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

Han Yingying was stunned for a moment. To be honest, she hadn't thought that much about it—her mind was blank at the time, and her body just walked over on its own.

"I……"

"Don't think about it now," Zhou Lang interrupted her. "We still have work to do tomorrow. Killing the housekeeper won't get you a day off just because you stayed up all night."

Han Yingying snorted and closed the door.

Zhou Lang returned to his room, sat on the edge of the bed, and placed the oil lamp on the table. The green flame burned quietly, without making a sound.

Hua Ling.

He had heard those two words before.

Not in this manor, but much earlier. Before entering this game, he had come across a code name in a file within the Town of Ghosts – Hua Ling Shuang.

The file was classified as SSS.

All he saw at the time was the code name and a note: "Confirmed dead."

The word "extinction" is quite interesting. It's not "death," it's "extinction." In the terminology of the Town Ghost Bureau, these two words represent several lives.

Zhou Lang glanced out the window. The moon was obscured by clouds, and the entire manor was shrouded in a thick, inky darkness.

He lay down and closed his eyes.

A thought swirled in his mind a few times, but he eventually suppressed it.

It's not that I don't want to investigate, it's just that the timing isn't right.

Zhou Lang woke up promptly at six o'clock in the morning.

He had developed a habit of waking up at the exact time in the game—sleeping even a minute longer might mean missing something important.

Pushing open the door, the corridor was empty. The ghosts from last night had vanished without a trace, not even a single hair remained.

The aroma of food wafted from downstairs. It was braised pork!

Zhao Qiang was already seated at the table, enjoying his meal with three dishes and a soup laid out before him. Seeing Zhou Lang come down, he mumbled a greeting, "Breakfast is more lavish than yesterday's!"

"You adapt quickly." Zhou Lang pulled out a chair and sat down.

"People should eat and drink as they please." Zhao Qiang stuffed a piece of meat into his mouth. "I thought about it all night last night and figured something out."

"What is it?"

"Whether you're afraid or not, you have to keep moving forward, so you might as well eat your fill before you go."

Zhou Lang glanced at him. His words were crude, but they made sense.

Han Yingying came downstairs too. She didn't look well, with dark circles under her eyes—she hadn't slept well. But after sitting down, she didn't say anything and just picked up her bowl to eat.

The three of them finished their breakfast in silence.

The butler appeared in the hall and assigned tasks for the day.

"Let's get to work today—cleaning the third-floor storage room."

"Zhao Qiang, today's task—repair the garden wall."

"Han Yingying, today's task—organize the old items in the attic."

Just as Zhou Lang was about to leave, the butler called him back.

"Lang li ge lang." Its voice carried an extra layer of meaning compared to usual—not a threat, but more like a deliberate reminder, "The basement lock broke last night."

Zhou Lang turned around: "Oh? It's probably been in disrepair for years."

The butler's empty eye sockets stared at him, and he remained silent for a full five seconds.

"Whether it's repaired or not doesn't matter," it said, "but it's best not to touch the things underground. You can't afford the consequences."

"What price?"

The butler didn't answer the question. It turned and walked away, pausing as it passed Han Yingying, as if hesitating about something.

Zhao Qiang waited until it was far away before approaching and lowering his voice: "It knows we went to the basement last night."

"Of course it knows." Zhou Lang picked up his teacup and took a sip of water. "Every corner of this manor is under its control. The fact that it didn't stop us last night means the basement isn't off-limits. But the fact that it came to warn us today means that what's in that coffin—or rather, what's on the top floor—is the real trouble."

"Are we still going or not?" Zhao Qiang asked.

Zhou Lang put down his cup without giving a direct answer.

He looked at Han Yingying.

Han Yingying was lost in thought. Ever since she woke up this morning, something had been off about her—not fear, but more like she was trying to recall something, yet couldn't quite grasp it. The feeling was agonizing, like a word stuck in her throat that she just couldn't utter.

"Han Yingying".

She came to her senses.

"How did you feel when that child touched you last night?"

Han Yingying thought for a moment. "Cold. Not the kind of cold that's just warm in temperature, but the kind that seeps into your bones. But at the same time, it feels a little...familiar."

"Familiar?" Zhao Qiang interjected. "Have you seen that kind of ghost before?"

"No," Han Yingying shook her head. "It's just a feeling I can't quite put my finger on. Maybe I'm overthinking it."

Zhou Lang didn't press the matter.

The three of them went off to do their respective tasks.

Zhou Lang's work area was on the third floor, which gave him a good opportunity to check out the top floor. The storage room on the third floor was filled with all sorts of odds and ends—old furniture, dusty picture frames, and yellowed fabrics. As he tidied up, he kept an eye on what was above him.

The top floor is up there. The staircase leading to the top floor is at the end of the corridor, blocked by a wooden door. There's no lock on the door, but there's a talisman pasted on it.

The talisman paper is new.

This is quite interesting—the entire manor is covered in dust and old grime, but this talisman is as new as if it were just pasted on yesterday.

Zhou Lang did not act rashly. He squatted at the door of the storage room and shone the light of the oil lamp on the wooden door from a distance.

The moment the green light touched the talisman, the ink on it distorted—as if something had pushed against it from behind.

Zhou Lang put the oil lamp away.

Good guy.

The talisman wasn't for sealing the door; it was for sealing the things inside. And those things were huge, so big that a single talisman barely managed to press them down.

The three met up at lunchtime.

While working in the garden, Zhao Qiang discovered some new clues—small characters were engraved at the base of the wall, containing some kind of chronological record that documented the earliest history of the manor.

"The gist of it is that the owner of this manor was a woman." Zhao Qiang spread out the notes he had copied from the wall. "It's from over three hundred years ago. She had a daughter, and after her daughter died, she went mad. She put her daughter's body in a coffin and performed some kind of ritual, hoping to resurrect her."

"The resurrection was successful?" Zhou Lang asked.

"I don't know, the words at the end were chiseled off. It wasn't that they fell off naturally, it was chiseled off by someone, the chisel marks are very deep."

Han Yingying put down her chopsticks. "The child in that coffin, is that her daughter?"

"Very likely."

"The one on the top floor..."

The three looked at each other.

"It's that mother." Zhou Lang finished the last bite of his meal. "A woman who has lived for three hundred years and gone mad for three hundred years."

After a few seconds of silence, Zhao Qiang broke the silence: "I suddenly don't think this meal tastes so good anymore."

They continued working in the afternoon. Zhou Lang found something useful in the storage room—a notebook.

The notebook's cover was rotten, and most of the inner pages were badly damaged by insects. However, a few pages were relatively intact, and the handwriting was barely legible.

The contents of the notes changed Zhou Lang's expression.

It's not about the manor.

It's about the game itself.

"...On the forty-seventh day, I finally understood the essence of this 'game.' It wasn't punishment, it wasn't a trial, but a sieve. It was filtering out certain people. Or rather, it was waiting for someone to return."