The No. 1 Hunfen King in the Entire Server [Interstellar] Chapter 9

Finally coming to his senses, Blondie glanced nervously out the window.

The grove outside was empty. No old man with an umbrella. Only a long-dead tree stood there, dry and withered.

Was it all an illusion?

The girl ignored Lin Jing’s forceful negotiation tactics, turning her cold, piercing gaze onto Blondie. Her pupils were unnaturally small, leaving most of her eyes a stark, eerie white. The sight made Blondie shiver as he instinctively tried to hide behind Lin Jing.

But Lin Jing grabbed him by the collar, pulling him back. “Don’t hide. Haven’t you noticed? The more scared of ghosts you are, the more they come after you.”

Blondie hesitated. “…” That… sort of makes sense. Out of everyone, I’m definitely the unluckiest. Always running into ghosts.

Reluctantly, he shuffled closer to Lin Jing.

Lin Jing sat casually at the table, holding a pen in one hand and a piece of paper in the other. He looked every bit like he belonged there. “Alright, tell me your name first.”

Blondie was incredulous. “Brother Lin, even if we can’t get any useful information out of her, there’s no need to go this far, right?”

Lin Jing twirled his pen with a smile. “You don’t understand. With girls, you have to be gentle. Patience is key.”

But his so-called gentleness didn’t seem to work on the girl.

The girl with the braided hair maintained her pale, sullen expression and turned her head away, refusing to speak.

Lin Jing wasn’t discouraged. Instead, he spread the paper out on the table in front of her and tapped it. “Don’t want to talk? That’s fine. Write it down. Do you still want your arm back or not?”

The girl glared at him darkly, her gaze shifting briefly to the arm lying close by. Finally, she gave in.

She extended her right index finger and began writing on the paper in black blood. Two characters emerged: “Xu Ya”.

“Xu Ya?” Lin Jing repeated the name softly. “Second question: what’s with that forest?”

Her wet clothes and hair couldn’t mask the faint stench of rot and clotted blood emanating from her. She lowered her head, her expression faintly mocking as she wrote two more characters: “Curse”.

“Curse?” Blondie blurted out. “This village was cursed?”

Xu Ya paused for a long time, then added two more words: “Forgiveness”.

Blondie was baffled. “Curse? Forgiveness? Can you explain clearly? What’s the deal with those monstrous babies? Or just tell us where the Door of Life and Death is!”

Xu Ya looked up, her needle-like pupils coldly glanced at him, as if mocking his daydreaming.

After answering the two questions, she seemed to have exhausted all her patience. She turned her head away and ignored them completely.

Lin Jing stared at the six characters on the paper for a long time. Afterward, he didn’t make things difficult for the young girl. When the red cloth was lifted, the stiff hand seemed to be suddenly unsealed. It hopped over to Xu Ya’s side. Once the severed arm was reattached, Xu Ya jumped down from the table and dragged her feet to the window. Opening it, she was swept away by the wind and dissolved into the mist over the mountains.

Blondie exclaimed, “You’re just going to let it go like that?”

Lin Jing folded the paper and replied, “Aside from main NPCs, you won’t get much out of anything else. This is already enough.”

“The window’s open?”

Xu Wanzhi, just waking up, rasped as he asked.

Lin Jing folded the paper neatly and replied, “Yeah, a ghost just came in.”

Xu Wanzhi: “Oh.”

With that disturbance, no one had any intention of sleeping anymore.

Blondie finally voiced the question that had been lingering in his mind, addressing Xu Wanzhi: “Brother Xu, why do I feel like you’re not invested in this game at all?”

Lin Jing thought, Because he came here just to watch the show.

Xu Wanzhi, still groggy from sleep, chuckled briefly and replied nonchalantly, “No need.”

Blondie raised his voice, “No need?!” Is that even something a person would say?

Lin Jing could more or less guess: Xu Wanzhi likely had a very high mental power level in reality. He was just in the game for the experience. Lin Jing interrupted before Blondie could spew a string of unnecessary words.

“Let’s organize the clues first.”

He pulled out a new sheet of paper and used a pen to draw three points on it, labeling them “village chief,” “Forest,” and “Cliff.”

“We need to find special clues to extract information from the main NPCs. But these past few days, the village chief has been elusive.”

Blondie became focused, as if a lightbulb had gone off in his head. “Oh yeah, the village chief is always either on the second floor or out somewhere. What’s he been up to?”

Lin Jing: “Probably preparing for a funeral.”

Blondie: “Huh?”

Lin Jing explained, “That old man at the market mentioned it last time: red shoes for binding feet, black ox pulling a coffin, and a scarecrow leading the soul. Hasn’t the village chief been fiddling with fabric and straw all day? Plus, a dying old man just arrived yesterday. The second floor is probably filled with corpses.”

Blondie: “What the heck! So, we’ve been sleeping right under a pile of corpses every night?”

Lin Jing sneered, “Not necessarily corpses yet.”

Ignoring Blondie’s suddenly horrified expression, Lin Jing wrote the script’s title, Door of Life and Death, on the paper. Turning to Xu Wanzhi, he asked, “Let me ask you something.”

Leaning against a bookshelf, Xu Wanzhi lifted his eyes lazily. “What?”

Lin Jing: “What do you think of the words ‘life and death’?”

Xu Wanzhi met his gaze.

He lounged against the bookshelf, his posture casual. The room was brightly lit, but outside, rain poured in torrents, the grass and trees silent. Blood-red climbing ivy slowly crept up the window.

“In what context?”

The small house nestled in the mountains was unusually quiet. For a moment, Lin Jing caught a glimpse of something in Xu Wanzhi’s eyes—something as calm and indifferent as the surrounding landscape.

Lin Jing paused, then said, “Any context. Simply put, what’s your interpretation of the game’s title?”

“Oh, Door of Life and Death?” Xu Wanzhi glanced down, his tone indifferent. “It probably refers to the boundary between life and death.”

Blondie eagerly chimed in, “Yeah! I think so too. But isn’t the boundary pretty clear? Isn’t it just the moment you stop breathing? Unless… you’re saying we’ll literally see a gate when we’re about to die?”

Lin Jing quipped, “Why don’t you try it? It’s called the ‘Ghost Gate.’ If you see it, be sure to leave us a code.”

Blondie: “…No, no thanks.”

Lin Jing chuckled, then shifted his gaze out the window. The police station stood at the village entrance, facing a cliff adorned with hanging coffins. Dropping his playful tone, he murmured thoughtfully, “I think, for the living, someone truly dies only when their coffin is sealed and buried.”

“Maybe… we’ll have the privilege of attending a funeral.”

The next morning, they returned at dawn. The village chief was in the courtyard, arranging his straw. He didn’t even glance their way.

From a distance, Feng Haozhong spotted them, dramatically removing his sunglasses with a smug grin. “Well, look who’s back.”

Being a kind and gentle girl, Xiao Xu asked, “What were you guys doing yesterday?”

Blondie was the first to answer, “Not much. We chopped a tree and got arrested for it.”

Feng Haozhong sneered, “Impressive. We ventured deep into the forest, barely making it back, and you guys had the leisure to chop down trees.”

Lin Jing ignored the sarcasm and directly asked, “You went into the depths of the forest?” He was indifferent to Feng Haozhong’s mockery—it was just background noise.

“…” Feng Haozhong felt as if his punches had landed on cotton.

The seven of them gathered inside to share their findings from the previous day.

Lin Jing recounted the blood baby on the tree and the incident with the girl. When it was the other four’s turn, Feng Haozhong kept quiet with a sour face, so Xiao Xu explained: “We ventured into the forest’s depths and saw a large burial ground.”