Chapter 138#
Little White Rabbit · 02#
“This basket was specially prepared for you. I’ll pick the red and yellow ones, you pick the green and gray ones.”
“Hmm, what number was I on just now?”
“Never mind — twelve, twelve, thirteen…”
Yu Feichen: “How many do you need?”
“I need a whole plate of mushroom salad!”
Yu Feichen looked at those gap-toothed three-part lips. A rabbit eating mushrooms — unheard of.
He said nothing and followed the rabbit through the waist-deep mushroom growth. No matter how large any mushroom was while still rooted in the ground, once pulled free it would shrink down to the size of a pinky fingertip. They walked a considerable distance before the basket was even halfway full.
“One hundred and eighteen, one hundred and nineteen, one hundred and twenty, one hundred and eleven…” The white rabbit pressed on with great effort. Yu Feichen followed slightly to the side and behind.
The white rabbit suddenly turned around.
“Ahh!!!! Stupid human!!!!” The rabbit stared at his basket and shrieked. “What have you been picking! Didn’t I tell you to pick green and gray!”
Yu Feichen glanced at his own basket. It was a full spectrum, like a paint palette.
“I forgot. These all looked nice,” he said.
“AHHHH!!!!!” The rabbit flew into a rage and lunged at him. It moved fast — Yu Feichen didn’t step aside, and it slammed squarely into him, snatching the basket from his hands. It turned its back to him.
The multicolored mushrooms were hurled out of the basket one by one. The basket returned to Yu Feichen’s hands with only a dozen or so green and gray mushrooms lying forlornly at the bottom.
“You only picked this many, you stupid human! I have never seen such a stupid human!! Have you been eating too many mushrooms!!!!!!”
Eating too many mushrooms makes you stupid?
Yu Feichen kept his expression neutral. “Could you teach me?”
The rabbit’s red eyes had grown even redder with fury, blood vessels flushing visibly. It plucked a green mushroom from Yu Feichen’s basket and declared loudly: “From now on you only need to pick green mushrooms! Memorize the pattern on the cap!”
Yu Feichen nodded.
“Stupid! Stupid! You’re so stupid!” The rabbit yanked at its own ears. “You made me lose count of my number!”
Yu Feichen: “Thirty-four.”
“Thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-five…” The white rabbit resumed its counting.
Behind its back, Yu Feichen slid open a hidden zipper on his coat.
The painter had given him many sets of clothing, but this was still the one he wore most habitually. The reason was simple: it had many places to store things, the design was remarkably precise, it didn’t impede movement in the slightest, and none of it was visible from the outside.
He put the green mushrooms into his basket and tucked the other colors away on his person, collecting five or six specimens of each variety he encountered.
Before long, the white rabbit’s basket was the first to fill. Once full, it turned around and kept a close watch on the stupid human.
Even after telling the stupid human how to identify the right ones by their markings, the brainless creature would still pull up the wrong ones. The rabbit corrected him loudly each time, its fury only dimming slightly whenever it happened to look at the stupid human’s face.
Yu Feichen’s basket was finally full.
Dawn was breaking — a pale gray light spreading across the sky.
“Done!” the rabbit announced. “Now you can come back to our village!”
Yu Feichen: “What are we going to do there?”
The rabbit tore at its own ears, nearly at the end of its patience with this stupid human. “Go back to the village!”
Yu Feichen: “What for?”
The rabbit came close to ripping its own ear off entirely. Its beloved baseball cap had already gone missing during one of its earlier outbursts.
Yu Feichen thought he could write a knowledge orb titled 108 Methods for Infuriating an NPC.
“Go back to the village! Eat mushrooms! We received orders from the City of Mist to entertain you stupid guests!!!!”
After several such exchanges, Yu Feichen had established one thing with certainty: at least in the mushroom field, no matter how furious the white rabbit became, it would not directly harm him — even though its eyes made clear that it would very much like to tear him apart on the spot.
As NPCs, their actions were also constrained by the instance.
He said: “Thank you. In that case, could you tell me the road to the City of Mist?”
The rabbit’s fury abruptly vanished. It grinned again. “Of course. Eat your fill, and then you may go.”
Following the rabbit along a lengthy road, a mist-shrouded village appeared in a valley below. Its buildings were all manner of different shapes.
A black bear in an old man’s plain white T-shirt was practicing tai chi at the village entrance.
“White Rabbit, why are you back so late?” the bear said.
“This human is so stupid!” the rabbit cried.
The rabbit’s house was a mushroom-shaped structure — not large, but it looked sturdy. A tall fence enclosed the property.
Yu Feichen followed it through the gate. The rabbit turned around, locked the gate behind them, and with its back still to Yu Feichen, its three-part lips split into a smile.
Yu Feichen could read the excitement and eagerness in the rabbit’s brisk, light movements as it turned the lock.
Couldn’t make a move outside. Had to lure them into the yard first?
Back in the mushroom field, when the rabbit had launched itself at him, Yu Feichen had already gauged its strength. The rabbit couldn’t overpower him — and those human hands of its weren’t particularly nimble.
The room, barely large enough for one or two people, contained a dining table with two plates set on it. Against the wall to one side hung a large iron pot, the water inside it churning and bubbling away at a rolling boil.
The rabbit tipped its basket of red and yellow mushrooms onto its own plate, then fixed its eyes on Yu Feichen and watched him pour out the green ones.
“By order of the City of Mist, I am now entertaining you as a guest. The road to the City of Mist is long — you’ll need to finish this plate of mushrooms before you have the strength to continue.” The rabbit’s delivery was stiff and rote, as though reciting a script.
Yu Feichen picked up his fork. His movements were unhurried. He had always been a person of considerable table manners.
The rabbit watched this all-appearance-no-substance human and let out a small, contemptuous sound through its three-part lips.
Given the structure of those lips, the dismissive sniff came out sounding like a slow leak.
Yu Feichen: “After I’ve eaten, will you tell me the road to the City of Mist?”
“Of course.” The rabbit gestured toward a section of the wall. “I have many maps.”
Along the wall to their right hung an array of maps — varying in shade, irregular in shape. The material was unusual, their surfaces carrying a faint sheen. On each was drawn something resembling a route.
Yu Feichen: “May I take a look?”
The rabbit watched him with a shifting expression. Yu Feichen said, “I’ll look, and then I’ll accept your hospitality.”
The rabbit speared a red mushroom with its fork and ate it. “Of course you may.”
Yu Feichen watched. The instant the red mushroom went down, the bloodshot veins in the rabbit’s eyes intensified.
Yu Feichen walked to the wall of maps and touched several.
Slick. Some were stiff and dry; others still had a degree of suppleness.
Human skin, he concluded. And not the outer surface — the inner side, the side that had once been attached to flesh and blood, treated with fat until it had become what it now was.
Each map bore a single winding route. Each route was marked with a number — the smallest being 1, the largest 50. Some numbers appeared on multiple maps, with similar paths traced on each.
Whatever their number, every single one of these routes terminated at roughly the same point.
The rabbit tapped its plate with its fork. “Haven’t you finished looking yet?”
Its voice had changed considerably from how it had sounded in the mushroom field — dark and brutal now.
“It’s too complicated. I can’t make sense of it,” Yu Feichen said. “After we eat, explain it to me.”
The rabbit: “Stupid.”
He returned to his seat across from the rabbit. Yu Feichen’s attention moved to the large pot on the other side of the room.
“Are you making soup?”
“I have never met a human who talks as much as you!!!!”
Yu Feichen: “…”
Live long enough, and you’ll hear every kind of assessment.
But getting to the City of Mist required asking.
“Mushroom soup?”
“I am boiling water!” The rabbit swallowed a great mouthful — a full ten red mushrooms at once — and gripped its fork in fury.
The solid black iron fork bent visibly under the force of that grip.
Yu Feichen assessed the hardness of his own fork. The rabbit’s current strength was at least ten times what it had been earlier.
“You’ve put too much wood on the fire. The water’s going to boil away.”
The rabbit cursed: “And whose fault is that for coming so late! Stupid!”
But it stood up and went to tend to the firewood all the same.
Yu Feichen tipped half the green mushrooms into the rubbish bin. To avoid detection, he didn’t empty the plate entirely.
Done, and seeing the rabbit about to turn back, he took out a red mushroom and put it in his mouth.
When the rabbit returned to the table, it saw Yu Feichen elegantly swallowing something.
It then looked at the plate, from which a great many mushrooms had disappeared. The rabbit grinned.
The red mushroom dissolved almost the instant it touched his tongue. A burning warmth spread through Yu Feichen’s limbs, and his strength increased noticeably.
Red mushrooms granted a strength buff. The yellow mushrooms the rabbit had been picking for itself would likely have a similar effect.
That would mean the green and gray mushrooms assigned to him produced the opposite.
After berating him for being stupid, the rabbit had told him he needn’t bother with the gray ones anymore — only the green.
The effect of the gray mushrooms was now self-evident.
Intelligence reduction.
Yu Feichen — whose intelligence the rabbit had evidently decided required no further lowering — quickly connected all the pieces. If his deduction was correct, the rabbit’s next move would be to…
The fluffy rabbit head leaned in close to him, tendons straining visibly beneath its fur.
“Why have you stopped eating?” the rabbit said softly.