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

At the bottom of the stairs was a small stone house.

Zhou Lang raised the oil lamp high. Green light filled the four walls, which were covered with densely packed names, one after another, stretching from the floor to the rafters. Some names had been half-picked off with fingernails.

Zhao Qiang leaned closer to look, glanced at them twice, and then turned his head away. "These are..."

"The people who died in this manor," Zhou Lang said. He counted the bottom row; the newly carved marks hadn't even settled yet. "These last few, the ink hasn't even dried completely."

Han Yingying stood at the doorway, not coming in. She stared at the lamp in Zhou Lang's hand: "Where are the ghosts? Didn't they follow us down?"

"The lights are on, so they don't dare come near." Zhou Lang turned halfway around. "But this oil won't last long."

He was doing the math. He'd tested the oil lamp's lifespan; a full tank would last about forty minutes. It'd taken five minutes to burn, leaving thirty-five drops. He needed to break the second lock, find the exit, and get there before the lamp went out. If it did, those things lurking in the upstairs corridor would swarm down the stairs. He wasn't afraid of ghosts, but he didn't want to gamble on a situation he couldn't predict.

On the wall directly opposite the stone house, there was another door. The door was thicker than the one upstairs, and the lock was different—not a padlock, but a mechanical lock embedded in the door, made of brass, with three grooves engraved on it.

Zhou Lang walked over and held the scissors to the lock. He couldn't cut them.

"I can't cut this," he said flatly, as if he hadn't brought an umbrella today.

Zhao Qiang's face paled: "What do we do? Are we trapped here?"

"It's a mechanical lock; you need a key, or you need to gather all the things that can open it." Zhou Lang squatted down to examine the three grooves and holes. "There should be three of them."

Han Yingying finally entered the house. Looking at the names plastered on the wall, she whispered, "Could it be... that the key is with these people?"

Zhou Lang didn't answer. He was thinking about something else.

The butler gave him a special look tonight; the look wasn't a warning, but more like he was waiting to see a show. When he was paid, he received a "perfect" rating, five hundred dollars. The rule in this manor is that the higher your rating, the more they'll be watching you. He currently has twelve thousand dollars, enough to exchange for some items in the next dungeon. But this basement isn't part of the normal quest—he insisted on coming down there himself.

Why come down? Because the smell wafting from the crack in the locked storage room upstairs was off. It was a mixture of blood and a faint fragrance. The fragrance meant someone had placed offerings there. The offerings meant this manor held something even older than the murder of the steward.

Zhou Lang wanted to figure out what that was. Not for any other reason than that in the last message his sister left before she disappeared, she mentioned the word: "old master."

He didn't tell the two of them these things. It would be useless; it would only increase their fear.

"First, find the item that corresponds to the groove." Zhou Lang stood up. "Splitting up, don't leave the light."

The three men searched inside the stone house. In the corner was a stone platform with a ceramic jar on it, its mouth sealed with wax. Zhao Qiang touched it, and a piece of the wax peeled off.

"Zhou Lang! There's something here!"

Zhou Lang went over, picked up the pottery jar, and shook it. There was a sound inside, but it wasn't heavy. He used scissors to pry open the wax seal and poured out something—a copper plate with a polished, shiny edge, perfectly shaped to fit into the groove.

"That's one." Zhou Lang put the copper piece into his pocket. "Two more to go."

Han Yingying found a second item at the base of the wall. A brick on the wall protruded half an inch. She pushed it and found a small hole behind the brick, inside which was a piece of the same copper.

"We're lucky," Zhou Lang said.

The third piece was nowhere to be found. The three searched the entire stone house, looking under the stone platform, in the beams, and in the cracks in the walls, but it was nowhere to be found.

The oil in the lamp had burned down to almost nothing. The green light was dimmer than before.

Zhao Qiang panicked: "What if there isn't a third piece at all? What if this is a trap, designed to lure people in?"

"The trap won't give you two pieces." Zhou Lang stared at the wall engraved with names. He suddenly thought of something, walked over, and reached out to touch the newly engraved names.

My fingertip brushed against a spot, and it felt a little loose.

He used the tip of his scissors to pry along the engraving of the name, and a small piece of plaster fell off. Behind the name, a third piece of copper was embedded.

"Hidden under the names of the dead." Zhou Lang pried out the copper piece. "The owner of this manor has rather peculiar tastes."

Zhao Qiang swallowed hard, not daring to reply.

He had never really understood why Zhou Lang was so composed. The upstairs corridor was full of ghosts; most people would go weak at the sight of them, but Zhou Lang dared to walk in with just a broken lamp, as if those things were nothing to him. Zhao Qiang had followed Zhou Lang for so long, and he increasingly felt that this man harbored unfathomable secrets. Last time at the haunted manor, Zhou Lang had gotten the ghosts in the room to take on the task for him with just a word; Zhao Qiang still felt a chill when he thought about that method.

He dared not ask. Even if he did ask, Zhou Lang might not tell him.

Zhou Lang inserted the three copper pieces into the grooves one by one. When the last piece was pressed down, the sound of a spring turning came from inside the door, once, twice, three times.

Click.

The second lock is open.

The door slid open a crack. What shone through the crack wasn't black, but a faint hint of red.

Zhou Lang peeked the oil lamp through the crack in the door. The red and green light collided, and behind the door was a longer corridor. At the end of the corridor sat a person.

He sat with his back to them in a grand chair, motionless.

Zhao Qiang grabbed Zhou Lang's arm: "Is it...alive or dead?"

Zhou Lang stared at the figure for a while. The green light of the oil lamp shone on it, and the person didn't appear ghostly—ghosts would reveal their true form under the lamp, but this person didn't.

"It's not a ghost," Zhou Lang said.

"That's a person?" Han Yingying couldn't believe it either. "Sitting on the ground this late at night, how could it be a person?"

Zhou Lang didn't go in immediately. He was on edge. If it wasn't a ghost, and it was sitting in this kind of place, there were only two possibilities: either it was an old player trapped here, or it was the thing he was looking for.

He took the chainsaw off his back, pulled it once, the engine revved twice, and then stopped.

"Stay close to me," he said. "If it moves, retreat up the stairs and leave me alone."

The three stepped through the door.

A row of bronze lamps hung on the walls on both sides of the corridor, lit by someone, their flames red and burning all the way to the end. The person in the armchair remained motionless.

Zhou Lang stopped when he was three steps away from the chair.

"How long have you been sitting here?" he asked.

The person in the chair shifted their shoulder.

A voice came through, dry and hoarse, as if it hadn't spoken in a long time: "...Which one are you tonight?"

"The first one," Zhou Lang said.

The man laughed, a strained laugh: "Liar. Tonight, besides you, there's no one else. What do you want to ask me? Just say it."

Zhou Lang made a mental note of it—this thing knows who has come down here, which means it has been watching over us all along.

"Who is the old master?" Zhou Lang asked.

The person in the chair stopped laughing.

One by one, the red lights on both sides of the corridor went out.

The red lights went out until only the one next to the chair remained.

Zhou Lang didn't back down. He held the oil lamp even more firmly, its green light shrouding the armchair.