Chapter 7:- He Seems To Have Merged With The “Traveller”

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Late at night, by the side of the vast Golden Lake, silence reigns as the dark corpses seem to be greatly fearful of the crocodile-headed man and stealthily return to the lake.

 

The wooden cabin is temporarily safe.

 

Zhuo Yu dragged the still-living Fang Hao into the cupboard, considering it a means of protecting him. Besides, out of sight, out of mind; he didn’t want to commit murder in this horror movie-like scene, as he felt it would serve no purpose. The act of subjectively ending someone’s life and self-defense or counterattack are worlds apart.

 

Moreover, Fang Hao is currently defenseless.

 

Zhuo Yu doesn’t want to be someone without integrity, and killing the helpless holds no joy or satisfaction for him.

 

Instead, he is more eager to understand what happened at Golden Lake. He recalls the crocodile-headed mask and suddenly finds it somewhat familiar.

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Crocodile…

 

Right, there was a mention of crocodiles in “Seven Days Talk”!

 

Zhuo Yu cautiously opened the worn-out book with curled edges and began to study it carefully.

 

The story dates back two thousand years.

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In a scorching summer, when all things withered and the land cracked, the Chunquan Tribe suffered from the torment of drought. They migrated for a long time until they found a spring within the mountains. They decided to settle here temporarily and quenched their thirst.

 

After more than ten days, they soon discovered that this place seemed to possess mysterious energy. The injured didn’t get infected, and the sick livestock recovered here. The greedy tribal chief believed this land to be a treasure and decided to develop it into the tribe’s territory, intending to live forever in this paradise-like world.

 

However, as they cut down trees and polluted the water source, they disturbed the deities within the paradise. These deities had just come into existence and were still weak. They timidly warned the tribal chief to leave the place, but the chief perceived them as spies from other tribes and captured them, tying them up tightly.

 

So, on the first night of the seven nights of torment, the tribal chief beheaded the newborn deity.

 

To his surprise, the next morning, the deity sat unscathed in the prison cell. There was no wound on his neck. This astonished and infuriated the tribal chief. He was a warrior, and there was nothing he couldn’t kill!

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During the busy daytime, the tribal chief had to oversee various tasks, so he could only execute the deity at night.

 

On the second night of the seven nights of torment, the deity was fed to the swamp’s crocodiles.

 

Being devoured by crocodiles was perhaps the cruelest death imaginable. In the midst of repeated death rolls, the deity’s body was torn apart. Just as the tribal chief was proud of his wisdom, the seemingly indestructible fellow appeared intact before him once again.

 

This utterly enraged the warlike and cruel tribal chief.

 

On the third night, the execution by fire arrived as scheduled. The deity was bound to the pyre, and the flames slowly consumed his smooth skin, inch by inch, turning it black and shriveled. But still, he did not die.

 

On the fourth night, the tribal chief gathered all the tribe members and declared that the deity was a devil sent by the heavens to stop them from staying in that place. So, over a hundred people took turns in torturing the deity, eventually vivisecting him.

 

As Zhuo Yu read this part of the story, he couldn’t help but frown. He was appalled by the ignorance and stubbornness of these primitive people. A deep sense of disgust arose within him, and a continuous stream of resentment seemed to emanate from his body. Only when Zhuo Yu snapped out of it did he realize that he had clenched his fists so tightly that blood oozed from his palms and fingernail crevices.

 

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What was happening? Did his role-playing character know something? Was that why he reacted so strongly?

 

Zhuo Yu didn’t stop reading and continued flipping through the pages.

 

On the morning of the fifth day, the deity, who had been reduced to a mere skeleton the previous night, regenerated his flesh, just as pristine as before. However, the deity could feel pain, and he couldn’t understand why he was being treated this way. So, he stared blankly at the sky.

 

At this moment, a young boy approached him. The deity recognized him as the only person who hadn’t harmed him the night before.

 

The boy seemed to empathize with the deity’s pain. He secretly brought water from the spring and brought his hidden food, trying to make amends for the harm the tribe caused the deity, even though he knew it wouldn’t change anything, even though he knew he might be discovered and severely punished for his actions.

 

He summoned great courage to approach the deity.

 

The deity didn’t accept the gifts. Instead, he smiled at the boy, a smile so holy that he harboured no resentment towards him.

 

In that moment, the young boy fell in love with the deity, and the deity also developed feelings for the kind-hearted boy.

 

On the fifth night of the seven nights of torment, the tribe members who had previously vivisected the deity saw that he was still alive and believed that his power could be harnessed for the benefit of the tribe. They tried to lure him into joining the tribe by promising him the advantages of killing others and plundering resources, revealing their greedy nature. They even pressured the young boy to persuade the deity, but to the deity, all their impure words were sacrilegious. The boy firmly shut his mouth, unwilling to let the deity endure any more contamination.

 

On the sixth night, as the tribe faced food shortages, their attitude towards the deity transformed from cursing him for his supposed ingratitude to gratitude. However, it was not out of genuine thankfulness but because they knew he could regenerate his flesh. They began to view him as livestock for their meat consumption and devoured the deity.

 

Driven mad by the love for the deity, the infatuated young boy attacked the tribal chief with a knife and was subsequently imprisoned by the others.

 

On the final night of the seven nights of torment, the deity looked at these human-shaped but true devils as they beheaded and scalped the head of the young boy from their own tribe.

 

At that moment, no matter how much torture the deity endured, he did not plead for mercy. Suddenly, he let out a mournful cry, weeping tears of blood, and before long, he collapsed on the ground. The tribal chief checked for signs of breathing and a heartbeat, and this time, the deity was truly dead.

 

His heart was dead.

 

The deity, who couldn’t die but eventually died, was thrown into the spring and transformed into the Eternal Spring.

 

As he finished reading the entire book, Zhuo Yu sat heavily in his wheelchair, his fingers trembling incessantly.

 

As an individual, he shouldn’t have been so deeply moved and empathetic because he was a horror novelist. He had witnessed even more brutal real-life cases and heard of more chilling serial killings. However, the story of “Seven Days Talk” immersed him completely.

 

Moreover, “Seven Days Talk” was a religious story, and to outsiders, the scenes might appear exaggerated. It seemed to solely amplify the wickedness of human nature, leaving people disgusted. In reality, there wouldn’t be that many bad people in society.

 

Zhuo Yu understands that this story fully embodies the “Lucifer effect.”

 

Stanford University once conducted a study in which volunteers were divided into two groups: one group played the role of prisoners, and the other group acted as prison guards. The study concluded that even a seemingly gentle person, when given absolute power, force, and an elevated status, can become a cruel demon, inflicting violence on weaker individuals due to the influence of their environment.

 

That’s why the young boy in the story is the most remarkable character.

 

Rubbing his forehead, Zhuo Yu looked at “Seven Days Talk” and came up with new speculation.

 

On the first night, it was only the tribal chief who tortured the deity, so only one dark corpse appeared on the day they arrived at Golden Lake. On the second night, the deity was fed to the crocodiles, resulting in the appearance of the nearly invincible crocodile-headed man.

 

So, what about the third night?

 

Zhuo Yu had already formed an assumption in his mind.

 

He held the book and felt that he couldn’t just stuff it in the wheelchair anymore. This was an important prop that needed to be protected. The system had given him three slots of space, so perhaps he could store the book in there.

 

Zhuo Yu experimented repeatedly and found that indeed, the compartment could hold the book and summon it back in its entirety.

 

While he was examining the compartment, he suddenly felt a rough and uneven area on the book’s spine.

 

Raising his eyebrows, Zhuo Yu carefully explored the spot and used the sharpened tip of a fork to pry open the cover. He kept tearing until he reached the spine, and as expected, a folded piece of paper fell out from the gap in the spine.

 

Zhuo Yu unfolded the paper and found it covered in numbers, arranged in a certain pattern that seemed to be some kind of code.

 

“Wait, this handwriting…” Zhuo Yu touched the paper with surprise. He wheeled his chair to the campfire and picked up a piece of broken coal slag, then casually wrote a few numbers on the wooden floor, comparing them with the ones on the paper.

 

“This is my handwriting…” Zhuo Yu murmured in confusion. He flipped the paper back and forth, only able to deduce that the ink had dried a long time ago, and it even showed signs of fading.

 

Suddenly, Zhuo Yu had an idea. He struggled to move his body and sat on the ground, examining his wheelchair closely.

 

“Everest & Jennings!” He blurted out the brand name on the inner side of the wheelchair’s wheel. As a disabled person with some disposable income, he had always been familiar with the latest and best wheelchairs on the market. Everest & Jennings was the brand that had created the world’s first folding wheelchair, establishing their company brand and contributing to the foundation of modern wheelchair design to this day.

 

But… this brand was only popular in the mid-20th century.

 

As expected, in a hidden corner, there was a marking indicating the construction date of this wheelchair – it was built in 1938.

 

Zhuo Yu became excited; he had caught a glimpse of the “unknown character”!

 

Hastily returning to his wheelchair, Zhuo Yu opened the cupboard again and quickly removed Fang Hao’s clothes. The shirt had a strong vintage countryside style from the 1980s, but Zhuo Yu’s own clothes were even more antiquated, with slight differences in stitching that were not typical of modern factory products.

 

“If the style of this movie is late 1980s cult splatter, then I am a completely anachronistic presence from that era.” Zhuo Yu clenched his right fist and knocked it against his left palm. “I understand, I understand!”

 

His character and the rest of them, don’t belong to the same time period at all! Based on the age of the wheelchair, there’s roughly a fifty-year gap between them! Moreover, after so many years, the wheelchair couldn’t possibly still be as sturdy and reliable; it just doesn’t fit together!

 

Naturally, unless it was fixed at a specific year.

 

In other words, he had died fifty years ago!

 

At the moment Zhuo Yu realized the truth, he could hardly contain his joyful hum. He chuckled and began to inspect the entire house.

 

Starting from the entrance of the wooden cabin, Zhuo Yu noticed numerous old wheelchair marks on the threshold. Those narrow wheel tracks, if not carefully examined, would be mistaken as natural wear and tear on the wooden floor.

 

At first, Zhuo Yu didn’t pay much attention to these marks, but he had been with his wheelchair for too long. With careful observation, he could discern these incongruent spots.

 

Moreover, the wheel marks matched the same model as his current wheelchair.

 

This was a clear clue, and Zhuo Yu believed that the true owner of this wooden cabin was none other than the seemingly harmless “traveler” himself.

 

Additionally, he noticed something rather peculiar, something he had spotted when he first entered the room.

 

That was a large wooden cabin with all sorts of tools like saws and axes, yet oddly, there was no small knife to be found. When Zhuo Yu searched the kitchen for a fruit knife or a kitchen knife that could be easily concealed, he came up empty-handed. In the end, he had to make do with a dining fork as a makeshift weapon.

 

This was another detail that Zhuo Yu’s teammates didn’t pay much attention to, but it caught his interest.

 

After all, the traces of life in this house were quite evident, yet the commonly used Western kitchen knives and fruit knives were nowhere to be found. It seemed somewhat deliberate.

 

Zhuo Yu played with the fork he had sharpened, put it into the compartment space, and then followed the wheelchair marks to the room with the heaviest traces.

 

For now, he designated that room, adorned with a large mural and appearing to be a storage room, as “his room.”

 

Here, he made an even more astonishing discovery.

 

Inside the room, there were piles of debris, wooden boards, broken furniture, and animal bones. After Zhuo Yu made an effort to push away these obstructing items, he indeed found square indentations near the window, marks left by a four-poster bed on the floor.

 

This room used to be a bedroom.

 

Once he cleared away the clutter, some rather obvious signs of a struggle became apparent. Indentations on the floor from blunt objects, aged adhesive tape discarded in a corner, and scattered, desperate scratch marks… These clues seemed to have been there for a long time, and compared to other speculations, Zhuo Yu was more inclined to believe they were left behind fifty years ago.

 

According to the memories provided by the system, the frequent starting point of disappearances was indeed fifty years ago.

 

What happened to this bedroom, or to the “traveler” himself?

 

Zhuo Yu furrowed his brow and examined the scratch marks on the floor more carefully. Suddenly, his head began to throb.

 

As if experiencing a temporal dislocation, fragmented scenes appeared in his mind like broken film reels. Zhuo Yu felt himself surrounded by a group of people, and strong, forceful hands held down his legs.

 

He struggled with all his might, continuously saying something, but those people did not let him go. His ankles were tightly bound with tape, leaving futile scratch marks on the floor with his hands, until his nails cracked, and he couldn’t escape.

 

“Move quickly! Once that freak comes back, we won’t have a chance!”

 

“Hahaha, so disgusting, could they be involved in that kind of relationship?”

 

The dialogue was unclear but filled with malice.

 

Then, a glint of silver flashed, and an axe and a hammer swooshed past Zhuo Yu’s ears. With a crack, a piercing pain swept through his whole body.

 

Zhuo Yu suddenly snapped back to reality, cold sweat rolling down his forehead.

 

He touched his legs, and the phantom pain still lingered, telling him that what just happened was not mere imagination but something that had truly occurred to him.

 

The feeling of powerless despair, the fury of being violated, and the longing to protect someone but never being able to see them again… Zhuo Yu, who had lived until now, experienced such complex and intense emotions for the first time.

 

At this moment, he seemed to have merged with the “traveller.”