You want me to treat you like the villagers, worshipping you and feeding on my own kind?"
The boy's expression became even more blank. He hadn't had much contact with normal society and didn't understand what was wrong with what the girl said, but his intuition told him otherwise. But before he could speak, the other child spoke up angrily.
“What makes you so great, outsider!” the little one said, head held high. “They have to serve us until we grow up so that their offspring can avoid the curse and be born as singletons.”
"I'm nothing special, but my food is." The little girl curled her lips proudly and deliberately patted her backpack.
The little one sniffed hard and said with some disappointment, "You're lying, there's no food there."
Cheng Shuang tilted her head and smiled, "Because I can do magic tricks!"
The little boy wanted to accuse her of lying, but he couldn't finish his sentence. He remembered that he had climbed over the wall because he smelled the aroma of meat. He scratched his messy short hair, his voice a little hoarse, "Then... then you can transform?"
Not bad, you even know how to use reverse psychology.
Cheng Shuang laughed, "But why should I give it to you?"
“You…you…” The little boy felt like he had been tricked. He was about to rush forward with his teeth bared when the boy grabbed him and shook his head. “She is dangerous.” He paused, not caring that Cheng Shuang would hear him. “It was Old Master Zhu who personally supervised her and her brother to complete the ceremony.”
The little guy frowned slightly, rubbed his nose and said impatiently, "I will be more powerful than Old Zhu Jun in the future. He is already old, and if he doesn't return to his original form, his meat will not taste good."
"Wow, I'm that amazing?" The pretty young lady exclaimed shamelessly, touching her face. This caused the two little boys to turn their heads to see just how thick-skinned she was.
“You’re not that great.” The boy shook his head and denied it. “Old Zhu Jun said you’re dangerous because of the kind of danger you’d bring to the village.”
“For example, you’re trying to trick us into talking,” the little one interjected, baring his teeth in a menacing gesture. “We can’t beat you… or rather, what’s behind you.”
They were talking about the baby bears.
Cheng Shuang understood, but also asked with some doubt, "Since you knew, why were you willing to let me trick you into telling me?"
"There's no need!" The boy looked into the distance, as if he could see through the courtyard wall and know everything outside.
The young girl paused for a moment, then decided to drop the preamble and get straight to the point, "You want to break the curse? But outsiders have never succeeded, so..."
"I've succeeded before." The little one interrupted her, staring at the schoolbag, and said, "If you give us food, I'll answer whatever you want to ask."
Is it that easy?
Cheng Shuang was very tempted and took out braised eggs, fruit salad, braised meat, pastries and juice, and laid them out on the floor.
“She eats a lot,” the boy said earnestly to the little one.
The little girl puffed out her cheeks, so she was deliberately tricked into coming here?
"Other outsiders also have food, why don't you ask them for it?"
"Theirs are not tasty; they're compressed biscuits, and the texture is bad."
And then they ended up as food delivery drivers? That logic makes perfect sense!
"So what if I succeed?" The boy picked up a bag of pastries and slowly tore it open. "Life still goes on the same way."
Cheng Shuang suddenly looked up at him and saw that his eyes were lifeless, while the little one was stuffing a braised egg into his mouth.
She recalled the question from before, and the boy's answer was that it wasn't necessary.
The reason it's unnecessary is that every time outsiders come, they turn the ancestral hall upside down and always find the answer!
Does the person who grants this request know that the world they inhabit is subject to constant reincarnation and repetition?
She suddenly stood up and walked to the pile of bones, her heart pounding, and the little one's voice echoing in her ears.
"You're quite smart!"
"Aren't you going to keep her as a reserve?" the boy asked.
"I don't like blood..."
"You admit it."
"But I'm not afraid of eating people!"
Cheng Shuang felt inexplicably sad for the two children. If they were oblivious and lived their lives in a daze like the other villagers, that would be fine, but what about Zhu Jun...?
When they saw the piles of bones in the house, the layers of corpses at the bottom of the cliff, and the predicament they could never escape, how desperate they must have felt.
Moreover, some of the people involved might not like bloodshed...
The little girl turned around, the turbulent emotions in her eyes quickly subsiding. She asked, "Why don't the bones disappear during reincarnation?"
"Because we realized that everything was just an illusion!" The little one gnawed on braised meat, his mouth full of braising sauce. "We, the villagers, Shuangsheng Village, the green mountains, streams, and big trees outside the village, we have never seen the spring and summer that outsiders talk about, and we don't know what flowers look like when they bloom."
The boy looked up. "Except for you, you are alive and your blood is warm."
Cheng Shuang licked her lips, her throat inexplicably becoming dry and hoarse. "It's a memory..." The dungeon is a memory? But the skeletons belong to the players and maintainers; they are real!
Therefore, if players say they are NPCs, they must have found some kind of pattern.
For example, in a fixed scene, a fixed season, or perhaps in words spoken, within a certain range, it is in the memory mode that the character would say those words.
As Cheng Shuang thought about this, she felt more and more that dungeons and the Death Realm were like twins, or that dungeons existed in imitation of the Death Realm.
The class monitor of the old school, amidst its turbulent history, suffers the pain of death repeatedly; the cruise ship adrift at sea never reaches shore; the city of the abyss replicates the lifestyle of the ancients…
It is all built from memories.
Cheng Shuang felt that her reasoning was somewhat far-fetched, yet subtly connected. After all, she had visited too few death zones to provide more clues.
Now, her priority is to successfully exit the instance.
"The number of bones is incorrect; there are too few."
The young girl calmly pointed out the suspicious points.
"Because there are no player skeletons!" the little guy said with a grin. He was eating a piece of dragon fruit, his mouth full of red flesh. His innocent face turned cold with these cryptic words.
Cheng Shuang lowered her eyes, something flashing through her mind, but it wasn't enough for her to find the answer.
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com
