A bizarre and terrifying experience; I messed up the dungeon world.

Zhao Qiang opened his mouth, then swallowed back his words.

Reaching the middle of the stairs, the light from the settlement system enveloped him, and the basement vanished. The metal plaque with the word "Stay" was still in his hand, heavy in his pocket. The first thing Zhou Lang did upon returning was to flip the plaque over and carefully read the few lines of fine text on the back under the lights of the game lobby—not numbers, but an address and a time.

He memorized the address and carefully put the sign away.

The game lobby was noisy, and people were returning from the exits of various dungeons one after another. Some were in good spirits, some looked terrible, and some just sat down on the ground as soon as they came out, ignoring the people around them who were too lazy to look at them and were preoccupied with their own business.

Zhou Lang walked to the bulletin board, and the refreshed list of dungeons scrolled through. He stopped at a certain line:

[Rank C Dungeon: The Mysterious House - 8 slots remaining, estimated difficulty: Medium.]

He stared at those words for a while.

The Haunted House. He'd heard this name from another player. It was a small-town inn; you could complete it by surviving for 7 days. There were 7 haunted creatures, and the rules weren't complicated, but the death rate was unusually high. It wasn't because the haunted creatures themselves were particularly strong; it was because the rules changed after the fourth day, switching from defense to attack, causing the difficulty to jump dramatically. Most players couldn't survive until that day.

But he didn't come here to pass through the checkpoint itself.

Last month, a message circulated, its source unreliable, but the details matched—it said someone had encountered something "not belonging to the instance" in a C-rank instance, and the description left behind didn't match any known C-rank anomaly maps. The characteristics of that thing overlapped with a clue he had been searching for. The information pointed to the House of the Strange.

He stood next to the bulletin board for about a minute and then clicked to register.

"You want to go into this?" Zhao Qiang leaned in from behind, glancing at the dungeon name. "This dungeon seems a bit off. I heard that going in—"

"Let's talk about it later."

"...Is this normal decision-making logic?"

Han Yingying also walked over and paused for a second on the notice board. "Mysterious House, Rank C, background is a guesthouse." She unfolded the dungeon details and looked at them. "The attack begins on the fourth day, and the fifth day is—"

"A chaotic dance of demons."

She closed the details page. "Have you checked this copy?"

"I've learned a bit about it."

"Do you have a plan?"

"Go in and check the situation."

"..." She paused for two seconds and then clicked to register.

Zhao Qiang stood to the side, watching her finish clicking, then turned his gaze to Zhou Lang, giving him a look that said, "It's all your fault," for three seconds before resignedly clicking to register, muttering, "I knew it... there's never a peaceful dungeon when I go out with Brother Lang."

---

The teleportation beam unfolded beneath my feet, and I landed at dusk.

A narrow road stretched out, flanked by low hills whose leaves were just beginning to turn yellow, rustling in the wind. Smoke rose from distant chimneys. A short distance further on, a small town came into view, with two or three shops open along the street. A bicycle leaned against a telephone pole, unridden, its rear tire flat.

Zhou Lang glanced down and saw a sketchbook in his hand, his drawing board slung over his shoulder—the instance provided each player with corresponding props, and the background was a sketching group, so everyone became art students. He opened the sketchbook; the first few pages had some pencil writing, seemingly left by the previous tenant, including the check-in date and some fragmented words. The writing became increasingly messy as he went on, until the third page contained only one line:

On the fourth day, do not open the door.

Zhou Lang closed his sketchbook and walked into the town.

The guesthouse is located in the back of town, a three-story wooden building. Some of the paint on the exterior walls has peeled off, but the yard is fairly clean, with several stunted trees neatly trimmed. A wooden sign hangs at the entrance, written in calligraphy: Yun Family Guesthouse.

The other players had already arrived. Three or four people were sitting in the courtyard; some were looking at dungeon information, some were spacing out, and a tall boy had his easel on his lap mixing paints. He was indifferent and didn't respond to the people around him. There were eight spots available, and five people showed up. Adding Zhou Lang and his two friends, they were all there.

The guesthouse owner was a woman in her forties, rather thin, and spoke crisply. She handed out room keys to everyone, informed them of meal times and water usage times, and then added, "Don't stay in the hallway after 9 p.m., don't knock on other people's doors, and don't look out the window."

Zhao Qiang stood to the side, listened for a second, then finally spoke, "Why?"

The woman glanced at him. "There are wild cats in the mountains. Their cries at night are terrifying. Don't mess with them."

Zhao Qiang: "...Oh."

She left. Zhao Qiang turned around and said, "She was just giving me the runaround."

"NPCs, that's the effect we want." The tall boy spoke without looking up, his tone flat. "Are you the only one who's never been to a C-rank dungeon?"

Zhao Qiang ignored him and looked away.

Zhou Lang stood in the courtyard for a while, looking the guesthouse over from the outside in. It had three floors, plus a backyard. There was a well in the backyard, and next to it was a tree with very old roots that had supported the ground, causing several cracks in the paving stones, from which thin plant roots could be seen pushing out.

Interestingly, the tree's crown was crooked, leaning towards the guesthouse, and the trunk's grain was more twisted than normal, as if it had been pulled along by some force for a long time.

He noted this detail down, followed the instructions upstairs, and found his room.

On the second-floor corridor, there were single rooms. Zhou Lang's room was at the very back, near the window, offering a panoramic view of the tree in the backyard. He put his backpack on the bed and first walked through the entire room—the bed, the table, the window, the door, paying particular attention to the door gaps and the window locks. The door gaps were normal, but one of the window locks wasn't closing properly, with a gap of two or three millimeters; he needed to be careful about that.

Then he knocked on Zhao Qiang's and Han Yingying's doors. The three of them huddled together in the hallway, confirming the location of their respective rooms. Zhao Qiang's room was next to Zhou Lang's, and Han Yingying's was in the middle of the hallway—a convenient distance for easy communication in case of trouble.

"Tonight is the first night," Han Yingying said, flipping through the dungeon rules. "The strange things on the first day can't enter the room; they'll only appear in the corridor. They're mainly testing us and aren't aggressive."

"Logically, all we need to do is lock the door and wait until dawn," Zhao Qiang said.

"right."

The two of them turned their gazes to Zhou Lang at the same time.

Zhou Lang didn't speak. He took out his sketchbook, flipped to the line "Day 4, do not open the door," wrote something in the blank space, and closed it.

"Brother Lang, what are you doing?" Zhao Qiang sensed something was wrong.

"Nothing much, go back and rest first."

---

The uninhabited room on the right side of the third floor was locked when Zhou Lang passed by in the afternoon. A faint scent seeped out from the crack in the door, not of decay, but of coldness—a dry, stagnant cold. He put his hand next to the crack in the door and felt the temperature; it was three or four degrees lower than in the corridor.

This isn't a problem with the building's insulation; wooden walls simply can't have that kind of temperature difference.