Chapter 137#
Little White Rabbit · 01#
Without the slightest warning, Yu Feichen was carried away by the key.
A spatial transit initiated, and the cheerful notification chime of the Gatekeeper system sounded in his ear.
“Dear guest, a warm reminder from your Gatekeeper: the world you are about to enter has an intensity rating of? An amplitude of? Out of a perfect score of ¥#%.”
“The Gatekeeper sincerely apologizes: you have undergone an uncontrollable anomalous transfer. Life and death are matters of fate — proceed with care and cherish every moment!”
“…”
This transit lasted far longer than any before it. When it ended, Yu Feichen landed in total darkness. The surroundings were dead silent, and a wave of damp air hit his face.
It did feel like entering an instance — the kind where he was the only participant.
Yu Feichen attempted to draw on the Fortress’s power, but in his mental landscape, his connection to the Fortress was blocked by a wall of gray mist. The physical enhancement he had gained back at the Gate of Eternal Night, however, remained intact.
A cold, wet wind blew past. Yu Feichen rummaged through the pocket of his high-collared long coat and found a tinderbox containing a pair of flint stones and half a candle. This place had suppressed his external abilities, leaving him with only this one item as a tool.
He struck the flint to spark a flame and lit the candle, illuminating his immediate surroundings.
He was in a dense forest. All around him were gnarled, twisted trees, their branches draped with low-hanging carnivorous vines. Through the curtain of foliage, a path wide enough for five people abreast led forward.
To his right stood a weathered wooden signpost. A small blood-red arrow pointed ahead.
Whether he tried to go back, left, or right, within a few steps he would hit an invisible wall of air. Like the sign at the roadside, whoever came here had only one choice: move forward.
Mist hung thick in the air. Yu Feichen stared at the path ahead — its surface an unusually deep, dark color — then crouched down and picked up a few stones from the ground.
He tossed the first stone onto the path.
It landed cleanly, no bounce, no sound. The calm held for two seconds. Then the surface of the path slowly began to bubble. The stone sank gradually into the ground and was swallowed up without a trace.
What the instance had pointed him toward was not a road. It was a bog — the kind with no way out.
Yu Feichen had no intention of testing a bog with his own body. After a moment’s thought, he threw another stone toward the base of the nearest tree.
The stone rolled slightly on the ground. It did show a tendency to sink, but far more slowly than the one in the middle of the path.
If trees of this size could grow here, the soil near their roots wouldn’t be as loose and waterlogged as the center of the bog. The dense root systems would also slow the rate of submersion.
The only problem was —
The moment the stone hit the ground, the entire tree erupted into a frenzied writhing. Vines surged toward it like slender, venomous snakes. Corrosive liquid dripped down, and within moments the stone was wrapped up and dissolved.
Bog in the middle. Carnivorous trees on either side. Signpost pointing forward.
Yu Feichen raised the candle in front of him and walked without hesitation toward the base of the trees.
Two steps in, he felt that having only the tinderbox as a tool was somewhat inconvenient.
— So he reached back and pulled the signpost out of the ground as well.
The soil at the tree roots was just barely firm enough for a person to walk upright without sinking. The carnivorous vines sensed movement and surged toward him the way they had when closing in on the stone, but stopped just short of the candlelight, unwilling to advance further.
They feared fire. It seemed the City of Mist followed the same rules as ordinary instances — it wouldn’t present an immediately fatal situation right from the start.
The candle was short, and time was limited. But on the soft muddy ground, moving too quickly would mean sinking in, so he had no choice but to keep his pace measured.
As if precisely calculated, just when the damp air began to thin slightly and the bog seemed to be nearing its end, the candle flickered — it was on its last breath.
And at exactly that moment, the faint candlelight illuminated what lay ahead: a fork in the road.
Two paths, identical in appearance. One veered left, one veered right. Neither had a signpost. Carnivorous vine trees stood guard at each entrance.
At the same time, the candle was nearly spent. What little time remained was only enough to pick one path and run for it. There was no possibility of scouting ahead. He didn’t even have a coin to flip and leave things to chance.
Yu Feichen’s body slowly tensed — and then, in the next instant, he simply blew the candle out.
The candle, already at the very end of its life, was forcibly extinguished. Darkness crashed down all at once, so complete he couldn’t see his own hand in front of his face.
Yet Yu Feichen held his breath and stared ahead.
In the dark, human eyes push their sensitivity to light to the absolute limit.
Far ahead and to the right, there was a faint glimmer — barely there at all.
Then, all at once, a fierce wind came howling from every direction.
Unable to see a thing, Yu Feichen leaned back to dodge the first carnivorous vine, and with a sharp crack, snapped the wooden signpost in two and hurled the pieces into the central bog — one to the left, one to the right. The right piece landed slightly further forward.
Vines came surging in from all sides. Yu Feichen had been walking on the right side of the path; now he used the evasive motion to launch himself airborne and pushed off the left plank for a single foothold.
The left carnivorous tree’s territory had been encroached upon. The vines that had been hanging low lurched into a frenzy and lunged toward him.
But by then Yu Feichen had already landed on the right plank further ahead. The vines from both sides converged — the moment they collided, they began tearing at each other with savage ferocity, their trunks letting out a teeth-grinding screech. Had a living person been caught between them, they would have been reduced to nothing.
The plank had little buoyancy in the bog, only slowing the descent by spreading the load — it started sinking the instant Yu Feichen’s foot touched it.
But with the two vine clusters busy destroying each other, Yu Feichen leaped forward once more and landed at the entrance to the right-hand path. The ground was solid. He had left the bog.
The sound of vines battling rang out behind him. Yu Feichen struck the flint, and in the brief flash of light the scene was illuminated: the vines tore at each other with equal and terrible force, ripping one another from the roots and toppling inward toward the center, tangling into a mass that slowly sank into the bog and fell silent.
Yu Feichen turned. The spark faded, and that faint, ghostly light reappeared in the distant darkness ahead. He followed it, and before long, another blood-red arrow signpost appeared by the roadside pointing forward.
This was the right path, then. Since the signpost was there for the taking, Yu Feichen, ever consistent, took this one along with him too.
No stars, no moon overhead — no way to track the time. After what was simply a very long distance, Yu Feichen arrived at the source of the light.
It was a… mushroom field.
Bioluminescent mushrooms of all shapes and sizes rose and fell in clusters, giving off a distinctly sweet and cloying fragrance.
The mushrooms were a wild and bizarre assortment of colors; taken all together, they could hold their own against Murphey’s haphazard sense of palette.
Just as he stepped into the mushroom field, movement stirred in the depths.
“One, two, three.”
“Four, five, five, five… six!”
“Seven, eight, eight…”
The tone was cheerful — like the voice of a young boy — but with a faint rasp and a sharpness at the edges, slightly lisping, impossible to form any mental image of the speaker from sound alone.
No living person had appeared anywhere along the way, and this voice carried a distinct strangeness. It had to be an NPC.
Yu Feichen moved through the clusters of glowing mushrooms, using the taller ones as cover, and made his way toward the source of the sound.
At last, through the tangled mushroom growth, he spotted a fluffy white figure — clothed, and roughly the height of a teenager of sixteen or seventeen.
“Thirteen, thirteen, thirteen…”
The white figure was straining to pull out a large red mushroom, chanting numbers in a steady rhythm, until it finally came free and “thirteen” jumped to “fourteen.”
Once done, it raised its head and looked toward the other mushrooms.
As it lifted its head, Yu Feichen saw it in full.
A white rabbit.
More precisely: an upright, humanoid white rabbit.
Its entire body was covered in the short-furred coat characteristic of white rabbits. One ear stood straight up; the other drooped halfway. Its head was nearly indistinguishable from that of an ordinary animal rabbit — yet it had two human hands, each with five fingers, one now holding a basket and the other stuffing the freshly pulled mushroom inside.
It wore a brown baseball cap and a slightly ridiculous pink dress, but on its feet were a pair of glossy black men’s leather boots.
In short: deeply mismatched.
Yu Feichen held his breath, intending to follow and observe. But at that moment the white rabbit slowly rotated its head in his direction, and its two red eyes seemed to see straight through the mushrooms and lock onto his position.
“I can smell it…” The rabbit’s split upper lip moved, producing the same cheerful boy’s voice it had used to count: “I can smell a guest.”
With that, the rabbit dropped its basket and walked toward him.
As it moved, mushrooms were crushed underfoot, releasing their juices. Knowing his position had been detected, Yu Feichen stepped out from behind the mushroom stalks and came face to face with the rabbit.
“Hello,” he said first.
The rabbit’s nose twitched, then it leaned in toward his shoulder and sniffed again.
“The smell of wet mud,” the rabbit said, lips drawing back into a grin. “A guest who has come here through the bog.”
Faced with a grinning white rabbit, most humans would feel a degree of unease and discomfort. But Yu Feichen was something of a seasoned traveler, and he remained calm.
“I did come through the bog,” he said. “Have you met others who came the same way?”
The rabbit kept smiling. “You mean guests like you? Of course — I’ve seen many.”
Yu Feichen caught a slight ambiguity in the phrasing.
“There are others who come from somewhere different, aren’t there?” he said.
“Of course. There are many paths leading here, and many paths leading out from here. Where would you like to go?”
Yu Feichen kept his expression neutral. “The same place as the others.”
The rabbit looked him up and down, then clasped its hands behind its back and puffed out its chest — the sash of the pink dress nearly bursting from the motion. “Yes, yes, of course you’re just like them. The Sabbath is almost upon us. You’ve all come seeking the right road to the City of Mist. It truly is a grand festival — everyone returns with all they could desire.”
Yu Feichen noted “City of Mist” and “Sabbath.”
So he had not yet entered the City of Mist. He was still on the way.
Going by Klaros’s second-hand account, the old key that had brought him here was practically mass-produced — many people had one. Throughout the Eternal Night, quite a few others must have accidentally triggered the mechanism and been summoned here, landing in the outer reaches.
And all of this was in preparation for the grand festival the rabbit had called the Sabbath.
In that second-hand account, the City of Mist was a dreamlike place of boundless pleasure — a mirage that many yearned for.
Now the rabbit was saying the same: everyone returns with all they could desire.
Yu Feichen turned this over for a few seconds and said nothing.
Meanwhile, the rabbit had begun to pace around him like an elder inspecting a prospect: “Hmm… hmm… compared to the vast majority of guests, you do have some commendable qualities.”
Yu Feichen raised an eyebrow slightly. “Such as?”
A pair of cold, human-like palms pressed against his cheeks. The rabbit’s nose twitched, and an expression of rapturous delight crossed its red eyes.
“You have a very fine face,” the rabbit said. “Looking at it makes me very happy.”
Yu Feichen: “…”
What a waste.
His gaze drifted downward along the rabbit’s hands without drawing attention.
The pale, bloodless human hands gave way to the fluffy rabbit arms, and where the two met, the skin was faintly turned up — revealing a ring of irregular, uneven stitches.
He glanced at the rabbit. It was still lost in its own contentment, completely unaware.
Yu Feichen decided this strange exchange could come to an end.
The rabbit had said there were many paths leading out from here. What he needed now was a clue pointing to the correct one.
He mentally reviewed the contents of the knowledge orb 108 Techniques for Talking to NPCs, then spoke: “Is there anything I can help you with?”
“Of course!” The rabbit’s tone shot up with sudden excitement. “Let’s pick mushrooms together!”