VAP - Chapter 176
Chapter 176: The Ruler in the Endless Deep Darkness (9)
Day five on the cruise ship, 3:00 PM sharp.
The players were scattered in the line in front of the Fairy Tale House. Each carried a hiking backpack containing a fire axe and irritant spray.
Yue Du held Aiona’s hand, standing in line amidst a group of chattering, excited children and young girls.
At this point, she no longer expected Einser to suddenly appear and take care of the child. In fact, she would be more vigilant if Einser did show up.
Who knew which side this female painter pretending to be human was on? She might just turn around and deliver the child to the captain’s blade. This kind of aimless, unpredictable person was the most terrifying.
“I have free tickets. That bad captain from yesterday stuffed them in my hand and told me not to miss the Fairy Tale House.” Aiona waved the free tickets in her hand. There were two of them, identical to the paper slips the five “lucky winners” received yesterday. “He also wanted me to bring you along to play, sister.”
Yue Du confirmed, “Einser?”
Aiona nodded vigorously.
The captain also wanted Einser to enter the Fairy Tale House. Was it because he was so fanatical about the eyes that he wanted to control the artist, or was there another reason? He shouldn’t know that Einser wasn’t human.
Just then, Kong Wenbin walked back from the front of the line.
Yue Du asked, “What’s wrong?”
Kong Wenbin pushed up his glasses with a wry smile. “The staff won’t let me in. They said I look like an adult office worker and can’t participate in a youth activity. I’m going to swap with Bi Yan.”
Earlier, when the players discussed their plan, they decided that five people would enter the Fairy Tale House to stop the cultists from killing, while one person would stay outside to handle any contingencies. Initially, Bi Yan was assigned to stand guard outside, but now they had to switch to Kong Wenbin.
It couldn’t be helped. Xiao Pang was originally a student, Xiao Wang was the spitting image of a street-smart youth, and the women could all dress up to look like schoolgirls. Only Kong Wenbin had an elite aura that he couldn’t hide, so it was no wonder he was stopped.
Bi Yan, stepping in at the last minute, seemed quite calm as she quietly got in line at the end.
Finally, Yue Du and Aiona were at the front of the line. A staff member took the free tickets from Aiona’s hand and asked, “Will you two be going in together, or would you like to draw lots for teammates? If you draw lots, you’ll have to wait on the side for a bit.”
Yue Du said, “We’ll go in together.”
“Alright, have fun.” The staff member tied their wrists together with a thin rope and gestured for them to enter the corridor.
The little girl wiggled her wrist, seemingly finding it novel. Yue Du whispered, “So it doesn’t hinder my movements, I’m going to cut the rope in a bit. Once we’re inside the room, Aiona, don’t stand too close to me. When I tell you to run, run out of the Fairy Tale House. Understand?”
“Understood.” Aiona had a serious expression, though it was unclear if she was still playing out the script of fighting the shark monster in her head.
After waiting near the entrance for a moment, Xiao Wang came in. The child partnered with him seemed quite afraid of him, constantly glancing at his bleached-blond hair.
Xiao Wang said disdainfully, “What are you looking at?”
The child immediately looked away, very obediently.
Next came Gao Yin, Xiao Pang, and Bi Yan, each with a child by their side.
Gao Yin and Xiao Pang had chosen their partners in advance, forming voluntary teams.
Their two child partners wanted to have fun in the Fairy Tale House but didn’t want to be tied to strangers, even if it meant losing their eligibility for a prize. So after entering, they were quite cooperative—or rather, overjoyed—to let the adults cut the ropes, and they took off exploring like wild horses set free.
Xiao Wang’s and Bi Yan’s partners, however, were assigned by drawing lots. Only after being promised toys better than the prize as compensation did the two children agree to separate, happily skipping off together to find some fun.
Yue Du asked, “Gao Yin, can you sense which rooms feel wrong?”
Gao Yin closed her eyes. “It’s probably the same few rooms as yesterday, but they also feel a little different. Let me try to sense it again.”
Xiao Pang immediately joined in the sensing, but his condition was clearly not as good as Gao Yin’s. It was unknown how much Rationality he had consumed so far today.
After a long moment, Gao Yin pointed to several doors as if sleepwalking, then suddenly snapped back to her senses. “The spiritual reaction is stronger than yesterday. They must be carrying spiritual items related to the Deep Darkness Ruler—every single one of them.”
Yue Du immediately thought that these spiritual items must be the “Blade of Imureta,” the tool the cultists used to refine flawless souls. It seemed each of them had one now.
Keep an eye on the sea surface later. Yue Du sent a message to Kong Wenbin, who was waiting outside the Fairy Tale House.
He replied quickly: The Moroses?
Yue Du: Yes. Let’s hope they don’t appear.
Kong Wenbin: I really hate jellyfish.
Yue Du turned off her phone screen and stood carefully in a surveillance blind spot with the other players, waiting for the five children who had drawn the free tickets yesterday—the children with flawless souls—to appear.
Logically, stopping the children from entering should be much easier than stopping a cultist bent on offering souls to their ruler.
However.
“I’m sorry, I came here for Xu Yuan. The only way to see him is to clear the game. I really can’t give up now.” Xu Yuan was the celebrity the captain was using as bait.
“Who are you people? Are you staff from the Fairy Tale House?”
“No, not even for double the prize. I’m here to play the game. My mom said the process is what’s important.”
Without exception, they were all refused.
Xiao Wang scratched his hair in frustration. “We should just knock them all out and hide them.”
“That would cause too much of a commotion and would inevitably attract the cultists’ attention. If they all came out, it would be even harder to deal with. It’s better to go into the rooms individually and catch them off guard,” Bi Yan said.
Yue Du said coolly, “Besides, I doubt we can stop these kids anyway. Look who that little boy is tied to. Does he look like a teenager to you?”
Indeed, apart from the girl who was here for the celebrity and was partnered with an oblivious child, all the other children’s partners were adult men.
Comparing their appearances, it seemed Kong Wenbin had been wronged by being stopped at the door.
Bi Yan suddenly whispered, “I’ve seen one of them. He’s a sailor. Is his presence here the captain’s arrangement?”
Yue Du nodded. “These men aren’t cultists, but they follow the captain’s orders. They’re obstacles too.”
Just then, the little girl Yue Du had spoken to before came out of a safe room. Her left hand was tied to a man, and her right hand clutched a piece of paper.
Yue Du called her name. The little girl turned around, pleasantly surprised. “What a coincidence! Are you collecting stamps too, Sister Yue?”
“It is a coincidence. How many have you collected?” Yue Du’s expression didn’t change.
“I haven’t gotten any yet. I went to the wrong first door,” the little girl said with an embarrassed smile.
Yue Du encouraged her, “Well, keep trying.”
The little girl, full of energy again, ran toward the next door. The man beside her gave Yue Du a suspicious glance, but seeing nothing amiss, he turned and followed.
“If I’m not mistaken, the cultists will be in the third and fourth rooms on her route. Her partner will control the timing, making sure she doesn’t arrive too early or too late,” Yue Du said. “It should be the same for the other targets.”
Gao Yin said, “Since we can’t stop them, we’ll just have to follow them in.”
Xiao Pang seemed to want to say something, but he hesitated and then shut his mouth.
He was very uneasy, not because of his spiritual senses, but out of pure fear. Who could imagine a student living in a peaceful era being dragged into such a bizarre situation, about to stop insane cultists from committing murder?
But no matter how scared he was, he had to bite the bullet and do it. Newcomers received no special treatment; that was the most profound lesson he had learned these past few days.
It’s okay, he thought. I don’t have to risk my life to stop them. If things look bad, I’ll just run. As long as one person succeeds, the sacrificial ritual can’t begin, and we’ll all live.
4:55 PM.
The theater was buzzing with voices. The heavy stage curtain separated the stage and the audience into two different worlds.
The lead actress sat alone in her dressing room, looking at her reflection in the mirror, her eyes glinting with a strange light.
“Doris, why are you still sitting here? The show’s about to start!” someone shouted, poking their head in from the doorway in a hurry.
Doris said softly, “I’ve run into a little problem. Call Blanche to help me.”
“Alright! Blanche! Blanche, get over here if you can hear me!”
In less than half a minute, an intern makeup artist named Blanche came running over. “Sorry, I’m late. Is there anything I can help with?”
Doris smiled. “Close the door first. My lipstick is a bit smudged. Could you help me fix it?”
Blanche closed the door behind her. “Is that so? Let me see…”
The girl, who had just recently graduated from school, walked forward and rummaged through the makeup box. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw in the mirror that the lead actress had stood up. The next moment, a hand clamped firmly over her mouth.
The black jade blade pierced precisely through Blanche’s heart.
No blood spurted out. The girl only had time for a shocked struggle before her eyes, like her face, rapidly turned ashen, as if her life and blood had been completely absorbed by the blade.
The lead actress, in stark contrast, had astonishingly bright eyes. She laughed softly, unable to control herself, and said neurotically, “The first one. You should feel honored. You are the first…”
The actress dragged the body into a wardrobe and concealed it with various props, tools, and clothes. After doing all this, she lovingly caressed the hilt of the blade, secured it in a leather sheath on her forearm, and pulled down her long, layered sleeve to cover it.
She would use this divine token to bring the curtain down on the most satisfying performance of her life.
In the corridor of the Fairy Tale House, all the players’ phones vibrated twice simultaneously.
A message.
Notice: The first lamb has been placed on the altar. Her soul is imprisoned within the black blade. The Moroses have sensed the surge of spirituality. They are excited.
Staring at their phone screens, the atmosphere among the players seemed to freeze.
“What’s going on? None of these kids have entered those rooms. How did someone die? Who died?”
“There are only five kids on the list. Counting the one with us, that’s only six. Their people must have made a move somewhere else.”
“It must be those two women from the theater… but the show is about to start. Where would they find the time to kill someone?”
Aiona tugged on Yue Du’s sleeve, asking uneasily, “Sister, did someone die?”
Yue Du sighed, straightened the little girl’s hair, and said gently, “Yes. Don’t panic. The shark monster’s minions will be defeated in the end.”
Then Yue Du turned her head and made a “pause” gesture. The players gradually quieted down.
“I previously speculated that the last of the seven would be the male lead of the play. It seems now that either something unexpected happened at the theater, causing the cultist to act against the male lead ahead of schedule, or they had a kill list with more than seven people to begin with, and we just don’t know the exact number.”
Hearing someone gasp, Yue Du continued in a relaxed tone, “It’s nothing. It’s impossible for there to be exactly seven passengers with flawless souls on the cruise ship, but there can’t be that many more, or the cultists wouldn’t be focusing their efforts on the Fairy Tale House.”
Bi Yan added gravely, “But this means we have to do everything in our power to stop the killings here in the Fairy Tale House, without giving up on a single one, to maximize our chances of completing the mission.”
“That’s right.”
Xiao Pang’s face immediately turned pale.
He wasn’t the only one who had been hoping for an easier way out. The other players’ expressions weren’t much better, but as veterans of the game, a one-on-one fight with a cultist wasn’t a death sentence, so they could maintain their composure.
Just then, a little boy from the list came skipping out of one of the doors. He studied the slip of paper in his hand for a long time, then suddenly shouted, “We have to go into this room next!”
He was pointing to one of the five targeted rooms.
Before this, no other group’s clues had pointed to any of the five rooms. Occasionally, a group would enter the wrong one, but they would quickly come out in frustration to study their clue again. This was likely the captain’s arrangement to prevent interruptions from unrelated people.
The players looked at each other. Xiao Wang shrugged. “Then I’ll go first. Wait for my good news.”
He swaggered forward with the gait of a street punk who fears no one. The child shrank back in fear. It was unclear what he said to the other two, but the little boy’s partner—the sailor sent by the captain—nodded, and the three of them entered the room together.
After that, the other children on the list appeared one by one. Following the clues given by the staff, they confirmed their next game room, which was also one of the death rooms where the cultists were waiting.
The players then split up accordingly.
Yue Du squeezed Aiona’s hand and gave her a look. The little girl nodded with a serious expression.
Yue Du then walked over to the little girl she had spoken with earlier and asked with a smile, “Which room are you going to next?”
The little girl, completely unguarded, pointed to the target room. “That one. If I get two more stamps, I’ll clear the game.”
“I have to go to that room next, too. Let’s go check it out together. If it’s a puzzle game, we can just come out first,” Yue Du suggested.
The girl agreed at once. “Okay! I’m really good at games!”
Her partner hesitated for a moment but also agreed, probably because the captain hadn’t told him that only one group could enter that room.
The little girl solemnly pushed open the door. Yue Du followed behind and immediately saw a teddy bear sitting in the middle of the room.
To be precise, it was a cultist in a brown bear mascot costume. Yue Du discreetly sized him up and noticed that the costume’s head and body were separate. The bear head hung around his neck like a swaying lantern. The eyes were two large black holes, and it wasn’t hard to imagine the sinister eyes behind them watching the group.
Seeing four people walk in at once, the cultist-bear froze for a few seconds before saying, “You’re the next group. You’ve come to the wrong room.”
Yue Du feigned confusion. “You don’t even know which group we are. How do you know we’re in the wrong place?”
The cultist fell silent again, then came up with an excuse after a moment. “To avoid wasting the time of groups that get lost, my colleagues and I share the characteristics of the incoming groups. He said a big boy and a little girl would be coming. Clearly, that’s not you.”
It was impressive how he could lie with a straight face, calling the burly sailor a “big boy.”
Yue Du pretended to look down at her paper. “Oh dear, we did go to the wrong one. But we’d like to stay and play the game here. It looks very interesting.”
The cultist glanced at the game area to the side.
Since he never intended for anyone to leave alive, he hadn’t designed a game. The setup was extremely perfunctory. What part of it looked interesting?
The cultist was about to tell them to leave when he suddenly noticed Aiona behind Yue Du. The bear head tilted to one side, and he changed his tune. “In that case, you can stay and watch.”
The little girl’s partner closed the door.
The lights in the room were off. Sunlight filtered listlessly through the curtains, making the room very dim.
“What’s the game?” Perhaps because the light was too dim, the little girl’s voice was a bit anxious. She looked around and subconsciously turned to Yue Du for help.
The cultist said, “Don’t be hasty. You wait here first.” He turned to Yue Du. “Young lady, I need to put blindfolds on you and this child. You can take them off after the previous group’s game is over. This is to ensure you don’t lose out on the game experience.”
Yue Du seemed very agreeable. “Alright. Let me put my phone down first.”
She took off her hiking backpack. Seeing from the corner of her eye that the cultist’s attention wasn’t on her, her gaze suddenly sharpened. She reached out, grabbed the bear head, and twisted it one hundred and eighty degrees.
The back of the mascot head, of course, had no eyeholes. The cultist’s vision went black, and he instinctively lunged forward. Standing quietly in front of him was Aiona.
But Yue Du gave him no chance to grab anyone. The fire axe in her hand swung in a sharp arc, cleaving horizontally into the cultist’s neck with unstoppable force.
The axe blade slid smoothly and steadily into flesh and bone, following the seam between the mascot head and the costume.
This blow would have been enough to incapacitate any human and send them to the floor, but this cultist let out a low, hoarse sound from his ruptured throat—a mix of cracking and wheezing—and flailed his arms wildly.
Aiona took this opportunity to step back twice. If Yue Du had seen her expression, she would have noticed that the girl was surprisingly calm, her eyes even holding a hint of interest.
Unfortunately, Yue Du had no spare attention for her. At that moment, the sailor on the other side finally reacted. He shouted in a mix of shock and anger, “Hey! What are you doing?!” Then he snapped the rope, threw the little girl aside, and charged toward them.
Yue Du’s gaze and wrist didn’t tremble in the slightest. She pulled the axe blade free from where it was lodged in his throat bones, then swung down again with even more force in the same spot.
This time, the bear head, along with the human head inside it, rolled to the floor. Blood gushed out like a geyser.
She had cut off a person’s head.
The sailor screeched to a halt. He looked at the bear head still rolling on the floor, then at the blood-soaked axe blade. He swallowed hard and gave a dry laugh. “Ma’am, I didn’t see anything.”
Yue Du said softly, “Didn’t see anything?”
He nodded frantically. Yue Du gave a casual reply and walked toward him, fire axe in hand.
The sailor’s fear peaked. He turned to run and opened his mouth to shout, “Hel—”
The back of the axe slammed into the back of his head. The sailor’s eyes rolled back, and he fell forward heavily. He had passed out.
Yue Du kicked him. There was no reaction. Only then did she let go of the fire axe and stare blankly at her blood-splattered hands as droplets slid off like water.
Aiona deftly skirted the cultist’s headless corpse and put on an expression that looked like she was scared and wanted to cry but was forcing herself to hold it in. “Sister, are you okay?”
Yue Du turned around, first letting out a sigh of relief, then her face darkened. She scolded in a low voice, “What were you doing just now?”
Aiona was stunned. “I… I didn’t do anything.”
“That’s the problem—you didn’t do anything! What did I tell you before we came in? Stand far away from me. Why were you standing so close? Do you know how dangerous that was?”
Yue Du rarely spoke to people with such a cold expression. Aiona blinked, seeming to want to put on a cute smile and act spoiled, but looking into Yue Du’s eyes, she found herself unable to say anything.
After a few seconds, she said, “I’m sorry.”
Only then did Yue Du realize she had lost her composure. She averted her gaze, took out a tissue, and wiped the blood from her hands. “You have nothing to be sorry to me for. It was my own lack of consideration that put you in such a dangerous place.”
She walked over to the other little girl at the far side of the room. The child had witnessed everything and was huddled at the edge of the game area, crying silently.
Yue Du tried to help her up, but the girl kept waving her arms to push her away, unable to make a sound. She had probably been scared speechless.
In comparison, Aiona, who had watched a cultist be decapitated less than two meters in front of her, was unnervingly calm.
Yue Du sighed, feeling a bit guilty. Just as she was about to offer a few words of comfort, Aiona came pattering over, eagerly saying, “Sister, let me talk to her. She won’t cry once she knows what’s going on.”
Yue Du said, “Then you stay with her for a bit. I’ll be right over.”
Hearing the word “stay with,” Aiona’s eyes turned slightly cold for a moment before she broke into a sweet smile. “By the time you get back, sister, I promise she won’t be as scared as she is now.”
After saying that, her smile vanished, and her dark eyes looked into the little girl’s hazy, tear-filled ones.
Meanwhile, Yue Du searched the table where the cultist had been sitting and, as expected, found a black dagger. It must be the so-called Blade of Imureta. She carefully put it away.
Coiled next to the dagger was a thick rope, about two fingers wide. Yue Du used it to tie up the unconscious sailor securely, then found a random cloth to gag him, ensuring he couldn’t cause any trouble even if he woke up.
The cultist’s headless body was much harder to deal with than the sailor. Yue Du simply dragged the head and body to the game area and buried them under the plastic balls in the ball pit. As for the blood on the floor, she had no choice but to wipe it with the sailor’s clothes until it was mostly unnoticeable.
While hiding the body and cleaning up the evidence, Yue Du could faintly hear Aiona muttering things like “shark monster,” “evil minions,” and “for justice” on the other side of the room.
Kids are so easy to fool. To think she still firmly believes in the shark monster story, Yue Du thought.
When Yue Du returned to the two little girls, she was surprised to find that the other girl had actually stopped crying and wasn’t as scared anymore, though she was still sniffling a little.
Seeing Yue Du approach, the little girl sniffled and whispered, “Will more of the shark monster’s minions come? I’ll be good, I promise. I won’t hold you back.”
For a moment, Yue Du didn’t know how to respond. “You watch The Adventures of Baby Dolphin too?”
The little girl said shyly, “I watch it every day. I even make my grandparents watch it with me. I’m a loyal little fan.”
Yue Du: “…”
Alright, it seemed the children here really were easy to fool.
Yue Du led the two girls out of the room, closed the door properly, and urged the little girl to leave the Fairy Tale House immediately, advising her to convince her parents to return to their cabin as well.
The excuse she used was that the shark monster’s sister, the poisonous jellyfish monster, was coming. Heaven knows why a shark’s sister would be a jellyfish.
To Yue Du’s surprise, there were no other players in the corridor.
She first checked her phone. There was no new message in the notification bar. This could mean that a second flawless soul hadn’t died, or that the game only gave a notification for the first “lamb” and wouldn’t announce any subsequent ones.
Kong Wenbin, however, had sent a message two minutes ago. It was just a single picture of a small patch of sea next to the cruise ship. The water below the surface had turned black. It was a mass of jellyfish-like creatures clustered together. A few tentacles were draped over the lowest edge of the ship’s railing, as if they were trying to climb up.
Heeding the mysterious call before the sacrificial ritual, the Moroses—one of the Deep Darkness Ruler’s kindred from the abyssal depths—had arrived.
At the same time, the cruise ship suddenly picked up speed. It wasn’t because the helmsman wanted to shake off the bizarre creatures that shouldn’t exist in the human world; after all, they had no idea something was currently climbing out of the sea.
A few sailors were chatting leisurely at the control console.
“Do you know why the captain wants us to reach the Selenfor Abyss before seven o’clock?” one of them asked.
His colleague waved his hand dismissively. “He’s probably planning some kind of event, like playing a documentary above the abyss or something. Captain Green loves that kind of gimmick, doesn’t he?”
“Who cares? We can’t participate in the events anyway. We just have to do as we’re told.”
“True that, haha.”
The cruise ship’s speed continued to slowly increase, cutting through the waves, but it failed to leave the Moroses behind.
In fact, at its current speed, the Pilgrim would reach the sea surface above the Selenfor Abyss at 6:50 PM—the very place where these jellyfish-like creatures congregated.
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