Chapter 83
The pungent smell of rust mixed with earth suffused every inhale Mo Yi takes, making it suffocatingly difficult for him to breathe.
Every surface was covered in the colour of blood and the rich scent had seemingly coagulated and condensed into a solid form. Layers upon layers of vermillion soil formed the inner wall of the tomb. Thick globules of dark red oozed out from within, only to be quickly absorbed by the soil below.
Huge scratches with differing thicknesses span the scarlet walls of the dark tomb, crisscrossing with each other to form complicated and strange patterns. Blood gathered in the depressions, forming odd pools with disparate hues.
Mo Yi raised his eyes and quickly scanned every inch of the tomb, not missing any details.
The pattern before him overlapped with the pattern in the human skin book, and every corner of the pattern gradually became more and more familiar.
—Ivy had long known that both her hatred and persistence would gradually be eroded and softened with time, and she would eventually become no different from the other mindless hourly monsters.
This sacrifice was like a huge and precise instrument. Once it started running, it was extremely difficult to stop it.
So Ivy had never allowed things to go beyond her control.
So Ivy had been killing all the players off before she lost all shreds of her self-awareness, before the situation reached the point of no return.
However, just this time, she decided to let them go—
Which meant that she left the players with the right to choose.
Ivy’s hoarse, scalding voice seemed to ring by his ears again. “…Because I was foolish, so foolish that I still continued harbouring hope.”
She chose to hold hope in her heart, chose to trust that players can stop her from losing her mind and bottom line, chose to believe that they could really break this vicious cycle of death, and that was why she told Mo Yi the location of that human skin book.
Because that book was the source of everything. And it would be the end of everything too.
Even from inside the deep tomb, Mo Yi could hear the sharp clang of metal from the two colliding knives, Ivy’s frenzied roar, and Yu Ran’s pained groans.
The dizziness from excessive blood loss surged. Mo Yi gritted his teeth, and did his best to focus on the pattern in front of him instead of the wailing outside.
He had already engraved the contents of the page tucked into the human skin book deeply into his mind, from every word to every sentence, to every single picture on it.
His gaze fell on a corner of the tomb, and his eyes suddenly lit up.
—Right here.
He pressed his injured hand to the soft and wet soil in the tomb and reached his other hand out to the middle of the pattern.
It happened to be between the deformed goat skull and the inverted pentagram. The colour of the soil there was such a deep dark scarlet that it had morphed into a rich black, and was easily missable if one did not look carefully.
Mo Yi forcefully reached forward, pushing his palm against the wall. The damp soil was akin to a swamp, bubbling with a thick viscous dark red fluid as it greedily latched onto his arm, and more than half of his arm swiftly sunk into the wall.
His bloody palm sank deeper and deeper in, and the soil sucked the blood out from his open wound..
His temperature plummeted with each drop of warm blood lost, his body turning ice-cold.
Mo Yi lifted his increasingly heavy eyelids, tightly pursing his paper-white lips as he focused his blurry sight fiercely at a singular point in the tomb. Streaks of red soil stained his pale face, making him look unbearably pitiful at this moment.
Darkness encroached the corners of his vision, bringing with it a wave of drowsy dizziness.
Mo Yi shook his head from side to side. He sunk his teeth harshly into his lips, trying to use pain to keep that last bit of his consciousness as he groped around in the moist and soft area of soil.
Cold, heavy, dizzy.
The sluggishness from excessive blood loss dragged his remaining consciousness into the abyss. It felt like falling into a deep icy river, a glacier, where the coldness numbed all of his senses and left him with only mechanical movements.
And at this moment, his stiff fingertips struck something hard in the soil.
A spark of hope lighted up Mo Yi’s heavy-lidded eyes. With all the strength he could muster, he curled his frozen and numb fingers around the object buried in the soil and yanked it out!
A small book sprung up from under the blood-covered soil.
As if to make up for his hazy vision, Mo Yi forced his eyes open as wide as he could and tried to identify the cover of the book in his hand—it was an old tattered collection of nursery rhymes.
When he had been analysing the human skin book earlier, he tried combining the Latin text on the book and the messy English footnotes on the paper in an attempt to piece together critical details.
The sacrificial ritual required a medium, and that object must be the one which formed the deepest bond between Erica, John and Ivy.
According to what the two children said to Ivy just now, she would sing nursery rhymes to them every night before bed—and that was why Ivy chose it as the medium.
Mo Yi took a deep breath, trying his best to stay conscious, and reached into his trouser pocket.
Numb fingers that had almost lost their sense of touch fumbled with difficulty, and pulled out the lighter that he had kept with him since the first instance.
The whistling wind, screaming, and ethereal singing all seemingly merged into one singular sound, that when combined with his pained panting and chaotic heartbeat, melted into white noise which sounded as if it came from a great distance away.
Mo Yi’s fingertips trembled. A dry ‘crack’ sparked in the constricted space, and he finally ignited the fire after several attempts.
A tiny orange-red flame danced in his palm, but it was far too small to bring him any warmth.
The tongue of fire licked the edge of the yellowed and damp pages of the book, slowly snaking its way upwards. Then, at a certain point, bright flames sprang up all of a sudden and fiercely began devouring the entire book.
Mo Yi feebly loosened his grip. The burning book fell from his hand onto the bright red soil, and the smell of burning paper twined with the scent of blood.
A familiar robotic voice sounded next to his ears.
“Congratulations player Mo Yi, you have completed the side mission—”
The remaining robotic voice slowly faded away together along with the terrifying screams outside.
The commotion could no longer rouse Mo Yi from his state of cold and dark semi-consciousness.
He tried struggling a few times, but he couldn’t resist the intense weight that dragged him right down into the icy sea.
The soil around him began squirming violently. A large amount of viscous, freezing cold blood poured out from the depths, colliding into Mo Yi’s side like a wave and slowly started to fill the entire tomb.
Mo Yi no longer had the strength to struggle.
His blood loss had stolen away every last trace of warmth and vitality in his body. The promise of eternal rest and cold death came hand in hand, slowly occupying his body.
A large amount of blood pooled around him, submerging Mo Yi’s body and limbs, and slowly covered his mouth and nose. Perhaps due to the onset of hypothermia, even the cold blood felt a little warm.
The sense of suffocation washed over him, flooding him with a wave of comfort.
Just at this moment, a warm and dry hand gently lifted his neck, bringing his mouth and nose up and away from the rising pool of blood in the tomb.
Mo Yi parted his lips in a daze. He struggled to open his eyes too, but failed.
Something warm and tender pressed against his cold pale lips. An equally warm liquid slid into his mouth and down his throat. The familiar taste of blood permeated his mouth, leaving a trail of scalding heat so blisteringly hot that it almost made him shiver.
Mo Yi choked on the hot blood that kept pouring into his mouth, and coughed violently.
The palms patted his thin back lightly several times to soothe him.
That weird blood slid down Mo Yi’s oesophagus, and the warmth and vitality it brought along quickly flowed out to his extremities and deep into his bones, instantly warming his cold palms.
Strength returned to Mo Yi’s limbs.
He moved his eyelids, then opened his eyes—he was sitting in the tomb with his back leaning against the wall. The tomb was already filled with flowing dark red blood, and ripples formed on its surface with his movements.
Zhou Yunchen and several other panting players rushed towards him, clumsily pulling him out of the blood pool.
Their faces were filled with joy and relief. Zhou Yunchen stammered between gasps of breath, but Mo Yi, whose mind was still a little fuzzy, took a long time to react.
Mo Yi pushed away the hands supporting him. He parted his lips to speak, but an uncontrollable itch from his throat made him break into a violent coughing fit.
His thin body arched from the coughs, and his bloodless pallor stained with a sickly shade of red.
A trace of bright blood spilled from his lips.
Zhou Yunchen, who was standing beside him, was taken aback. He quickly stepped forward to support him, and asked, “…Are you okay?”
Mo Yi blinked, his dark eyes regaining their usual calmness. Without changing his expression, he shook his head and wiped off the blood on his lips.
.
“It’s okay.”
This blood wasn’t not his.
A familiar handsome face surfaced in his mind. The cold and sharp angles of the face were full of aggression, and the light-coloured irises were shrouded in the colour of a thick mist.
Mo Yi lowered his eyes slightly. He pursed his pale and bleeding lips, before swallowing the remaining bloody smell into his throat.
“Where’s Yu Ran?”
He couldn’t have carried out his earlier plan without Yu Ran. The danger she faced was also the largest of them all—those two children were Ivy’s greatest weakness but they were also Ivy’s reverse scale. Trying to harming them was akin to committing suicide.
Zhou Yunchen turned his body sideways and allowed Mo Yi to look behind him.
Not far away, Yu Ran was half lying on the ground, her face paper-white. Half of her arm was missing, and her lower body was utterly drenched in blood.
Zhou Yunchen added, “Her arms and lower body were seriously injured.
However, as long as she survives, the wounds she received in the instance will not be brought to the real world, so she only needs to survive for a few more minutes until she leaves the instance.”
Mo Yi was relieved upon hearing that Yu Ran’s life was not in imminent danger. He couldn’t muster any extra strength to answer Zhou Yunchen, so he just replied with a slight nod.
Immediately afterwards, he paused, his attention shifting to something not far away.
Ivy, covered in blood, slumped to the ground in a pile.
Blood-soaked dismembered body parts fell onto the ground beside her. The head and arms of players, the stomach of the spider, and the paws of the cat…
The sacrifices disappeared, and the once youthful-looking limbs on the children were now reverted to their previous fragmented appearance.
They could no longer maintain the image of those two innocent children.
Ivy kept her head lowered and her expression was hidden. All they could see was her gently patting the fragmented corpses in her arms with her blood-stained palms.
She sang softly.
One last, final nursery rhyme for her children.
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